Se Yong Park - FOMO

Building on Salona was a very obvious choice. If you want to trade something, you can do it very easily on Salona. Whether it's today, whether it's six months ago, whether it's even six years from now. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Billions, the show where we interview the best consumer founders in the Salona ecosystem. I'm here with, say, one of the co-founders of FOMO. Thanks for being here, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat FOMO because we've been having a lot of interesting conversations around the social aspect to trading, right? Or if FOMO is truly a social network or a trading app, and I'm curious on the spectrum of things, which side you guys resonate more towards, or if it's all of the above. Yeah, I think they kind of go hand in hand, so they don't work without each other, right? So if you don't have the best trading app, then the social doesn't matter. And if you just have a good social network where the trading doesn't work, then it's two parts of the same piece. So I think the way we think about it is we need to build at minimum table stakes, the best trading app that exists in crypto, whether that's mobile, whether that's web, whether it's a Vute Telegram, whether that's across different chains, spot assets, perps for the consumer markets. We need to build this environment where you can pretty much do anything you want, and do it in a way that's super seamless. And then that's at the bare table stakes before we have a chance for the social to actually kind of stand out of the zone. That's interesting. I've been thinking a lot about, in the world of hyper-financialization, you can speculate and rest, bet on anything. I'm curious on the future of social networks, like you're seeing X, other social networks, the incumbents essentially, integrating finance features and trading features. Do you think this is like the next kind of social networks that there's inherently a financialized trading aspect to them? - Yeah, so I think if you kind of take a look at the history of social media, it started with people you knew, right? So it started with who you knew, and whether you're cousin or an aunt or a friend, and this is kind of birth early days of Facebook, right? People wanted to connect with each other online, and that was kind of like V1 of social media. V2 of social media, I think, is where we are today, which is TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, and it's very much more based on the thing you're interested in rather than the person that you might want to connect with. So V1, it was always a person came before the content. So in order for you to see that your mom posted about her dinner, you would have to friend your mom first. In V2, you could actually see your mom's cooking video or cooking recipe instructions before you even know it's her, and then you might go and follow her, which would be strange 'cause your mom, but imagine somebody else. And it's very different, right? So you've evolved from who you know to what interests you. And I think in the world where AI starts to commoditize a lot of content, you can now produce 10,000,000 times the content in the same time period, you get to this place where everything has commoditized to an extent. I don't know if you saw the series where the one guy on Twitter took all 3 million files of the Epstein files, put it into this podcast format, and it's like top 10 on Apple podcasts, top 10 on Spotify. And people are really interested in it, and this was all done through AI. So you can actually commoditize content very, very easily. And then you think about a world where the stuff that you see, whether it's a Twitter article or Instagram video or YouTube short, it's all commoditizing created by AI. So what's that we bust with? It's risk, right? So the way we think about it is that in a world where, you know, let's say with or without you be I, in a world where AI is kind of taking over pretty much everything you can think of, and it's commoditized away a lot of content, the only thing that's going to be able to differentiate you from somebody else's creator is your risk. How much risk did you take? How much piano did you make from it? And what does that look like in this kind of world of monotony when it comes to content? It's so interesting, Sarah, because I've been thinking a lot about, you know, yeah, as you said, V1 of social networks was based on the social graph of people to people, right? Like the Instagram feed is just people you know. - Right. - And now the Instagram feed is random meme pages or content, finance content, depending on your interest, it's niche based. And that's why TikTok does really well, right? Like people at the ratio to likes and views to followers that people have is quite interesting. It's like very, very high. People go viral, content goes viral, not people. - Right. - And it's interesting you talk about that in the context of risk, where risk is the comparative advantage of content creators nowadays. Is that like a fair way to say it where you guys are taking the bet that content creators are almost like risk curators in a way and like that is the new extension of like the social network? - Yeah, I think content creators begins to look different based off of you know what the popular platform is. So the same person who is you know very good at writing a thousand Twitter, create eyes, not also the same person who is very good at YouTube. And I think that often with content creators, there's not a lot of range. There's very few people can kind of do all the things in between, there's a lot of people who are talented enough to do it, but it's not the majority. And I think that the definition of a content creator will change over time. You'll still have the people who are curating the AI content, right? Or still you know dramatically using a lot of AI tooling and information to actually create content. But I think the content creator that I describe is actually the trader. So it's the person who's putting up their own dollars at risk in order to either make or lose money on you know whatever it is they want to express their view on whether it's a spot as a meme coin, whether it's you know Salona as a token, whether it's a long, short commodity prediction market bet. And I think that ultimately in a world where everything kind of can be mass-produced, the only thing you can't really commoditize your fake is P&O and the risk that you took to get to P&O. So for us like we view the trader as a next generation content creator. And I think that's something that is probably like very, very early. I don't think this happens in the next few years. Maybe not even the next decade. But I think over time you get to this point where you know risk is the only thing that's real. And it's the only thing you can use to quantify people's actual you know output at performance. >> That's super. I saw the pieces that you've been putting out on FOMO, on you know tri FOMO on X where you talk about people are building a distribution in an audience on FOMO that's greater than X and Twitter. And I think that's something that Raj really, one of the co-founders of Sloan I really resonates with where you don't want existing celebrities to come onto Sloan and you want to create net new celebrities on Sloan. And I'm interested to hear you know how you guys think about that because it seems as if you're taking a similar approach to incubating these new celebrities on FOMO. >> Yeah definitely. And I think that's really important for any social network to grow. I think you can think about a prime example of this is Clubhouse. You know Clubhouse was a platform that attracted a lot of people they started to make names to themselves. And it was very quickly a threat to places like Twitter. But I think where they kind of misstep to was instead of incubating the home-grown celebrities that had made a name for themselves, they started pulling in you know a list celebrities. They started pulling in you know the most famous people. And then you start to kind of crowd out the very people who created the the success of your platform in the first place. So you know we take a lot of lessons from history. And I think for us it's incredibly important that we're able to take these home-grown you know FOMO celebrities, FOMO traders and really give them an opportunity to like become world class famous. Not just crypto famous, not just internet famous, but famous in the real world. I think the most recent platform that's done a really good job is TikTok right where there's a lot of creators there who have kind of transcended the internet fame and now they're people who are at the VMAs, at all the red carpet events. They're getting all the brand deals like these are people that you know couldn't walk down the streets today without you recognizing them because they're so popular and at the end of the day we need to you know curate our experience for almost silver in that direction. How we get there is obviously a very tall task but you know it's something that's very very tough on my for us. Yeah it's it's interesting. It's like the Addison example. Exactly. Yeah. Forming at the Grammys in 2020 she was dancing in her parents' house. What does that look like for the like pie in the sky right? Like five years. What do you want the top FOMO celebrity to be famous for in the mainstream world? Like how do they get there? Yeah. So I think you start to see some semblance of this whether it's you know people that play esports right? Like you kind of think about professional athletes versus esports athletes and to some extent you know there's a lot more popular figures in people play real sports but you start to see a lot more people begin to get recognized from the online world and I think in our perspective you know there's a number of things we need to do right which is one we need to let you have a better experience on the app as it grows. So you having 10,000 followers your experience should be much better than if you had 10 followers right? And if you get to a million followers your experience should be much better than if you had 10,000 followers. And right now FOMO is at this place where we're very intentioned about how we roll out features. So we don't just kind of throw everything at you immediately and say hey here's a social graph here's how to you know kind of find your footing. It's you know first we introduce trading we introduce away for you to see other people's you know activities for the leaderboard then we introduce the feed then the profiles get a little bit better then we add more metrics then we add theses then we add you know theses history and liking theses and it's kind of evolving game where you don't want to throw too much at once otherwise the user doesn't really understand what the purpose is for. So each kind of you know input that we put into the app is something that's very very intentionally timed. And I think that as you know a platform grows you need to be able to service a wider audience and give them more tooling the same app that can serve as you know a hundred people was in the one that can serve a 10 million people and I wrote about this in my previous article but if you took any platform that you know maybe as a hundred thousand users and you added a billion users overnight they would die immediately because they're just not skilled for that and you kind of need to grow with the user base. >> As you're saying that I'm extremely interested in why the founding team like why you took this direction with Thelma or why why you started it right like you guys were at dy de x and a social network granted there's a trading component but you're talking about it in a way that it's like a it's a consumer social media app right so I'm curious like what was the impetus - Boil this. - Yeah, I think. So, kind of taking a step back, even like, they'll take two years ago, three years ago, one of my co-founders in IPA, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we build something that lets more people touch crypto, whether they know it or not. And you know, at the time we were building the IDX, which is an institutional heavy perps platform. And at the time, you know, it was probably 95% of the perps x volume, even before hyperliquid and all these other perps x's. And it was an interesting question for us, 'cause we service institutions all day. So, you know, you have maybe 5,000 traders on any given day. And I would say that, you know, 50 of them do a majority of the volumes, since it's all market makers hedging their inventory across, and for exchanges, taking, you know, larger positions in the average retail user. And while that was a really good experience, we wanted to build something that, you know, your cousin or a friend that doesn't even know what crypto is can actually use and derive joy from. So, we started iding for a while, we first thought, "Okay, what if it's a, you know, a wallet?" And then we, you know, took a look at the landscape, I think that Phantom was one of the first wallets that I used on Salana, and it was a really good experience. It was something that I thought kind of nailed the head on what it should look like for an EOA experience. But that kind of led us back to, you know, the first kind of square one, where we were like, "Maybe the EOA wallet experience is not the way you want more people into crypto." Maybe it's a little bit too daunting. It's a little bit too kind of high touch for a normal retail user. So, we started to idea on what if you can make swaps a lot easier for these people without them having to, you know, go through those steps of funding their wallet, having to, you know, understand if they're getting sandwitch, if they have to dig through the block explorer, if they have to, you know, in some time's bridge. So, we wanted to create this experience that allowed a very easy kind of access point to that. And around this time, I think Moonshot was a popular platform that a lot of my retail friends were using. And, yeah, we looked at the app and it was very impressive for its time, you know, it did quite a number in onboarding more and more people with the trading Salana tokens. I think that what we thought, if all short, was, you come onto this platform, you go by Mooting because you think it's, you know, Qtipo, you know, you make some money and then what do you do after that? You know, it's unclear to you as a person who's having the context on crypto, what a, you know, a Pippin coin is or what is, you know, Zerbro or what is, you know, XYZ. So, we thought that, you know, their natural user journey is you make some money and you either withdraw immediately or you buy a bunch of other things you have no context on and you either get scammed or you just, you know, lose money in some different way, right? So, we wanted to add a social error on top where you could have visibility into the top traders, you could have visibility into your friends and you can have a stream of activity that is already existing on the blockchain, just kind of abstracted away from, you know, affluent numeric strings and transaction ashes into something that you can read as a normal person and we wanted this to be joyful. I think that that's the thing that's often overlooked in a crypto app, it's, does the tech work? Yes, it's gonna enough, ship it. For us, we wanted it to be something that allowed people to derive joy as they used it. A really good experience, something that feels very fun and something that they can kind of come back to be excited about. That's fascinating 'cause I see a lot of attempts from trading apps, adding, you know, social features, bells and whistles, chats, social feeds, et cetera. It sounds like you guys are using these social features in a thoughtful manner, like this is the core part of the product, right? I think a lot of times people try to overlay these social features in order to increase retention, but it's not necessarily a core part of the actual product experience. Right. Which, that's like a big bet. Like the social graph, I think the social graph in crypto and we saw this with, you know, the Forecaster News and Lens, et cetera, theoretically super interesting and has a ton of promises in terms of a composable social graph experience. So I'm curious like what cause you guys have conviction over this, right? Because it is, you know, granted trading is a validated use case in crypto, but the social graph and the social network certainly isn't. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, our general philosophy is kind of twofold. One is if it's not, you know, an order of magnitude better, it's not good enough for people to move over from something that already exists. And in the second is the social is something that works around a primary activity that people are already interested in doing. And those two things have to both be true. So I think in a lot of social, for example, is that people have tried in the recent, you know, a few years, it's always been taking something that already existed in, you know, Web 2 and trying to create a Web 3 experience around it. And while that's something I think, you know, for a long period of time did have momentum, it's not 10 times better, right? There's no, there's no 10x value problem that you get from having a decentralized Twitter than not having a decentralized Twitter. Is it two times better? Maybe is it three times better? Arguably, but it's something where it's definitely not 10 times better. And anybody who uses, you know, X in its current form wouldn't find a 10 times more enjoyable experience using it in a decentralized manner. So I think for us, you know, that's something that had to be, you know, true. And then the second thing is, is you can't just create what you would call like random games or random things that you think people might be interested in slap-as-social air on top of it. It has to have product market fit as a primary behavior. So you think about, you know, the top social media platforms, right? Like people like to write content. So Twitter, you know, they can publish these thoughts. People like to share media, whether it's a picture of video to their friends or Instagram, creating network around that. People like to, you know, teach people how to do things or inform them so TikTok can do the same. And we view trading in the same light where if you strip away all the social, people are still going to trade, you know, it's a great way to speculate whether it's spot, whether it's perps, whether it's, you know, another asset class. So it's something that people are innately interested in doing anyway. So you build a social behavior around that and let's it to kind of magnify in order magnitude. - I have a thesis that I want to validate with you. - Yeah. - Because at, you know, at the foundation, right? We obviously help in guide teams, but you guys are in the trenches building. I'm extremely interested in monetization models coming from, you know, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, transitioning from an advertising, when you perspective where you have to monetize user data, depending on the platform and the model, it might be extractive to one where you're monetizing all of transactions and swaps. Where the scalability of that model is arguably more scalable, maybe higher margins, and then you don't have to, you know, sell user data or you don't have to, you know, worsen the experience. Do you guys think about that? Like I'm curious like how you think about monetization, because when I think of social networks, I think of like the S curve, you know, the critics and model of, you have a really good experience early on, if you're an incumbent social media platform, Facebook, et cetera, at free, and then when you scale, you have to monetize and you have to offer a, maybe a sub-park experience than previously in the growth cycle. - Yeah, I think, you know, of the two options, we definitely prefer the latter, where I don't think we ever want to be in this place where we have to monetize view means that aren't courts, they actually have itself. And, you know, in some ways, like if you told us, hey, we'll be able to grow 100% new in the next year and we don't earn a single dollar, we would probably take that in a heartbeat, because it's just one of those things where growth is the most important thing. And I think a lot of teams get too fixated on monetization early. Like you kind of mentioned, you know, it's mostly in the later curve, but I think in crypto, people tend to think about monetization way too early in a lifecycle of the company. But yeah, I think for us, like the way we think about that is, you know, you obviously need creators to be able to monetize their, you know, following their brand and, you know, be able to benefit off that in some sort of way? That's how every social media platform to some extent does thrive and track these creators. I think for us, we wanted to be in a way where, you know, you are willing to pay the cost for whatever that is as a user. It's not something where you're forced to give up your data or you're forced to give a percentage of, you know, the fees that you might earn or your first forced to do XYZ. We wanted to be in a way where you are willing to do this. And if this was an option, you would be, you know, running to the door to do this immediately. So, you know, this is not necessarily saying this is what we would do, but in a great example of this is a lot of retail traders like, "Hey, like, I really like this trader change, you know, he's making a lot of great trades. He always seems to know what to sell. He always knows like, you know, what the right narrative is and he has great theses, but I'd love to interact with him. Like, if I could send them a $3 tip and, you know, get a response from him, I'd do that in a heartbeat. If I could get access to a chat room of his to like, just see his journal of thoughts for, you know, $20 a month, I'd do it." And, you know, that's kind of directionally how we think about it. It's like, what does the user actually want to pay for? And how do we allow you to do that? Like, it's kind of like everything is some sort of marketplace in a way. And, you know, I think that's a way we can get away from like, having to put in ads or monetize data or, you know, do any of these things that aren't very core to the business itself. - Yeah, I was gonna ask in that direction, you know, if, you guys are tracking the amount of brand deals, if any FOMO celebrities have gotten brand deals as a result of FOMO. Because I think that's an interesting metric to, to track even though it's probably in like, this crypto Twitter bubble in a way. But maybe like the peer to peer model of, hey, you're a copy trader, is there your super fans or are willing to pay for content as like a more healthy expression of that. - Yeah, I think there will also be brand deals as well, but I think it'll be very different than the brand deals that exist in crypto today. I think in today's world of crypto, a lot of the brand deals that we see is like, hey, we're going to pay you retainer. Please wear a badge and, you know, post about us. And, you know, defer from posting about competing services. And I think that that is something that doesn't always work in the favor of the person who's doing it. Right? If you're a person who's major in tire, reputation around, you know, using the best products. But there's a sub product that you think is, you know, not as great. It'll probably be a worse experience for your followers, but they're willing to pay you. pay you twice as much as the product they use today. There's a lot of people who take that deal, and I think you all end up in a worse spot because now you are using a worse product, you're forced to not use a product that you think might actually be better for you, and you're subjecting your audience to product that isn't the best either. So I think in this world of brand deals, it's not necessarily the most sustainable way, but I think it could be super cool if you pull in areas that are kind of insiliar, right? Let's say Remiss is a good example. He's made a lot of money on chill house soak in, and it's something that he's kind of like builds reputation for, and then he had the white whale trade, and there's all these things, but what if a swimsuit company is like, man, white whale, you're known for that trade, we'd love for you to just be the ambassador, and we'll give you a brand deal, right? 'Cause it's a Jason, right? It's not necessarily one to one, but it's something that allows them to kind of like memafide or create some sort of buzz around, and I think that that's something that's super healthy because that doesn't know harm to their user base, right? It creates them, it creates, you know, incentives where, hey, this is a swim company that I actually like their product, and you know, it's not something that I'm known for, but maybe my followers are gonna swim soon, and it's an interesting way to segue into a market that's very different than, you know, whatever it might look like today. - I wanted to, yeah, I wanted to double click on the AI UBI example, and that's a good segue. I'm talking about asset type, right? Do you think that the future looks more like, you know, people are gonna continue to trade meme coins on FOMO, and there's gonna be these celebrities and these swimsuit brands are gonna reach out to it. Or do you think it's, you know, crypto becomes more, you know, institutional one, the more tokenized assets that come along, people are gonna be trading them on FOMO, and you're gonna have a convergence of these FOMO crypto-native celebrities with the traditional financial world. - I think those worlds actually converge, some extent. I think that, you know, I personally have a broad view that like anything that is not directly driving revenue back to token is a meme coin, and that actually extrapolates to stocks as well. Like if you're owning a stock and you actually don't get any, you know, dividends and you just are able to buy it and sell it a little bit higher when the price actually goes up and the brand does something that is worthwhile. In my mind, that is not an accurate representation of you owning something. It is a meme coin. It is you owning something that represents, you know, some semblance of what this thing is, or the trend that it's going up on, and you're just here to kind of collect your piece as a result of having to merge. So I think in some world, you know, there's, there's a few things that are starting, right? Everything is coming on chain. I think that is going to be something that the world, whether they acknowledge it or not, has gonna have to recognize, right? They're gonna have to recognize that stocks are coming on chain, or the WA is maybe even like primary asset issuance is gonna come on chain. And we need to be prepared for this world where you need the infrastructure to be able to do it in a way that's adhering to the ethosocrypto, right? So if you're issuing something on chain and it's something that people want to buy, it doesn't really make sense if you're using a centralized experience to hold all these assets when they're on chain, right? You should be able to have self-custody, whether you know it or not, you should be able to, you know, decide I want to do this with my money and not be subject to any of the rules of the institution that might be guarding them. And you should be able to freely kind of go in and out of things as you please without any restrictions. So I think in some world, you know, all those things do converge where you have everything existing on chain and there needs to be a platform that services them. And, you know, you mentioned you'd be I've been in a world where, you know, let's say two decades from now, somehow there is no economic disparity, AI has solved for all basic use cases. We can do what we want with our time and we have, you know, basic UBI for everyone. Then I feel like in that world, the way you stand out is actually just going to be how much risk can you take with your underlying and how much money can you compound into that, right? It's always been, I would say, the greatest social status have more than others. And, you know, that dates back to prehistoric times, right? The person who was able to collect most food was often seen as the person who, you know, at the village wanted to look at as, you know, the king or the leader. And that's something that I think is very in any humans is who can take the same amount of resources and compound it to an extent where you have much more than everyone else. And that's kind of why I'm keeping alluding to traders as content creators. Because they're going to create the content that entertains, you know, the rest of the world. Oh, man, there's a lot of things there to pull that thread. You said so many interesting things. One, I agree with you that I think this return to value is the consensus trade right now on Wall Street. But I agree with you, right? When you look at the cash flows and the multipliers of a lot of these traditional companies and equities, publicly traded equities, for example, they're almost like meme coins at this point. Granted, we have to talk about they have governance rights. There is some liquidation like preferences in mind. But I think the mode in the AI world for 90% of the valuation of these traditional assets and equities specifically is storytelling and distribution. Right, like I think investor calls you're seeing it today are becoming, you know, who has the fanciest like podcasts set up. And like that is how value is being defined by. Whereas I think that's converging more until like the meme coin era of like, you know, the white whale storytelling aspect. I'm really, really curious around you talk about this like long term future of we have UBI, AI solves everything. It's super interesting the future that you predict with like, you know, everyone's compounding at different rates and that's how you essentially decide social status. But I'm curious in the short term. Right, like three to five years. Where, you know, we might have some dislocation in terms of unemployment assets are coming, you know, on chain. Is your dream, is your dream in the short to long term? Like is your dream to have UBI tracks coming into FOMO and, you know, people trading to like make it almost from like a from a social status respect. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, the way we view this is we want to give people the opportunity to do the thing that they want to do. So, you know, there's a lot of cases where people have wanted to buy us as whether they're in crypto or stocks or even in the private market that they haven't had a chance to, you know, sometimes for very difficult reasons like regulatory or, you know, lack of liquidity or, you know, lack of underlying. But in some cases, it's been pretty trivial reasons like, I don't know how to use a slanted wallet well enough to be able to go find, you know, a Jupyter and a route through and find the right contract address. And I think that in those cases, you know, we want to create a platform where you should be able to do the thing you want to do and you shouldn't be essentially, you know, guarded out by user experience issues or by frictions that, you know, otherwise could be solved in some manner. So in that world, you know, for us, we want people to be able to do what is best for them. I don't think we have really have a view on like, you know, you be out going to FOMO similar to how maybe Robin Hood wants the children's accounts to be on Robin Hood. Like, I don't think we have a particular view there. I think in a world where somebody else solves the same issues in the Sadduce, it's probably, you know, in our minds a better outcome, right? It's a good outcome. It's not a better outcome, but it's a net good outcome where you're still solving issues that are getting gay keeping people from doing things they want to do. And I think a good example of this is, you know, I'm from South Korea where I was born there. I left at the age of four and I went back a few years ago and spent considerable amount of time with my mom. And she says, hey, like, you know, all my parents, friends are all my friends, kids are graduating college. They graduated at the top of their class at the best university and, you know, they're going to go work at Samsung for 15K a year. And, you know, I had to, you know, take a step back and say, did you say 15K a year? Like, what do you mean that's the best of the class? And I think the way the social hierarchy works there is you come into the employment workforce. If you're lucky enough to get a job at such a company and you earn such little money that you effectively have no chance of, you know, leaving your parents' house until they age of 35, you can't get married or consider, you know, serious relationships for quite a long time after you get out of college. And that's the start contrast a lot of the crypto friends I have in Korea, who they found an opportunity in the market to, you know, speculate on things, earn, you know, more than a level of age. And, you know, they have great lives there. So it's the start contrast. And I think a lot of these people would have, you know, the benefit if they had an opportunity to take something that they have, express views, create systems and try to figure out how they can actually escape this, kind of, a lot of trouble sorts. And I think that that's what, you know, most of the world is driving towards and they want to give more access to things, whether it's crypto or whether it's stocks or, you know, whether it's, you know, anything between you and, I think that's the framework that we like to view things in. It's like, we just want to get you the tooling to do the thing that you passionately want to do no matter what that looks like. - Yeah, what I love about that framing is because I think a lot of folks take that analysis of that, the South Korean experience and say, hey, you can make it by trading meme coins. And I think what I love about the approach is what I think you're saying is, hey, listen, trading is a great way to trojan horse self-custody, a great way to get people to have access to assets that they traditionally do not have access to. It's meme coins, but it's also anyone in the world now can have access to stable coins, the American dollar, which I think is extremely powerful. Treasuries, which I think is extremely powerful. But I think you guys talk a lot about transparency a lot, because I think that sometimes I'm a little hesitant about the financial nihilism is because of the lack of transparency or verification. And I think the tooling around that, I think, meme coins are awesome from a social value perspective 'cause they value things. They value culture in a way that previously, in my opinion, has not been able to be valued before. But I think the transparency aspect is something that we need tooling for. So I think it's great that you guys are doing that. And I would love for you to talk about that in terms of like safety and just that user experience. - Yeah, I think that then the day when you create a platform that interprets a lot of what happens on chain into common text and into something that people can understand, it's not always the most pleasant transition for people, because we talk about practical obscurity and there's a lot of people who their edge is, I have all these wallets, I can read a blockchain, so therefore I'm just much more informed than you are and I'm just gonna be at advantage. And I think these very people are the ones who are typically the ones to bring pitchforks when something like FOMO exists is like, hey, why can everybody see this person's trades? I wanted to be the only one who had that access. I wanted to preserve my alpha, my edge. And that's something that I think we want to solve. You should be able to have all the information as you kind of can see it. And you should be able to decide how to use that information. In a world where edges often very short lived and determined by things that are not equitable, it's really important for us to shed light on here's exactly what's happening, here's how it's happening, and your edge should be the way you take in these inputs and create an output rather than your inputs themselves. So yeah, transparency is key. And I think there's often people who are upset about such things, but for us, we're vested in the long term where these are things that already occur. You can translate them into English text, maybe we create a platform where you can even add more transparency, but it's really important to us. We never want to be in this place where we're gatekeeping information for the user, because we think that whether you are a one follower account or $1 account or a million dollar account, you should have the same access information. And it should be something that I think is equitable for everyone, because I think historically, the financial system has not been kind to people that are typically on the lower end of the spectrum. And I think most of the current financial system is actually built around the very wealthy. And they can do things that people like myself just don't know about. They can do all these clever loopholes, borrow against their house and invest in stocks, and then for all the capital income. And do all these things that the normal person just has no idea how to do. So it's really important for us to shed more light into transparency into this financial system and hope that that can expand out to beyond just crypto and beyond what we're working on. What does that mean for the-- what does that mean for y'all's roadmap? From a product perspective, because you guys are, say, you guys are long-term thinkers. Seems like there's a lot of threads that you can go on, offering traditional assets that are tokenized to like financial literacy, to more social features. To the extent that you can talk about it, right? What's on the roadmap? Yeah, so I think one of the things that we think about often is yield. So if you've opened up your Chase account or your Bank of America account or a French national something similar, you often open it and you can get yield, but it's going to be 25 basis points. You're going to get maybe 50 basis points if you put in like five, six figures of cash. Versus the treasuries are yielding close to 4%. So there's somebody in the middle that's taking all of that money from you today. And I think in D5, there's opportunities to earn even more yield, which obviously comes risk-adjusted. But one of the things that's important for us is offering yield on cash, right? At minimum, we can be a platform where you can go park money and earn yield, whether it's something partnering with a very specific stablecoin provider, whether it's D5 pools. And obviously, these are all risks that you need to highlight to the user. Hey, there's no free lunch at all. And I think the best case with treasuries just in general, anyway, no matter where you're investing from, there's platform risk, there's maybe risk if you're above some certain amount. Maybe there's risk around macro. There's always risks that are associated with trying to earn money. But I think that's a pretty big improvement in the common experience. I have a savings account. I earn 0.3% every year. And sometimes I wonder where does the rest of this money go. And we want a current experience where you can actually bridge that gap to some extent. So that's one thing we're interested in. I think another interesting thing is Perps, right? Because Perps today allow you to essentially create a market on anything that is an Oracle. So there's a lot of people who are not able to trade the US stuff market, for example, right? Like let's say, you're in a country where they don't have the infrastructure to do so. But you're really excited about some of the developments in let's say a Tesla or Nvidia or something that trades in a US stock market. You have no access to be able to express that in any way. So that's something that actually allows you to democratize this market to a lot more people. Similar to how stable coins allow you to get access to the US dollar. So these are things that we think about quite often is how do you build a product that actually lets people from different parts of the world actually benefit from it. And you can kind of pull in different pieces of technology, different pieces of geospecific markets, and put them into a platform that is very easy to use, easy to understand. And something that we put a lot of time into is fraud warnings and education. And getting people to really understand what are the inherent risks here? What are the things that you might not be looking at? And if there's a red warning, you should probably read that it says it's low liquidity. Or this is not something that is truthfully representing the underlying or has some issues in the smart contract. And trying to create this experience or to have the full source information. It seems as if you talk in a way that's-- because I think a lot of crypto native people, as are also being crypto, do you kind of understand where the money-- where that arbitrage opportunity-- where they're losing out on the treasury yield side? And I'm curious if you have a breakdown or can kind of explain the user base from a crypto-tweeter perspective to a non-coptotter perspective if you can shed some light there. On the phone, we'll use it in my graphic. Yeah, so today we have roughly 4,000 users on the app. And I would say the most interesting part about this is we add somewhere between, let's say, 1 to 5,000 users every day. I would say 80% of these users are not crypto native. So these are people that in our mind have either never going off of a centralized exchange, have never touched crypto in any capacity or are just becoming privy to what crypto is for the first time, maybe even without knowing so. And the way we can attribute this is, we have a pretty extensive media program that allows us to work with content creators who then find-- or content managers who then work with content creators. And we're able to perform a lot of educational content on what flowmo is. So we drive a lot of activity around educating the user. Here is what this app is. Here's a token that you might have heard of previously. I know it was very hard to buy. This is how you can do it. This is the app and how it works. And I think that drives a lot of users because they've always wanted since Rackle Crypto. But there's such a high barrier. You can think about a funnel analysis of when do people drop off from using crypto. It's one, you have that one app. That's a very big hurdle in of itself. Two, you have to create an account, which often is a very long-winded process on centralized experiences. You have to figure out how to unwrap the money. And then that's just the beginning of your journey. Then how do you figure out where do I trade, what are these assets, what does this mean, what is a market cap. It's just all things that are really, really confusing. So I think that they found Solus in being able to use a platform that makes it a very easy experience, something similar to Web2App, something that's very intuitive and easy to understand. And at the end of the day, if we are looking back five years later, and we say, OK, we've captured 100% of crypto-efficient as a crypto user volume as it exists today, that's probably a fail-see. We want to be able to expand this to millions, tens, hundreds of millions of users. Because otherwise, we're not doing the thing that we set out to do, which is bringing more users into this space of crypto, whether they recognize it or not. We think crypto is going to power a lot of the experiences in the financial system. And it's something that we want to be a large part in doing. That's interesting in terms of the top of funnel. And you mentioned, here's a token that you might be interested in buying. Is that analysis done on what are the-- the trends on social media like the monkey, right? What is that attribution or analysis based on? Or is it just folks who are interested in financial literacy, content on Instagram? It's a pretty wide range. So I think a common one is the mooting token that I think it might have been like two years now. But there were a lot of people-- and I would say everybody's now working on wanting to buy this token, because it was a trend that was very viral. It was something that people thought was very easy and expressive you want. And I think that that's a common example, because by the time most of the people found out how to buy that token, it was already 10, 20, 30 times higher than they first saw it. And I think that that was one of the first times where, at least in the new age, where the average TikTok user could say, I saw mooting, and it was only training at $1 million. Like, I would have loved to just put in $10. That $10 would have ended up being $10,000 for some people. So I think that it's just an example that people can use to say, hey, you wanted to do this before. You might not want to do it now, but here's a platform that actually allows you to express your view easily. It doesn't have all the complications that you might have used previously. And I think the toughest part about this is that onboarding the crypto is still very difficult, but it's been so difficult for so long that people just kind of get jaded and they give up. And once they hear this topic, and hey, you can do it easily. They've heard that a thousand times, so they go try to do it again. And they're usually expecting disappointment. Like, hey, like, I've done this already. I've failed this step. I know what it's going to be, but why not? I'm going to give it a try. And then they have this magical moment where they onboard to foam a very, very seamlessly. They own right money very quickly. And then they're able to buy this token within 30 seconds and take hold on. This thing actually works. So then they're compelled to share with their friends. And I think that in a market like today, [BLANK_AUDIO] how much to actually be doing on chain, but at least in the back of their minds, they know, hey, next time, I'm really excited about something I know where to go. And that's kind of the education that we want to perform. - Yeah, it's fascinating, right? I feel as if there's a contrast between folks being able to identify TikTok trends early and the ability to capitalize or to speculate on those trends. Still, obviously with FOMO, it's easy if they're on the app, but in terms of onboarding or prediction markets today, I don't think are the right mechanism for that, right? I think like social trading. And tokens might even be a better mechanism to speculate on trends and what's happening, especially if you have a social feature around it. One of my last questions and given this is a slona, based podcast, I am curious, you guys do use slona in a pretty heavy way in terms of unified balances, but I'm curious in terms of the benefits that slona has given you, especially with the experience that you guys have had, that DYDX and just supporting other chains as well. - Yeah, so for the people who might know, FOMO launch as a slona specific app, they won. So for the better part of a year, we were only on slona, and this is something that we, in hindsight, very much benefited from and appreciate tremendously. I think that the slona ecosystem is one of the places where if there's an issue, and you mentioned it, there's already five people working on it. I think we have a number of conversations where, hey, this asset is not available on slona, if you want to trade it. And I think within 48 hours, every number of time where you guys have listed that asset, or work with the team to bridge over enough liquidity to make it tradable. And I think that's just one example of working within this ecosystem. It's something where people are very hungry, where people are excited to build, and you can kind of feel that energy no matter where, which part of the ecosystem you're in. So for us, building on slona, day one was a very obvious choice. It was something where they have the most assets. There's this unified goal of trying to become the layer where everything settles on. And it's really important for us to understand that if you want to trade something, you can do it very easily on slona, whether it's today, whether it's six months ago, whether it's even six years from now. And I think that we have a very high level of trust that that's the world that we're heading in is everything is coming on chain. There's going to be places that allow you to do these things. And we want to create an experience where you can do it in half a second, right? On phone, what's today, if you go to buy a slona asset, it probably confirms before you even have a chance to kind of register what's going on. It's half a second to confirm. And we imagine a world where you can actually do on every asset. You can do that on a stock. You can do that on an RWA. You can do that on, maybe something even like a piece of real estate. And you can just buy things in such a quick fashion and understand that there's enough liquidity, you can trust the environment, and understand that it's something that will contribute to a great user experience that's unified. And that's why we decide to keep all of our cash balance on slona. It's the experience that is best for the user. And that's something that we'll never compromise. It's like I get super excited thinking about, if everything is standardized on slona that I'm confident it will be, you guys can capitalize on that standardization, right? If everything is an SPL token, you can easily capitalize and just plug into whether it be prediction market balance today, whether it be purpose, real estate, et cetera. One of my last questions here is, I always asked to close out advice for young consumer builders. You've had different pattern matching recognition in different industries. So I'm curious if you had any advice of a consumer founder in this market, what would you tell them if they're early stage ideating with something today? Yeah, I would say that one of the most important things here is you need to take a step back and think about, what am I excited to be doing for the next 10 years, 20 years? Because I think that often a lot of people jump into an idea that they might not be excited to work on even in six months and think that it's a good opportunity now. And you can't really fake passion, right? You need to be able to come to terms with the fact that this is something that, if it goes well and you should hope it does, you'll be working on for potential domestic life. And it's really heavy because I think people, humans as a whole really tend to not be able to think on such large timeframes. So you kind of need to take a step back, think about, am I willing to work on this for my life? And then increase that heaviness by an order of magnitude and say, am I really willing to commit to this thing? Because it's something that is not always going to be easy, building consumer is really difficult. Building consumer crypto is even more difficult. I think that we're still pretty early as an industry and there will be tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of people who use crypto, but it's still growing in the street today and you might be fighting for the same users. You might be building in the wrong direction temporarily. You might be at odds with what big decision to make. And there's going to be a lot of tough times as much as I hope there are great times as well. And you need to be able to have the conviction that the thing you're doing is so important that you're going to be able to overcome those convictions, overcome those doubts and find the conviction to continue to tread in the right direction. And just wholeheartedly hope that this is something that you can commit to doing with great passion for the regts and period time. - It's awesome, I do. - Thanks, I've just done my-- - I appreciate it, man. - Thank you everyone. Make sure to subscribe on Apple Music and Spotify. And we'll see you soon.