Episode 02

Yossi Hasson (00:01.84)

Welcome back to another episode of Reimagine Ownership podcast by Metaversal. I'm Yossi Hasson, founder and CEO of Metaversal and I'm enjoying the bar.

Dan Schmerin (00:12.892)

Dan Schmerin, president and co -founder. Happy to be here.

Yossi Hasson (00:18.373)

I'm happy to be here too. This is the Reimagine Ownership Podcast where each week we are diving into how blockchain and Web3 technologies are transforming ownership. We'll be exploring how decentralization is shifting power from big and bad corporations to individuals, making ownership more transparent, secure and accessible. Join us as we uncover how these innovations are changing the game and paving the way for a fairer, equitable future. We're going to get started. Robin, our great producer, put that blurb together and I quite like it, but maybe we can...

refine them a little bit and get it there. But we're to be joined today by Tor Bair, a pioneer and the leader of world of blockchain and privacy technologies. He's the CEO and co -founder of Stassh, one of the Metaversal Portfolio Companies and a key figure behind the secret network. has been at the forefront of redefining digital ownership and privacy in the decentralized world. He's got a background spanning blockchain development, privacy solutions, and even music. And he brings a unique perspective to the evolving landscape of Web3.

We're excited to dive into how blockchain is reimagining ownership and the future of decentralized economies. Tor, we've got a lot to talk about. Welcome to the podcast.

Tor - Stashh (01:27.704)

Thank you guys for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you and always a pleasure to talk with you guys online or offline about all this fun ownership stuff and what Web3 can do to revolutionize it.

Yossi Hasson (01:39.089)

It was quite the feat getting you on the podcast. How's your summer been? And what have you been up

Tor - Stashh (01:45.71)

Shipping, mostly. We released Dash 2 .0, so I haven't been hitting the conference circuit, which is kind of a relief, but we've pulling our weight along. We've been pulling the community along. People are really excited about what's happening with Web3 ownership, especially the cultural aspect of Web3 ownership, even beyond the financialization. So we've seen a lot of really interesting stuff emerge, some new metas, some new...

some new exciting cultural elements. So happy to talk about everything we're seeing and everything we're trying to build to support it.

Yossi Hasson (02:19.411)

We are definitely going to dive into that but then you know what I really like to hear when I was someone a founder that we've invested in you know How is your summer been and where have you been and he's like well heads down shipping? Nothing makes nothing makes my ears ring more than hearing that well, let's get right into it and For our guests not everyone knows whose stash is and what stash is about so maybe you can just start off by explaining to our listeners what stash is

Tor - Stashh (02:47.246)

So Stashh is this convergence of everything we need to fix about how NFTs work and everything that we need to fix about how social and discovery works in Web3. We realized that there was a big problem for both creators and collectors when it came to not just selling their work or purchasing work, not just the financial elements, but the cultural elements, these elements of discovery where everything was either siloed inside of a

private discord or telegram or where it was siloed blockchain by blockchain, Solana collectors not meeting Ethereum collectors, not meeting base collectors, so on and so forth. We set out to solve the problem of social discovery. And in addition, we were looking to solve all the issues that exist with these Web2 platforms for social, where there's zero context and zero proof of ownership, which I suppose is the most relevant piece for this conversation.

You know, you go on Twitter, somebody has a PFP, but you don't know if that represents ownership of something else. It also raises questions about identity. How do I know that I'm talking to a real person who might have an on -chain reputation versus somebody who just recently created an account or purchased it off somebody else? So all the problems Dash is trying to solve have to do with identity and ownership, have to do with permissionlessness, but also have to do with everything Web2 Social tried to solve. Discovery.

connection, just a fluid and dynamic social experience. when I first I explained the problem, then I try to at least say what it is. mean, if you come to stash his homepage, what you're going to see is a feed. Essentially, we are a social first NFT marketplace, minting and discovery platform. It's where you're going to do all your creating, all your collecting and all of your discovering in one place while breaking down as many of the silos that we can around what blockchain are you on? Where have you already been active?

but we also help you build a reputation over time through experience and levels, everything that you'd want to do to show that you're active in the NFT space, prove something about your identity, and most importantly, show off something about your ownership to everybody else who's part of this same global network.

Dan Schmerin (05:00.592)

I want to ask the sixth grade question because stash has two H's at the end, which makes me think that there is an importance to the shh, which is a frequent phrase in my household as the kids run around. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of why you named the company that way.

Tor - Stashh (05:06.946)

Yeah.

Tor - Stashh (05:15.918)

Hahaha

Tor - Stashh (05:23.126)

Yeah, it's worth explaining because it's something that I suppose we take too much for granted within Stashh and maybe within the Stashh community, but it's not something that's well embraced or understood outside of it, at least not yet. So the reason that Stashh has the double H on the end, we mean it sort of in much the same way as you might mean it with your six -year -old or really a child of any age or in my case with our cats. You really...

want to emphasize this idea of privacy, or at least, you know, being able to have this degree of control over ownership. And what I mean by that is privacy is not to say like you could never tell somebody what you own. That's not what privacy means in the real world. Just think about something in your house. If you've got a piece of art hanging on the wall, what it means to have privacy in your own home means somebody comes over for dinner.

They get to look at the art on your wall. You get to give them the house tour. You get to tell them when to go home. You have a degree of control, but nobody doubts whether you own the art or not. You know, they can see it in your house. They can see it on the wall, but you're choosing how it's shared. Who can see the art? Who can know that you own it under what conditions? The way that things work in the physical world is how we think they should work in the online world. But with Web3, we've taken for granted

that there's this transparency problem with blockchains. Stashh does not think there needs to be a transparency problem. We think that transparency is the other side of the coin from privacy and it's part of the solution. Having transparency means you can prove something about your ownership or prove something about your identity whenever you want to, under the circumstances you want it proven. And you can prove a little bit about yourself, a lot a bit about yourself. You can show off everything you own. You can show off just a little.

So the shush in stash is really just about that level of permission and control. That's why we've built privacy technologies into every piece of the stash product, whether it's on chain ownership or on platform reputation or on platform social interaction. We give a lot of choice to the users, a lot of ways to consent to other users, how they want their data to be shown, how they want their ownership to be shown.

Tor - Stashh (07:40.77)

Some of that the blockchain helps with, some of it the blockchain makes a lot harder. But at the end of the day, we fundamentally believe privacy and ownership are inextricably linked. They will always be part of the same product and part of the same solution.

Dan Schmerin (07:55.25)

Can we double click on that for a second and then I wanna hand the mic back to Yoast. Where is the line in your mind at a macro level when we talk about privacy?

and anonymity because much of our ecosystem has been targeted by folks that are beginning to wrap their head around what Web3 represents and the opportunity that it brings to bear and yet they get stuck on this idea of anonymity. How have you thought about that and where does Stashh fit in?

Tor - Stashh (08:31.126)

Yeah, it's interesting because I think a lot of people have misconceptions about what blockchains enable and don't. If you think that the blockchain is a tool for anonymous finance, you're going to have a bad time. That's pretty explicitly not what the blockchain does. What the blockchain can do is create a permissionless ownership structure that anybody can interact with. You can have a pseudonymous account in that the account is a series of letters and numbers and your private key is a string of characters.

and no one else can access that but you. That's pseudonymity, but it's certainly not anonymity. Every trace of your information, what you're doing with the blockchain is on the blockchain itself, and it's auditable by every single user and observer of the blockchain. So the blockchain is not an anonymity tool by any stretch, but also what we're trying to solve for with privacy, we're not trying to solve for anonymity, we're trying to solve for security. The reason you want

Privacy with your ownership is to secure your ownership so that somebody can't go and easily steal your private key or easily track everything that you do on the internet so it makes it easier for them to try to exploit you or attack you or socially engineer you. We value privacy because of the value it gives to the end user and helps them secure their ownership. We don't value necessarily anonymity to the same extent because we know, especially for creators...

collectors, people who care about the cultural aspect of the space, your reputation can be everything. And it's really hard to build a reputation if you want everything you do to never have a past and never have a future and always be anonymous and never traceable. A lot of people want what they're doing to be traceable. They just want to be able to consent to how that history is traced. They want to be able to say, I want to prove to potential collectors or potential business partners who I am and how I operate.

I just don't want that to be by default, radically transparent to every party in the world. So privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. That's, mean, the most important takeaway from that big long string of words, but that's not what we're solving for. We are solving for privacy and security and consent, not for anonymity.

Dan Schmerin (10:45.682)

You know, the corollary I use is in this environment where fraud is becoming increasingly pervasive, meaning Web 1, Web 2. Yossi has the ability to lock down his credit report and many people are now choosing that option because they get notifications from every major company that they interact with that their stuff has been stolen. And they provide them with a service and they say one solution is for you to go ahead and lock down your

credit, it's a permanent freeze and you can go onto the website of Experian or Equifax or TransUnion, which are the big three credit agencies and unfreeze it for period of time. You give it the permission so it stays private until you're going to an automobile dealer and they need to run a check or you're applying for a new credit card and they need to run a check and you provide access for three days, five days, seven days, whatever the time period is. So I see that in a lot of what you've

have been building and describing. Yos, back to you.

Yossi Hasson (11:49.331)

Well, Tori, you're talking about the fundamentals of what Stashh is about is privacy and ownership. And we're about reimagining ownership in the digital world here at Metaversal. What does ownership actually mean and why is privacy key to ownership and the kind building of these networks that it needs to be fundamentally there?

Tor - Stashh (12:13.848)

The historically ownership, I don't know how many millennia we want to go back to go, but ownership is traditionally something that has been secured by the state. And if we think about like what gives you property rights, what allows you to be able to say my home is my home? Well, somewhere there's a deed that shows with this public record, you actually own this thing and people agree upon this and only a certain number of people are permitted to

stamp it and say, you actually do own this thing. And as a society, we all embrace this structure because it makes life a hell of a lot easier if we all know whose private property is whose. And it makes us feel safer to know that there are a bunch of people, systems, infrastructure in place to protect those rights. Without protection for those rights, without some means of securing ownership, you do get chaos or anarchy in that

You could just walk in anywhere, take anything off the shelf, take anything out of a house. I'm being hyperbolic on purpose, but just to say somewhere on this spectrum, property rights are being secured by somebody beyond yourself. We don't all just sit around on our front porches with our shotguns to make sure nobody comes in. And it makes society work a lot smoother. And there's actually a lot more trust as a result. We trust that people own what they say they own because it's not just we're taking their word for it. We're also taking

the deeds word for it. We're taking whatever other record of transactions word for it. Historically, we've needed the state to certify this. And the state really only has so many ways of handling property rights. A lot of them can be nonviolent. A lot of them can be violent as a last resort. What blockchain specifically gives us the opportunity to potentially do is say, is there another way, just with math, just with cryptography, to be able to say,

some entity or agent somewhere definitively has ownership and control over this other idea. And this is what public private key cryptography allows you to do. I have the key, only I, to unlock the state of this specific wallet. Only I can move these items around. You are the only one with right access. And maybe that gives you, in our sense of the word, ownership over what's inside that wallet.

Tor - Stashh (14:36.268)

because only you can alter the contents of the wallet. Only you can authorize this account to do something on your behalf. From my perspective and also from Stashh's perspective though, there's another component. I'm just talking about write access, but what about read access? Doesn't true ownership feel like the sort of thing where you'd also, as I did with my home example, give you read access to the things that you control? If I want to be able to say, I own this, but I don't have to tell

the entire world at any given time, right? We're not talking about just some government official or just my dad or just North Korea. We're talking about every single entity can now read the state of the blockchain. That to me does not feel like true ownership. It feels like we got a little closer maybe to being able to operate in a more permissionless structure of enforcing ownership rights or at least having them verifiable, but we've gone too far.

that solution over to something that I think creates far more problems than it solves. So with blockchain, yes, we've created the opportunity for a new dimension of ownership, for a new paradigm for securing ownership, improving ownership, but it's not a perfect solution. And I would go so far as to say, in many ways, it's a worse solution than anything we've come up with before. It would be the equivalent of leaving everything in your house out on the front line to make sure that everybody knows that it's actually yours.

Not the best way to handle things. Fortunately, we're nowhere near done innovating with this model.

Yossi Hasson (16:08.627)

And I want to touch on a little bit of your background in music and doubling on the theme of ownership. If you think of platforms that exist today like Spotify, and really have changed how musicians distribute music and monetize their work, but they've prioritized reach over ownership. And as a musician and as a blockchain expert, how do you think technologies like Stashh and others can help regain control over their creative output? And do you see NFTs?

playing a part in reshaping kind music distribution and music ownership and how does this play out in that world? know that streamers of music, know, do a billion plays on Spotify and make, I know the exact numbers, but make like a hundred bucks. And there's a lot of pushback now, but me as a consumer, I love the fact that I can have music in my pocket and listen to any song. How do you think that's gonna all play out?

Tor - Stashh (17:04.686)

So I'll start by talking about the work I've already done here. Back in 2015, I was still a graduate student at MIT and I did my final thesis report, whatever you might want to call it, specifically on using blockchain and technology to enable the music industry and to solve all the issues with rights management and stream payouts and things like that. I'm saying the year was 2015. We don't even have an Ethereum mainnet.

I think like a month before I had talked to Joe Lubin in a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn. So the most of the solutions that were being discussed were not even things that were yet viable. It was like maybe with this future smart contract technology or something else. The thrust of my report though was not like we're one blockchain technology away from solving this problem. The thrust of it was the problems mostly exist within the music industry, not with the technology. Most of these problems

for not just artistic industries, but anything like finance and banking to real estate and real world assets. It comes down to a lot of the politics involved, the different stakeholders, aligning interests, all these legacy systems that have entrenched middlemen and support. It takes a lot to nuke something that works well enough, except for the people it's supposed to.

and replace it with a completely new system. It has to operate in parallel for years. You have to build trust, not just from the artists, but from the labels and so on and so forth. And ultimately the system that exists benefits the biggest musicians. Taylor Swift does not need to make money from her Spotify streams. It helps her dominate the discourse. It helps her sell tickets to the live shows and merchandise in other ways, but she doesn't need the streams. The small artists need the streams.

for discovery. They don't get paid from the streams, but it allows them at least to unlock. Let's sell tickets to the shows. Let's sell some merch. Maybe in this new paradigm, right? They're also selling NFTs that represent rights on their work or just at least represent some sort of collector's edition. You know, there's a million ways you could take it. They're the ones who need new solutions, but the new solutions don't get adopted unless the big artists say we need the new solutions. And if the big artists are dominating, you know, if it's a power law and they're making 99 % of the rewards from how the industry is currently working,

Tor - Stashh (19:24.172)

Well, where's the means for revolution? It's got to be bottom up or you need someone in a position of centralized power, whether it's a label or distribution platform like Spotify to say, we want to embrace some different model. And in my paper back then, I said, most likely it'll have to be the streamers, somebody like a Spotify who finds themselves squeezed by the labels and squeezed by the market to say, we're going to innovate. And they're the most technology driven company.

Maybe Spotify themselves will find some kind of model for using web three technology to better secure ownership. They offer it to the artists. Then the artists embrace it to me without getting that kind of adoption at scale. We're talking about a nine figure platform of daily active users on Spotify. Without that kind of scale. I don't think you're going to see the kind of artists and consumer adoption that would be required to continue innovating, but at least it's promising to see that.

We're still experimenting with the technologies. have platforms, know, even as, you know, today it would be Audius back then it was like mycelium and pure space. People have been innovating forever to try to solve these problems. I wish it was just a technology problem, but the, you know, the founder hat on in me and the musician hat on in me is like, I know it's more complicated than that. would, it's hearts and minds and it's politics. And at the end of the day, it's money too.

Dan Schmerin (20:46.01)

And aren't there going to be aspects of that in each industry that is set to be disrupted or disintermediated because you have

Opponents, the rent seeking middlemen that you're describing, those financial intermediaries who you're threatening to upend. And when someone's financial lifeline is upended, you shouldn't expect that they will put down their pitchfork gently, right? So it's going to be true in title insurance. It's going to be true in

I mean, you're talking about Spotify. Think about Michael Smith, who was recently arrested for activating tons and tons of bots to just stream his music, right? So even with technology, we know that there's more to it. Think about the art industry, traditional art, right? Which is controlled in large galleries and private transactions that are opaque.

So are you going to be able to upend all of that on Falswap? I think your assessment is right. It's going to take time. So the technology is a piece of it, but it's also human behavior and a groundswell of forces coming together, which are creators and consumers seeking to come closer together. I think about ticketing as a final example where I want to take my kids to an event and

I'm paying some massive premium to the stated ticket price. The performer on stage isn't seeing any of that premium increase. It's ticket price.

Tor - Stashh (22:19.405)

Yeah.

Tor - Stashh (22:25.538)

The nice thing about some of these examples, especially when we talk about the music industry versus finance, because you're completely right. Like every industry ultimately is structured in the same way. just, it works differently depending on regulations, depending on who the middleman is, depending on where the margins are. Like the path to disruption is a little bit different. There are certain industries where it's like, can say, who likes Ticketmaster? And like no hands go up.

Everybody knows there's a better way, but they have this dominant model. So people are just waiting for some kind of antitrust thing to finally push through. When you say who likes the banks? Well, people know that ultimately banks are not necessarily always acting in your interest. They're acting in theirs and in their shareholders. But at the same time, they're a better alternative than putting all of your money under your mattress all the time. Only so many people are willing to hold all of their net worth in gold and

and crypto or, you know, you have to be an extreme kind of person to believe that that is the only way to exist in what is now a very global society and economy. You have to be able to interact with that system in some way. So depending on the industry, I think it's a different sort of hearts and minds approach to say, like, we need to have this and this kind of revolution. The reason why I like being able to innovate specifically on the side of culture and ownership beyond just money and ownership is no one thinks that culture works the right way.

Everybody thinks it's nepotism or everybody thinks it's dominant monopolies like ticket master. Everybody hates the labels. There's just this obviousness of how much there needs to be a return to these more like grassroots communities. And those communities still exist, but they've been disempowered. So to what extent we can get these grassroots music communities or artistic communities, re -embracing web three tech and making it clear that it's in their best interest.

and making it clear this is the only way to put pressure on the centralized institutions to make change that even if they don't embrace Web3, even if they don't understand it, this is one of the only tools left in the toolboxes for creators and collectors who genuinely care about the future of these industries and the ability of individual artists to successfully become self -sustaining. At least if they understand that, they're more willing to try something new. But if they don't even understand that this might be the only shot that they get to have that revolution,

Tor - Stashh (24:42.358)

with this tech in their hands and with this amount of like potentially industry support from web three, then, you know, we're not going to build a big enough movement or momentum to least solve problems in the narrow industry that we've identified as being maybe more ripe for destruction, disruption, not destruction, versus making everybody into some sort of anti -back, anti -bank activist and get them in the streets to make sure that, you know, we have some sort of bloodless financial revolution.

those historically have never been bloodless.

Yossi Hasson (25:16.691)

Yeah, lots to think about in that and go deeper into, know, speaking about how Web3 gives people control, gives them an alternative, exactly what you're actually saying. And then people need to wake up to the idea that there is an alternative, that they don't need to be effectively abused by the status quo. Some of the innovations in Web3, if we talk about some of the technologies that have been developed, know, things like fractional ownership, you don't need to do that quite easily.

And there are a couple of other innovations in the model, but let's talk about fractional ownership and how you think that plays a part in potentially winning the hearts and minds of either the consumer and the creator, all these big industries that are looking to innovate and relinquish some of that control and the benefit of the creators.

Tor - Stashh (26:04.898)

Yeah, fractional ownership is a really interesting concept to me because every time you start talking about something where each word in the phrase itself is sort of like a contentious definition, what is fractional mean? What does ownership mean? And so now what is fractional ownership mean? I used to do this every time I talked about decentralization and people were like, let's talk about decentralized, private infrastructure networks. And I was like, you know, each one of those words.

could mean 90 different things. So how can we agree on a definition of like this sort of collective phrase? But we've already talked about ownership. Let's talk about fractional, right? We already to some degree have what I would consider to be fractional ownership. And you might just call it a corporation, right? Well, you can have shareholders in this traditional stock model and the corporation is an entity that owns and controls things. It acts as an agent on behalf of these controlling parties. And we've devised offline

legal systems for how that's managed. You have some sort of board structure. You have a CEO. You have people who have accountability. There's a legal system for enforcement. So we have fractional ownership structures, but they work the same way as ownership structures more generally that somewhere there's some sort of series of legal institutions that help enforce these rights or help enforce accountability. Now, going back to what we said with ownership, how much of that can we do with a blockchain?

How much of this can we make automated? How much can we do with smart contracts? So we remove the ability for abuse or increase the ability to have audit ability. There we can do quite a lot. We can do quite a lot to say, here is this asset provably on chain and ownership in this asset. If the asset is transferred, if it's sold automatically, there's some sort of flow, which is really just a flow of data on a blockchain, but there's a flow of this data that has monetary value.

back to these specific accounts and these specific accounts are controlled by these specific entities, which may or may not be individual human beings. They may themselves be corporations or they may be autonomous artificial intelligence agents. It can be arbitrarily complex to start to figure out what this all means. And then we get into beyond all that, what are the social implications if like every single asset that we would consider valuable has thousands of different owners?

Tor - Stashh (28:26.336)

As humans, the way we're like hardwired, we can conceptualize this is my house. This is my cat. This is my family. My, my, my, we, we are very much the center of the world. know the things we consider to be ours. And then we have some concept of joint property and then so on and so forth. But really we have that sort of egocentric view of the world by design. Once we get into this world of like, we all partially own a lot of things. Well.

Maybe that makes all those things more valuable from an economic perspective, because now we're increasing access. Everybody can own a little bit of a Picasso. But then what does that mean? If everybody owns the Picasso, does anybody own the Picasso? Is there a magic number of people who own the Picasso that make it still socially valuable in addition to economically valuable? Is it seven? Is it a thousand? Does it have to be exactly one? These are totally open questions.

So from my perspective, fractional ownership is an interesting design space. I love it. I don't have a perspective strong enough personally to be like, I can speak for every human on the planet. Here's what people are going to find valuable. But if we can construct on -chain markets for fractional ownership and the market tells us what people find valuable or what any entity or account or autonomous agent would find valuable, we're going to start answering these questions experimentally as opposed to having to sit here and hypothesize.

this is what people are going to think is expensive or socially flexible. Whatever we want to say. I just want to test in prod. Let's see what the market thinks. Let's see what people think. And then we know. And I hate to just leave it theoretical, but man, the rabbit hole is endless, as you can see.

Yossi Hasson (30:11.283)

Well, maybe one of the world's biggest experiments of this exact question, if I take people back a little bit, is Constitution Dow, it was an effort to acquire one of the last remaining copies of the Constitution by the global space, by the global public. And I think it was about 40 ,000 people came together very quickly, in about 48 hours, and raised almost $50 million. And if they were using something like Stashh, then the amount of money...

that was contributed did not need to be public. It didn't need to be transparent, like you said. And then couldn't have been outbidded at an auction. And then one individual got the constitution. But it did open up the concept of how do you get millions of people or tens of thousands of people very quickly to say, what is the value of this thing? And does a group of people want to have more say over its control and governance of it? And that was able to be done very, very quickly. So we are seeing that type of experimentation happening.

Tor - Stashh (30:43.822)

That's true.

Tor - Stashh (30:51.876)

No.

Tor - Stashh (30:55.502)

Yeah.

Yossi Hasson (31:08.295)

We are seeing things like meme coins come onto the sphere and something that's trending on the internet. Now a group of people are speculating behind it and want to own a piece of the meme and do that. So these things are happening in real time. It is fascinating to think about it and how the kind of global collective, like you say, are things more valuable when tens of thousands of people can go behind it? Or is it more valuable when only one person can own it? And where is that kind of interplay between those two?

Tor - Stashh (31:38.668)

I think you're hitting on exactly what I find to be the interesting point though. so go ahead. Go ahead.

Dan Schmerin (31:38.724)

Yo, so we were the first star - Sorry, I just wanna -

Dan Schmerin (31:44.466)

No, I just wanted you to remind me, we were the first institutional dollars in the constitution down and the people token still trades. It trades at six cents today. It has a $300 plus million market cap after losing the bidding process at Sotheby's to Ken Griffin.

Yossi Hasson (31:55.539)

There is a

Tor - Stashh (32:05.804)

Yeah, it's a fascinating. was going to say, I know exactly who won that auction because I live in Chicago and half the things here are named after him. So I know what happened very, very keenly, but you're hitting on what I think is a fascinating point, right? Here we have what has essentially become a meme coin, right? And I don't mean that with any pejorative intention, like, but that's what it is. It didn't do the thing people thought it could do, but it still has value. How

And why has that value been created? The people who hold it are the ones who need to know, or the potential people who would be acquiring it, or, you know, they're the ones who really need to understand it. It doesn't have to be the same global understanding of that value. That's what make markets exist. The fact that people can change their opinion over time about the economic value of some scarce item. But beyond that, I mean, you're, hitting on exactly the point that I think stash is keenly aware of, which is.

People want to create this stuff, they want to trade this stuff, they want to collect it. Most meme coins have a half -life of about 24 hours. They're just going to rapidly lose relevance, just like a meme does on the internet. Anything that trends on Twitter, we talk about the 24 -hour news cycle. There's no memory to memes within social media. And generally speaking, the blockchain is horrible at forgetting. It has a very long memory for everything, for better or worse.

So generally speaking, that's a better foundation for memes, but it doesn't fix this idea that people's attention spans in the real world are strictly limited by the amount of hours in a day, by the amount of competing things they have to do. I think it was Reed Hastings at Netflix who once said that Netflix's biggest competitor is sleep. And same goes in the meme coin space. The biggest competitor is not the next meme coin. Are these people ever going to touch grass?

I think that what we saw with Constitution DAO with the people token, Clearly meme coins aren't going anywhere, even if they don't do the thing that you originally thought they were going to do. But each successive meme coin has no ability to really to create its own memory beyond what the blockchain says about its economic history. Where is the cultural history of the meme coin? Where is it on chain? Where is it where it's provable? Where is that social context? My answer very selfishly is Stashh built that social context.

Tor - Stashh (34:29.73)

We want someone to be able to say, hey, I've created this NFT. It's only clamable on stash. It's only clamable if you have collected a meme coin on this particular chain. Now only those meme coin holders can be collecting these scarce, provably scarce cultural assets that are meant to last forever. And then when you look at that user and that user wants to prove something about themselves, they're not just proving their meme coin balance. They're not just proving something about their economic status. They're also proving

Here's my cultural history with this thing. Here's the NFTs I created just for this community. Here's the ones I collected just from this community. Also, here's a record of the social things, the things I said about this. Culture is so complex. The context is so critical to creating and proving the value of these communities. I wonder if that kind of tech had existed, if Stashh had been fully mature at the time that the bidding was happening, could we not only have solved the issue of private bidding,

through our privacy features, could we also have solved this issue of social discoverability? Could we have built that movement even faster, even bigger, so that even if Ken Griffin knew exactly what the Constitution Dow was bidding, it wouldn't have helped him. He would have run out of money. You can't outbid the world, but I'd love to see him try.

Yossi Hasson (35:49.255)

The way I think about what you've described just to try and give it an analog that people can understand today is if I was a vinyl collector way back when, and that's how I interacted with music, and I bought a new Rolling Stones, new vinyl comes out, the new LP comes out, I buy that, I bring over my friends, we interact with it, maybe we go and watch a concert. And this thing now has some cultural significance embedded into this.

piece of vinyl, but it's what I remember and the story that I tell about it. Now what we're saying is that moment is not only something that I interact with. You can bring in all that information and attach it to that piece of vinyl, digital piece of vinyl, and prove you'll see Owen's piece of vinyl. These are the ten friends he interacted with about this vinyl. He went to go see the show. He did these ten other things. And later on in life, 30, 40, 50 years later, someone can come and say, if you were one of the people who originally had this piece of vinyl, went to see a show.

Interact with these 10 people you get access to this now This is what this enables you because you are proving culturally that you are one of the people that were the OGs or one of the people that did this thing and that now has been a group of other people may decide that that has value at the time or It disappears into the ether where it has no value other than my memories attached to it That's what you're describing in terms of this kind of social culture that can come on chain and stash as a platform helping build

that mechanism and that capability to be able to pull all of this information, things that are happening digitally and bring that into an asset using NFTs as the foundation of that. So got that right in how I've described.

Tor - Stashh (37:26.67)

I think so. Stashh is really very much a Web 2 .5 sort of product. We use the blockchain for exactly what we think it's good at, which is payment rails, proving ownership, securing ownership to the extent that if it's your keys, it remains your coins, it remains your NFTs. We can't solve things like, can you prove you're a citizen of a country? That's up to the country. There's certain things that you can't solve just with a blockchain that you need some other kind of platform.

What Stashh wants to do is can we be a platform and a product that synthesizes all of this, the ability to verify your web to your offline information, to build reputation, also to synthesize what you're telling us about your web three ownership so we can sort of match those details together and then on platform, make it as easy as possible to create, to collect, to discover so that we're building the biggest global community of creators and collectors.

breaking down all those silos and barriers, but still in a way where, again, if you leave stash, you don't lose your ownership. You're losing something of your social reputation. You're losing maybe some of your community, but we can never take your assets from you. As long as we're making that guarantee, as long as we're protecting ownership and privacy, I think we have a great chance of building a long -term user base that's going to be aligned with our mission for as long as the platform is active.

without needing to make a stance on any specific blockchain, just making a stance that ownership is good, permissionless ownership is good, communities are great, creators are great. The same things we're always going to say.

Dan Schmerin (39:08.228)

I wanted to ask a personal question, which is, what is the first thing you remember owning and why was it consequential to you?

Tor - Stashh (39:21.901)

Wow.

Dan Schmerin (39:23.034)

I remember owning a matchbox car. I was obsessed with things that go. I spent a lot of time on the floor building little cities as I accumulated more of these cars. There were certainly police and fire engines involved, lots of mashups, crashes.

Tor - Stashh (39:44.174)

Hehehehe

I have an answer for this, but I guess it speaks to my personal definition of ownership. As an eight -year -old, I started collecting Magic the Gathering cards. And the reason it felt like I owned those versus other things is I did chores. I got paid to do the chores. I went straight to the store. I bought a booster box. I opened all the packs at home. I saw the cards. Some of them I kept for my deck. Some of them I sold. And then when I sold them,

was pretty clear to me someone was willing to pay me for them. So they must have been mine. You know, to me that I think made a different like ownership versus if my parents went to the store and you know, bought something for me. To what extent is this my matchbox car versus like they can ground me and take my toys away. That never felt like ownership. I'm like most people in the blockchain space. I'm pretty independently minded. I wanted to do it all myself. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of those magic cards anymore. If I did, you know, we

I think I would just be happy to have the memories even more than the extreme monetary value that some of them have acquired. But I definitely think that was what I would consider to be something, the youngest memory that I have of something that I knew and definitely felt ownership over. I think that that was very formative for me. And I think probably it was formative for a lot of collectors and probably for a lot of creators who now deeply understand their collector audience better than anybody else.

Yossi Hasson (41:15.697)

love you. You said it right there. think ownership is a feeling.

that we're hoping that to bring to the world in new profound ways. Tor, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast and to our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe the part that definitely helps us reach more people. And we've got some really incredible conversations coming up until next time. Goodbye.

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