Episode 08

[00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to Reimagine Ownership. Thank you so much for spending time with us today and as always subscribe All that good stuff for today's pot. We have a great guest steve mckeon. Howdy How you doing dan? I want to do just a quick intro for our listeners Steve is co founder and managing partner at collab currency venture capital firm Back in cutting edge crypto and blockchain projects that bring culture and technology together in new ways.

Steve has a Ph. D. in finance, a wealth of experience as a professor, a researcher, and an entrepreneur. And his career has been all about pushing boundaries. He's published extensively on crypto assets and private equity. Also co founded Skywork, [00:01:00] which is a drone software company that was eventually acquired by Verizon.

Now at Collab Currency, he's focused on supporting bold, visionary founders who are rethinking how we all connect, create, and own in a rapidly evolving digital world. Steve, I want you to jump right in. I know we met a number of years ago, but why don't you go back to telling the origin story, a little bit about your journey, how you got into blockchain and Web3, how you met.

Derek, and decided to launch Collab, and then I'll pepper you with lots of other questions. That sounds great. So, um, I'll give you sort of the abbreviated version, which is, I was a professor. As you mentioned, we had this, um, software startup called Skyward that eventually got acquired. And when I was stepping away from Skyward, as it was kind of moving into the sale process, Um, I was kind of known as the, the tech guy on the finance faculty.[00:02:00] 

And I thought, so this is 2015. I, Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's a good thing, right? Because they gave me the alternative investments class, and they wanted me to teach fintech. And I thought, which was like a natural interest, Um, and I thought well what's the intersection, like the most interesting intersection of kind of finance where I have all this traditional training.

And technology where I have all this recent experience from kind of running the full journey as a as a software startup And I decided it was bitcoin, right? So this was kind of like ethereum was kind of just launching but bitcoin was kind of the only game in town I was eventually introduced to a guy named chris berniski who was at arc with kathy wood at that time and writing a book and a short time later spun out as one of the founders of placeholder another another crypto venture fund And he really took me down the rabbit hole.

I became enamored with the space. Um, I [00:03:00] decided to start writing about it. And so, you know, I've been studying securities for 10 years as a professor. And so the first thing I wrote about was the idea of bringing securities on chain. So the idea of tokenizing traditional assets and it hit a nerve.

I think it was kind of the zeitgeist of the moment in 2017 and 2018. Um, and so I, that was really the trigger. I started getting invited into telegram groups and podcasts and, and these sorts of things. And eventually an old friend of mine who had a fund called collaborative fund, it's a New York based venture fund reached out and said, Hey, we're seeing crypto deals.

Could you help us kind of look at them and figure this out? We invested out of their main fund for about a year. This was like through 2017, early 2018. And then one of their investors said, Hey, I'll write an anchor check if you want to start a fund just around crypto. And so that was the birth of Collab Currency.

We realized pretty quickly we had to spin out from Collaborative Fund for various [00:04:00] kind of regulatory reporting reasons. And so we spun out about halfway through that first fund. That's when Derek joined. Derek was a former student from many, many years prior, the very first year I taught MBAs.

He was in the JD MBA program. He had gone off and started and grew and sold his own startup. So we had kind of each advised each other's projects. We worked on a little economic development fund here in Eugene. And so we, collab was actually the fourth thing we had worked on together. Which was really important because I think when you have that kind of rapport and you can say anything to the other person like that Kind of helps you Really, you know vet these projects.

Um, and so You know, he's been here since the very first fund we then raised a second fund and a third fund and and now just recently launched a fourth fund And so that's kind of the the history the strategy evolved over those funds which we can dive into more deeply But that's sort of the origin story [00:05:00] I love that.

And, you know, I think about a lot of the works that you have published, and going into the holidays, what caught my eye is a piece that you put out which you framed as Cliff Notes about crypto, and just that title caught my eye, because I often find that I'm trying to explain things, even to family members, even to my older brother, um, In Cliff Notes version.

Today, our kids obviously don't have Cliff Notes. They just have Chachi BT and Perplexity. So they don't get to enjoy that hardbound yellow, yellow book we used to stuff in our bags. Tell us the, the genesis for writing that Cliff Notes, because I know that it has been widely praised and well received.

So what led you to coalesce your thoughts so succinctly and then I want to want to parse into some of that. [00:06:00] Sure. So we, you know, our fund has, um, lots of investors called LPs, limited partners. And in the thing you have to understand about, you know, the, this category of investors often called asset allocators, right?

Because they're typically managing large pools of capital across multiple asset classes. And so crypto is a portion, typically a small portion of what they do. It might be 2 percent of their overall portfolio or 5 percent of their overall portfolio. This is like for a pension or endowment foundation, large family office.

And so they're paying attention, but not really, right? Like they, I mean, they have a million things that are demanding their attention across all these different asset classes. And so often our job is to just give them like the cliff notes version. Right. It's oh, well, if I only have your attention for a 30 minute call here's the most interesting stuff that kind of like you should be aware of, like across all the different segments of crypto.[00:07:00] 

And I found myself having that conversation so often and so many times and more or less the same conversation that when I had a little break over the holidays and you know, we didn't have a million meetings every week and calls and all this stuff. I thought I'm just going to sit down. And put all of this conversation into writing and so it's really written with that audience in mind, which is When I meet a new institutional investor and they want to get up to speed right away I can just send them this article And then that way when we do a call It can sort of be like we can dive deeper on some of the stuff.

Yeah, let's start a chapter two Exactly. And so I thought like this would be a great precursor. I wanted to cap it at 20 minutes So that anybody could sit down in one sitting and kind of get up to speed The interesting thing is that even though I wrote it for this audience like institutional investors You know, you mentioned friends and family and it really struck a nerve with [00:08:00] sort of other people outside of the the intended audience so You know people inside crypto Were writing me saying like man.

Thanks for writing that because like it was so great To just like step zoom out for a minute, right? Everybody gets very focused on the thing that they're working on. And if you zoom out, especially if you've been in the industry, I mean, it's about a decade now, I guess I've been following crypto.

It's like incredible. What has been built when you look at it in adequate, like across like stable coins and deep pin and defy and real world assets and like all the emerging stuff, like NFTs and AI and gaming. And it's that was like an unexpected I guess kind of like positive externality was that all these people in the industry were saying, man, it really re energized me to just say look how far we've come.

And then also a lot of people saying Oh, I sent this to like my uncle or whatever. Cause like in 20 minutes they could kind of like maybe not think I'm crazy, you know, having kind of like [00:09:00] left some traditional finance. You know, let's diffuse the family tension at the dining table when they say.

What is it that you fellas are doing again? Yup. So I definitely fall into that camp. I want to ask you a, a follow up on that, which is something Yossi, my partner, and I talk about frequently. And that's, you know, precisely on this notion of contextualizing where we are. I often use the baseball game analogy.

My father asked me a few years ago, so, you know, this, this whole business with tokenization and NFTs what inning are we in? I said, we're actually not in the first inning. I think we're still in the second. Adding practice, but we're making our way there and Yossi will talk about, you know, being late early and being early early.

And when we think about tokenization of real world assets, looking at what's happening in the ecosystem, Securitize and others were still early. You may feel that it's a little late, but if so, it's late [00:10:00] early because. The vast preponderance of potential assets to be tokenized had not happened yet. And then you have things like AI agents, which are really just coming into the fore in the last six months.

And so early, early, if you're, you're early, early, you're in it every day. And we feel like, Oh, these guys are already doing that. But again, in the grand scheme, we're so early. How do you and Derek think about that? Even when you identify investment opportunities. Because it's not just about building the technology.

We've seen that in the NFT ecosystem. You do have to get some of the timing right to know that there will be consumer adoption. Yeah. So, I mean, I like that framing. I would say, you know, as a, as a seed stage investor, we're pretty much always focused on early, early. Once it's late early, it's kind of like usually beyond the, the, the life cycle where we would focus.

But the other thing I would say is like crypto has become, um, very diverse in [00:11:00] terms of this stage, as you just pointed out, which is you know, you used to be able to say like in 2017, everything was early, early, like there wasn't really anything that was mature on any spectrum. But now you could kind of say like stable coins are getting fairly mature, right?

If you just look at the total market size and the number of countries that are being used and, and this type of thing, you could say like real world assets, you've got like. The ceo of the largest asset manager in the world and larry fink at blackrock like touting tokenization is like the the next wave like that's clearly not early early like He's arguably one of the most powerful voices in finance and so it's at least medium early maybe late early, but there's still as you said like Most stuff still isn't tokenized.

So there's still like a lot of work to do. So all of these things are still early Um, a chart that I used in the article was this overlay of sort of the growth of internet users with the [00:12:00] growth of crypto owners. And I think there are more here, right? Like you are here too. And it is like a pretty remarkable, like when you overlay the charts on each other, I think again, it depends how you define a user, right?

So is a user just someone who owns cryptocurrency and as you and I both know, the vast majority of crypto owners own it through an exchange, right? They, they don't actually own it through a self sovereign wallet, like a MetaMask or Rainbow or something like this. That's a much smaller percentage of the total people that can connect to decentralized exchanges and buy things off OpenSea and all of this sort of stuff.

But I guess regardless of how you define it, we're still pretty early like in internet terms. We're either in maybe 1997 if you define it as like people who have a self sovereign wallet or maybe like the early 2000s if you talk about total crypto owners. [00:13:00] The difference is And so like our thesis has always been someday everyone will have a wallet just like I I mean i'm old enough where I went from no one had an email address in high school To everyone had an email address by the time I finished college Right.

So I graduated from college right around 99 2000 and I've always felt like wallets were going to be the same. So now why did you have to have an email address? Because like you couldn't receive email and like people were communicating via email and you had to have somewhere to receive that stuff.

And so it was like colleges were issuing email addresses. Like workplaces were issuing email addresses. Everyone was just pushing email addresses out on the general public. So the only challenge with it, it's, it's a great analogy. Cause like literally with zero to one in a decade. Right. It was like, no one had one, everyone had one.

And then that changed the world in terms of like communications. I've always felt the same thing with wallets, but the [00:14:00] trick, it's like the same analogy. It's like, why will everyone have a wallet? Because like, how are you going to receive payments if payments are in the form of cryptocurrency? Even things like AI agents, we believe most economic activity with AI agents will be conducted with crypto.

And there's a debate. Will that be like stable coins or a native asset or whatever? But like in some way it will be on crypto rails, right? Because like you need micropayments, you need instant finality, you need super cheap. Like you need all the things that crypto can offer that frankly crypto uniquely can offer.

There really is no alternative there. Now if you're a merchant and you want to engage in the AI economy, you're gonna need a wallet. The tricky thing is with email there really was no predecessor, right? Like email wasn't replacing some other form of electronic communication. It was just replacing the postal service, which was like a 10 X improvement [00:15:00] with crypto.

The tricky thing is that there are these use cases like A. I. Agents and and maybe areas of the world where like dollarization hasn't happened, and it's very difficult to get U. S. Dollars and stable coins have really penetrated in there. But for kind of like somebody sitting in the United States, they might say Oh, we have Venmo or like we have ACH or whatever.

And, you know, we can point to all of these improvements that crypto offers, but the, the Delta historically hasn't been large enough that it just like crypto wallets, swept through the population, the way email addresses did. But I think now that we're getting to this AI era and we've got other things Crypto very uniquely is suited for, you're going to start to see that proliferation and that is the big unlock is it kind of wants everybody or a meaningful percentage of the population has a wallet in which they can engage in these systems.

I [00:16:00] want to talk for a minute about the macro environment because as succinct as your article is. In laying out the various areas of enormous progress. Everybody at this point knows that we have a new administration that is clearly pro digital assets, pro innovation, pro AI, and has made a number of appointments.

In fact, I think just this afternoon, David Sachs is having a press conference to talk about some of their plans for the year ahead. Um, but we also know that you can occasionally temper that enthusiasm because enacting that change can be very difficult in a federal bureaucracy and part of this administration's mandate has been we're going to cut through and we're actually going to produce those results.

So sometime we'll tell, but in terms of regulatory normalization, it does appear that the [00:17:00] writing is on the wall at both these enforcement agencies and rulemaking committees. Tell us your perspective and how, how to think about that as part of the, the big unlock and the sea change. Sure. So, um, really enthusiastic about having Somebody who's been in the industry for a long time, David Sacks, kind of beating the drum.

As we know, there's a limited number of things that can be done through executive orders, right? And, and those things become a little fragile because like another administration down the road could kind of undo them. So we really need to pass this stuff through Congress. And, you know, when our investors have asked us about kind of a postmortem on the election and what we thought about it, and, um, obviously.

You know, most focus was on the presidential race, but what we've said is like what happened in Congress is arguably more important, which is if you just look at the numbers, I don't have them right at hand, but it was a sea [00:18:00] change in terms of the number of pro candidate, like pro crypto candidates that were elected on both sides of the aisle.

It was Democrats and Republicans. It was the house. It was the Senate. It was just like, um, an incredible sort of changing of the guard, right? And, and that ultimately is going to be more important. I mean, the presidential election was important because we need to make sure there's not a veto at the end of the line once something gets to Congress.

Um, and because you know, Trump was able to appoint people like David Sachs who had really beat the drum. Um, but I think this, this conversion in Congress is going to be ultimately super important. What the industry has wanted forever is just clarity right now. You know, even when these things roll out, it can be a little bumpy.

I mean, we've seen this with Micah. So Micah is a large regulatory, um, sort of, I guess, program or set of bills that passed through in Europe, right? So [00:19:00] Europe has been a little bit more kind of present in terms of creating some clarity. But you'll find that like some people aren't fans of Micah, because for example, it basically makes tether.

Incompatible with that set of regulations. And so now, you know, Bitstamp and many of these others kind of are Europe based exchanges are having to delist Tether, which is, as we know, an enormous trading pair because it's not compatible with MICA. So I always tell people I am very sure we're going to get clarity.

I hope, you know, there may be some aspects of that clarity that we actually don't like as an industry. But on net, once you know where the rules are, now you can figure out how to comply with them. And I'm very confident the industry is going to figure out how to do so. And I don't think people fully appreciate how important just unlocking the U.

S. market is. Like our founders have had to move offshore. They haven't been able to release their products on shore. There's you know, the U. S. market has just kind of been like [00:20:00] absent. Um, except through people using VPNs and kind of like various ways they might bypass this stuff. But it's it's, I mean, it's certainly not the only market in the world, but it is an important market, right?

It's an important market, and I think unlocking and supercharging sort of the U. S. consumer to start engaging with this technology is going to be really cool to see over the next few years. I love that perspective. I want to turn to So our favorite topic, which is NFTs in the you have shared an interesting perspective on how you describe NFTs to your uncle and others.

And I wondered if you could walk us through that because we often find that sitting in 2025. There is still this tarnish to NFTs. I have used the MP3 analogy when I talk about music that we're going to focus on the experience as opposed to the delivery mechanism. [00:21:00] And so I don't get off the airplane and talk about, Oh, I just heard this amazing remastered Beatles MP3 on JetBlue or Delta.

We just talk about the fact that the end product was improved. Share with us how you, how you think about it. You nailed it, which is like NFTs. Or, or I guess like when we think of NFTs internally we think of them as a file format, right? So they're a container, they're analogous to PDF, right? So like an Adobe Acrobat format in the sense that it actually matters what's inside.

NFTs as a category are completely heterogeneous, just like PDFs are heterogeneous, you know? So I was mentioning earlier what matter, what's, what matters is what's inside the PDF, right? So if I open up the PDF and it's the title to my house, it's quite valuable. If I open up the PDF and it's like [00:22:00] my, you know, kindergartner's, cran drawing is probably not as valuable as the title to my house.

And the way people would value it is very differently. And like everything about it is different. The only thing they have in common is that they share a file format. That creates certain functionalities in terms of people able to view it on their phones and computers in a, in a, like a way that doesn't change.

And so this is why people use PDF format is to make sure that the way it's sent is like the same way it's received in terms of the way you look at it. It's a formatting thing. NFTs are the same, right? NFTs are a container that you can put something in, and it's a way to bring that thing on chain, like into the on chain economy.

To record the ownership of that thing on chain to record transactions or attributes of that thing on chain, but what's in the NFT is actually what matters, right? So if it's a collectible, like a board ape, um, that's going to trade one way and, you know, [00:23:00] a certain contingent might be attracted to that sort of thing.

If it's a piece of fine art, it might be a totally different market for that asset. If it's a title to a house, as we talked about, like real world assets actually are very compatible with the NFT format, right? So if I want to bring that title on chain, maybe so I can borrow against it or perform other sorts of financial services, um, with regards to that asset, it unlocks a whole bunch of additional functionality for that house title or the mortgage or connecting those things that we maybe don't have when the title is in the format of a PDF.

But again, like the title to the House on chain and like the Bored Ape couldn't be more dissimilar in a sense other than they share a file format. And so that's kind of the way we think about NFTs broadly, which is it's, it literally is just a file format that is doesn't tell you anything about the value of the thing that might be inside it, other than we know if it's an [00:24:00] FT it's gonna have certain.

Functionality around marketability and divisibility and sort of all the things we can do on chain with crypto. But it doesn't tell you anything about whether it's valuable or not, because that really matters on what's in there. Right. And, and last I checked, I might be the person most obsessed with PDFs.

But the vast majority of the population doesn't care. I'm obsessed because it's always mattered to me. The way that you see a particular document that I've crafted to ensure that it is the same as it appears on my screen, as of your screen. And, and that's true going back 20 or 25 years when I was, when I was writing essays.

So, I love that analogy. But let's take it one step further then in terms of. Practicality. Often the question that comes back is, well, why does X, Y, and Z, your article does talk a bunch about real [00:25:00] world asset tokenization, which is where we've been spending a fair amount of time over the last year. It also talks about decentralized physical infrastructure networks, DIPIN.

Often the question I'll get back when we start to dive into that is someone will say, well, why does this asset? need to be on chain. What is the advantage of blockchain or tokenization? Like I have access to capital markets with this item or this commodity I can borrow against my house without it being on chain.

So I want to hear your, your answer and your response in the cliff notes mindset. Sure. So I would say for I don't know if there's show notes or something we can attach to, to this podcast after the recording, but there definitely are like articles I could point the viewers to that really unpack this, right?

Because it's a, it definitely is a multifaceted thing. My partner, Derek also wrote a great response on. X the other [00:26:00] day to kind of a traditional finance person that was asking this question of you know, what, why would we need to bring any of this stuff on chain? And I think that the point he made and the point we've made in prior articles is like, it's not just digitization.

Digitization is something we've been able to do for years, but it's actually it's like standardizing the asset. And when you standardize the asset in terms of the file format, Now you can do all these additional things, right? That's, so it's this idea of composability. So like you should get larger lending markets.

So that should reduce the cost of capital, which translates to like lower mortgage rates, which everybody is excited about. Um, it should do things like it should open up markets where you can, you can transfer fractional ownership. And, and I know that's something you chatted about with, with MetaStreet on a recent episode.

It should unlock things like. We can alter voting rights based on like how long you've held the asset. If it's a share of stock, [00:27:00] there's all this allegation of like short termism. Well, maybe we, maybe the more years you've held the stock, the more voting power you get is like just an example, right?

But the point is once you introduce programmability into the asset, which we kind of don't have with a PDF, right? Um, it just unlocks all of these features. That are things that I think ultimately like the marketplace is going to value but it you also we've had an issue where You know the problem with tokenization.

So really it's like 2017 2018 when this idea really kind of initially captured people's attention And then the problem is like tokenization kind of then it's kind of fell out of favor Right during the bear market and it became this place where it was like an adverse selection problem, right? Like people wouldn't go to tokenization when they couldn't raise capital elsewhere.

But now I think with BlackRock jumping in and Ondo and sort of like a lot of [00:28:00] like very established kind of adults in the room, you're seeing like real high quality assets. I think treasuries help this a lot too. Like the on chain treasury market is like Billions of dollars now. Um, and you're starting to get away from this kind of market for lemons issue, which is exactly what the space needs because, as you said, in the end, we're not going to think of these things as tokenized securities.

They're just gonna be the way securities trade and are formatted. And you might. This is a point I'm often making to people's like you might end up using the same interfaces. You might still go to Merrill Lynch and buy your shares of Microsoft. But on the back end, the shares of Microsoft are tokenized because it allows for like instant settlement that brokers don't need to do post trade reserves, like whatever, there's all these features that might be like we might get some benefit from if the asset is tokenized, but the end user might not even know it, right?

It might be something that's [00:29:00] happening more kind of behind the scenes in the hopefully they won't. We hopefully we managed to abstract away. All that technology and our kids will one day wonder what do you mean you had t plus two steve? What what what what type of settlement process is that how arcane?

One has three final things. One has three final things before we run out of time. First, meme coins. Meme coins have become all the rage in 2024 sucking a lot of oxygen out of the entire ecosystem, including NFTs, right? Some arguing, actually, meme coins are NFTs with better liquidity. I can form the same type of community.

There are those of us, including my partner Yossi and I, that, that don't fully agree with that, that, you know, the average hold time for most meme coins is seven hours or so. And so, there's not much community. These are purely for speculation and you have an option to go gambling in Atlantic City or Las Vegas.

Now you have an option for global markets. [00:30:00] But it is a, it is a, a large movement and worth noting. So how are you framing meme coins? On a grand scale. Sure. So I went into this a little bit in the article, but the way I think about meme coins is like the way I think about toys, right? So toys are just for entertainment.

We don't hate toys because like they don't do anything other than provide entertainment and you get a lot of kind of negative sentiment around meme coins. It doesn't really compute for me because I just think of them as toys. Like people like Playing around with meme coins. Like I, I have chatted with folks who are kind of like college age kids and like they get together on Saturday night and like trade meme coins together.

Right? Like the way, like maybe we played settlers of Catan or whatever. And so I guess that's my large framing on meme coins is it's basically a game. It's it's a financialized game, but it's sort of like a toy. It's something people are engaging with for [00:31:00] entertainment. Um, there is this financialized aspect, which I think is what draws a lot of the kind of like negative ire to it.

But ultimately I view it as like a a form of entertainment that's obviously caught a lot of traction. Now with regards to NFTs, like to what degree does that intersect or differ from kind of like what we saw with NFTs, particularly in like 2021? I would say, I mean, I guess I would definitely go back to this argument that like NFTs are heterogeneous.

Right? So, are meme coins taking much away from real world assets in NFT format? Definitely not. Are they taking much away from fine art on chain? Say a squiggle or a Fidenza? Maybe some, but I would argue maybe not as much. Are they, perhaps kind of, cutting into the board apes or true, kind of, collectibles market?

For sure. Right? Because I think those were more traded, um, kind of in the same way. Entertainment, [00:32:00] you know, number go up, financialization. The difference, which you alluded to, is I actually think things like Bored Apes and NFTs, broadly, the fact that they are a little bit of liquid and are unique, are actually much better instruments for creating community.

I don't think meme coins really are going to be able to compete with NFTs in the long run around kind of like at least small format communities. Maybe meme coins are better for creating communities of like hundreds of thousands of people, right? Because it's got to be divisible enough to kind of like spread that wide.

But for communities of a thousand or five thousand or ten thousand, like maybe NFTs are like the better format for that. Because, you know, like you're BoredApe and you're like, this one is mine. And you like felt some connection to it. And it was obviously one of, one of X, which helped foster kind of like that feeling across like all of the owners.

And it was a fixed amount, right? It wasn't like a billion units, like a [00:33:00] meme coin might be. And there is something psychological about some of those features that I think you can, it's harder to capture with meme coins. So they're, they're definitely different. But do I think there's some overlap between the people that were trading board apes and the people that are trading meme coins?

100%. I fully agree. And, you know, we continue to double down on our interest and exposure to digital art for part of the reason that you've just said. We think these are incredibly rare, incredibly scarce assets, far more scarce than even Bitcoin, notwithstanding all the things that Michael Saylor says.

And many of them we agree with, but let's be clear, Bitcoin today is still inflationary. There's still new Bitcoin that is being mined, even if it has a hard cap of 21 million. There's only a thousand ringers, and it will always be that way. So, second to last question. You, your team is spending a lot of time [00:34:00] around decentralized AI.

What's the headline? Is that, is that to mean that this is where you're most excited for 2025? Definitely with regards to sort of our strategy, we are probably spending the most time on AI. Um, it's, I would say more than half of kind of what we do at the fund at this point. I'll just very quickly give you two categories.

I say one would be kind of the decentralized AI stack. And so these are everything from like data collection, data scraping. Data storage inference that sort of all these layers of the stack that we think many of those things can be done better by a network than by a centralized company. Um, so that's kind of one huge category that we're focusing on.

The other, I think, bigger headline is almost like what we talked about a minute ago with complexity, like our kids won't understand things like T plus two. They also probably won't understand like. I got to get a wallet and now I got to take [00:35:00] the seed phrase and I got to write it down on paper and I got to do all like this 12 step process to like actually get onboarded into a self sovereign wallet because like we view the app layer of AI, which really we think hasn't even really manifested yet at all.

Maybe agents are like our first taste of it and just collapsing most of this stuff to natural language, right? So it'll be voice, it'll be typed in, but we'll just say. Create a wallet for me and store the seed phrase securely and maybe it will shard it across like a secret secrets network like lit or something like this.

Um, it's not going to be it is AI is going to make everything so much simpler at the interface layer. In and outside of crypto. And I think that is something that is hugely important in terms of kind of onboarding the masses is like I was telling people when chat GPT came out, you know, I could teach my mom how to use chat GPT in 60 seconds is like open this thing up.

Here's a couple tips on how to [00:36:00] prompt it and like you're off and running right when I taught my mom how to get a self sovereign wallet, which I did right. So like we went through the whole process. We got like the rainbow wallet. You know, so that we could get some teacher with NFTs, this was back in 2020, 2021, you know, it took hours, right, to really go through the full process, get onboarded to somewhere where she could buy crypto, transfer it into the wallet it's a lot, as we all know anyone who's onboarded, kind of a friend or family member, and I think AI is going to collapse a lot of that process down to something where a, crypto gets as easy To use from an interface standpoint as things like chat gpt.

So that's why we're excited Staples had it right with that red easy button. We need it It's coming back to us final question for you since this is the reimagined ownership podcast. Can you share a vignette when you first felt? A sense of ownership, maybe when you first [00:37:00] acquired an item on your own that you remember distinctly So I do actually remember this thing very distinctly.

I actually brought a little prop to show you so So it was it was baseball cards, right? So that's kind of like the first I was always kind of a collector I remember collecting baseball cards and I remember The first time I got a baseball card of like meaningful value Right, so I don't know if you're a collector, but we have these things called Beckett monthly You should look up you could buy a pack of tops or whatever And then you could look them up and see if they were worth anything And I distinctly remember I was like in my friend chris's backyard like next to the alley and I opened this pack of tops And I got a Daryl Strawberry card, a Daryl Strawberry rookie card, which was like you know, Daryl had some challenges later in his career, but at least when he was a rookie, he was like, Daryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden, right?

Like it was the Mets. It was amazing. And I, you [00:38:00] know, I looked it up and Beckett, I think it was worth like 50 bucks, which was like a fortune to me at age 11 or whatever I was. Um, and I actually tell a little in one of the first articles I ever wrote about crypto. It was titled traditional asset tokenization 2017 actually told the story of this card How it was like this revelation to own this thing.

And then I went to the baseball card shop to actually try to convert it to dollars, which is when I learned about the concept of bid ask spread. Right. Because you know, Calvin wasn't going to give me 50. He was gonna give me like five or 10 or something. And so anyway, I wrote this article and this article went sort of like viral, like hundreds of thousands of people read it, including.

This was back when I was a professor, I was still teaching, so I would assign this article to kind of get them up to speed on real world assets, and one of my students at the end of the term bought me the Daryl Strawberry card. Which was, this was like, you know, literally the rookie card. Um, there it [00:39:00] is.

PSA rated. And so I keep that thing on my shelf as kind of like a memory of the first valuable thing that I sort of ever felt ownership of. I love it. And I'm sure Straw would love it if he could see you today. We're big admirers of Collab Currency. Thank you so much for what you guys are doing in this ecosystem.

And look forward to reading more of your pearls of wisdom in the year ahead. Thanks for taking time to join us today. Thanks so much, Dan. Happy to be here.