Episode Transcript
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0:00
If you're competitive, markets
0:02
are quite a good arena
0:05
to play in, but you have to
0:07
be at least in the top three to make money. Turn
0:10
$25,000 into $125 million essentially, it would be more.
0:15
You can segment things in different ways, but
0:17
I think what we call trading
0:20
and winter media is mostly market making. Private
0:23
side is easier and harder.
0:25
Private side is essentially access
0:27
and filter. When you get access to
0:30
the right deals and when you have access to the right deals, can
0:32
you say this is a good deal I want to invest in or
0:34
not? You need to have
0:36
at least 14 investments to see your money back.
0:39
Usually the first seven or eight, so just go down to zero.
0:42
You have three or four or five of the
0:44
business. He returns your money and will give you a bit
0:46
more. Then he's sent out one investment
0:48
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0:50
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Start staking today at Chorus.one. Welcome
3:05
to Epson and the show which talks
3:07
about technologies projects and people driving decentralization
3:09
and blockchain revolution. I'm Brian Crane and
3:11
today I'm speaking with Jo Turpin who
3:13
is the co-founder of Vintermute.
3:16
Vintermute is one of the largest
3:18
or maybe the largest market making
3:20
company in crypto and
3:24
yeah I think it's a
3:26
field I'm super excited to dive in here so thanks
3:30
so much for coming on, Joon. Thanks
3:32
Brian. Thanks for inviting us. We're
3:35
the largest spot market making
3:37
firm. We're not the largest across
3:39
derivatives yet. Not yet. Working on it as
3:42
though a spot is true. Define
3:44
most likely as well. Getting
3:46
there. You know working to be so like
3:49
we can't claim the full name yet. How
3:52
did I know about the crypto space in
3:54
general? We need to do a bit more
3:56
derivatives but we're working on this. Thanks
3:58
for the invite. Thanks
4:00
so much for coming on. We
4:03
hung out a bit in Singapore recently and it
4:05
was really great to talk and so I'm super
4:07
excited to dive
4:09
into interviews. But
4:12
maybe to start off, share
4:15
a little bit, how did you become interested
4:17
in trading and markets?
4:21
Well, okay, trading and markets are
4:23
well before crypto. So
4:26
I am to be like full disclaimer, so I'm 41
4:28
and I started to get interested in trading when I was 12. And
4:32
I was essentially reading newspapers,
4:36
so my dad would be a subscriber
4:38
to something called the Figaro in France.
4:41
And they had essentially that a
4:43
main newspaper for just typical
4:45
news, politics and the likes.
4:48
And they had like, they had like,
4:50
also what we call the salmon papers, which
4:52
are essentially like similar to the FT, sort
4:54
of the market papers. And I was just going through this and I
4:56
was just took to
4:58
compassion to read through that. One
5:01
of these kids who had
5:03
kind of 120 options of like what they wanted to do when they grow
5:05
up. So I wanted to
5:07
be you know, like, what are the doctor,
5:09
experimental physician, astrophysicist between essentially the age
5:11
of 7 and 12. And
5:14
then from 12, I really wanted to be a trader. So
5:17
I got into this discussion
5:19
with my dad, had
5:21
a stock portfolio that he would
5:23
manage. We didn't have the
5:25
internet per se, we had Minitel. So
5:28
Minitel was quite popular in France at the
5:30
time. You just log in into the
5:33
6637, it's similar to a web page, but you just
5:35
type in a number. And
5:37
essentially, we just log in into the what was the credit
5:40
union at the time, and we just we could just buy
5:42
stocks such. So I started a
5:44
study like this,
5:47
putting some orders into to buy stocks with
5:49
my dad's money when I was 12. It
5:53
wasn't a ton of money, but it was just enough to be
5:55
able to passion for it. And then
5:58
I got him to buy me like a an
6:00
options book when I was 15. So my first
6:02
option took and then basically I couldn't trade options. So basically
6:04
I found a way to trade warrants. Essentially,
6:06
you could only buy stuff. I
6:09
was right directionally, but
6:12
I realized that the
6:14
banks on the other side, essentially warrants a bit different from
6:17
options in the way that they should buy banks or
6:20
like a warrant issuer. And essentially they
6:22
were taking so much margin that I was right
6:24
in my bets, but I was giving too much margin away.
6:27
And it's probably one of the first things that led me
6:29
to think of more like market making percent. So
6:32
I kind of hired one of my, like
6:35
a little cousin who's, I think he's five
6:38
years younger than me over summer and I was going
6:40
through like sort of finding arbitrage across the page and
6:42
so on. So anyway, I started slightly quite
6:44
early on market in
6:46
general. I think the theme has always
6:48
been that I would
6:51
go through different subjects
6:53
and I would get a bit bored of it. Half
6:56
of my family is entrepreneurs, half of my family
6:58
are educators. And then one thing I really didn't
7:00
want to do at the time is just not
7:02
be a teacher as such because I thought it was just a
7:04
bit too repetitive, going through the same
7:06
lessons and teaching the same things every year. And
7:09
one aspect in market side of it is just
7:11
changes all the time. Yeah, these
7:13
economic cycles, they say every three, four years or so,
7:16
you can see that in crypto, you get like,
7:18
when do people call it more like seasons
7:20
and such. And it just
7:22
changes enough and it's noisy
7:24
enough that it forces you
7:26
to relearn things and so on. So
7:29
I found that, oh, if I want to have some
7:31
sort of career for 10, 20
7:33
plus years, it needs to be linked with markets.
7:37
So in a way that it needs to just
7:39
be refreshing enough. Yeah, that's the
7:41
long short of it. And then I ended up training
7:44
my first teachers when I was 18, got someone to write off,
7:46
sign up
7:50
for a professional investor letter for me to
7:52
trade a future in some bull's trauma when
7:54
I was 18 as an internship. Basically, I
7:56
qualified that as an internship with the... school
8:01
and then they wanted to like a
8:04
bank as the first sort of gap year and then wanted to do
8:06
trading as the first job at 23. So
8:09
when you got interested in trading
8:11
this early, you mentioned one of the things
8:13
you liked was this fluctuating,
8:16
the change. Do
8:18
you think that was the thing that kind of
8:20
caught your attention and got you to deep in
8:23
there or were there like other aspects that ended
8:25
up being so fascinating for you about
8:28
training and markets? There's
8:32
a competitive level. That's
8:34
interesting. There's a few things. I
8:37
did some self-trading before doing
8:39
trading professionally and I found
8:41
that self-trading was not always
8:43
aligned with the customers and I didn't really like
8:46
it and I found that trading was much more
8:48
aligned with, it's pretty clear
8:50
where the P&L comes from. I
8:53
found that was just a very honest way
8:55
of making money. So I quite like that
8:57
aspect. You get very
9:00
clear feedback, very tangible feedback if you're doing things right,
9:03
you basically make money, if you're doing things wrong, you
9:05
lose money. It is much more like
9:08
honest process. I think it
9:10
gave me a sense of independence as well
9:14
to the degree that you can trade some things
9:16
on your own as such. But
9:19
I think there's also not quite a lot of
9:21
things that we do today that are to be
9:23
data. We can only
9:25
do because we have the infrastructure, because we have the team in
9:27
the background. There's quite
9:29
a lot of things that have to
9:31
be quite collaborative between getting everything aligned
9:34
between the right access to capital, right access to
9:37
exchanges, right access to an
9:39
inventory, right strategies
9:42
and so on. So I think there's
9:46
also a collaborative aspect that's interesting there. I
9:49
think if you're competitive, markets
9:51
are quite a good arena
9:54
to play in because it's global pretty
9:56
much from day one. So
9:58
if you think about us when we started. in
10:00
the crypto space, it was essentially you're both from
10:02
day one. So you know if it's going to
10:04
work pretty quickly, then it's not
10:06
destroying some sort of follow with zero to
10:08
one like when it works. You
10:11
want to be in the top three definitely, ideally,
10:13
you're the first one in certain vertical
10:16
as such. So you want to
10:18
be first one in spot trading as such. But
10:22
you have to be at least in the top three to make
10:24
money. But no, we
10:27
interact on Twitter here and there and so on, and it's
10:29
more about I think people
10:32
get somehow satisfied to be doing a bit better.
10:34
But I think the realization, especially in
10:36
trading is that you need
10:38
to be doing better than the competition all the time.
10:42
And it's a bit more about you
10:44
know, there's this marginal advantages that you
10:46
need to add on to that
10:48
make it quite competitive. So
10:51
it's just, yeah,
10:53
keeps you on your toes. I
10:57
want to go into this but mainly before
10:59
that, then what's the story of
11:01
how VTmute started?
11:04
There's a convergence of two things. There's
11:07
a convergence of Yevgeny
11:10
set up the company 25th of July 2017. And he was doing
11:12
like little sort of hackathons here and there
11:17
with our first CGO R. And
11:20
then on my side, I essentially had
11:22
already built a few companies, a few
11:24
trading related companies, but I see also
11:26
some startup studio, a
11:29
bit more of a VC advisory
11:31
firm as well. And
11:33
on my side, I was going back into trading 2016-17.
11:36
And I was sitting next to
11:40
this ex-martial waste. I don't know if you know
11:42
of martial waste, but it's probably the
11:44
largest long-shore touch fund in London that
11:47
you know, a Philip Marshall, I
11:49
think it's a Philip, made
11:53
a few billions out of it. But essentially, they managed
11:55
something like 86, $90 billion of
11:57
the UM and they and
12:00
they do a lot of long short, more
12:02
in the equity space. And one
12:05
of their first employees was sitting up, was sitting not
12:07
too far from me on a trading desk.
12:09
And he was setting up his own macro fund, and he was all
12:11
over crypto in 2017. So we reviewed
12:13
a lot of ICOs together, about 56, I think.
12:15
And he wanted
12:18
to have a macro hedge fund that would
12:20
have actually a crypto sleeve, what they call
12:22
it. Essentially, they have a macro hedge fund that
12:24
have different strategies, and you have a sleeve of it.
12:26
So part of the allocation is in crypto. And
12:29
he wanted me to manage that allocation. So
12:33
it came to mind that, well, I can't do
12:35
this alone. I need a,
12:38
you know, I can trade, but I need someone else to
12:40
help with, just
12:42
automate by everything, some more with CTO, and
12:45
I need another trader because it's 24 seven.
12:47
And then essentially, just I reconnected just discussing
12:50
very openly with some ex
12:52
colleagues from trading, suggested
12:55
me to reconnect with you again. And then we
12:57
we aligned on this and I joined
12:59
in as a co founder, essentially late
13:01
2017. We put everything
13:03
on paper with with our CTO actually on in the
13:05
early 2018. That's the decision or thing
13:09
that he he had just left a
13:11
trading farm and he wanted to do something in crypto.
13:13
And I had basically the allocation we didn't
13:16
we did not end up taking money from
13:18
from that fund, actually. But I was enough to just just
13:20
for doing it like rekindle the interest for
13:23
me to get into crypto. And philosophically,
13:27
for me, it's more like I had done
13:29
both trading and VC before. And
13:31
I found that crypto was super interesting in terms of
13:34
like democratizing like liquid is one we
13:37
call like liquid venture essentially, so
13:39
very early stage bats, but that
13:42
you could get access from just with
13:44
trading very, very early on, which
13:46
I couldn't find in the private markets
13:48
anymore, like within private and public markets
13:50
in what to to
13:52
add some background to that Brian, where
13:55
to like, I had
13:58
done first non listed. investors in
14:00
2008. I was a pretty
14:02
active angel investor, so London and song between
14:04
2012 and 1516,
14:08
let's call it. I
14:12
think you still have this in web 2 where in
14:16
the past 90s or so, you'd
14:20
be a city investor at Amazon. Amazon just
14:22
lists like three years later, sometime
14:25
around 1999, you can still buy Amazon in
14:27
$1. You can actually get a lot of the
14:29
growth and you can get a lot of the upside. But
14:33
after 2009 especially, while
14:35
you get into the year by listing, you get into the
14:38
Facebook listing, there's nothing like there's not, there's not
14:40
necessarily a ton of upside left. So
14:43
everything just lists like 10, 15 years
14:45
into the life of the company. And
14:47
it's much more what we call encrypt or
14:49
extra liquidity, but it's key equity
14:51
like typical web 2, share
14:54
all those of listing companies just end
14:56
up becoming, you know, extra liquidity for
14:58
VCs or private equity groups essentially. So
15:02
I was, I found it really refreshing
15:04
that crypto was trying to solve
15:06
that problem essentially. And another
15:08
aspect that I love in crypto is
15:10
more like I've dealt with
15:12
people in the trading space and the hash space
15:14
from the EFS space and stuff. And people
15:17
can be a bit cagey and
15:19
enders anders space. And I found that
15:21
actually like people in crypto are always
15:24
quite open. And maybe you
15:26
made some scammers here and there, but
15:28
actually in general, people are quite that
15:30
pretty goodwill and are quite
15:32
a lot more interesting to interact with. So
15:36
I'd love to get a bit into
15:38
sort of trading and like, I
15:40
think a lot of people they will
15:43
have and I, you know, they will know
15:45
trade a lot of listeners will know sort
15:47
of trading in the sense of,
15:49
you know, okay, I have
15:51
some US dollars and euro
15:53
or something, I want to buy some
15:55
Bitcoin, I go on like an exchange
15:57
and I put in, you know, maybe
16:00
a market order, maybe a limit order,
16:03
and I buy some tokens,
16:05
right? Or like maybe I
16:07
do it on the exchange, I buy some shares. But
16:10
I think that's probably the extent
16:12
to which most people listening
16:15
here will understand trading. And
16:17
obviously that's something very different
16:19
from having the things you did
16:22
previously at before
16:24
crypto, at this training company
16:26
or then at Adwintmute. Can
16:29
you tell me what's
16:31
trading? When you say you're trading, what
16:33
does that mean and what does that
16:35
look like? You
16:38
can segment things in different ways, but
16:40
I think what we call
16:42
trading at Adwintmute is mostly market
16:44
making. So essentially, we're there
16:46
in the order book, so we're there in
16:49
a marketplace, we're there in the exchange, and we're
16:52
there to always be so that if someone
16:54
wants to buy or sell, there's someone on
16:56
the other side, someone like us, Mark and
16:58
Mickey, there's someone on the other side there to
17:00
fill our order. Because
17:03
let's say if you, Brian, if
17:05
we both individuals and somehow
17:07
like you want to sell Bitcoin at 70K and
17:09
I want to buy it at 60K, nothing happens.
17:13
And the market makers are there to make sure that we
17:17
always show what's called a
17:19
bid and an offer. The price
17:21
of which we can buy and the price of which we can sell. And
17:25
then we're trying to be there to always make
17:28
trading easier and the cheapest possible. So
17:32
what we call trading tends to be associated
17:34
with market making. Now most
17:37
people, to your point, most people call trading
17:39
and are trying to buy with
17:42
that $1 and hope that it gets $2. That's
17:49
often not
17:52
the greatest strategy. I think the way that most
17:54
people should be trading in crypto is
17:57
to see it as venture. different
18:01
x amount of money, either they don't
18:03
do any research and just stay in like BTC and
18:05
ETH and sort of the top four or five names
18:07
as such. We
18:09
start to see more what's
18:11
called more basket products and more index
18:13
products as such that would give you
18:16
exposure to the top 10, 20, 30
18:19
names which
18:21
is for most people is probably a better way to
18:23
do things. I mean,
18:25
how do you trade? Let's
18:28
ask this, this side that way. I
18:31
know you've done some venture investments but
18:33
do you trade anything, any
18:36
liquid tokens? I'm
18:39
very like buy and
18:41
hold and don't do much else and
18:43
you know maybe. Do
18:45
you have any leverage when you take a position or? No,
18:48
no. Okay, sounds very cute. Very
18:50
leverage. It's pretty good. I
18:53
don't have
18:55
the impression that I'm
18:58
good at predicting basically
19:00
market movements so I don't
19:03
try to do that. Yeah,
19:06
so I mean that's quite reassuring. I
19:09
have made money historically with some
19:11
cycles like in stocks or so like taking
19:14
directions but through
19:16
previous firms, not necessarily through interview. Whether
19:20
it's VCs as the venture arm is doing quite
19:22
well but it's very much
19:24
like venture investment so again to separate
19:27
like I think what you refer to as trading
19:29
is much more liquid
19:31
investments but on the private side, private
19:34
side is easier and
19:36
harder. Private side is essentially access
19:39
and filter. Can you get access to
19:41
the right deals and when you have access to the right deals, can
19:43
you say this is a good deal I want to invest in or
19:45
not? And
19:47
that's venture for you. The
19:49
problem usually of venture or in
19:52
crypto and some of the spaces is just that you're
19:56
married to the position. The good thing with it is
19:58
that you don't tend to have any leverage. So if
20:01
it goes on to zero, it goes on to zero, but you
20:03
get psychologically to
20:06
do things going on to zero. Now
20:09
you'll understand why I mentioned this for
20:11
trading is I think most people should
20:14
consider even when it's liquid crypto, they
20:17
should consider it like a venture bet. They
20:19
should consider that they're actually making an investment
20:21
that actually should be pretty much with them
20:23
down to zero. And they
20:25
also should look at the stats of actually venture
20:28
investments. So venture investments for like, I
20:30
don't have the stats for crypto, but
20:33
like for Web2, Angel, like even
20:35
10, 15 years ago, you could already get all the
20:37
stats where you needed to have at
20:39
least 14 investments to see your money back. And
20:42
usually the first seven or eight, so just go down to
20:44
zero. You have three
20:47
or four or five that basically return your money
20:49
and it'll give you a bit more, then you
20:51
tend to have one investment every less than 10.
20:54
That actually just has the yields 80% of
20:56
your return. And
20:59
that causes some challenges
21:01
when you think of how people trade,
21:04
which means that the
21:06
winners should
21:08
essentially return 10 plus times their money. And
21:12
I think it's very, very hard psychologically for
21:14
most people to think of like keeping
21:17
something that does 10X and not sell it
21:19
before it reaches 10X. Another
21:22
parallel with this is that, do
21:25
you know what valuation the Uber investors invested seed? It's
21:29
2008. So 2008, do you know
21:32
what valuation they invested? I
21:34
don't know. $3 million. So
21:39
essentially when Uber listed, people
21:42
had a 5,500X. So
21:46
whatever J-Call and Strands and Son made like
21:48
$25,000 into 125 million, essentially,
21:51
but a bit more. But
21:53
that's basically the math. So
21:56
imagine if Uber had a 5,000X, but it's
21:58
not a 5,000X. been liquid before
22:00
that. I'm pretty sure that
22:02
F-HOLT's sold some of it. It's
22:06
a bit of a challenge of thinking of investing
22:08
in crypto. You
22:11
end up with a liquid venture and then you need to
22:13
find a way to trade
22:15
maybe. If
22:19
you sell your 5,000, if you have 100X but
22:21
then it turns into a 5000X, it's
22:23
quite a big miss. It brings us
22:26
to the challenges of comparing venture and
22:28
trading. Trying to find a way to
22:30
invest and trade is actually pretty hard.
22:34
With the market making that you guys do
22:36
at the interviews, how do you make
22:38
money? We basically
22:40
are forced into a position we don't want. We
22:42
call it a position that is being normal or
22:44
short. As long as you make money if things
22:47
go up, short to make money if
22:49
things go down. We're forced into a position by
22:51
providing liquidity by just basically saying
22:54
if you want to buy Bitcoin for me. Let's
22:57
say there's a particular coin
22:59
and then you have buy
23:03
orders and you
23:05
have sell orders. That means
23:07
you have to hold both
23:09
sides. What
23:12
cost us money in the first place
23:14
is infrastructure. People to run algos
23:17
to send the orders and so on.
23:19
Coast of capital
23:22
to borrow the
23:24
coins on each
23:26
side. Even if sometimes we get
23:28
a sign and a ship borrows but
23:30
there's still commitments, there's still some things that are associated with
23:32
it. The borrows
23:35
are often from the
23:38
team or
23:40
foundation or whoever is issuing the
23:42
token. That's much less than half
23:44
of what we have in the balance sheet.
23:47
Some of the borrows are from foundations.
23:49
Some of the borrows used
23:51
to be from the lending borrowing platforms like
23:54
BlockFi and the rest. It must have been
23:56
actually going to us. We have
23:58
some borrows in DeFi. that you'll
24:00
know through like wildcat people, the
24:02
maple of the well and so on. But
24:05
essentially, yeah, a lot
24:08
of borrows come from some of our shareholders or
24:10
so, just directly from the emphasis and so on.
24:13
So we borrow directly from foundations and
24:15
other people. So we have a certain
24:17
cost of capital. And then we
24:19
make money by essentially being in the order book
24:21
and trying to capture as much as possible of
24:23
the spread. So we essentially
24:25
get paid over time to take risk
24:28
because we pushed, as I was saying earlier, we pushed
24:31
into a position because you want to buy. We don't
24:33
actually want to sell, but necessarily we want to
24:35
sell at that price. And then
24:37
we hope that we can hedge it as in
24:40
we can buy back whatever we sold to you.
24:42
We hope we can buy it back at a slightly lower
24:44
price. But let's
24:46
say I want to buy a token and
24:50
then you guys
24:52
have to sell order. So now you're buying
24:54
that token at that sell order. And then
24:59
you hope that maybe you can sell
25:01
it at a different exchange at a
25:03
better price than buy
25:06
it at a better price
25:08
than you sold it to
25:10
me or do you hope that the price moves? Market
25:14
making is actually, this summarises is
25:16
quite simple. It's quite simple to
25:18
explain, but quite difficult to implement.
25:21
Market making is just what do
25:23
I think this and the length of
25:25
this, but Bitcoin is worth that time to how
25:28
wide do I want to quote and how what sort of size
25:30
do I want to quote it? So you
25:32
just have width, quote size
25:35
and then your mid price or what I
25:37
think the theoretical value of the token is.
25:41
And then we quote around this and as
25:43
yes, there's small amounts of money that
25:45
come from arbitrage, so basically
25:47
be able to sell, you know,
25:49
near enough at the same time, sell on one
25:51
exchange, the same asset and just
25:53
buy it, buy it better than the other exchange at
25:55
a lower price. But yeah, often it's
25:58
just, it's pretty much trying that
26:00
price things as well as possible. It
26:04
turns out to be like it's much more about, it's quite
26:06
a competitive space in the way that to
26:09
be able to trade both sides, we need to be
26:11
really within the thread. So we
26:13
need to be the best offer on one side and the best bid
26:15
on the other side. And
26:17
it's very infrastructure-driven. So it means that
26:19
we need to be able to
26:21
adjust the orders safely so we
26:24
don't get taken out by other people. So
26:26
there's some infrastructure cost in that. And
26:29
obviously, you don't have the capital
26:31
constraints, there's cost of capital
26:33
because we
26:36
borrow all these assets. Yeah, long
26:38
story short, we make money by
26:41
taking your risk, we
26:44
don't necessarily want to be short this Bitcoin, but we
26:46
want to buy Bitcoin. And
26:49
now if you have
26:51
different companies that compete,
26:55
different market makers that compete, you
26:57
mentioned you need to be the top or top three
26:59
in stuff to make money, but what differentiates
27:02
the top from the
27:05
other players? So
27:08
that's an interesting discussion that I had even in
27:10
touch with when I was at
27:12
my first venture in trading in 2011.
27:17
And I actually did it in 2014 and I was
27:19
looking at trying some other
27:21
top five firms and just trying to learn from
27:24
other people. Basically, my first venture was the one
27:26
senior trader there and I felt I didn't really learn
27:29
enough. And I think a lot of it is
27:31
actually much more about cultural differentiation. I think
27:33
if you can attract them, I'd tell it because
27:36
people are very honest and they can actually just
27:39
bail. But I think there's an aspect of people
27:41
being aligned and being there and being traders for
27:44
the right reasons. Often people
27:46
don't actually stay traders just for
27:48
money. It
27:50
can be quite rewarding financially, but it's actually
27:52
often people just get, if you
27:54
are just interested in money, they just get the first bonus and they
27:56
sort of leave and they do something else that's a lot less stressful.
28:00
So either people can like math,
28:02
they like whatever problem solving, there's other
28:04
aspects that make it interesting. The
28:08
math comes in
28:10
because when you are
28:12
basically around determining this or the midpoint,
28:14
the width and things like that, that's
28:16
when you use some kind of data
28:20
analysis. Yeah, yeah,
28:22
you try to predict as well as
28:24
possible. It's never
28:26
an exact science, which is why
28:28
infrastructure comes into play quite
28:31
heavily, where it becomes
28:33
a more exact science because you end up trading
28:35
very high frequency. I think some people know
28:38
the term of GFT is sort of high frequency trading
28:40
as a thought. And you end
28:42
up trading, you end up making money every
28:45
day at least at the start and ideally
28:47
every hour because
28:50
you trade very, very high frequencies here. So I
28:52
think we trade four, five, six million times a
28:54
day these days. It
28:57
becomes very granular. So
29:01
it also becomes very infrastructure dependent.
29:04
So it means you
29:06
need to essentially 50
29:08
plus people to
29:10
go and cover, just
29:13
make sure that everything is running smoothly. And
29:15
especially in a crypto space between CFI,
29:17
DeFi, between the OTC side of
29:20
the business, between an API offering, you
29:22
end up crossing quite a few things. Getting
29:26
into this a little bit, like if
29:29
you compare market making in
29:32
a traditional market versus crypto,
29:35
what are the biggest things that
29:37
you need to be good at specifically
29:40
to do well in crypto markets? So
29:44
I can tell you what I think is
29:46
a good differentiation for the business is that
29:48
we build a very good brand of reputation
29:51
by being honest people and not
29:53
looking for the short term optimal
29:56
that we can really wish for for a long time.
29:58
So I think that was quite a bit of a challenge. quite key. So
30:02
maybe you can explain why that matters because you
30:04
think if all if you just have the orders
30:06
in the exchange and you know it just takes
30:08
the best order I don't even know who's on
30:10
the other side so on
30:12
that side it sort of shouldn't matter right? So
30:15
as soon as you try to see your face
30:17
counterparties we would call counterparties they're not really customers
30:19
as such they're just because we
30:22
tried as we would call principles we try to
30:24
own capital. So
30:26
essentially you want to be
30:29
reliable like when you show a price basically
30:31
you know you're there for
30:33
certain price versus in size for an extreme amount
30:35
of time. So reliability is
30:38
being more predictable is worth something. So
30:41
market making can be done I think people in crypto
30:43
space are used to hear the term
30:46
towards foundations but it's also towards
30:49
exchanges. So if
30:51
you're reliable towards exchanges do that when
30:53
things move around but so on then
30:56
the exchange is
30:58
just the room essentially and then you need
31:01
the exchange needs people like us to be in
31:03
the room to trade with some other many of
31:05
the users and if
31:07
you're reliable as a market maker on an exchange and
31:09
you know you're there when things move and so on
31:12
essentially their users will have better execution will
31:14
have a better experience in general and
31:17
that's quite valuable to an
31:19
exchange and then
31:21
just build a good relationship with that small akin
31:24
to a partnership
31:26
with an exchange than anything else.
31:29
And then do the exchanges also
31:31
pay directly for the liquidity you
31:33
provide? Very nice and ones do
31:35
but like usually they don't. You
31:38
know you want to be in a situation where they're big
31:40
enough for the big enough about
31:42
the opportunities they show on us. Yeah
31:45
they're way
31:47
there to take risk with our money and take
31:50
risk you know providing liquidity as such but
31:52
then the exchange should be
31:55
there to bring users on
31:57
board and do the onboarding into
32:00
space essentially. One thing I
32:02
didn't do
32:04
is how we build the business is that, and
32:06
especially the difference between crypto and
32:10
the tradfire space, is
32:12
that there's a whole default
32:14
element that we actually focused on
32:17
early on, especially from 2019. And
32:20
we found that it was quite a good differentiation to
32:22
the business, but also it's something that
32:24
we could only do because we were
32:26
much longer term focus. So
32:29
essentially we took VC money and we
32:32
very much pitched ourselves and we
32:34
still see ourselves as a tech
32:36
company first before being
32:38
a trading company. So we essentially took
32:41
VC money which was just quite different from
32:43
having investors from a hedge fund space or
32:45
trading space. Which means that we
32:47
didn't have actually people on our back
32:49
asking every day what the results were
32:52
and we had more people, much more patient
32:54
just researching us build infrastructure
32:57
first. So 2019 we started on
33:00
our on DYDX for example in
33:02
around August 2019 and that
33:04
enabled the rest of the business to actually be
33:07
more robust around essentially on chain transfers
33:10
to the point that we're
33:13
probably driving Manson users like crazy
33:15
at some point thinking that they're
33:17
following smart money but they're
33:19
just seeing transfers going back and forth. So
33:22
if you have tens of thousands of transfers,
33:24
I don't know what sort of signal
33:26
they can get from it but probably not much from
33:28
us. So I think there's a big
33:31
differentiation of being able to trade on chain is
33:33
quite a differentiation from the trade fight. What's
33:36
the biggest difference about trading on
33:38
chain versus on centrist exchanges? There's
33:42
aspects around obviously just direct integration with
33:44
the chain but there's aspects
33:46
of managing your own custody,
33:49
thinking of potential sandwich
33:52
attacks as such, thinking of
33:54
the risk of actually not really being failed
33:58
as well if the cost So just,
34:00
you know, pushing for a transaction and
34:02
not always knowing exactly when the block
34:04
is going to be, you know, confirmed.
34:08
There's quite different level of uncertainty in terms of,
34:10
you know, what you traded and what you didn't
34:12
trade between, you know, DeFi
34:15
and essentially CFI and
34:17
like the traditional finance. So
34:19
these things are quite, is quite different.
34:21
On the other side, once you've made the effort to
34:24
integrate and to build a certain amount of
34:26
DeFi knowledge, then there's,
34:30
you know, if it's a barrier to entry
34:32
for you, it's a barrier to entry for
34:34
the people as well. So yeah, this
34:36
is, well, it becomes, it becomes a
34:39
competitive advantage. There's
34:41
some aspects that we
34:44
realized later as we were starting
34:46
to invest. So
34:48
we started to invest in
34:50
different projects from late 2020,
34:53
essentially from the summer 2020 when I
34:56
think Ewes was probably DYDX for that. I
34:59
don't know if it was a series A or series B at the time
35:01
already. But essentially
35:04
because of the operational experience
35:06
and trading experience and dealing with
35:08
these, these DeFi protocols,
35:11
we had a good amount of insights on
35:14
just doing a technical due diligence
35:16
for investing. So
35:18
we ended up just, we
35:21
ended up dealing like different relationships with VC
35:23
firms, for example, which is here coming to
35:25
us and like, not only from a
35:28
potential trading perspective to help, you know, build
35:30
some other volumes for them, but also in
35:32
terms of just getting feedback on due diligence
35:34
on just how robust was
35:36
a certain protocol, for example. Well,
35:39
what do you feel like were the key things that
35:42
allowed to interview to get, you know, become
35:44
so big? I mean, it's a
35:46
very competitive space, right? Full alignment
35:48
of blood. Full alignment. So
35:50
full alignment of blood, where you want to
35:53
get into position. There's a bit of an
35:55
execution play in terms of, because
35:57
We had a really good team to start with in terms of
35:59
the experience. Riyadh and sunset. Add
36:02
express crazy many. If. Any built
36:04
since it. Is the first. Company.
36:07
Divini of a belt but it he adam. He.
36:09
Built the each year form of the of a
36:11
large market maker Oats and a tough I mock
36:13
America and Europe. Said
36:15
you him could express any Jess. And
36:18
I'd go to stress and non the often
36:20
trading but also just raising raising funding As
36:22
such. An. Office to deal with squat pica
36:24
didn't have as getting for skeleton of and for such
36:26
as we had a. We. Had some risking
36:29
that. I'm. One.
36:32
Factor that was interesting is because we ended up
36:34
closing the first round of funding. And.
36:37
with quad out of difficulty. In.
36:39
The middle of two thousand and eighteen Crypto
36:41
winter. We ended up in a space
36:43
that was our seat. Client. He. And
36:46
then we ended up with dealing with
36:48
Freddie into O O G Groups and
36:50
Crypto Lived Oshima. Comments on. Who.
36:52
Are quite heavy jarvis around and. Them.
36:55
In our and winters visited upon is very small.
36:58
Say. A young have like if she
37:00
first that survives that an Nsx to club
37:02
has trip into this is pretty healthy interaction
37:04
does that. she resilient enough reserves is quite
37:06
a happy that I think she. Guess you
37:09
got started down the same time you about
37:11
six in our seventies. All this I'm up
37:13
Yeah yeah of course on he shouted a
37:15
dad yeah basically said of twenty aging. I.
37:19
Think it's excellent for that like it's of the
37:21
the the base because you just have a focus
37:23
on building. In. Our the distracted with
37:25
dislike Like we are not as and
37:27
say distracting. I'm but it's
37:29
fun. Hims is more more than happy to
37:32
see like me, eyes and song as as.
37:35
For. The price to. The. Prices to the marketing
37:37
for us as into it. But. In general
37:39
is kind of. Caesar. To
37:41
saw think having this pretty good answer even and what
37:43
to and bubble on and so on. And
37:45
says of people billing, successful company starting and
37:47
like in crosses his. Ah,
37:50
So. That. That
37:52
was helpful. I think
37:55
it was really helpful that. two
37:57
things there was really helpful the giving out of
37:59
really the idea of like being
38:02
tech fast and being like very much
38:04
product driven and being in your everything
38:06
being automated and we
38:08
never really had trader roles we've
38:11
always had dev slash quan slash
38:14
trader roles so anyone basically
38:16
just code and everything gets
38:18
into into play
38:20
very very very very
38:23
soon very very quickly you
38:25
mean so this this basically means that like
38:29
it was always to focus on like you know
38:31
building a system and building algorithms as
38:33
opposed to because I mean
38:35
I guess it's always algorithm is market
38:37
making no I mean I guess that
38:39
people not doing this manually nobody you'd
38:41
be surprised there's a lot of trans5 firms who
38:44
who have very separate roles between people
38:47
who there's quan roles
38:49
to be able to people who build the
38:51
algorithm they actually traders who do like little
38:53
manual trading actually so
38:56
you'd be surprised that we start even in crypto with
38:58
staff competitors who are actually trading a
39:00
lot more manually than you would think so
39:04
I think there was there was a strong tech focus there
39:07
and the tech the motor is
39:09
things being reliable and scalable essentially
39:13
now on my side I had
39:15
good experience with you know raising
39:17
raising equity and raising debt so
39:20
we had the capital that access capital
39:22
sorted and we were
39:24
all very aligned in the vision
39:27
of having like
39:29
in terms of the culture I think essentially it was
39:32
more startup like when we started then
39:34
now we had to find them we
39:36
had to compensate people with a
39:39
hybrid of like bonus and shares over
39:41
time because they were just getting pushed a bit
39:43
too too much by essentially hedge funds and in
39:47
anyone who wanted to enter the space because
39:49
the shares were too like too
39:51
much of a long-term thing and
39:54
yeah so it's still a still a
39:56
balancing act but I think we've got
39:58
something quite quite
40:00
nice nowadays. I think
40:02
you'll end up with something like a
40:05
program where people have few shares but
40:07
they get some bonus once a
40:09
year or so and then they can reinvest that bonus as they
40:13
choose and we
40:15
start to need to have some secondary answer here.
40:18
We invest a bonus in buying
40:23
shares or in lending
40:26
into the company or something.
40:28
Yeah, essentially so. We
40:30
very much want to have
40:32
some VC shareholding as such but we really
40:34
want to be as employee owned as possible.
40:39
It makes a ton of
40:41
sense for companies that trade
40:43
their own capital essentially because you want
40:46
best alignment possible between people who trade
40:49
and people who own
40:52
the capital. These things we got
40:54
right. Some of the
40:56
things were difficult to fully align on at this
40:58
time because some of the things are much longer
41:00
term in terms of building the
41:02
brand, building the beauty side of the business
41:05
versus building the day-to-day algorithm
41:08
trading side of the business. I
41:10
think we clicked around late 19 at
41:13
the age of 2020 when
41:16
we had the first COVID hits and March
41:18
and the first big dips in the
41:21
Bitcoin at the time. Well,
41:25
actually we saw all the algos actually caught robust
41:27
and we started to make real
41:30
money but essentially we started to, we
41:32
were building the rocket for two years and
41:34
we started to really put fuel in the rocket two
41:37
and a half years in or so.
41:40
So that took some time. What
41:42
was that because that the algorithms weren't good
41:44
enough? Some
41:46
of it was because of this. Some
41:49
of it was because we didn't, we had not,
41:53
we are not rich enough of a critical mass between
41:55
what we could show, exchanges that what
41:57
we could become because essentially exchanges, need
42:01
to build a certain volume to actually get into
42:03
better and better fee schedules. That
42:06
was a challenge. And then
42:08
simply, we had not built
42:10
enough in terms of getting cheap
42:14
enough access to debt as well.
42:17
So we were using equity, equity
42:20
fundraising to hire
42:22
and build a tech. But
42:24
actually for trading itself, we needed to borrow.
42:27
And getting, slowly getting access to inventory
42:29
was a, it becomes
42:31
a bit binary, basically. Nowadays
42:33
we're one of the two to three
42:36
firms to get essentially first steps on access
42:38
to inventory because we're
42:41
quite reliable and because we turn
42:43
to these things quite quietly. When you say access
42:45
to inventory, what do you mean? Your
42:48
ability to borrow tokens from
42:50
other teams or the people in general.
42:54
So inventory says we trade what we call
42:57
market neutral. So we don't make many things
42:59
go up and down. But it means
43:01
we need to, we can't buy inventory all
43:03
the time. We can't buy
43:05
the tokens themselves. Because if we buy the tokens, then
43:07
we're sensitive to things going down. But
43:10
often we can, we can quite a lot larger
43:12
size by simply borrowing the
43:14
tokens and trade around it. Yeah.
43:17
Yeah. I mean, I
43:19
guess you can see also here
43:21
the sort of advantages of size,
43:23
no? Because like, yeah, you trade more
43:25
and then because you're trading so much,
43:27
I guess the exchange trading fees matter
43:30
a lot and
43:32
then makes it hard for someone
43:34
to compete. Yeah.
43:38
2019, we still had the down year because
43:40
we, 80 plus percent
43:42
of the money we were making trading was
43:44
going into fees. Wow.
43:47
But it was just, and something
43:49
like a rule of thumb that kind of works
43:51
for me, like for proof sums, I
43:53
don't know exactly why we are nowadays, but
43:56
it was more like if a side of
43:58
the money we make, if you make like. one
44:00
dollar on a trade and you spend 30 cents
44:03
in fees, you can run
44:05
a business. Because
44:07
you start out financing costs behind the staff to pay
44:09
your people. If you start out
44:12
money, you have to start out to pay bonuses
44:15
and taxes and stuff. So
44:17
one third is maybe
44:20
moderately where you can
44:22
start scaling. But 2019 was
44:24
essentially 80% of the money going into
44:27
exchange fees. In
44:31
terms of the interviews company culture,
44:33
you mentioned something. You mentioned this
44:35
thing of trying to be a
44:37
start-up mentality, having a sense
44:40
of ownership and also this long-term
44:42
focus. Do you feel like
44:44
there are other things about the interviews culture or
44:47
maybe the way you've hired people that have been
44:49
crucial? There's a bit of
44:51
– so for further
44:54
background, I think I mentioned – maybe
44:57
I didn't make it clear. Evgenia
44:59
and I used to work for a company called Optiva
45:03
in Amsterdam. So the quite large
45:05
firm is still very much an option firm
45:07
in Tratfire. And it's
45:09
very much – the
45:11
Dutch culture is 100% imprinted at that
45:13
company. And how
45:15
brutally honest Dutch people are. And
45:18
then essentially it's part of
45:20
the culture. There's also a big
45:23
differentiation where we took the best
45:26
from it in the way that it's a completely
45:28
company-wide bonus pool. And
45:30
we took the same thing, which is – what
45:33
I noticed is that a lot of training firms
45:35
are structured very differently. A lot of training firms
45:37
have little siloed teams and no one
45:39
shares information. But actually when you're in a firm
45:41
and training firm that actually has a company-wide
45:43
bonus pool, people do behave
45:45
a lot more like shareholders or
45:48
such or at least think that if
45:51
they share knowledge with – the
45:53
senior people are sharing knowledge with junior people. It just
45:56
– there's a
45:58
lot more of that dynamic when people are having a good time. happy
46:00
to teach other people. And
46:02
that's basically some percentage of the profits go
46:04
into this bonus pool. And then how do
46:07
you determine who gets how much
46:09
of that bonus pool? There's
46:13
still something that we work
46:15
even to perfect. But
46:19
there's this philosophy that even people like with
46:21
us, there's even people like in legal, so
46:23
like, oh, can't say everyone is
46:25
a P&L contributor to a degree. We
46:27
have internal recruiters and so on. And external
46:29
recruiters, but they said it will also assume
46:31
that everyone helps recruiting. So I think there's
46:33
a few functions like this where obviously that
46:39
we want people to feel that owner
46:42
is as much as possible. And
46:45
I think that that has
46:47
worked well. I think I mean,
46:49
a general advice for how
46:52
many people do you have nowadays? The
46:54
chorus one? Chorus one, like 60 ish,
46:56
65, something like that. And
47:00
when did you, assuming at
47:02
the start, you were always involved with
47:04
hiring, when did you stop being involved
47:07
with hiring? Oh, I still am. I'm
47:09
still interviewing. Yeah, I'm still interviewing basically
47:11
everybody. My real firm is like
47:13
the first 20 people or so.
47:16
It's really, really key to
47:18
get right because then you
47:20
imprint the culture of the company and basically on the
47:22
first maybe five, 10, 20 people. And
47:25
then they actually do. Then there's actually
47:27
people you hired who help you scale
47:30
and not learn. They scale your training. Yeah,
47:33
I know I'm still, for me,
47:35
I see like interviewing
47:38
is like just really crucial and
47:40
I think I'm pretty good at
47:42
it. So I, I
47:44
focus quite a lot on it. And at the
47:46
same time, I feel we haven't figured
47:49
out. Well, or
47:51
like, I like one of the
47:53
things I still really want to do. And I
47:55
don't think we're there. It's
47:57
sort of to figure out how to.
48:00
formalize, systematize like the injuries I do
48:03
so that I feel like okay I
48:05
can have like other people do it.
48:08
I mean there was just there's a few people
48:10
and last year I was out for like a
48:12
few months or like a month and a half
48:14
because of this like health issue so then there
48:17
was a few people we hired that I didn't
48:19
interview but I've interviewed except for like three or
48:21
four people I've interviewed everybody. That's
48:23
interesting. I got less
48:25
and less involved with it. I don't know I
48:27
mean to check with the beginning I'm
48:29
pretty sure he doesn't get involved with everyone but
48:32
I think we very structured maybe we've got too
48:34
many rounds of interviews as like maybe now. How
48:36
many rounds do you guys have? Like
48:39
for a BD person, Subban 5. They
48:42
go through like a use case and so on. For
48:45
technical interviews for like
48:49
some of the infrastructure guys I'm
48:51
not too
48:53
sure but I think I mean
48:55
beyond that I think cultural fit is still really
48:58
to keep off of it. I think
49:00
if they yeah this fit in the culture and
49:02
it's kind of the challenge or the question now
49:05
that we're expanding across Asia is just
49:07
maintaining that culture. If they see
49:09
that they fit in the culture like how do you how
49:12
do you what questions you ask or how do you
49:14
assess that cultural fit? Depends
49:20
on the role. Often for like
49:23
traders who live from John Fyte to
49:25
crypto. We know we don't
49:27
have some excolates we know people who know them we
49:29
can get a lot of third-party
49:31
validation. I think there's
49:34
a there's a there's a red line around like
49:36
for everyone's like honesty that's quite key.
49:40
Long-term focus. Yeah
49:42
people being entrepreneurial being quite
49:44
self-reliant to be honest like
49:46
quite I like to say
49:48
self-repelled. You just don't really need
49:50
to just push that much. We have a lot
49:53
of people in the company that I can just go and pick at
49:55
3-4 a.m. like I need to tell them good to bad. So
49:58
my head of trading is like this. a few
50:00
people I just think there's a
50:02
strain of work, work, the whole
50:05
is in but so that's
50:07
I like to think is well placed at F but
50:09
then you need to force people to be in holidays
50:11
you know though quite a few people in the beauty
50:13
team in Singapore like this. Yeah
50:16
I think there's this this this three elements like
50:18
this and like sort of the work ethics it's
50:20
very cheap. I'm thinking long-term
50:22
enough and being
50:24
much more mission driven than mercenaries and
50:26
so on. The challenge is
50:29
I think hiring like the interview process
50:31
is often not sufficient so I think
50:33
it's just like you know the
50:35
first one two three first month
50:37
is often key to make sure
50:40
that we didn't make a mistake but um
50:43
we don't. I
50:45
think we've done a good enough job
50:47
to be honest like surprisingly enough and
50:49
the hiring because we don't like
50:53
we don't that many we don't have really
50:56
people even leaving that much or we
51:00
did hire fairly slowly think
51:02
about it like founded in you
51:05
know July 2017 we had the first time in
51:07
September we officially
51:10
October 2018 and
51:12
then finished a year of a lot of
51:14
basically five people total finished
51:17
2020 barely 10 or 12 finished 2021 we did all of
51:19
2021 with between 20 and 25 people
51:26
and now they really started to hire
51:28
more because we we've done much more
51:30
into product company from 2022 and I
51:33
think we finished with 50 people 2022 or so
51:35
slowly really really slowly hiring but thanks
51:38
to that we never we never had a we
51:40
never had any rounds of layoffs as well. Yeah
51:44
yeah that's very similar with us. One
51:46
of the things that I
51:50
noticed across one in terms of hiring that
51:52
I feel like has been one of the
51:54
most reliable predictors is
51:56
whether people are really passionate about
51:58
crypto. And
52:00
it happened a bunch of times that we hired
52:02
people who were, you know, they seemed like a
52:04
good fit in other regards. So like, you know,
52:07
we really needed someone for the position, but didn't
52:09
really seem to care much about crypto. And
52:11
then none of these have
52:13
worked out. They all ended up leaving, basically.
52:17
Yeah, we had this with a, it was more 2022 or
52:19
such. Like,
52:22
I think people, some people are a bit too optimistic. I
52:25
think maybe that's informal from 21. And
52:28
then it's sort of like start and then just come in and
52:30
then winter starts or something like this. And
52:33
we have people who are sometimes tempted by a tried fire
52:36
as well. And it's true that
52:38
22, maybe 23 was actually quite busy in
52:40
effects and commodities. It's like,
52:43
that's fine. Like, there's a few people leaving, but
52:45
it's far from being neural. Like, usually people stay
52:47
and, you know, understand, understand
52:50
the cycles and whatever. There's
52:52
pros and cons to any side of the cycle, to be honest.
52:55
It's a bit of a filter as well. And
52:58
I'm with you that people only have some
53:00
passion or bind to the vision of the
53:03
space, at least in terms of either democratization
53:05
or like, be a bit like,
53:07
slightly libertarian, whatever, you know, they need to buy to
53:09
the vision of the space at least. They don't have
53:11
to be as like
53:14
crypto believers as, you know, if you're not. Well,
53:17
we're quite strong. But I went to the crypto
53:19
thinking that basically sort of crowdfunding had a bit
53:21
failed. I was really into crowdfunding and I said
53:23
to Phil and meanwhile, in
53:25
terms of democratizing, investing and so on. I thought
53:27
that was quite interesting. And they said that, you
53:30
know, so many rules around being
53:32
a sophisticated investor and so on. Especially in the US, like if
53:34
you try crowdfunding in the US, there's just a bit
53:37
of a way. It's
53:39
not really crowdfunding. You need 5 million on
53:41
your bank account outside of your
53:44
house to qualify to be able to invest
53:46
and so on. I
53:48
mean, different doctors. I want to qualify. I was
53:50
just thinking about what I said before. I want
53:52
to qualify it a little bit. I think it's
53:55
passionate or at least make curious about it.
53:57
I think we've also had people who worked
53:59
out to work. like I'm kind of
54:01
skeptical about crypto but I'm also very interested
54:03
in it and like I'm trying to understand
54:05
it and like that I
54:07
think is also so something
54:09
the indifference is probably more anything of
54:12
like that is like okay if people
54:14
have feel like it's just
54:16
a sense of indifference about it and then
54:19
they didn't work. Yeah, that's
54:21
a bit worrying but that is probably
54:23
it's probably a massive right like the
54:25
best. We've
54:28
had people who like depending on
54:30
the roles we've had good
54:32
success with people who actually came from trot-fire
54:35
who are used to like too much structure
54:37
to a degree like the banks
54:39
or so and they were frustrated of like not
54:41
being able to do enough and
54:43
we've had good success with them because they
54:45
you know some of them had traded crypto
54:47
like PA or so and
54:50
and it is a balance because we actually we
54:53
want people to understand regulation we understand
54:57
like a not as like a like a
54:59
good long-term framework. So
55:02
sometimes people who are just purely crypto native are not
55:04
a good fit they don't understand how you know markets
55:07
should work and so on and how it works long-term.
55:10
But being a leader by this and it's
55:13
good if people have gone through you know
55:15
both both well both yeah both
55:17
have some experience of crypto some experience with trot-fire
55:19
I think I think it just ends up yielding
55:21
the best trot-fars. We have pretty
55:23
good experience hiring straight from university as well but
55:25
for more technical roles you see it's
55:31
it's yes it's it depends
55:33
on the roles. So
55:35
you mentioned building right and
55:37
and I guess one of the
55:39
things that you
55:42
know that you guys have been building that has you
55:44
know become pretty significant is
55:46
R-Sync which is
55:50
is it the I guess the largest block
55:52
below on Ethereum or certainly one of their lead
55:54
like. 25 is one of three
55:56
launch I think I think this is a
55:59
very even. I just said it. Yeah.
56:02
I think it is 25% of block building. I
56:05
don't know the latest numbers, but I think you
56:08
should know that better than me. Yeah. Well,
56:11
I know it's foreign for large, but I don't know exactly right
56:13
now. So
56:18
why did you guys decide to
56:20
do that? And what's sort of
56:22
the connection between the block builder
56:25
and the market making? I
56:28
think it's a good representation
56:31
of the fact that we tech fast,
56:33
that we very much build this fast, and
56:36
an analogy that I like to use, and you
56:38
probably have me say this for you guys, but
56:41
I'm not necessarily a fan of Google, but Google is a
56:43
good example. If
56:45
you think of Google, it's a tech firm. It's
56:47
a tech firm fast, and they happen to
56:49
make money from advertising, essentially. And
56:51
then we want to be, and
56:53
we are tech fast, and we happen to make money from trading.
56:56
But essentially, what we do day to day is
56:59
tech building. So there's only,
57:02
now there's about 10 people more like
57:04
me who are just more externally facing
57:06
and do the more commercial aspects
57:09
of the business, but most other
57:11
people are basically product buildings, infrastructure building,
57:13
and so on. So our
57:15
thing comes into play as a subsidiary,
57:17
as such, to help with block building.
57:20
And it's just making sure that we're part
57:22
of the block confirmation, as such. We
57:25
are quite cautious of not being
57:27
too vertically integrated. So I think the good
57:30
example of that is on the like
58:00
a system in general, you
58:02
need to have some infrastructure
58:04
built to be able to participate in trading. And
58:07
so block building basically means, right, that
58:10
it's an entity, right, that basically gets
58:13
transactions either from the mempool or that
58:15
people directly send to this block builder
58:17
and then, you know, basically put it
58:19
together in a block and then, you
58:21
know, send that to, you know, relayers
58:23
and validators and the one that sort
58:25
of has the highest monetary
58:28
value that implied
58:31
that it's the one that goes in there.
58:35
And sort of the
58:37
attractiveness here is, for
58:39
example, that, you know, you
58:41
can sort of construct your own blocks and
58:43
put in all of the arbitrage, all of
58:45
the transactions, the on-chain transactions that you guys
58:48
want to do and I guess you can
58:50
also prevent being sandwiched in
58:52
that block. Is that sort of the main? Because
58:55
you guys would still, would
58:57
you still submit transactions to
58:59
other block builders or like all of the
59:02
interview transactions that you guys do? That's a
59:04
good question. You need to ask
59:06
one of my default guys to get the
59:08
full answer. But I'm assuming we do because
59:10
we, you know, we would still
59:13
look if another block builder is
59:15
performing better, the trading team could
59:17
independently just push this to
59:19
a better block builder. Like
59:22
many in the space, we used flashbots in the
59:24
past and others. I'm
59:27
sure it works a
59:29
bit like an option, but it needs to stay
59:31
competitive enough to a degree
59:33
there's enough competition in-house to
59:35
make things more efficient. Because
59:38
if we don't keep things efficient enough, even
59:42
if it's between different teams basically
59:44
in-house, then some of the competition
59:46
will take it away. And we want to mean if
59:48
we only favor our own blocks, then
59:50
at some point it becomes inefficient. It's
59:53
a good question. And
59:55
I'm assuming, yeah, I'm assuming we'll use other blocks, but
59:57
it's true that in terms of defending
59:59
our essential. files against Senator Shataksev,
1:00:01
you want to have some control
1:00:03
there as well. So
1:00:06
I'm curious also a bit about your
1:00:08
thoughts on sort of the long
1:00:10
term evolution both with crypto and
1:00:14
what it means for a company like venture
1:00:16
mute and maybe like some of the topics
1:00:18
I'm curious your opinion about. One
1:00:21
is, do you think
1:00:23
that in the future, sort
1:00:26
of like most assets will be blockchain
1:00:28
based and that's how
1:00:30
markets work? Do you think
1:00:32
that decentralized exchanges are going to overtake
1:00:34
centralized exchanges and you know those will
1:00:36
be the largest exchanges and marketplace in
1:00:39
the future or like how where do
1:00:41
you see things going? So
1:00:43
it's funny because I've had different answers
1:00:46
to this question though that yes, it's
1:00:48
one thing is I'm
1:00:51
one of these guys who is
1:00:53
cautious with like you know people like
1:00:55
Larry Fink for example that's saying everything
1:00:57
will be tokenized. I think a
1:00:59
lot of things will be tokenized but I think for
1:01:02
some aspects like
1:01:04
around our ability for example so we're all
1:01:06
what I said so like around sort of
1:01:08
like tokenize the equity and stuff. It's
1:01:11
been tried before and some of
1:01:13
it if it doesn't bring a sufficient like
1:01:16
factor of improvement it's quite
1:01:18
difficult to distribute and just to
1:01:20
get adoption. So
1:01:23
I think it will happen but it won't happen
1:01:25
all at the same time. There's
1:01:27
a few things in the crypto space that I'm still
1:01:30
really eager to see like so I'm in Asia now
1:01:32
for six months because we trade derivatives
1:01:34
from Singapore from Singapore office and I think
1:01:36
there's a big thing that's still not happening
1:01:39
if you compare the crypto
1:01:41
space with TradFi. There's still very
1:01:43
very little volumes in options for example. So
1:01:46
essentially options in TradFi trade about 25%
1:01:48
of the total volumes and
1:01:50
in crypto is like it's a
1:01:52
tiny percentage it's just single or very low
1:01:54
single digits and
1:01:56
I think there's a few factors to explain
1:01:58
that but I think it's just. like with a bit more
1:02:02
that actually positively is digitalization of
1:02:04
the space. There
1:02:06
will be more people around the table and actually
1:02:08
we'll get more derivatives there. More
1:02:10
derivatives we did a bit of price discovery
1:02:12
down to the line tokens, down
1:02:14
to the base spot token as
1:02:16
well. That's the
1:02:19
second trend, more derivatives, more tokenization
1:02:21
for sure. I think it
1:02:23
was 25th of April 2022, I gave a
1:02:25
talk in Davos about DeFi flipping C5. I
1:02:28
was quite happy to discuss the topic. You
1:02:31
have such a memory for dates, whenever you were
1:02:33
mentioning dates you were like exactly ok it was
1:02:36
incorporated on the 5th of July 2007.
1:02:42
It used to be as more as the
1:02:45
grid strike, the very few
1:02:47
things I'm good at, just remembering people and
1:02:49
remembering dates. It's
1:02:53
funny because I was at this foundation because
1:02:55
they invited me to speak about it. One
1:02:59
inch of a little booth and
1:03:01
so on had a pretty nice
1:03:03
discussion there. We
1:03:06
were just right next to WEF
1:03:08
and they were all WEF guys
1:03:10
that basically all talk about oh 90% of
1:03:12
the money is DeFi, it's like criminal money but
1:03:14
we all know it's rubbish. But
1:03:17
I was happy to talk about potentially what we needed
1:03:20
for DeFi to flip C5. It
1:03:24
was interesting because there was like April 22 as
1:03:26
I mentioned, obviously we had FTX
1:03:29
in November. My
1:03:31
first reaction when FTX went down was like
1:03:33
oh people will realize that the thread is
1:03:35
because of centralization and that people will just
1:03:37
go for DeFi. The
1:03:40
problem is I had, I was talking about
1:03:42
this with a founder at the time,
1:03:44
was that actually
1:03:46
C5 is very good for adoption.
1:03:48
C5 basically is centralizing strangers regardless
1:03:51
of risk of fraud and centralization
1:03:53
and so on. It's very
1:03:55
much they're actually onboard the new users. When
1:03:59
people get sufficiently familiar with the
1:04:01
tech and so on and get sufficiently incentivized
1:04:03
to basically do custody
1:04:05
themselves, and they're essentially confident
1:04:07
enough and like the tech to actually
1:04:10
send, you know, send funds on
1:04:12
chain. Then
1:04:14
they really are part of DeFi. But
1:04:17
at the time, it was about
1:04:19
so turn two is about 400
1:04:22
million total users across the crypto
1:04:24
space. And you add about 6 million
1:04:28
four and a half whatever four, let's call it, I
1:04:30
think sorry, it was 300 million total
1:04:32
users in the crypto space and there was
1:04:34
about 400, four and a half million DeFi
1:04:37
users per se. And now it's
1:04:40
double across the board, but I see the percentage of
1:04:42
DeFi users stays the same. It's a
1:04:44
bit of like there's a bit of a failure in
1:04:46
terms of like DeFi in the way that we
1:04:49
did have like contraction around DeFi summer because there
1:04:52
was like zero yield everywhere or negative yields in
1:04:54
most of the places and basically DeFi was able
1:04:56
to to attract some users through
1:04:58
through having some yield. But
1:05:01
essentially, there was a whole phase afterwards
1:05:03
where well, TradFi actually
1:05:05
get it up as of getting yield again.
1:05:08
And, and I think the DeFi space
1:05:10
and essentially crypto was just bit stroking on the
1:05:12
on the on the yield front. So not not
1:05:14
to be attractive that I
1:05:16
think there's still a lot of things to solve in terms of UX
1:05:19
UI, getting that leverage and
1:05:21
DeFi, that some sort of, you know, credit
1:05:24
scoring in the meantime, it's a lot of
1:05:26
people are building pretty cool things to
1:05:28
help solve these things. But I think we still
1:05:30
end up with this sort of bottleneck from DeFi
1:05:34
to really flip. See, fire is actually still
1:05:36
quite challenging because if you see
1:05:39
how people are boarded into the crypto space,
1:05:41
don't ever see first. But if you think
1:05:43
like, you know, 20 years or
1:05:45
10, like a long term
1:05:47
future, so I think DeFi
1:05:49
work can can be more much more
1:05:51
more prevalent once you get like
1:05:54
once you get robots everywhere once you get
1:05:56
like proper Internet of Things, because
1:05:58
then whenever you're fridge
1:06:02
buying your food automatically based on what
1:06:04
you've eaten the day before and stuff,
1:06:06
your fridge is not scattered like sending funds
1:06:08
online. Well, your fridge is not scattered in
1:06:11
the custody of stuff like probably this, maybe
1:06:14
you just have your house wallet or whatever
1:06:16
you want to phrase it. Yeah, you can
1:06:18
have your fridge sandwich to have the heating
1:06:20
system. It's like disproportionate
1:06:23
like hacking risk as well. But
1:06:26
I think it's like the machine to machine trade. I
1:06:28
also feel like this in 20 years time. I think
1:06:30
it's pretty normal. But I
1:06:34
think that's probably precious
1:06:36
D5 first. And
1:06:39
it's surprisingly if you talk to institutions, a lot of
1:06:41
them are like there's a few even
1:06:44
three years ago at this side
1:06:47
chat, this little charter house,
1:06:49
like chat after panel
1:06:52
at a London conference. And
1:06:54
they were like traditional finance, they
1:06:56
have like these guys who call like rheumus custodians who
1:06:58
hold all the people's money. And so
1:07:00
they just top 10 out there, that's one of the
1:07:02
JP Morgan's one of them, but like BNY, there's
1:07:05
a few Australians there as well. And
1:07:07
there's a few of these custodians who are
1:07:10
completely ready to think of a world where
1:07:12
D5 is first. But basically
1:07:14
they want to be the wallet. So
1:07:17
they basically that thing is like, okay, people can trade,
1:07:19
trade actually everywhere, but
1:07:22
they want to be they want to secure
1:07:24
the funds essentially. So there's a future there.
1:07:27
I don't know how much we have to pay them, but I
1:07:31
think I think I think that can work. Dreds
1:07:34
is just not happening yet.
1:07:36
It's not happening yet. And
1:07:39
maybe one more topic when it comes to sort of, you
1:07:41
know, the future. What
1:07:43
about AI? Like, what do you think
1:07:45
is the impact of AI on like
1:07:48
winter mute? Very
1:07:50
little in terms of pricing and delivering most of
1:07:52
what we do is already said here to make
1:07:54
it. I think there's
1:07:56
a really annoying aspect that I'm trying
1:07:58
to give myself. head around is
1:08:01
on the commercial side, is around risk
1:08:03
of fraud or people impersonating and so
1:08:06
on. It's more and more
1:08:08
possible that tech is there for
1:08:10
you to think that you could have had the
1:08:12
podcast with me but you could have had the
1:08:14
podcast with someone else sitting
1:08:16
in you know from the 50th cent
1:08:18
army and actually just using Gemini, using
1:08:20
some AI tool to basically
1:08:27
replicate how I move, how
1:08:29
I speak and so on and thinking you have
1:08:32
a commercial call and
1:08:34
then convince you to
1:08:36
send me money for a deal
1:08:39
and so on. Yeah I think we're
1:08:41
not too far away from having to go
1:08:43
back to like physical locations and having different
1:08:45
offices in different countries and then just having
1:08:48
people to just check in that
1:08:51
we have this but actually blockchain solves some of
1:08:53
this because you think of that you know for
1:08:57
us to have you know either it's linked
1:08:59
with an address that's like we resumptile it
1:09:01
or not. We have a few
1:09:03
points of validation that we can
1:09:05
check and we can we can function trustlessly
1:09:09
but it's yeah that's a bit that's
1:09:12
a bit of a concern because there's
1:09:14
disasters about life in AI or so
1:09:16
on like in tech in general where
1:09:18
we favor convenience or the privacy or
1:09:20
where many other things you know of
1:09:22
a security and I think
1:09:24
it's a bit of the rest as well so I
1:09:27
don't know how to see AI
1:09:29
affecting your business as well. I
1:09:32
mean for us it's a pretty significant focus
1:09:34
I mean we have like a team that's
1:09:37
like focused on basically building sort of like
1:09:40
well I think the obvious thing is
1:09:43
that I think it could just improve
1:09:46
everyone's productivity by like maybe you
1:09:49
know maybe 20% maybe 50% maybe 100% by a
1:09:51
lot but then I think to do that you
1:09:56
know it's not like easy I don't think you would
1:09:58
get that just from like you think like 20pt
1:10:01
or something but you actually have to like
1:10:03
integrate it into how the entire
1:10:05
organization works so that is like a
1:10:07
focus for us. I think
1:10:09
that is the sort of thing where it can
1:10:12
become like something that's you know very compounding where
1:10:14
okay maybe this year will
1:10:16
help us like 5% right
1:10:18
but maybe next year it will be 20% then maybe
1:10:21
the year afterwards it will be like 50% and
1:10:25
then I think these
1:10:27
effects can just become like massive over
1:10:29
time. AI
1:10:31
is like for me AI is like so I
1:10:33
used to invest in air businesses in morning work
1:10:35
too and you can sort
1:10:38
of put them in like optimization automation or
1:10:40
discovery and
1:10:42
like and initiate so by the sound of
1:10:44
it what you think is it's more optimization
1:10:47
this day is still like a 10-20% you
1:10:49
know a marginal improvement on your
1:10:51
site but I think
1:10:53
if you just if you just get generally inside
1:10:56
like if you get the discovery aspect about that's
1:10:58
actually quite useful. What do you mean with discovery?
1:11:01
Yeah discovery is like think
1:11:04
of an AI that can think of
1:11:06
like you know alpha
1:11:08
go is probably an
1:11:11
example of this like you know they just think
1:11:13
pretty differently or if
1:11:15
you apply AI to like biology and
1:11:17
just finding that discovering like new treatments
1:11:19
or so. I
1:11:21
think that will probably emerge right but
1:11:23
I think the first thing is like
1:11:26
kind of like I mean
1:11:28
for example one thing is like in
1:11:32
terms of a sort of thing we
1:11:34
would like to have so right now you know
1:11:36
we run all this infrastructure for you know
1:11:38
lots of different blockchains and then you know
1:11:41
we have all these engineers on call and
1:11:43
then the you know systems so like alert
1:11:45
and then something happens and someone has to
1:11:47
look at it and then like respond to
1:11:49
it. So for example can you
1:11:51
build a system that like knows
1:11:54
how all of the issues
1:11:56
are right and all the ways they've been
1:11:58
resolved and if there is an alert,
1:12:00
it can like basically, well
1:12:02
autonomously resolve it. Or
1:12:05
maybe at least suggest to the engineer that comes
1:12:07
up, hey this is a lot probably you should
1:12:09
do this right. And
1:12:11
then maybe they can check but maybe some points not
1:12:13
necessary to check, you can just go ahead and do
1:12:15
it. So something like that
1:12:17
is for example something we want, yeah we
1:12:20
want to build but it's not easy. This
1:12:22
is going to take probably going to take
1:12:24
two years or something. What
1:12:28
is it? I think it's 83
1:12:30
with neural networks, 2006 was the
1:12:33
postman, how do you call it? Postman machines and stuff.
1:12:36
And then like it took over,
1:12:38
I think a lot of progress been made in the eye
1:12:40
just by like doing
1:12:42
just playing around with an optimization curve. I
1:12:44
think people were quite surprised with this, how
1:12:46
far we went. And
1:12:48
I don't know,
1:12:50
I played around with chat
1:12:53
DPT and so on recently but it's like
1:12:57
quite interesting because essentially anything
1:12:59
that deals with words used to be considered
1:13:02
very very difficult. Like you
1:13:04
could before you could build some trees,
1:13:06
you could build some things and actually just do
1:13:08
like chatbots, you could build them like in a
1:13:10
very narrow sort of lexicon,
1:13:12
so a sort of like very
1:13:14
narrow context and now the fact that we can have other
1:13:16
limbs is quite interesting. So I
1:13:19
don't know. I think it's often
1:13:21
the thing that like we sort of over estimate
1:13:24
what we can get in two years and we
1:13:26
massively underestimate the changes in ten years time. So
1:13:29
we'll see where we're all there. I'm
1:13:33
just curious about the last, maybe last thing. So
1:13:35
I understand like you know like a
1:13:37
lot of languages and you learn a lot of languages,
1:13:39
I'm curious like how do you
1:13:42
learn languages and how do you maintain the
1:13:44
languages that you learn? I
1:13:47
learned them fast and I maintained them very
1:13:49
difficult. It was very difficult for me to
1:13:51
maintain but I'm still maintaining
1:13:54
about five and
1:13:57
what I don't like 24-7 I used
1:13:59
to just have a just watch movies
1:14:02
or read or trying to read in a language
1:14:04
or try to... I
1:14:06
love Singapore for like Asian languages because you
1:14:08
can maintain Chinese, I can maintain
1:14:11
some Japanese, I can learn Korean slowly
1:14:13
with the limited time I have. There's
1:14:15
two to three big dimensions, there's
1:14:18
something in learning that you
1:14:20
call schemas. It's sort of like the
1:14:23
scaffold things of like how you learn. So
1:14:27
essentially let's say if
1:14:29
you're French, let's say this you have similar
1:14:31
schemas to like Spanish and Italian and so
1:14:33
on, so basically like same sort
1:14:35
of framework and I say it's quite easy for you
1:14:37
to learn all the Latin languages but
1:14:40
once you just like you're European and you learn
1:14:42
Asian language like it takes a while to get
1:14:44
there. If you've got good memory
1:14:46
for new words it's useful but
1:14:49
there's still a dimension why even
1:14:51
you understanding like rough
1:14:54
grammar is not sufficient to
1:14:56
really just you know like to
1:14:58
put words and speak perfectly. I
1:15:01
think a good way to do things is just
1:15:03
consider yourself a child and basically don't
1:15:05
be fussed about making mistakes. Like
1:15:07
I just half joke
1:15:09
about torturing people, not learning a new
1:15:12
language but basically torturing people, I'm
1:15:14
gonna listen to you like basically you're gonna
1:15:16
make mistakes and so on and I think
1:15:18
people are especially when you learn a new language
1:15:20
as an adult people are too fussed about making mistakes
1:15:22
and I think it's a bit it's a good lesson
1:15:24
for learning in general. Like if the
1:15:26
price language is where it's in the school. When
1:15:28
you learn a language you focus on one at
1:15:30
a time or if you sometimes learn multiple at
1:15:32
the same time? Just one at a
1:15:34
time usually. One
1:15:37
at a time is much easier. The
1:15:39
thing is to get to a level where you should
1:15:41
be able to have a list of
1:15:43
conversation or at least watch a read
1:15:46
like this kind of material or
1:15:48
so like simple things because you
1:15:50
want to be able to maintain it and
1:15:52
then you can only maintain it if you can have a
1:15:55
mix of active and passive learning. So
1:15:57
active learning is really you literally like
1:16:00
learning new words and so on and learning new
1:16:02
sentences and practicing. And passive is
1:16:04
basically just you watch a
1:16:06
Kdrama show or so, it's
1:16:09
much more passive but at least what's quite
1:16:11
key is get your ears to hear
1:16:14
all the sounds. And
1:16:17
I found this difficult for the Korean for example.
1:16:20
Life for Chinese is really difficult to get around
1:16:22
all the tones. I mean in biscuit tones
1:16:24
and they just generally get around
1:16:26
that. Many people
1:16:29
use soft tones in Chinese as well so it's more like
1:16:32
you just need to end up having to
1:16:34
learn to say like the
1:16:36
same thing in three different ways and just make sure you can
1:16:38
be understood. Then just
1:16:40
by practicing and be a bit shameless
1:16:42
about practicing and just I
1:16:45
think this is the biggest barriers for adults actually.
1:16:48
But in general, I find this
1:16:50
fascinating in terms of language learning because
1:16:53
it's usually like 50% of the language
1:16:55
is about gives you good insights on
1:16:57
the people's culture because this
1:16:59
is about who speaks to who and
1:17:01
how they articulate things and so on and so on.
1:17:04
It's just a mash little. It's
1:17:06
just a GTA exercise but it
1:17:09
was my pastang for a long time. What's
1:17:12
your favourite language or what's your task to
1:17:14
ask very tricky questions? I
1:17:18
mean in college I studied
1:17:20
quite a bit of Chinese and
1:17:22
then I spent some time in China too
1:17:24
and I spoke pretty well at the time.
1:17:28
This was a long time ago. This was like 2006. I
1:17:31
was kind of like a two
1:17:33
hour dinner someone and talking
1:17:35
Chinese and I could like you know. Then
1:17:38
I did not use it at all and
1:17:41
I really enjoyed learning Chinese. It
1:17:44
just found it fun. Like more fun than learning
1:17:46
other languages. And then I
1:17:48
didn't practice at all and I forgot
1:17:50
kind of everything until
1:17:53
like when I was in A
1:17:55
actually when I was in Singapore like in
1:17:57
January I started studying again a little And
1:18:00
so I've been studying, you know, every day for
1:18:02
about, you know, seven, six, seven
1:18:04
weeks. And,
1:18:07
you know, it's coming back kind of
1:18:09
to some extent. Yes, having
1:18:11
Chinese is the one I enjoyed learning the
1:18:13
most in terms
1:18:15
of studying the language. What
1:18:18
I found difficult for you for Chinese and Japanese
1:18:20
was that if you just
1:18:22
really in it and you practice every day, you can
1:18:25
get to really, really good level just reading and writing
1:18:27
as well. But I find that
1:18:29
the spoken and
1:18:32
understanding people speaking in a
1:18:34
general spoken level is not
1:18:36
too difficult to maintain because you can put
1:18:38
shows and stuff inside. But I found that
1:18:41
maintaining reading and writing at
1:18:43
a proper level gets very difficult with, you know,
1:18:45
all the hanzo or the kanji to
1:18:47
maintain. That's something that needs to
1:18:49
be a lot more, a lot more active on my
1:18:52
side. Yeah, reading, I
1:18:54
never managed to get to like, I never
1:18:56
could get to the level where I could
1:18:58
like read a newspaper or something and like
1:19:00
understand a lot. I can send you some
1:19:03
books. There's
1:19:07
a book by someone
1:19:09
called Richardson, he
1:19:13
actually started with a Japanese book. The
1:19:16
legend is that he was in the 70s in
1:19:18
Japan and basically he land like all the 1914
1:19:20
whatever official kanji list in necessary month.
1:19:22
And he used
1:19:26
like a memory palace kind of method. So
1:19:29
he would just deconstruct the root of the kanji and
1:19:31
basically just build around it and build a little story
1:19:33
around it. And it's
1:19:35
just called Remembering Kanji. Actually, there's
1:19:37
a hanzo, there's a Chinese equivalent
1:19:41
that's been same writer, it's
1:19:43
also Richardson. I used
1:19:46
this in 2009 or so. It's
1:19:49
all the positives and the downsides
1:19:51
of memory palace and when you build a story
1:19:53
around remembering something, it's kind of
1:19:55
slow. But you
1:19:57
actually remember it. So it's kind of slow to recall.
1:20:01
like finding the whole story around, oh there's
1:20:03
a ladder, oh there's something, there's a moon,
1:20:05
there's a sun there, there's something and then
1:20:07
you can rebuild the kanji or the hadza
1:20:10
but it's kind of so so it's
1:20:13
useful in like a first kind of
1:20:15
practice and then you kind of forget
1:20:17
about the story and you just like it goes into
1:20:19
the long-term memory and just once you read it you
1:20:21
just you just read the right signs as it is
1:20:24
but if you have a bit of a barrier to remember them
1:20:26
it's quite it's quite useful. I'll send
1:20:29
you the reference. Cool, well
1:20:31
thanks so much Yo, it's really fun
1:20:33
daddy on, we enjoyed our conversation. Thank
1:20:36
you same bit same bit. Thanks
1:20:39
so much for listening for tuning in and we'll be back
1:20:41
next week. Thank
1:20:44
you for joining us on this week's episode. We
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