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The Starting Block is The Block's new flagship daily live show — the breaking news, the context behind it, and the people shaping where crypto goes next. Each episode is a 45-minute live broadcast hosted by award-winning journalist and broadcaster Gareth Jenkinson and powered by The Block's newsroom and research desk.
Welcome back to The Starting Block.
Happy Tuesday to you wherever you
are joining us from today.
It's a great pleasure to have you
with us. If you've never watched the
show, this is The Block's new daily
show. We'd be going for just over
a month, started in
RBW a few weeks ago with a
very special interview with CZ.
Again, if you haven't watched that,
you can go and check that out on The
Block YouTube channel.
And while you're there, please
subscribe to our channel.
We're working very hard to get
you the best content in the
internet. And of course, if haven't.
Been paying attention to social
media for the last couple of
days. It's been a crazy few days
for the show.
We had Charles Hoskinson last
Friday, and that's definitely caused
a bit of a buzz with a lot of other
accounts sharing bit of an
altercation that we had.
Go check it out for yourself.
Make of it what you will.
We're continuing doing what we're
doing. And today I've got a
very, very exciting show.
A guest of mine who probably won't
give me gears if I ask him for his
founding story.
Alex Svanovic will be joining us a
little bit later. But before we get
into that.
I'm gonna jump into the block
briefing, which is of course our
big rundown of the top news that
you need to know in the last 24
hours.
Bringing up our first headline
today, Circle just made a big bet on
intellectual property.
The stablecoin issuer has acquired
core assets from IBM's blockchain
patent portfolio.
In a deal, Circle says, makes it
the largest blockchain patent holder
in the United States.
I saw this news come out late
yesterday.
And already asked the Circle
team if we can get an entire
list of that blockchain patent
because over
680 patents are in
that family and
there's been nearly a thousand
issued worldwide covering everything
from foundational blockchain tech
to banking, insurance, supply chains
and secure cloud.
Circle says the expanded IP position
backs its push to push
an internet financial system.
Including USDC, the Circle Payments
Network and its ARK blockchain.
In short circles, not just issuing
dollars, it's stacking patents.
I do think it raises a very
interesting question around the
ownership of these patents and what
they're taking off the market and
doubling down as IP
that they themselves own.
Obviously, a lot of people out there
on the internet think that
everything should be open source.
This is the direct opposite of
that. So definitely a story we'll
be watching in weeks to come.
Then a deal in the wallet space,
Kraken's parent company, Payward,
is acquiring Magic Labs embedded
wallet business.
It's structured as an
asset sale, and it comes as Magic
Labs restructures and rebands itself
to Newton Labs.
Magic's wallet customers will move
over to Payward services while
the remaining company pivots to
focus on its Newton protocol.
For context here, Magic Labs says it
created more than 60 million wallets
since 2018 and supports
over 200,000 developers.
So Kraken picks up serious wallet
infrastructure and Magic Labs gets
a fresh start under a
new name.
Then a big plumbing upgrade in
Ethereum staking, Lido
has started consolidating around a
fifth of all staked ETH,
more than 8 million ETH worth around
$16 billion onto
Ethereum's largest post-PECTRA
validators.
These upgraded validators can hold
up to 2,048 ETH
each versus the old 32
ETH cap.
Letting Lido's node operator secure
more stake with fewer validators.
The upshot here, it cuts Ethereum's
total validator count by roughly a
third, easing a load on the network
and pushes stake on the newest
validators past 50%.
And that's all part of Lido curated
module V2 rollout.
Then a story in the United States,
the NFL is stepping into the
prediction markets fight.
According to a July 27
letter reported by prediction
markets newsletter, the closing
line. The league is urging CFTC
chair Michael Selig to
tighten the agency's proposed rules
for sports events contract, arguing
they fall short on protecting the
integrity of its games and
consumers.
The NFL says its highest priority
is preserving game integrity and
that stable, orderly events
contracts depend on it.
It's a heavyweight voice weighing in
as prediction markets like Colshean
Polymarket push deep into
new territory.
Then some regulatory pushback out of
New York State Attorney General
Letitia James is urging
Congress to tighten the proposed
Clarity Act, warning it would
weaken states' ability to police
crypto.
In a written testimony to a Senate
subcommittee, James said the
bill seeks to interfere with and
preempt state investor protection
laws and would, quote, dilute the
ability to prosecute fraud.
She's calling for stronger
anti-money laundering ethics
safeguards and argues New York
has crypto regulation
for over a decade.
It's a notable state versus federal
flashpoint as market structure
legislation moves through
Washington.
Then a win for prediction markets.
A federal judge has blocked
Minnesota from enforcing its new law
banning them, letting Kalshi and
Polymarket keep operating in the
state while the case plays out.
Judge Catherine Menendez granted a
preliminary injunction on Monday,
siding with the CFTC Kalshian
Polymarket, Minnesota's law
set to take effect on August
1st. Would have prohibited
creating, operating, and advertising
prediction markets.
But the plaintiffs argued the state
was unlawfully trying to regulate
federally overseen derivatives.
For now, the ban is on hold
and the prediction market
boom rolls on.
If you're interested in reading more
about those stories, you can find
them on The Block's website.
That's theblock.co.
Go ahead and support our journalism.
We've got a fantastic newsroom full
of journalists working very hard
at their craft.
And of course making these block
briefing bulletins possible.
So big shout out to the team.
All right, that's it for the block
briefing. We're gonna move into
market polls and the hot seat
straight away.
So it's a great pleasure to welcome
on air, Alex Svanevec
from Nansen.
He's of course the co-founder and
CEO of Nansen and we
had the pleasure of meeting a few
years back, Alex,
at your offices in Singapore
in my first trip to token 2049.
It's been a crazy journey since
then. So.
First things first, how are you
doing?
Yeah, doing great.
I cannot wait to tell you
my founding story of Ethereum,
where I co-founded that blockchain
with 17 other
co-founders.
So this is going to be a great one.
I'm looking forward to it.
Okay, as long as you promise not
to shout at me on air
for asking the question.
I would never, I would not.
Look, I appreciate the words of
support and also just everyone out
there for saying so,
like just on the interview last
week, more than anything, I've
been doing this for a long time.
I worked on radio and TV in South
Africa as well.
I've done lots of interviews.
All I want to be is respected.
And I think that all
of the journalists and broadcasters
out there in this industry do do a
good job and we
all deserve a little bit of respect.
And if you don't want to onto
something.
Just saying, no comment, move on.
There's no need to verbally attack
people. I think that's the line in
the sand that needs to be drawn, and
it's not a lot to ask, you know?
I couldn't agree more.
Anyway, we
are
all on the same side, exactly.
It's great to have you on the show.
First things first, last month you
guys rolled out
hyper liquid trading on Nansen but
before we even get to that, I wanted
to talk to you a little bit about
the evolution of Nansen because when
we met in 2022, you know,
Nansen was kind of just focused on
like on-chain analytics and you know
giving people alpha to trade with
but it's completely evolved
since then and like what it is in 22
versus what it is.
Now is completely different.
Can you talk to us a bit about how
quickly that evolution happened and
why you went through those
iterations?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think a lot of people compared
Nansen to Bloomberg
back in the day.
They kind of thought of Nansen as
like an on-chain Bloomberg.
Uh, and to me, it
was always a very compelling idea,
uh, to think about what
if you could actually just trade
through the Bloomberg terminal,
right?
And so I always knew that
was going to be possible one
day once blockchains had
matured and we had the
infrastructure in place for
it. And, you
know.
Quite recently, we
kind of took that step into the
world of trading
and allowing our users to trade,
because at the end of the day,
most people who use our product,
they use it to trade and they use to
invest, right?
They come to Nunson to discover
which tokens they might want to
invest in.
And they come to perform due
diligence to figure out, should I,
should I buy this token?
Should I sell it? Should I just
ignore it? And we
thought the best way to
create, you know, what we
think is on the path to being the
best product in crypto
across any category within crypto
would be to just close that loop
and allow them to trade.
And there's another reason why I
think this is really important.
And that is, and maybe we'll get to
that later.
That's because when you start
looking at agentic trading,
you really want your trading agents
to be able to do everything full
stack. You want them to.
Look at what's happening on chain.
You want them to reason and do
research and you
probably want them to actually pull
the trigger, uh, at some point
as well, to, to
make trades on your behalf in some
capacity.
So that's kind of the evolution.
Like you could, you could think of
it as kind of executing
towards the same arc because
the mission has always been to
surface the signal and create
winners.
So now we are focusing more
on that on the second part of the
mission to create winners.
Um, and yeah, it's really
exciting. It's been, it has been
fun. We've, we've done a little over
half a billion dollars in trading
volume since we launched,
so it's good to see users,
uh, like it, but we still have a
long road ahead of us and a lot of
cool things coming out soon.
Yeah, look, I'm a big fan
of the pivot, obviously, and
just the evolution of the platform.
And like you say, if people were
coming there for alpha,
doesn't it just make it easier
if they could trade the alpha on the
platform as well?
So it's great to see this kind of
rollout.
Talk to me about the hyperliquid
integration, how long that took to
do, and how
interesting the last six weeks have
been. Because I can imagine it's
been crazy to see what people are
doing on platform on Nansen and then
just plugging that into hyperliquid.
Yeah, so our
first entry into the hyper liquid
ecosystem was actually to become a
validator, um, relatively
early on and, uh,
we've held the number one spot as
a hyper liquid validator from time
to time. I think we are in the
top three now besides the
foundation.
Uh, so that was actually the first
kind of contribution we
had to the hyperliquid ecosystem.
And then people, of course, wanted
to get hyperliquid analytics.
So we added our own analytics.
We added really great P&L tracking,
smart money tracking for hyperliquet
into the product.
And then of course adding
trading capabilities into the
product was kind of the, the final
piece of the puzzle.
Um, and
yeah, overall it's been, it's really
good. Actually people, people seem
to enjoy it.
I've personally been trading more
than I normally do through
our, through our product, uh, which
is fun.
Uh, to me,
what is probably gonna
have a bigger impact
is when we start rolling out
the autonomous trading agents
that we're working on.
We're doing a lot of R and D right
now on that front and
it's cool to
be able to trade agentically on
your mobile phone, people who
haven't seen that you should
download our mobile app and
literally just talk to our agent.
And you can sort of, you can trade
conversationally with an agent doing
research and.
Executing trades through the chat.
It's a pretty cool user experience,
but it's kind of a stepping
stone towards, uh,
autonomous trading agents, which,
which is kind of the full, full
self-driving analogy.
Um, and that's something I'm
extremely excited about, not just
for crypto, but the
ability, the ability to, uh,
be able to run agents that are,
you know, doing inference with
kind of, the frontier models or
open weights models and
then actually run.
Portfolio of sorts, I think is
a really compelling idea.
And, and I think a lot of us,
frankly, who are in crypto, we
have certain views
about the world and convictions
about markets, but we
also don't want to be glued to the
screen constantly.
So one of the things we, we
do at Nansen is we try to surface
the signal so that you don't have to
be glued the screen, constantly,
right? We want to make sure that
you're actually getting the alpha.
You're getting not just a bunch of
noise and a bunch of data, but
you're getting insights that you can
act on.
And I think once we get autonomous
trading agents out, that's
kind of taking that one step further
where you can express the strategic
intent.
And then you can kind of let the
trading agent go for
you without having to be glued on
the screen. Maybe you're out
bicycling or you're going
to the gym or you know,
out in the real world, which I think
would be quite nice.
So we think of all of this as like a
new way to trade.
We don't really wanna just recreate
the trading experience that you
could find in other products.
We're trying to create something
that's genuinely novel.
And we think our starting point of
having the best on-chain analytics
for traders gives us a really
nice edge.
Are there any platforms that are
currently doing this or doing it
better than what you've kind of got
like cooking behind the scenes?
Cause I mean, there's a lot of
centralized exchanges that have
touted on
like unplatform agentic trading
which might not be exactly what
you're describing.
No, I actually think every
centralized exchange and
every other trading venue in
the world is going to have to
grapple with agentic trading in
the months and years to come.
And my view has always
been that the centralized
exchanges, I think, are going to
struggle for a few different
reasons, although they are
definitely making investments into
this area.
The first reason is that they have
licensed businesses, which makes it
a little bit tricky to to
do.
Various things that you would want
to do when it comes to agentic
trading without getting into
too much detail on that front.
That's number one. Number two, they
have very lucrative legacy
businesses.
And I think agentic training is
quite disruptive in many ways
because it is fundamentally a new
way to trade.
So you see Robinhood is doing
agentic accounts, I think they call
them.
You have OKX, you have
Coinbase.
You have Kraken.
A lot of them are focused on kind of
agentic toolkits like CLIs,
MCPs, that kind of stuff.
The approach we're taking is that,
again, we use the
data and the analytics that we have,
which is unique.
We have more than 500 million
labeled addresses that we've
accumulated over the last six
plus years, which means that
the agents can literally see things
you wouldn't otherwise be able to
see on a blockchain.
Right. And that's a great starting
point. The other, the other part is
that we're doing a lot of R
and D in-house when it comes
to the performance of the trading
agents and I
tweeted, I think it was yesterday,
it was kind of tongue in cheek that
one of our trading agents, um,
made a $23 in profits,
but it spent $700 in inference
costs. And so that is kind
of, it's a, it' a funny, funny
situation to be in, but it shows
how like when you do R&D.
You know, sometimes funny
situations, um,
uh, occur, but of course the
idea is that you have trading agents
that give you a
better starting point than if you
were manually trading yourself
as a retail trader,
number one, number two,
obviously you have a runtime for the
agent that is incredibly reliable.
You know, a hundred percent uptime.
It basically just always works.
Number three.
We have scalable inference
economics behind the agents so
that we don't break the bank on
token spend, as
the example there shows.
And then number four, that we have a
delightful and entertaining user
experience around this, because I
don't think people in
trading and in crypto want to
just have an agent that they kind of
set and forget. I think people want
to be somewhat involved and maybe
see what it's trading, maybe get a
notification when it places a new
trade, like what is it doing?
So it's a really exciting
product area, maybe the most
exciting product area that we've
worked on. And I really feel like a
lot of our strengths kind of combine
together to create this unique
take on agentic trading.
Yeah, look, I mean, I've played
around a lot with Claude and like,
you know, building different things,
different workflows and stuff.
And, uh, it's very hands-on and
like kind of time consuming.
But once you get an agent to start
doing very specific things,
research, on-chain data analytics,
that kind of stuff, then it gets
exciting, right? Cause you can get
to the point where you're like, I
think there's an opportunity here,
help me figure out if there is, and
it might take a week or two for you
to figure this out, but eventually
it's like, yay or nay.
And if it's yay, then it can help
you actually figure out the workflow
to make it as automated as
possible, you know, because like you
say, no one wants to, no, one
wants be sitting in front of their
screen all day, if you think you've
got a great trading idea, and you
can actually make it work, if you
can automate it, well, that's
it, you know.
Exactly.
I think, I think people who've tried
doing that kind of stuff, for
example, you can, you can use our
MCP with Claude.
You can literally go to
app.natsun.ai slash
API, and you have like a one-click
installer for Claude desktop.
So you just plug in our Natsun API
key. And now you've given Claude,
you know, eyes on chain.
And people who have tried to do that
to your point.
I think they see that like, wait a
minute, I can kind of see where this
is going. Like right now, it's
not perfect. It messes something up.
I have to correct it. It doesn't
quite understand the significance
of this finding it, it
found on chain and so on and so
forth, but you can see where it's
headed. And so we're trying to skate
to where the puck is going and
the, the bet is that
we don't want to release like
slop trading agents.
We want to keep this in the kitchen
a little bit longer to make sure
that it's really high quality.
And then we want to give people sort
of a factory where you can
very rapidly back test
agents on
with our own actually pretty
incredible data platform that allows
you to place an agent back in time
and replay what the chain looked
like at that point in time.
And then once you've kind of
maybe tried 10 agents and then nine
of them failed the back test, you
take one and you put it to paper
trade. And then if it
paper trades well for a week or
something like that, you can
actually give it real funds and let
it trade. So that's kind of the
overall flow we're working towards.
And the idea is that you'll
be better off running this
through this kind of factory that
we are creating than just kind of
vibe coding some slop trading agent
that's gonna lose all your money.
I mean, my counterpoint
to that is like,
will there ever be a point of
diminishing returns when it comes to
agentic trading?
And basically, the beauty about
agents, right?
And like AI is that it
can have all the knowledge
of the internet and then
figure out, take the
knowledge and then apply it to
whatever market you're pointing it
at. So it can tell you of all the
different trading strategies out
there, we can probably execute this
and it could work.
If we all start doing the same
thing, surely at some point it's
like arbitrage trading.
Eventually the arbitrage takes the
trade away.
Yeah. So, so my counter take
to that is I think actually agents
will be more diverse than
human retail traders.
Uh, if you think about human retail,
traders, we are quite sheep-like,
you know, we'll see some meme
coin that Anson posts on X and
we'll all buy it.
Right. That, that is not a very
diversified or diverse,
uh, set of training strategies, uh
whereas agent.
Have a lot of different inputs,
right? They can consume more
different types of information.
There are a bunch of different
models. The models have different
settings, whether it's reasoning or
temperature or all these
types of things.
The agents have different harnesses.
There are different ways for agents
to use tools, whether it is MCPs
or CLIs.
And so, if you kind of add
up all of these different things,
and then in addition, you allow
users to express
some kind of strategy that they want
to run.
I actually think that trading agents
are going to be more diverse than
human traders.
So I'm not super concerned about
all of these agents doing the same
thing.
I think that might have been the
case when you think about trading
bots that don't do inference,
but they just execute an algorithm
or they
execute some have rules set,
but the trading ages
we see now.
Are run on inference, which means
that they are very flexible and very
powerful.
And by the way, there are many
pitfalls too, right?
Because you can basically
contaminate or poison the
inputs and kind of run different
attacks in that way,
which is something that we're gonna
have to
make sure, it's not an issue
for the users of this product we're
building.
But yeah, they're also, you know,
not going to be emotional in the
same way, but they will be easily
influenced, right?
So I think it's going to super
interesting.
And I would be very surprised
if we don't
have more
trading edges than humans, you know,
within two years.
Um, and, and of course it's gonna be
humans behind the trading edges.
But if you think of the analogy to
coding, Obviously
now most engineers are
running some kind of harness or
coding agent, you know, whether it's
through cursor or grok
or codex or cloud
code or,
you know, droid and so on and so
forth. I think the same thing is
going to happen with trading and
investing. It's just, it's
just going to give you such a big
advantage, but we
obviously need to get the tooling to
a place where it actually is a
genuine advantage.
Um, and we're not quite there
yet, but I think we're going to be
there within the next, you
know, months and
I think within the next two
years, we're gonna see a real
flippening in how people trade,
um, which is what we think is the
new way to trade.
Yeah, you posted online, I think
you said something like, you know,
open source AI is the new crypto.
And I wanted to pull on the thread a
little bit like the similarities
between the cryptocurrency industry,
probably between 2017
and 2020, when I think, you
know, I got into the industry around
then I think you've been here since
like 2015, right, something like
that. You were at an Ethereum
startup, you've seen it all.
But the evolution of
us figuring things out and then kind
of having to give it to people on
the platter.
Feels like it's happening again with
all the AI tools that we're
building, right? Because if you
really take the time and make the
effort, you can do a lot of things
on Claude, but what you're trying
to do now is again,
give to your users AI
agents on a platter and be like,
this is how it works, just talk to
it, and then it'll do what you
need it to do.
And for a long time, that's what we
had to figure out with crypto.
Eventually it was like, this is our
exchange and this is how you use it
to trade. It had to be very
ordered down for the plebs.
Yeah. So yeah, I tweeted that,
um, for a few different reasons.
The first reason is I see a lot of
the same people that
were active during DeFi
summer, now being active with open
source AI, uh, a good example
is Banteg for, for those of
you who don't follow him, you should
follow him. He's, he's awesome.
Um, and so I think it appeals,
I think open source appeals to
a specific type of person who,
you know, is intellectually curious,
likes to tinker.
Isn't afraid of some complexity
and kind of,
you know, seeing that this is
something that has great potential
and you might benefit
from being early, right?
I think that's kind of those are
some of the similarities.
And there's also kind of a
spiritual similarity
in that there is some degree of
decentralization, right?
People, obviously DeFi it's
in the name, it's decentralized.
Um, but even open source AI,
I think has a much more
decentralized approach, which I
think a lot of people like, uh,
and many
people have had concerns about AI
being a centralizing force, which I
think is true to
some extent.
But that's why it was so cool when
open claw in particular, uh
came out, but also, you know, you
have Hermes agent and a
bunch of other great open source.
Harnesses and tools, and then of
course, open weights models.
These are kind of almost
like giving power back to the people
or like back to people
who haven't raised tens
or hundreds of billions of dollars
to run some AI lab or something like
that.
And I think people really like that,
I think they spiritually connect
with that.
So that's probably another reason
why many of the
same people dabble with open source
AI.
Um, so, so yeah,
those, those are basically
the parallels I see.
And I just find it very exciting.
It's like, there's this saying, I
can't remember who said it might've
been Mark Andreessen, who says that
you should like invest in what the,
what the nerds are spending their
time on on the weekends and,
and, uh, it might have been Chris,
Chris Dixon or Mark Andreissen.
I can remember.
Um, but that's kind of what
open source AI is right now.
So yeah.
Is there a favorite open source?
I mean, I know Paolo at Tether
has been rolling out QVAC, but
obviously we had Ilya from Nia on
the show last week.
And I think they're
a protocol that's been pushing
really, really hard, you know, like
the envelope.
And if you look at Ilya, that's
kind of what he actually started.
You know, he was an AI engineer at
Google, you know?
And it's kind come full circle.
It's like what he needed, the
infrastructure he needed to build
was blockchain in order to...
Create the reality through which we
are now actually living.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's super cool.
I mean, on our end, and
me personally, I use a lot
of these tools.
Some people are dunking on OpenClaw
now. They feel like, oh,
it's
I saw that.
I saw you in an interview someone
was asking you you give everyone an
open claw that joins Nansen now.
Is that true?
Yeah, that's right. That's right and
I would say probably
about a third or
maybe a little bit more 30 to 50% of
the company still uses their
open claw pretty much daily,
but not everyone uses like
some people don't really
like it for a bunch
of different reasons and
it doesn't solve all of your
AI needs but
it is really great.
It's like a sidekick that runs con
jobs for you that can like edit
documents and maybe
do a quick poll request, that kind
of stuff.
Um, so yeah, uh, we use a lot, we
also run open weights models in our
product. So if you, if you use our,
um, our agent either in
our web app or in the mobile app,
if, if use toggle to fast
mode, which is there's two different
modes, fast mode and expert mode
fast mode actually runs an open
weights model under the hood, um
currently is GLM 5.2, but
we've tested a bunch of different
models and we run evals on them
and kind of improve them for our
setup for trading and investing in
research.
And I wouldn't be surprised if
we end up switching out the
expert mode with an open weights
model not
long from now.
Right now, we're actually running
Opus. So we are
subsidizing Opus
tokens for our users.
But, uh, but.
But I think we might switch to an
open weights model.
And we've been doing like a lot of
fine tuning experiments and stuff
like that. So we're pretty deep
in the trenches on open source AI.
That's awesome.
Look, I think we've spoken about AI
at length. I wanted to chat to you
about a few different things.
And one of the threads I wanted to
pull on actually is like the staking
side of Nunson's business.
A couple of months ago, you said
that Nunson was the eighth,
number eight staking provider
globally across all chains.
How did that kind of work out?
I mean, why did you get into the
stake in business? And is it kind of
a core part of the
verticals at Nunson?
Yeah, there's a few different ways
to think about this.
The first one actually goes back to
the trading part, which is that we
know that most users of Dunson are
token holders, right?
They invest in tokens.
And so why not give them
the option to stay
with us? They already have tokens,
they're using our product.
So why don't you just stay with
Dunson? You trust us, use our
product?
That's number one.
Number two, we have
very good relationships with a lot
of great chains.
You know, Solana, Piper Liquid and
so on. We've integrated them into
our product.
We have, you know the best analytics
for a lot of these chains.
And so it was natural that we would
also contribute to their ecosystems
by running a validator for
their network.
So those were like the two main
reasons we did it.
And the way we did is we acquired
a company called Stake with us,
a Singaporean company that's
been around since 2019.
And they had built a really strong
team.
Very nimble, a great platform,
but they didn't really have that
much distribution.
So what we thought was, why don't we
fold this into nonsense?
We have great distribution, we have
a user base who can,
you know, stake with us.
And in nine months,
we basically 40x the
assets staked
with our staking
offering, which was awesome,
obviously.
We became the leading hyperliquid
validator after the foundation.
Uh, we've been climbing on Solana
and we actually just added a theory,
I'm quite late, but we've, we'd
added a theory mouse.
If you go to app.nansen.ai
slash stake,
you can stake all of these tokens
that I'm mentioning, uh, including
ETH now, which is a partnership
with Lido actually.
Um, so, so
yeah, that's kind of how it came
about and It's
a way for us to deepen the
relationship with our users and also
with the chains that we already have
very good connections with our
analytics offerings and now also
trading.
Yeah, exactly.
I want to pull on a few different
things here from tweets that you've
put out recently.
And one of the interesting things
that came out in recent weeks was
Balaji announcing that Network
States is going to move.
Yeah, well said.
I'm going to my late.
Yeah,
exactly. Well, I mean, I
think it was like a year or so ago
where you were also contemplating
pulling up your roots in Singapore.
Can you talk a little bit about the
environment there and what you think
about Pilaji moving and if it's
a sign of the times for that region?
I mean, it's a shame
is what I would say, first
of all, I think
at the end of the day, he's
a positive force for tech and,
you know, he would have been able to
create a lot of,
help create a lot of startups in
Malaysia.
So it is a shame in that sense.
I'm, I'm going to Malaysia literally
tomorrow morning, speaking there
at Malaysia blockchain week.
There are some incredible companies
in Malaysia, incredible founders.
Um, so I would just say that,
you know, I, I do think it's kind of
a lose-lose for both parties,
but, um, it looks like he's
got a pretty good setup now in
Kazakhstan.
Uh, I was checking flights to
Kazakhstan. There are no direct
flights from Singapore,
unfortunately.
Um, maybe he'll set that up for us.
Who knows?
Um, but yeah, so, I think at
the end of the day, it's a shame.
Um, for all parties to
be honest.
And I visited network school.
I thought it was super cool.
I was actually hoping to spend more
time there, but yeah, it is
what it is.
Yeah. Yeah, you you can't
change that.
One of the one of the other things
I wanted to pull on here as well was
your recent tweet about BitCub.
Oh, yeah.
And you know, the SEC
filing and the news that has come
out there. And this kind of also
just ties into, you know the whole
FTX debacle and what
Nansen used to be and all
of that. But can you talk a little
bit about the on chain stuff that
you see that has helped in
some ways with some of these big
criminal enforcements over the
years?
I think actually maybe the first
time we met was around the FTX
times in
2022.
And yeah, the kind of interesting
thing about our product is that you
can use it to see what's happening
in real time, right?
On a blockchain.
And we have more than 500
million addresses labeled, so
you can kind of know, oh, this is a
BitCub wallet.
This is FTX.
When FDX happened?
And Sam was saying that he
halted all withdrawals.
I could see on chain that he was
lying. I could literally see
that he was sending out funds
to other wallets.
And I was like, what's going on?
And it turned out that it was the
Bahamas KY seed
accounts that he was letting through
because he was afraid to go to jail
in the Bahamas.
So he just like said, send out
all the funds to the Bahama's, um,
the bit cup situation, I will
admit I have not studied it
now after the
news came out.
But back then, I did notice
that there were some flows.
Um, I can't recall if it was
in, I think it was out of the
hot, one of the main wallets of
bitcub and there
was a lot of interactions with
tornado cash.
And I just found that very curious
and I reached
out indirectly.
I don't want to kind of disclose who
I was talking to, but I reached out
indirectly, I didn't hear back.
And so in hindsight, maybe I should
have pulled that thread a little bit
more. There's one more case
I want to mention, which is a HODL
knot, which was kind of a
block fire here in Singapore.
And that's when I could see on chain
that they were doing some
shenanigans with the stable
coin deposits.
And I actually confronted the
founder. I WhatsApped him because I
was in a group with him and he gave
like very shady,
flaky answers.
And in hindsight, it turned out that
he was basically yoloing.
The user's funds into
anchor, I think on Terra and
lost hundreds of millions of
dollars.
I could literally see that on chain
and the difficulty
is like, I don't
always want to just call out
people and say, Hey, what the
hell is this? Because there might be
some reason for it.
That's kind of the tricky thing with
on chain. And it's not always
totally unambiguous.
But in that case, I did actually
call them out.
And with Bitcub, I reached out more
discreetly. With FTX, obviously, I
called them out, and so occasionally
you see some of the stuff on chain.
And I tried to be transparent about
it, but I also want to make
it clear that you don't
always know the full story just from
seeing what's happening on chain
Yeah. And I think that's like,
that's the game that Zach XPT plays,
you know.
Um, and I think he does a pretty
good job, but, uh, like three weeks
ago, we had Terrence Kwok from
Humanity Protocol.
And obviously after, you
know, that hack happened, there were
a lot of people on, on Excel.
We're kind of like, man, this is,
this is a straight up rag pool.
And, you know, and I asked him on
air, like, people are saying that
you, you stole the money here, what
happened? And, uh he, he kind of
pointed a finger at Zach XP T and
he was like, sometimes it's not
good when you pull the trigger and
cry wolf when you actually don't
have the full facts because on-chain
can tell you that funds are moving
but you don't have the whole picture
and sometimes
it is not quite fair to just
claim things that you don't I don't
know.
I think, I mean,
people will feel differently about
this. I think depending on the
situation, the right thing to do is
like, Hey, I see this on chain.
Can you explain it?
You know, and it's like, that's
fair, especially if it's a, if it is
a centralized exchange and you're
dealing with, you know, user
deposits.
Like, yeah, you should be able to
explain, Oh, we're moving these
funds to like another wallet.
In fact, Coinbase is
very tidy about this, they've
like published in the past
of these. I don't know if they still
do it. They published ahead of time
that we're going to move funds to
a new wallet architecture, so
don't panic if you see funds moving
on chain.
That's, that seems like a reasonable
thing to do.
So like, why not just accompany,
um, a movement like that
with an explanation either ahead of,
or roughly at the same
time, there was another thing with
multi-coin where they unstaked some
hype and they complained
about, you know, this is why we need
privacy, but it's like, I
mean, if you're not going to well.
Just say you're not going to sell
and you can do that ahead of time.
You know, it just looks a bit, I
don't know. It looks a little bit
odd.
Um, and, and by the way, like people
can do what they want, but then just
don't complain when people observe
things on chain and ask questions.
That's like totally reasonable.
I mean, when I was still at
Cointelegraph, the
social media team was often watching
stuff on chain and Vitalik's
wallets are very openly
labeled.
So whenever he was moving funds
around, it's like Vitalik is moving
another $10 million of
ETH. What's going to happen?
It's part of the beauty of the
transparent nature.
But again, the back and forth
between do we need more privacy now?
The Ethereum foundation as well
as like the, that's like a meme,
right? That's like Ethereum
foundation selling.
Yeah. But I mean-
they got very unhappy with us on
that as well.
Joseph Schweitzer would always
message me like bro you guys need
to calm down like at least ask
us for comment if you're going to
publish something about this
because.
I mean, come on,
like, do they not know that people
are tracking the wallets?
I mean come on.
They must know.
And so I think like, it's
possible to have two thoughts in
your head at the same time.
It's like, yes, we need privacy for
consumers, I think,
for a bunch of different reasons.
You're never going to use
blockchains to do, you know.
Shopping and that kind of stuff.
If everything is revealed on a
blockchain, everyone's monitoring
it. That seems kind of unlikely.
So you do need privacy, obviously.
But I think you also need
transparency.
If you go to a Bloomberg terminal,
you can see who the top holders
of shares are.
And it's not exactly the same
thing, obviously, there is a
difference. But I think transparency
is also good, especially for
retail investors.
It's, it's fair to
ask questions if one of the top
holders of the token is moving funds
and like, Hey, what's going on
here? Like, can we just, can you
explain, can you calm the markets?
Like, I think that's totally
reasonable.
And I do think we should
think of public blockchains
that are open and
transparent as having a feature and
like lean into that rather
than trying to make them
be something they're not where we're
like, Okay, should we just like
close our eyes when you make
a transaction?
Like, I mean, it's there, right?
We can see it.
So, so yeah, I think it's
possible to think like, yes, we need
privacy, but like, we also deserve
transparency to some extent as
retail investors, uh,
owning some of these assets that are
on public blockchains.
So yeah, that's, I, I it's
not like black or white.
I think people, um, most
people with common sense can see
that.
Yeah, for sure.
Look, we've had you for a while
Alex. I'm gonna I'm going to let you
go very short either one question I
did want to ask you. I remember
chatting to you last year when you
rolled out, you know Solana
analytics on on nonce and it's been
a long time since then when you
see meme coins like Ansem kind
of launching And then pumping what
kind of stuff do you see on on
your platform? And like what's your
general thoughts about this meme
coin trend happening again?
Do you think Ansem's kind of revived
the trenches trenches and
Might be brighter times ahead for
Solana. I mean.
This is not investment
advice or predictions, right?
But it is true,
empirically, that he has revived
the trenches to some extent.
And, you know, a lot of these meme
coins have like 15 minutes of fame.
It's like, I see it.
There's like a Holland meme coin
when he's playing a match and it's
like okay, it disappears.
Um, but with Ansem, it kept showing
up. You know, it was like every day
it was on the front page of Nelson
and it's, like, okay, that's
interesting.
And the approach he's taking to
distribute Ansem tokens
to people who are seemingly loyal,
I think is like an interesting way
to do it. So I'm all for
experimentation and
he seems to be doing it in a very
transparent way as well.
I mean, um,
you know, it's all, it' all on
chain, right? So you can see
everything he's doing and he's
talking about it a lot.
So I think it's interesting and
he, it, it does seem like he has
revived.
Some the trenches to some extent.
Obviously, we're not back to like a
full blown meme coin season.
At this point, I
think it's probably more likely that
people are going to be trading
stocks and,
you know, perps in stocks
in the form of perps.
In the next months and years.
But I think it's a it's good.
It's a good attempt.
And you can see on chain that
it's having some kind of effect way
more than any random meme
coin.
Yeah, for sure.
The last question you touched on it,
obviously, RWA tokenization
securities on chain.
It's massive now, like Robinhood
chain launched a few weeks ago and
quadrupled
Ethereum's base chain fees.
They're making a lot of money.
Do you ever think about your
platform now and the
possibility that in three or four or
five years time, the mainstay of
your users might be a load of TradFi
people that are looking for chain
alpha on, you know...
Mainstream stocks and shares that
are now tradable on chain 24-7.
Yeah.
First of all, I want to take this
chance to say that we actually just
added Robinhood to the platform
so you can get analytics on
Robinhood, you know, smart money,
all that stuff, uh,
both in the UI on the mobile app and
in the API.
And later this week, I think maybe
tomorrow or the day after we'll
switch on trading as well.
So you can trade on Robin to train
through Nelson.
Um, one interesting thing we
have seen, it's funny, you say like
in four or five years, uh.
Because when we look at what people
are trading, on Anson in
terms of perps,
if I look at the top 15 perps
that are traded on Anston,
like 10 of them are non crypto.
So the majority are non-crypto.
I don't know this, it's a little bit
sad almost, right?
Because we are in crypto, but
people are trading, you know, SpaceX
perps S and P 500
gold, silver,
crude oil, Brent oil.
So,
interestingly...
It kind of seems like we're already
here.
Like it's already happening.
It's already happening.
Like people are, I mean, our,
our vision for the future is that
every asset is going to be on chain
and it actually feels like
we might be at the tipping point of
that now when we will just have
a deluge of assets
coming on chain, either tokenized
or through perps.
So I think this is super exciting
and it's going to take on
chain, you know, a hundred thousand
X.
Make it 1000x bigger than
what it has been.
So I'm super bullish on it.
I'm super bullish on it as well and
I'm surprised that more of the like
exchange founders that I've spoken
to haven't doubled down on the,
we will be the everything exchanges
and we will eat TradFi because I
think that it's, I actually think
it's inevitable.
I mean, the product vision we
have with Nansen is that you're
going to be able to trade everything
on chain with agents.
It's very, very simple.
Trade everything on chain,
with agents, and that
means we have to make a shift from
analytics only to
trading as well.
We have to make a change from crypto
only to every type of
asset. And we have to make it shift
from humans picking the
tokens to agents actually taking
the tokens.
And when you put all that together
you get this very simple phrase,
trade everything on chain with
agents. And that's what we're
building towards.
Beautiful.
Next time I have you on that'll be
the title for the show.
Alex, thanks so much for coming on
the show and chatting to us.
Luckily, we got through about an
hour with not fighting with each
other. So one day forward.
I appreciate it, man.
It's good to catch up.
My pleasure. Likewise.
And thank you very much out there
for joining us on the starting
block. We will be back again
tomorrow. We've got Sergey Kunz
from Oneinch to join us.
They actually released some news
today, so we'll be unpacking that.
And the rest of the week is also
looking pretty good.
I've been working hard to try and
get Jack Mallers on the show to
chat about his departure from 21,
and hopefully we can get him on in
the next couple of days as well.
But keep it locked on our socials to
hear who's coming up next.
We will be back tomorrow.
Until then, look after yourself,
and we'll see you then.