Tokenise: Engineering Tokenomics Before and After Launch

0:00 Welcome back to the permissionless podcast brought to you by the team at Guardian. And as always, we are going deep with teams that are building on the edge of web 3 and tackling some of the problems that are plaguing the DeFi and web 3 space. And of course, our discussion today with Daniel from Tokenise does not disappoint.

0:22 Tokenise is building on a really exciting space and they're at a really exciting spot as you'll see in our discussion where they're solving the problem of token deployment and management in a sassified platform and they came from really a more white glove service and now they're making all the tools and all the analytics that are necessary to manage a token available in an entire platform for founders and they're seeing a lot of traction taking off.

0:51 So we will get into everything that goes into the actual platform but also Daniel's taken his experience on consulting for tokenomics and token structures and economic modeling and also looking at the risk of tokenomic models etc. And then of course we'll look at you know the market today and look at how some coins had exceptional tokenomics that worked in their benefit and really gave an exceptional flywheel for the protocol.

1:20 And we'll look at some of the tokens that maybe didn't play out so well and and look at in a meta point from that, what is it that works in the favor of a protocol or against it when it comes to tokenomics and risk modeling. But of course, before we go deep on all of that, my name is Owen and over 3 and 1/2 years ago, I founded Guardian.

1:41 And really, it started on the premise that DeFi would house trillions of dollars of assets and that we would need a level of security that was really just a stepwise jump above what we had available to be able to ship in that environment confidently. And today, I'm happy to say that Guardian has achieved the level of security necessary to be able to ship missionritical code.

2:06 We use not only one but two distinct auditing teams for every engagement accompanied by a world-renowned lead researcher and a full-time dedicated fuzzing engineer for the scope. And together with all these things in our model, we're able to gain so much confidence that we will actually put up our own funds as a bounty in a public contest for the protocol after our review to be able to first of all show our confidence and also show the effectiveness of our model.

2:36 And so really today, it's just a matter of time for DeFi to catch up. And now without further ado, let us get into the discussion with Daniel from Tokenise. Well, I mean, first of all, of course, Daniel, thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with us and chat more about the space and everything you guys are working on right now.

3:00 But, I mean, like I said, I' I'd love to start and just hear about like first of all, before even Tokenise anything you guys were doing there, how did you find your way in? and we'll kind of see how did you guys end up getting to where you're at right now. But how did you how did you find your way into DeFi and and crypto in general?

3:15 It's a pretty straightforward story to be honest with you. So when I was in high school, I thought I was going to be a chef. so that's fine. So that's I don't know six, seven years ago now. And I was doing my apprenticeship. So I did the full monty and then I just decided that I basically hated it.

3:29 And then it was like two months before I two months before I finished high school when I decided to stop doing it and I was a little bit, you know, I was antsy, of course. I wasn't sure what I was going to move into. And at the time, my mom, she's still working in banking and she was working in banking then.

3:44 And she said, "You should just jump into banking. It's a stable job. It's not going to go anywhere really." And you're pretty good at numbers. So, I'm sure you'll have some good success. And so, I got some interviews set up. I got a job pretty quickly. And so, I started my professional career, I guess, in traditional finance.

4:00 And ironically, not enough, it was the hate from traditional finance that spawned my interest in web 3. So it was just like I was very hyper aware of how much bureaucracy there was and how much how many friction points there were in traditional finance. I mean it still takes like 60 days to settle a house payment and customers typically hate banks and and for good reason.

4:20 So there's there were just a lot of things that I could see especially internally that just weren't working and I thought there's got to be a better solution to this and that led me into looking into white papers and this would have been like 2019 probably. So typical story like I you know read a bunch of white papers and I got really interested in the technology and I wasn't as interested in in trying to make money.

4:40 It was it would have been cool to make some money but I was more just interested in tech and it was about early 21 mid 21 where I managed to talk a company into hiring me over telegram. So I was like I just started reaching out to people and I was like hey I'd love to work with you.

4:54 I'll work for you for free. Just let me help you out. And I started working for this guy for free for like six weeks actually. I had never met him and he was he was living in Sydney. And then after that six week period, the company that I was working for free for managed to go through like get some fundraising.

5:08 This was off the back of Outlier Ventures Accelerator at the start of 21 for them. That was pretty cool. Outlier Ventures is huge. I'm sure you guys know who they are. And yeah, I talked him into hiring me and then that was my proper first foray into web 3. And then after that I I started to specialize just sort of accidentally in token launches.

5:26 So really quickly within 3 months of working with those guys they were called motor launched a token raised like 10 million 80 mil valuation it was really quite cool and then lots of Australians wanted to start to get into web 3 but most Australians had never launched a token before so I just like through networking people were sort of said Daniel can you help me out is there any chance you could give me an idea on how to do a token launch and that was where I started to move towards I got into consulting got into token launches got to token builds project builds all those sorts of things and then eventually it would have been this time last Yeah, we got so goddamn busy.

5:58 It was just like hard to keep up with the work. And so I talked to my co-founders at the time and I just said, "Could you build out a piece of software to make my life easier, just to make the token builds easier?" And then I showed the software to some people and they were like, "This is amazing.

6:11 How do I get access to it?" And that was basically what spawned Tokenise. That's sweet, dude. It's funny how points of like hating something that you're doing is like always the impetus for like a big career shift. And I think it moved a lot of people from Tradfi into into DeFi, but also you wanted to be a chef initially and then pivoted from I mean kind of for the same reason, right?

6:32 I think it it it kind of fuels everybody's like big career decisions. I was actually a chef for I don't know I probably wasn't like as legit of a chef as as you were training to be, but I was a chef for for a couple. That's cool. And also Brendan's brother, he's also a chef in the Yeah, I have a brother in the industry.

6:50 There you go. Yeah. That's so cool. That's awesome. I mean, I right now I still have some skills. My girlfriend loves it. So, it was probably it was probably a really good thing to learn in my youth and then I can sort of carry that on for the rest of life. It's pretty good. It's a good like party trick or like something I agree.

7:08 Yeah. Good like two truths and a lie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely right. But what what kind of cuisine just out of curiosity? I worked in everything. I worked in cafes. I worked in Indian food. I worked in burger bars. I worked in like a charcoal euros place. It was like it was just as many different areas as I could get my hands on basically.

7:28 And it's a grind, man. Like I know the long nights I can imagine that I mean it probably helps you a little bit, you know, coming into crypto when it's a bull market. Like you know the 14- hour days are not unknown to Oh, I mean yeah I'm obsessive by nature. So I'll sit at my I I'm not I have no issues with sitting at my desk for super long hours and super long days.

7:49 Is probably a little bit unhealthy. So, it's I guess like everyone has to have it, right? Yeah. I think we all have we all have that problem for sure. It's like we're like moths to a flame with this. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. I mean, honestly, if I'm away from my desk from too long, I get withdrawals.

8:06 So, you know, you know what I mean? Like you sort of start to get like the the work angst starts to come up like I haven't done I haven't touched the keyboard in a couple of days. Oh dear. So, yeah. 100% dude. And then okay so moving into into the like sort of traditional financial world what was it that made you not like that experience so much and then see DeFi as like the answer?

8:26 Ironically enough, it was mostly to do with just all of So, it was friction points was one. I just This is a good example. When we used to work with customers to send an international transaction, it would cost like $25 just to send the money. and and it would it was Yeah. So, it would it would take money.

8:43 Then you have to come physically into the bank. You have to fill out the physical form. Then we have to physically wire the money to wherever it's going to. If you don't have the right information, you won't know that until weeks later because it's like it has to it has to try getting to the receiver address then bounce and then you find out that it bounced and then you get the C.

9:03 So you can see how it's just it's basically like it's just so so bad. And that was a really really big key experience where I was like okay this is just doesn't make any sense. And then I discovered like the Ethereum network and Tether and that you could send however much money you wanted to and as long as gas fees were low for super cheap anywhere in the world.

9:24 And I was like well that's just like an immediate obvious use case like why would why do banks exist if you can do stuff like this? And then it was I was it was sort of like if I can do that with crypto what else can I do? And that was really where like you know I fell down the rabbit hole basically.

9:40 Yeah. Diving off the deep end. And I mean you came Yeah. such an interesting time I think around 2019. That was I mean right before DeFi summer and this whole explosion of like really interesting things that you could do on top of you know of course we had Tether and all that stuff long before but now you have like different utilization use cases, new dexes, new lending.

10:04 So yeah, I was actually at I was at work once and I was like tweeting out very very voriciously. I was I was tweeting out how do I use compound finance? I was I was like what does any of this mean because it was still I was still trying to figure like I didn't know what yield farming was at the time.

10:20 I didn't know what was happening when you were supplying liquidity but but I knew that it was super exciting. So yeah, all these incredible things started to spawn so quickly. I remember vividly like so because of the way that work would work, you you'd have to drive in for like hours a day and so I would do all my research on the way to work.

10:37 I'd do my 9 to5. I'd do more research on the way back like just on my phone looking at what's going on. And then I'd get home and I'd sit here for a good three to four hours after work just like doing more self-education and trying to figure out how I can get my feet in the door.

10:52 It's a very exciting time. Like I know exactly the the period the stage that you're talking about because same same exact thing with myself like just getting your hands on Ethereum and even learning like the underlying like solidity and stuff like this is just so it just feels so new and novel and it's just like I I think it's the idea of the possibilities like what could this even open up in terms of opportunity for me personally but then also like opportunity for like how can we shape the like the new financial system or even just technological system in general.

11:28 So exciting, so addicting. Those are some of the best times is when I was like just watching like backtoback like DeFi MOO videos, just reading like all that stuff. But the good old days. Yeah, absolutely. Now it's just like, okay, I just do this 14 hours a day and you know, may maybe I could use a little bit less at this point.

11:48 Okay. So, we you pivoted into DeFi, started working for free with this company. They end up doing a raise and then you get to this point where you launch your own token. Was it was it your own token? No, it was the company's token. It was called the Motor token basically. Yeah. And then this token, I mean, obviously it sounds like you're pretty hands-on with this launch and you saw everything that goes into it and you start basically consulting for other teams that are launching their token.

12:14 Is that right? Correct. Yeah. And what is it that really goes into it? Like when you're doing a consultation, let's say project comes to you, do they just present you with the tokenomics and like their liquidity bootstrapping plan? Like what does that actually look like? I love that you say liquidity bootstrapping plan as if anyone has a liquidity bootstrapping plan.

12:34 One of the Yeah, like one of the So, in essence, yes, without being too flippant, like a project will come and sometimes they have tokenomics, sometimes they don't. sometimes they'll just have like a pitch deck and a really cool idea and maybe some like early traction or a product or something like that. So, we typically work with projects when they're quite early stage pre-t obviously and they come to us and we'll sort of look at their tokenomics and we'll sort of say to them this is where we can help.

12:59 The biggest key areas that we look at is so with tokenomics there are two key parts. There's the design. the design is where all of the stuff that you guys will see and it which is like the vesting and the token allocations and the fundraising and and those sorts of key bits that you're probably sending out to investors and you're showing to the public and etc etc.

13:19 And then there's the token engineering which is not like not development engineering more like mathematical engineering. Yeah. where we actually go in and we look at things like your ecosystem play. We look at things like staking mechanics, liquidity pool mechanics. We do a ton of different module simulations to sort of model out exactly how we think the token should perform in market.

13:40 Basically just based on a bunch of really good experience and a bunch of good math and algorithms and all those sorts of things, right? So it gets super deep. And then what we also do with projects is we can help them actually get into market in TGE. So we've got like a pretty good partner network where we can work with like different market makers and listing managers and different launchpads and etc etc etc.

14:02 And physically get them into market and TGE them post TGE. What's interesting is that the biggest blocker that most projects have is they feel that once they've TGE their token there's essentially no way to touch it afterwards which is actually like the total opposite is is is true. tokenomics are your design might sort of be set in stone like your allocation depending on which areas you're giving it to but what you can do with those tokens is never set in stone like you can always do different stuff with them.

14:28 So it's like you know sort of getting over that hurdle but that's that's typically how we we like to work with projects. Yeah. Okay. And it seems almost like so there's this whole like simulation and analysis aspect and that almost seems somewhat similar to what a lot of these like risk I don't know what you would categorize them as is like risk firms like a gauntlet or like a chaos labs what they kind of do.

14:51 Would you guys see yourself at all comparable to that or is it like totally different kind of like risk analysis? I can put my hand up and say I'm not exactly sure what companies you're speaking about. I do know what you're talking about when it comes to risk analysis and stuff and and in some sense yes. The way that we look at it is we like to create mathematically sound data backed digital assets.

15:10 Pretty straightforward because most projects are just what we've noticed is that most projects are not interested in the three pieces of data they can use with pump.fun. Most people go to that platform for just like sort of launching the next basically. But a lot of the projects that we work with are founders who are actually trying to create a legitimate business and they need more control over their assets at the end of the day and more granular control over how the assets should perform in market.

15:35 And so yeah, we help to you know alleviate some of the risk. A lot of the projects come to us and they'll say we've got 1% liquidity and we've got a $100 million valuation and we just sort of sit there and well that's going to die in about three months and they just simply don't know because all they see is market hype and narrative and think that's that's all that there is to it.

15:53 So we help to you know sort of correct that and give them a much better chance of success. So what are the key levers like obviously there's liquidity depth there's like diluted valuation what are the levers that you guys pull to try and engineer like the most ideal outcome for a team so we look at all different factors it depends a lot on what the project sort of narrative is say you have like an infrastructure like a layer one with a layer one of the key things that you're probably going to be looking at doing is designing some sort of grants program because as a layer one you're infrastructure and you're trying to incentivize users to come and build on your infrastructure so grants programs is really useful for that particular use case.

16:29 But if you were like a say for example a DeFi protocol and you were doing lending and borrowing, then you'd need some sort of yield program that's probably got something to do with either like a yield farming or like staking protocol. And then you design it so that you're not over incentivizing bad behaviors as in people just coming mining assets, taking them away and dumping them, but more coming and actually contributing to your ecosystem.

16:54 So it depends a lot on the use case and the particular sector that you're moving in. And then we sort of try to design out particular mechanics that will actually help with your particular use case. There are also other things that you can do just off the jump that are quite generic. So liquidity mining like mechanics and liquidity mining programs are often always really quite useful because you're basically incentivizing people to come and deepen your liquidity pools.

17:17 And the biggest problem that I see most projects having is is having too thin liquidity and too high FDV. Really good example of this was obviously M. We saw that crash and they were keeping liquidity thin intentionally to artificially inflate the price but then they just hit way too much sell pressure. we saw a 45% spike in their inflation rate which would have been like super detrimental within 5 minutes it was a 45% inflation rate and then and then it was dead within about 3 hours.

17:48 So you know what I mean? Like there's there's push and pull. There's always catch 22s. and and we understand what to look for when building out a good token. So, we can help projects sort of, you know, give them the most realistic chance of success even though it's never guaranteed. The market will always do what the market does, but you can sort of help to what's the term?

18:06 It's like the more you can do, the more you can do in the way of trying to give yourself the opportunity for luck, the more likely you will get lucky. Absolutely. Yeah, totally agree. I love that approach. looking at the actual like underlying application and figuring out like how do we actually turn this into a flywheel with the token on top because a token really it's a tool of a protocol to be able to reach like the end outcome like any like you mentioned very different for like a layer one like a grants program I mean I I think it can really make or break an ecosystem I think a lot of teams specifically with like layer ones have e either done a really great job of like incentivizing and and bringing teams on board

18:44 Or you know maybe not so much and you don't hear about those networks so much. And then the same thing with like a lending borrowing protocol or you know any kind of DeFi protocol and I think it does get really interesting when you start to think about DeFi because there's all kinds of different DeFi protocols and there's new novel ones that are getting spun up.

19:02 So like there's just an infinite demand for how do we create the optimal flywheel for this DeFi protocol. And I think I mean sometimes tokenomics alone can pretty much just carry a project if you have the right incentives. I mean I think Olympus was kind of a great example of like if you just get the right incentives and you get the right little I mean dare I say Ponznomics but if you get the right incentive then the flywheel will just you know carry itself.

19:31 Well, their their bonds were really quite novel when they came out with them. It was I remember watching what was happening like Olympus was doing it. There was other one called Wonderland Time which was doing it. It was all really quite cool. I think it's fun to sort of look back because like I think about 2021 is like very very experimental.

19:49 And I think about now and it's still pretty experimental. Like I don't think anyone's really quite cracked it just yet which is quite cool. And I think to your point earlier when I speak with projects the way that I sort of frame up their tokenomics is it's it's sort of like the secondary product to the business. Yeah.

20:04 Sometimes people get too focused in sometimes they think it's the primary product. It never is. The primary product is whatever the protocol or the platform is actually building. But the tokenomics it is definitely the secondary product of the entire protocol and you need to treat it with with the same sort of you know gravitas that you would an actual product roll out.

20:22 Yeah. I think that has been a key like learning point for really the industry as a whole is that like you said like the token is not front and center the main part there's got to be like an actual there has to be something it can't just be like vaporware within which I think was most things if we go back three four years was exactly that now I think the general crypto populace has figured out how to discern whether something was actually a good opportunity if you know if this token actually has something behind it.

20:54 I think the most successful projects that I've seen recently have the product far before they have the token and then they the token into a ton of pent-up demand and the launches are like sometimes crazy. I think obviously like hype was an insane one. Yeah, I think that's definitely the the model. One small one that I I really loved recently was Dolomite.

21:20 I mean, Dolomite, I don't know if you've heard of Dolomite, but No, I haven't. Yeah, dude. They've been building in DeFi for years at this point, and they just recently launched their token, and they they've already hit like a billion dollars in AUM before they even launched the token. And I mean, their team's just insanely solid technically as well.

21:38 But yeah, so I I I definitely love the idea of getting the product fundamentals right, get some actual revenue generated and then yeah, that's when the token comes in to add like gas to the fire and sort of like as a flywheel on top of like an initial spark. So yeah, definitely agree that also could agree more.

21:58 There's constantly been this battle of like tokens need to have utility, tokens don't need to have utility. I'm interested to hear like what's your I mean obviously like you said it's on a case by case basis but like what are your thoughts on that debate especially in like today's market. I have a bit of a hot take on the utility debate to be super honest.

22:18 My opinion is that most project utility is is essentially The way that I look at it is is that everyone collectively realized that if a token was a utility token then the SEC won't crawl up our asses about launching unregistered securities. And so if that's the case then well maybe I want to really fund raise for my web 3 project and maybe the VCs I'm talking to don't want to wait 10 years for an exit.

22:44 They'd rather only wait 18 months and so they really want me to do a token. So if I just create a security and then build a thin layer of utility on top, I can get out of regulatory purgatory. Yeah. And that's essentially how I see 99% of projects in the space. There are some projects like that definitely have utility that like just are baked in.

23:07 Like infrastructure platforms were a really good example of this. DeFi protocols are a good example of this. There are definitely projects that require tokens for utility. But I think in general most of it is just is basically thinly veiled horshit. That is the most of it. And I think I I do think however that I'd like to see a shift here in in two directions.

23:28 The first one is that as regulations start to catch up and things get better and better and better. I think it will get more and more easy to potentially be launching securities as long as you're doing it regulated and as long as you're doing it compliantly and with the correct sort of like licenses to do so. you know, the UAE is making a huge effort and sort of moving in that area.

23:45 The viral license is very good to be able to do regulated securities and and not necessarily get in trouble. And then the other side of it is actually doing things that have legitimate utility. So a good example of this, something that I've been thinking about a lot at the moment is data tokenization. One of the biggest problems that with just data privacy and with data sharing and anything to do with of that nature is that it's all really quite sensitive and companies don't necessarily want to be sharing data with each other.

24:10 But as AI becomes a larger and larger piece of the puzzle, the whole world is sort of seeing it just explode out of thin air. Basically, they are going to need to find ways to use data better. if AI is want to get better, they're going to need new data to be trained on. And proprietary data being sitting in silos within these large companies is probably not going to fit the bill.

24:32 I imagine there's going to have to be some sort of crossover at some point. And I think actually the easiest way to do that is is through commerce. You imagine you have two data packets. Two data packets have been tokenized and an LLM is trying to figure out which of those data packets it needs to buy without looking at the data and breaching privacy concerns.

24:51 And the way that it could do this is the value of the data. If one data packet is $100 and the other data packet is $10, the inference is that the data packet that costs $100 is more useful. And so a a an ecosystem that has utility tokens that enable this that's true utilitarian. And I think that makes a lot of sense because you're not actually creating this economy to for speculation or for to improve value.

25:17 You're rather trying to create the the economy to enable commerce between two entities basically if that makes sense. So yeah, I think I think there's there's a dulgence. I think if we're going to launch securities, let's sort of just come out the closet and start launching securities. And then if we're launching actual utility tokens, let's look at actual utility rather than just thin veiled I'm not a security utility.

25:39 Yeah, 100%. And actually I mean like you said with the regulatory environment sort of clearing up around this I mean big change at the SEC. Have you guys seen any interest from folks even like outside of the DeFi/crypto space in launching a token? Has there been any kind of whispers on that side? All of it is coming from the UAE for me.

26:00 So like loads of different companies like funds, hedge funds, just like any capital at the moment are all looking at ways to sort of get into regulated securities in some some way or another. And it's mostly because they have quite deep wallets. So for them, you know, getting a regulation, a regulatory license and then going out and launching the securities is less of a problem than it would be with someone who's like bootstrapped like like a small startup, right?

26:25 So yeah, so for me it's it's coming out of that area. I think also in part too because the UAE is super big on tokenizing real world assets and especially real estate at the moment. So that's that's just becoming bigger and bigger and bigger over there. you know they ran out of oil a couple of years ago.

26:39 So they're really quite interested in in sort of innovating and and and becoming a technology hub which I think is incredible. And so that's where a lot of the so to speak Chinese whispers are coming from for me anyway. No, that that absolutely makes sense. And I guess so obviously we've we've talked about all the different ways that like a token launch can go wrong or just be like kind of flawed from the outset.

26:59 What do you is like an example of a token launch maybe recently even that you felt went really well? Like what does it look like when it's pulled off flawlessly? Who is a really good example of this? I'm thinking about different companies. I think beer had a bit of a a start. you know some of the DeFi tokens like defi de f aai could be an interesting sort of thinking for a second so Virtuals Protocol as an example now they they didn't necessarily launch out the gate strong however they launched their token into a market that was they had a product that had a lot of really good use cases and then as the market started to heat up in defi they just exploded you know they shot right up to a $4 billion valuation

27:44 I think at peak now I when when when this was happening, I actually reviewed them. This would have been back in November or December and I sort of said my biggest concern right now is that their their currency, their virtuals token is being used as the default asset for a platform that requires growth rather than stability. And as a result of this, I would be concerned about the long-term effects of that particular economy.

28:09 Ironically enough, the token died a couple of months later or like at the very least sort of, you know, had a bit of a retrace. And then there's another protocol that we're looking into quite heavily called Hey Anon, which is being run by a guy called Daniele Sesta. He did Wonderland Time. Super cool product, like unbelievably cool product.

28:25 And the token launched at the correct time, it launched into the correct narrative again, just totally exploded. And then after all of the DeFi sort of narrative started to to eb away, I think the token was then priced by the market a little bit more in line with what the actual value was, if that makes sense. So yeah, so I guess to answer the question a bit more straightforward, like I I don't I can't think of a single example where the token has just done incredibly well as of late.

28:54 So you know, you got you when you launch into narratives, you're often launching into an environment that's going to be much more conducive to positivity. One of the things that I say when I talk to founders and stuff is that narrative and market will not always dictate the outcome of your success, but it will have a large impact.

29:11 It will have an effect. And so it's always worth taking into consideration. I think also though so from a long-term perspective as well, Sui have been doing fantastic. Yeah. So like they've been just slow and steady wins the race sort of thing. They've been seeing really consistent sustainable growth over time. They continue to move up and to the right from a trend perspective without necessarily seeing these big parabolic swings.

29:34 And I really like that. I think that they're just like fundamentally their technology is fantastic and the the token itself reflects what I think is quite a healthy company and it's very early stages. You know, I think SUI could be one of those ones. It's going to be going for the next 1015 years. So, yeah, I I apologize if that's like sort of like this weird roundabout answer, but it's like it's always like it never feels like one size fits all, if that makes sense.

29:58 Well, first of all, I think you're totally right about Sui. I think I I saw Alex Becker like shilling Sui or like he had in one of those videos the other day. So yeah, definitely getting more traction. And I mean, yeah, they feel like they've always just been in the space. I mean, they've never been, at least for me personally, like they've never been front and center for like the past handful of years, but they're starting to come out and like really show themselves as a team and actually like an ecosystem that is just always there in the background continuing to build.

30:31 And I think that's the thing that's the power of DeFi and when you have an ecosystem and a network is exactly the ability to continue to compound and continue to be in the game is what will make the biggest difference because I mean you could look at projects like Blast which had a ton of like attention. They had a ton of builders coming on all at once and then it's kind of like well where is Blast now?

30:53 Like I don't really hear of anything from Blast. I think they're working on like mobile stuff but I I really don't know. But Sui on the end slowly just compounding compounding bringing more folks to the ecosystem and I mean if you play that out over I mean five ten years like that's going to be a monster ecosystem slowly but surely couldn't agree more.

31:12 Yeah I think it's actually when you mentioned blast I immediately also thought about the TON ecosystem too. So like same thing like they just exploded. Now, I don't know if the interest sort of petered off because of unfortunately what happened to the TON founder and like he was like arrested and like that just seems like a bit of a one, right?

31:30 But but the the simple thing was that like the TON ecosystem was super hot because people realized they could integrate crypto natively into many apps on Telegram, but I just don't think that that was a long-term compelling enough use case to keep things a foot. I remember sort of seeing it would have been Octoberish of last year where it was still sort of quite frothy, but it was like the TVL and the TON ecosystem was just sort of falling off the face of a cliff and I was like oo time to time to pull out of that narrative and sort of look at what's next.

31:59 No, I think you're absolutely right. And I mean obviously like you said timing also plays a role. It it plays probably significant role in the short term but you know maybe the fundamentals shine through over the longer term but yeah that play into anything that you advise for teams is like do you really worry about the timing or do you do you say just focus on the fundamentals?

32:21 What what's your kind of approach there? Always focus on the fundamentals but I always like to make sure that we try to give clients the best opportunity. So yeah, unfortunately the problem with the market is that, you know, Bitcoin could be sitting at $100,000 per day, which I think it is sitting almost at $100,000, and then it'll drop down to 90 as a very normal, healthy retrace, and everyone will lose their minds and say, "It's all over.

32:44 This is it. We're done. I'm going back to McDonald's sort of thing." Like the Twitter timeline just gets very toxic very, very quickly when things aren't going up into the right. Even though it's healthy to not necessarily always be doing that. So when I talk to my clients, I'll say, "Look, like we're going to get you prepared.

32:58 We're going to get you set up with all the best tools and then as soon as it feels like for you guys it's the right time to launch, you can just click the button and you'll be done." And that's sort of that's how I like to approach it. You know, I ultimately you want to give the clients control.

33:11 They want to be the ones who are in the driver's seat. I can only advise as best as I possibly can as well. But right now, as an example, one of the clients that we're working with is in the agentic space and they're looking at sort of launching a token. And a month ago, they weren't 100% sure if it was the right time to launch within, you know, the next quarter or two.

33:30 And I was just sort of saying, you just keep keep things in motion, keep the wheels spinning because things you don't know when things will change. And now this month, sentiment is swinging back in the right direction. So, and I'm probably going to be pushing this towards a token launch sometime in the next quarter or so. So, it's it's all these things.

33:45 Is like the market is so dynamic and you can be the like as you can be super smart and you can be really clear and you can have a really good plan. You can execute excellently, but if the market wants to on you, you just might get on and I think it's best to try and avoid that at all costs if that makes sense.

34:02 Yeah, absolutely. It's it's part of the the game that we're playing. but when it comes to Tokenise as a as a product, you know, let's say a founder DMs you, you know, they're about to launch, maybe they're just raised or they're going into the race, they want to work with you. What's kind of that process like end to end?

34:19 So, we typically do initial consultation, figure out where the client is at, how we can best help them. then we'll do like a big, you know, big proposal and do all the data and do all the all the coms and all that sort of stuff. And then once we've engaged, we go through and do a full sort of reboot from ground up.

34:35 So we look at all the token design to start off with. We'll look at all of the initial problems that we think they might have. We look at things like, you know, what are the flywheels, the levers that we can pull on to really, you know, get your ecosystem moving. we'll look at things like liquidity ratios. One of the things that we can do on on Tokenise itself is that we have like an insights tab.

34:55 And so we run about 13 different simulations and then the next version of it will be almost double that. and all these different simulations on the potential projected health or impacts of your token. So we can just load the model in and we can look at it and we can figure out what the next best case is going to be.

35:10 And then after that we sort of do some engineering. We look at all of the the mathematics and we run different simulations. A good example of this is like we'll we'll build straight up custom software for clients. So we use like Jupyter notebooks basically and then we just create like a super simple UI and we'll do like price prediction models based on different liquidity scenarios.

35:30 So one of the clients we're working with at the moment they're doing watch tokenization and they have a dual token model and one of the main benefits of the token model is that the protocol itself almost acts as a liquidity back stop for the protocol. So any one time the protocol will buy watches off the open market depending on a discount price and we've modeled out for them what happens at certain price levels or what happens at certain discount levels and help them to give a better idea of how the ecosystem should function in market before going to market.

36:03 So we we just want to make sure that every founder has the correct data points to do that properly and then once once we've gone through that process obviously we get them TGE ready and get them out into the world. Yeah, definitely. And is there like a a stage cuz you you mentioned maybe even like reshaping tokenomics or or starting from scratch like is there a stage ideally projects would reach out?

36:23 Ideally is always going to be early stage. Pretgee is when it's most malleable. It's just easiest to sort of to shift around and change but then in future like the the biggest thing that we want to start looking at is different ways to get projects to market that are much more mature. One of the biggest things that I see in in the way of where things will start to go is I think ICOs and also I AOS which is what I'm calling initial asset offerings.

36:48 I think they'll start to look more like an IPO on a public marketplace. So you can imagine where you start to have less tokens being launched like less less digital assets being launched much higher quality. And I think the reason for this is because as the space matures and as the space gets more and more regulated, we'll start to see larger and larger and more mature companies coming into the space.

37:10 Could you imagine if the idea could you imagine if Apple decided to launch a token? like that would be, you know, and and like it sounds outlandish and insane, but one of the assumptions that we're sort of building the company off is basically agents and AI will continue to get better and better and better to the point where people will stop using their will stop interfacing with so many different things.

37:32 They'll just interface with AI. If you can just message your personal AI to say, "Hey, go and buy X or go and sell X." So much easier, so much simpler. And if the only type of asset that an AI will be able to transact with is on blockchain because we just cannot fathom a future where AI are able to transact on a stock market.

37:51 I just don't think that's ever going to happen. Then eventually all assets will have to be on chain. So Apple's token might not necessarily be a thinly veiled utility token, but maybe a tokenized version of their stock. And when you're working with companies like that, I can't imagine they're just going to use some sort of self-help DIY solution.

38:08 They're probably going to want to be handheld through that process. And I think that's eventually where we're going to be starting to sort of trend towards and that's what we're sort of building as a company towards. Yeah, absolutely makes sense. And you mentioned a couple things like obviously RWA right here with with tokenized stock some AI as well.

38:26 Are you open to like just all verticals like you know if there's a token on chain you know Tokenise wants to be involved. I agree. Yeah 100%. And it's mostly because we man we talk to VCs all the time and they're all terrified of the idea of investing into anything that's that describes itself as an everything platform.

38:44 And I don't know if I'd necessarily just describe ourselves as an everything platform. But the the the simple fact of the matter is that tokenomics exist at such a deep layer that if you understand tokenomics fundamentally, you could basically create any type of digital asset. Like there's nothing really holding you back as long as you understand how the tokenomics works.

39:02 And so that's sort of where we see the platform going. We we want to become essentially an agentic asset manager where you can come into the platform. You can speak with the agent that we will be providing to you and create the asset that you would like and then either manage those assets as if you were a founder or manage your portfolio as if you're an investor.

39:20 100%. Like I I also love the idea of you come to the platform, you have the software that solves you know maybe 95% of all the outstanding like optimizations and stuff like this and then you have the more custom like let's say maybe protocol specific maybe it's like a no novel DeFi protocol then on the kind of like the back end of that you can have the custom white glove solution to to work on some of those like more finer details.

39:48 Maybe you're engineering something from scratch, integrating it like much deeper and you know stuff that basically can't just be done by simulations. And I mean at that at that point you could almost just make the the software open or at like a very low cost and then just off the back end of it you're getting high ticket like white glove services.

40:11 There's a lot of ways that you can go with a product like this, but u so what exactly does a platform look like today? Like what's what's the flow? I get on the platform and you said like it's selfs serve at the moment or maybe future like what does it look like today? Yeah. So as of as of right now the way the platform works as you jump in it sort of functions very similar to enterprise software.

40:34 We built it around the premise of essentially getting people out of spreadsheets. One of the biggest problems that we've noticed and and so we we work with a lot of distribution partners across different accelerators. So we work with like Aptos and XDC and Brink and Foundership and those sorts of guys. One of the things that we noticed off the jump is that founders are really good at breaking their token models.

40:54 So what will happen is is you as as the as the wonderful mentor will give the founder your spreadsheet that you've poured hours and hours of time into and the founder will jump in and change one formula just on accident and it breaks like a 100 different data fields. And so then as a founder you have to take your spreadsheet and you have to go back to the workshop person and you have to ask them if they can redo the model.

41:15 And it's like it it's it sounds really quite minuscule, but when you're doing that across at hundreds of projects each year across all of these different accelerator verticals, it's a lot of time and a lot of wasted money. And so at very simply, our platform just doesn't break. So you can you can jump in and you can build out your models and you can have a much more robust experience.

41:36 You have better version control, all those sorts of things. So it's it's it's definitely focused more towards businesses and and and to people who are a bit more understanding of how tokenomics works. Even though we've made it really really simple, the next version is going to be we're going to be rolling out Alpha in about a month and a half and the where the platform is going is you'll be able to jump in and we'll take you through like an onboarding experience.

41:57 Yeah, it's like seven slides, seven pages. You go through the onboarding experience and at the end of it, you will create a custom tokenomics template that is like 75% 80% accurate to your use case just by answering the questions that we're asking you. Yeah. So that's going to be a big shift where now you actually don't need to you don't need to know what tokenomics are.

42:18 You just have to answer our questions and then you'll be able to build out your tokenomics model. And then of course the logical next step of that is totally agentic. So we're going to have like we're we're going to build in a co-pilot. The co-pilot will function as your buddy. You'll be able to jump in talk to the co-pilot.

42:33 Co-pilot will build a tokenomics model for you. It the reason why we're doing a co-pilot is because I'm a huge believer in beautiful UX for the sake of beautiful UX. I would be very depressed and sad if the all we do from now on is chat bots like as the only UX solution which I see a lot on Twitter these days where people are just like why do I need UX anymore if I can just talk to my AI like it just it would make me really sad.

42:56 So so like you know that's going to be the next evolution where the AI functions as your co-pilot to the point where you would have one agent across all different parts of the business. So, you know, imagine a a platform where you can jump in. Your agent will help to build out your digital asset for you. It'll then launch it depending on where you need it to be launched.

43:15 So, you'll tell it what the use cases and it will suggest Solana if you're a memecoin or it will suggest base or if you're DeFi or whatever. You launch it and then when you're monitoring it and managing it, the the AI will be able to tell you, okay, you know, Owen, your liquidity slippage risk just shot through the roof.

43:35 This is because your volume has started to increase but your liquidity is remaining thin. Next month, this is the risk parameters. We would suggest adding some liquidity to reduce this. Yeah. You know what I mean? And now you're a founder working with your AI, working with your Javas basically to keep your token health in proper check and to get in front of any potential risks that that you might not be able to see that your AI will.

44:00 Yeah. And I imagine this takes away a lot of the lowhanging fruit that you guys used to probably go through. Now that's almost taken out and and totally automated and then you can get to the the more complex bits if need be. But I mean does this like is this a complete solution to the tokenomics problem or is there other stuff that happens has to happen manually today?

44:24 Well when we get to an agentic platform the assumption is that it will be a complete solution to the tokenomics problem. I don't think you'd ever need to use anything else for tokenomics at that point. Yeah. what what we'll what we'll start to look at and and the way that we pitch ourselves to investors that we say that we're the JP Morgan of digital assets.

44:41 And it sounds again very outlandish and a little bit ignorant to be super honest. But but yeah, exactly right. Like that's the only way the investors will buy in. But that's actually legitimately how I see us sort of like moving. So to a certain degree, one of the biggest problems that we see in the space at the moment is that people are still like it's it's super challenging.

44:59 It's full of friction. And if you can help to reduce a lot of that in the way of creating these assets and then managing these assets in real time, regardless of whether or not you're a founder, a project owner, you know, a capital manager, whatever it might be, if you can create an ecosystem that makes it really simple to just work with your portfolio, we think that's a really big step.

45:21 So that's the ultimate goal. That's like the 5 to 10 year plan and and we'll see if we ever end up getting there. What's like a common problem that a project will have after they get the the token launched and they they've done their tokenomics? Like let's say somebody comes into the platform, they use their agent to accomplish everything there and they've you know they've got the right liquidity set, they've got the right model for you know whatever kind of utility it's going to be and then they launch the token.

45:49 What what's the next problem that a founder has after they use that? It's funny like the the biggest problem is they sit back and relax. Yeah. So like they they think their job's done for some reason and and when we talk to founders we say no as soon as you launch it's actually going to be way way harder to just keep your project alive and to keep you in market.

46:08 And that's that's the largest problem. So it's like shifting that mentality and then giving them the correct tools to be able to do it properly. If you're in market right now the you have to be you're so fragmented across different things. So treasury management is usually one area. Investing distribution is one area. Figuring out what the price of your token is doing, that's another area.

46:28 Figuring out how your liquidity is moving or supplying liquidity into your liquidity pool, that's another area. So all of these different things are fragmented across your your ecosystem. you have to hire internally to figure out like to either aggregate all of that and have like some genius who's super web free degenerate who's native and knows what to do.

46:45 You have to hire somebody like that or you have to teach yourself or maybe just use a really good tool that aggregates all of it and then of course it becomes like the hub for post launch. You need to manage all these risks that come up and you need to be able to like act on them and exactly get more liquidity in you know maybe even like get in contact with market makers and facilitate that.

47:08 Like all of the all of the existing tooling that that work that is in the space right now is it's fantastic for to be a tool, but it it just it it's not smart. It's not intelligent. It doesn't tell you where the risks are. It doesn't tell you what's about to go wrong. It doesn't tell you what's potentially going right.

47:25 It just gives you data. And I would be more interested in information or intelligent information, not just data. 100%. If you just have the the data then it's almost like okay well now I need somebody in my org who understands this data and can Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. So essentially removing the need for that and making it much more intuitive.

47:48 I mean it's something that you you almost change it from something that a a somebody who like a seuite has to hire somebody to like manage and monitor it to remove that person and just somebody who's in seuite can you know check in with this every couple of weeks or or maybe even have like alerts set up stuff like this.

48:09 Yeah. So just absolutely streamlines that process and yeah I love I love the the idea of like let's let's make launching a token and getting the right fundamentals and the right use case and all this stuff and the right liquidity model. Let's make that as easy and streamlined as possible with like the lowest barrier to entry. And then once you you get that's like kind of the first hit of like okay this this application is really useful and it wow that I mean that experience was delightful and we just solved this super hard problem that everybody struggles with and and up.

48:42 Yeah. Now you've got the you've got the user you've got the customer essentially. Now the real work begins and now the the app that's when the application starts to become you know 10 times as useful because hey now we need have continuous monitoring continuous management of all these and hey by the way you're probably going to want to be able to interpret like what the issues are and how to actually solve them.

49:04 We can do all of that for you in the platform. Exactly right. I mean like we the the tracking product that's going to hit the market in about a month and a half. You know, if we'd had it was just a prototype and it just turned out the prototype was really good. And if we'd had a direct line to JP over at Mantra, we could have said to him, "Hey, man, we just saw a 45% spike in your inflation, right?

49:27 Something's about to go very badly wrong. Please do something like, you know what I mean? Like, supply some liquidity or take this action or do X or do Y to just potentially save a couple billion dollars." That's, you know what I mean? And it's just like Exactly. Exactly. And and it's just like that's that's where the power of I think information, intelligent information is is really sort of lends itself to simply just giving someone the data.

49:57 Even if they're a very bright person, it may not always be super obvious to someone. It's just better to to act as as that sort of informative agent. So yeah, you know that that's sort of definitely something that we're working towards. Absolutely. What a great case study to have like hey by the way would or is it I don't even know mantra would not not have crashed if if they had this this alerting.

50:23 Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's just a perfect like hey there's a pretty clear pain point here. And I'm sure I mean with something like this it's exciting because you could even just start like permissionlessly monitoring a lot of these tokens and just like see what goes on out there and reach out to teams. I mean I mean that could even be like a a go to market strategy.

50:43 Exactly. Literally exactly what we're doing. It's it's amazing that you like just sort of nailed that. Like that's Yeah. I won't spoil too much, but the the prototype has very much evolved into something quite amazing. And it that's sort of like the the the thinking that we currently have anyway that we can sort of help people. It's ironic because, you know, we on Twitter we were posting this, we're like, you know, if if we had a direct line to JP, we may have been able to help him save a couple billion and the first thing anyone writes is, "Oh, it's it's because if it was true, you'd just short it and make money."

51:20 And I was like, maybe, but it's unfortunate. Like, that's just not our prerogative. I'm not actually interested in sucking value out of the space. I would much rather try to keep value inside the space. The the biggest problem, one of the biggest problems we have in web 3 is it's so PVP. And I'm just I'm not really about that.

51:41 I would prefer to find ways to make money that's not trying to rip somebody else off. Yeah. I mean, it's also like after you figure out like, okay, like I can I can make a decent amount of money and I can, you know, I I can pay for my living expenses, etc., and not have to really worry about stuff.

51:57 Then it's like, am I really going to go to the most malicious like way to make money? Like I don't like I want to make money in a way that's first of all ideally enjoyable for me. Yeah. Second of all, like actually lets you sleep at night and provide like valuable connections with other people and like move like the coolest industry on earth forward.

52:18 In my opinion. So yeah. Yeah, couldn't agree more. 100%. I mean it sounds like what you guys have have built is like truly pretty exciting. So interested to see how that adoption comes. And I mean if you guys are doing outbound with it, you already you guys already know what you're doing. So yeah. Well, I mean like we we've managed to crack super early distribution.

52:40 I mean, when you when you're talking to an accelerator and you say, "Hey, this is how we can help your founders." Within 30 seconds, they're like, "Okay, this is amazing. How do we how do we integrate this?" So, that's a yeah, that's a fantastic like, you know, it's basically the zero play. It was exactly what Zero did.

52:55 And so, that's just what we're going to keep doing. And and the basically the the process is going to be standardized. You know, we're not super big or loud with our marketing, but I guarantee you within the next six to 12 months, people won't be using spreadsheets anymore. They'll be using Tokenise 100%. That that's so exciting, man.

53:10 I mean, like that position to be in is like I don't know, dude. I wouldn't even be able to sleep at night just like the excitement of like getting everybody on onto your platform. So, I to tell you the truth, I've been thinking about getting a woot and I decided not to because I don't want it to tell me how bad my sleep is at the moment.

53:30 Yeah, 100%. So, what what would you say is like the bottleneck on the business at the moment? Largest bottleneck that I think we are having at the moment is just simply we're trying to grow really quickly and the the resource is probably the biggest problem. Ironically enough, we are I think we're probably going to open up a new seed round really quite soon.

53:53 So, we did our preed back in February and that was allocated within three days. Yep. and and now we've gone through this big growth period. we got a ton of feedback, you know, six months ago that we just looked too much like a consulting business and so we're like, well, it. We just need to push the the the product to market.

54:10 We've got it in market and we're already seeing hockey stick growth on user adoption curves, which is really cool. and so it's like right now the we have this wonderful little fire and now we just need fuel to dump on it and we're pretty damn convinced it's going to turn into a massive bomb, right? I know most projects are going to say, "Ah, my largest bottleneck right now is resources."

54:30 But ours actually is resources. And I imagine that will be solved really quite soon. 100%. I mean, like, what have you guys done? I imagine a lot of it is like on the technical side, hiring and finding the right fits there. What have you guys so far to try to solve that? So, we've got we've actually brought on a new AI specialist recently.

54:48 He's like studying a master's degree at one of the best technology universities in Australia at the moment. And then we've got another guy that we're thinking about bringing on who's studying quantum AI, go figure, and a he's doing a PhD at another really good technology at university. So we're we're really interested in in bringing more AI agentically into the company.

55:06 And then and then from an agentic perspective, so we are huge believers in making the company as efficient as possible. So our entire sales process, our entire outbound process, all agentic. So we have like you know email campaigns that are constantly being triggered. All of our content right now is is agentic. So what we do is is me and one of my founding team members, we do like we record video once a week.

55:30 So we'll do like an hour interview and we'll talk about what's going on. We'll do product updates and blah blah blah. And then we just stick it into our agent. It'll tear it up into different pieces and then distribute across YouTube, LinkedIn X, all that sort of stuff. So all of that process is totally automated. The outbound sales process is totally automated.

55:48 And then like I said, our distribution players is we go we're not trying to work with founders directly because it's just way too time consuming for the the uplift. We just go to to accelerators and we'll say hey use our software. We'll give your founders some sort of discount to use the software as part of going through your program.

56:05 We'll do workshops with your founders where necessary. So we'll jump on for an hour or two and and we'll work with them and help them get their tokenomics up to scratch just as long as you use our product. And that's also having a really big effect. So, it's like anywhere that we can be super efficient right now, we we we just are.

56:20 That's excellent. And I can imagine I mean, you're getting a ton of users on board. What's your pipeline for like user feedback? Because I can imagine at this stage that's like gold to you guys. Yeah, it is like the most manual process of the business actually. So, every every time we get a new user onto the platform, we I I I try to ping them.

56:43 So, I'll like I'll I'll I'll get their email. I track down whatever social profile I can track down. I'll reach out to them, ask them how they're, you know, do you like the platform? What do you hate about it? What are your biggest sort of like issues that you're having with it at the moment? And then we've been forming relationships with customers.

56:58 So, I like regularly talk to my customers about, you know, what bugs did they have? Or, hey, Daniel, can you quickly help me with this or or whatever. So it's like a super manual process, but it's like you you can't have your finger on a bit of pulse than talking directly with your customers basically. So that's like we we basically we talk we took a leaf out of the Y combinator playbook like basically just obsess over customer satisfaction and talk to them as much as you possibly can.

57:23 And so that's essentially what we what we've been doing. Absolutely. I mean that that's to me the hardest part about SAS is retaining the users. So, I mean, like you said, you've pretty much solved the outbound getting more users on board and like I mean, it sounds like it pretty efficient, which is really awesome, but yeah, the hardest part is getting the product like dialed in and it's it's such a it's a painstaking process, but it's also like an exciting one because it's you just make like a thousand minor iterations.

57:54 Like there's no one thing that you'll change and it will make like oh your SAS retain 100% of users year over year but it's like all these like little iterations and things that you wouldn't even think of if you didn't like hop on a call with a user and see how they're like using the application and then and then even like getting into like split testing stuff in the in the UI.

58:15 Yeah. Oh it's like it's even it comes down to even just like like a single word can change the customer experience. So, like we had we used to call the public round the featured round. We we defined it as the featured round just because it was like the the round that was on the homepage and it was like it was the featured round.

58:32 No one got it. Everyone was like, "What the is a featured round? What does that make like that doesn't make any sense?" And we just changed it to public round and they were like, "Oh, right. That's my public round. Okay, I get it now." You know what I mean? So, it's like it's just like even those things that you just you would never have thought of, people want to see because it makes it feel more familiar and it cuts down that learning curve even more.

58:53 Yeah. And they want to know that it's for them. Like I I think a lot of it is how do you get the messaging right so that when I especially with SAS when I go to a website and I'm looking at some kind of SAS product, I need to know does this solve specifically the you know niche problem that I have?

59:11 And if it does, I'm going to buy it. If it doesn't, I I don't. And then if you get that messaging right, then you're gonna have hockey stick growth like you said. couldn't agree more. What is your retaining like your your retention metrics? Like what do they look like? Do you guys typically like keep I mean this software is great because you have their token I don't know if you can maybe make it like really sticky with their token.

59:37 But it's like you've got their token. They launched it within your platform. So I imagine is the tension really strong or what does that look like? Yeah. So well actually so for the time being we have we haven't let founders launch their tokens just yet because sorry that's a lie. So it's they can launch on test net.

59:53 They can't launch it on mainnet and I think that's obviously going to be a point that is a little bit unsticky because once you're on mainnet like you sort of have to stay in the one spot. It's quite hard to sort of shift. It becomes quite rigid quite quickly. however, the retention rate is still really quite high.

1:00:09 And so, and I think that's because one of the the core features of the platform is that when you come in and you build out a token, you start off with building out project rooms. And your project room almost functions as your data room. So, you can create both tokenomic models and also plain text files. meaning you can stick in your white papers, you can stick in SAS if you want to, you can put in safe agreements, anything that you would put into a Google document, you can put into the Tokenise platform.

1:00:38 And so that's essentially one of the key moes of of the product is that the more data you add into Tokenise, the more entrenched you become within the Tokenise ecosystem and the harder it is to leave. So all all the the retention metrics obviously increase the more that users are adding like files to the platform essentially and adding data to the platform.

1:00:57 So that's that's a key thing that we see. and the obviously the the way we increase that is to reduce friction points and add all different file types and blah blah blah blah blah. but yeah, for the time being we're still technically in like an invite only phase basically. It's just that we we sort of call it an in invite only phase that got out of hand.

1:01:16 We we gave it to 12 users like two months ago and it's just organically grown to like several hundred basically. We're nearly at like a thousand monthly active users just through word of mouth. That's excellent. That sounds like a mean to start pouring money into. Well, you know, like the what we didn't realize was going to happen and is super obvious in hindsight is that you give the founder access to the platform and they share it with about five other people and those five other people are typically founder, other founders in the team, other team members, investors or community members.

1:01:50 And so it just has this insane network effect where you you do it once and then you just share it with all these people and then they share it with people. Actually, funnily enough, so in the first couple of weeks, this is a good story. In the first couple of weeks, we ran into a problem. When we first launched it, we allow we we forced people to log in with their Google account.

1:02:08 That was mostly because we just wanted the account information. We want to be able to reach out to customers and have conversations with them, right? But then within about a week, we realized that we're our bounce rate shot through the roof. And it was because it had gotten like several people removed from that initial 12 who knew us personally.

1:02:27 So it gets to like the fourth or fifth removed person and they're like, "Well, I don't know, Daniel." And this platform was just shared with me randomly. I'm not going to put my Google account information into it. And so we hit this bizarre bottleneck because that we didn't foresee was going to happen for at least a couple of months because of how quickly it grew.

1:02:45 And so within like within like like a week, we deployed a fix where you could just jump in and you didn't have to sign up sign up with a Google account anymore. You just had more flexibility. Bounce rate was cut in half pretty much overnight. I love those issues that just kind of like get revealed to you through adoption.

1:03:01 Like you didn't even realize this. You just wouldn't know. Yeah. Yeah. You just never know. Yeah. Absolutely. That that's kind of like the funnest part about designing SAS is like you have the system and you think it's you know you think it's built for X amount of usage and then you get there and then you even go beyond it and then you're like oh actually this is a a huge problem.

1:03:22 And then it's like an easy fix. That's like the most beautiful thing. Like I love the little like it's just a little fix like you you said like changing a word and it just gives you like 10x return on that. It's crazy how reality is in that sense. Sometimes it can be magical sometimes to be honest. You just sort of watch it all happen.

1:03:38 I mean, we didn't think we're going to hit hockey stick growth. We had this bad internal issue where we had like a the data that we were being fed was not the correct data. So, I've got I've got two guys in my team who are seeing the correct data. I'm seeing the wrong data. And the wrong data made it look like we were dead in the water.

1:03:56 The data I was getting was like we'd stopped having new accounts being signed up. And it was going on for like 3 weeks. And I was like, "Okay, maybe maybe people are just not using it as much right now and they'll start to use it again. I don't know." And I was getting super antsy. And and one Friday, I finally sort of like I was like, "Guys, like, what the is going on?

1:04:15 Like, no one likes us anymore. Why is this happening?" And the two guys just looked at me like I I sort of walked into the room backwards and they like, "No, we're things are going really really well. What are you looking at?" And we realized we had data mismatches internally. So it's like, you know, it's just like those moments that cause horrible anxiety and then just like immediate stress relief.

1:04:33 That's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. And Yeah. And I mean like what is the tech stack? Like I'm interested if if you know like what are the main technologies you guys are using to manage this? Pretty straightforward. So all of the blockchain stuff. So right now we're fully EVM compatible. We've got some Solana in there. So it's like you know Solidity and then Solana's Rust I'm pretty sure.

1:04:54 And then front end is being built using Svelte which is like a it was like a framework designed mostly for like news articles and content agencies. But the biggest advantage of it is that it's just like super snappy and really really clean. So like if you've ever used the platform, you can just like tab between tabs and everything loads pretty much instantly.

1:05:12 Like it feels really good. And then back end is just TypeScript. Excellent. Yeah. So super super clean, super straightforward. We're just trying to make sure that the text stack can evolve over time. We've actually the the addition we're really excited about is I just reserved the project DGX Spark from Nvidia which is like the Blackwell supercomputer that sits on your desktop basically.

1:05:36 And so that's going to be it's like a full I think it's you can put an LLM into it up to 200 billion parameters. So when we get access to that that'll I imagine that's going to boost our AI game really quite quickly. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And I imagine so you've got a lot of folks that are like really well trained in AI and they've done like yeah some really insane research there.

1:05:56 Is there any kind of a speed bump when you bring them into the crypto space? Like do they have to get up to speed with everything? What is that like? I don't think so at all. I mean maybe generally but like we've been so lucky. I've been so spoiled. We hired I hired this guy as an intern for tokenomics.

1:06:14 Yeah. And then turns out he's a genius at Mac and also AI. And so now I've been actually pushing him more towards the AI side of the business as that side of the business start to grow. So he's just absolutely brilliant. university student. He's, you know, about my age, so what like early 20s and like just an absolute cold-hearted killer.

1:06:36 And it's the exact same story with this guy in quantum AI that we think like we're going to sort of look at hiring too. So, we're just like honestly I've just gotten lucky as hell. That's wonderful, man. I mean, yeah, the team, especially with something like this, the team is so important to have that like really concentrated talent to be able to actually like deliver on a product like this.

1:06:57 And I mean, it sounds like you guys have have been and you you've got the right folks in place. So, I mean, exciting times ahead. You have to have the right people on the bus. We we certainly haven't been this lucky all the time. We've actually had people come through the business who were just like absolutely not right for the business.

1:07:14 But then in in those situations, you just sort of like part ways as amicably as possible and and you find the right people to get on the bus. And I think I think right now we've got some we've got some pretty excellent people sitting on the bus right now. That's awesome, man. Well, yeah, dude. I'm I'm excited to to see the growth in the in the coming weeks, months, and and over the next year, I think a lot more people will start hearing hearing about Tokenise.

1:07:36 I mean, it sounds like it's it's a pretty viralizing product. So, yeah, that's exciting, man. But, anything else any new features we should maybe shout out? I know in like a month and a half you guys are releasing the new like monitoring and like sort of aentic Yeah. side of the application. Is there anything else big you guys are releasing soon?

1:07:59 So, so all of that stuff is going to be coming out. So, we it's basically we're going we have app.Tokenise Tokenise, which is where you can build everything. And there's going to be track Tokenise, which is all of the real-time monitoring. We So, we're pulling in real time data as well. So, we pull in your token data as well as everybody else's data.

1:08:14 So, if you're someone who is interested, you can actually just jump in and look at anything that's been listed on CoinGecko as an example. So, it's pretty chill, right? and and so I guess other features, so you'll be able to jump into Tokenise. Like I said, you'll be able to jump in and do your onboarding process.

1:08:29 So if you have no idea what tokenomics are and have no idea what the mathematics are, you'll still be able to create templates that will fit your project use case, which is really cool. And if you want to, you can then compare your token to other tokens. So you'll actually physically be able to jump into the platform and have your tokenomics model and have a token that you like.

1:08:48 You'll have their tokenomics model and you can just copy it over. And we've got like over I think we got something like 250 token models that you can copy from that we'll be going live with very very shortly. And so the whole platform is going to act as this curated advisory style coach that will coach you through the process of creating, launching, and managing your digital assets if you don't know how to do it.

1:09:09 And even if you do know how to do it, it's going to make your life really easy. Yeah. Yeah. Just be a seamless experience overall. Exactly. Yeah. Excellent, man. Well, yeah, dude. I mean, I think we we've covered pretty much everything. I mean, you guys are just in a really exciting spot right now. So, we'll we'll see how it how it plays out for you guys and hopefully you guys open the floodgates and it just starts to compound and compound like month over month.

1:09:33 So, excited to see what the future brings for you guys there. But, I mean, to be honest, dude, appreciate you hopping on and and walking through all this stuff with us. And no, thank you. I mean, yeah, dude, just really exciting time for you guys. Thanks so much for your time. This has been wonderful. I I haven't done one of these in a while, so this has been really cool.

1:09:50 I appreciate it.