0:09BIt’s a DEX on Base. We focus on a lot of --
0:12AYou didn’t have to lean in.
0:13BOh, we focus on a lot of long-tail assets, RWAs, on-chain equities, on-chain commodities, regional stablecoins, and we help solve the cold start problem of bootstrapping liquidity, ’cause everybody’s talking about bringing assets on-chain, but unless they’re liquid, you can’t use them for tradability. You can’t use them on lending markets. You can’t use them anywhere. And retail traders have 100 different venues to trade on -- Robinhood, E-Trade, so on and so forth. And if you don’t provide competitive rates, then it’s not going to be used. So yeah, we help solve that problem.
0:48AOkay, very interesting. And how did you get into crypto?
0:50BBeen in it my whole career. I went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole in 2016, started working at Deloitte in 2017. It was in the ICO first, like, mainstream era when IBM Hyperledger was a thing. So there was a lot of institutional and enterprise interest, but people didn’t realize it was for things outside of money. So everybody was trying a lot of use cases that didn’t make any sense, and they needed practitioners. I joined Goliath’s Blockchain Lab, also realized it didn’t make any sense, started working for a few startups, and then in 2020, 2021, went down the DeFi rabbit hole, and I’ve been working for myself there ever since.
1:31AWow, congrats.
1:32BThat’s incredible. I appreciate it. Yeah. And so what is crypto? People who don’t even understand, right?
1:36AYou’ve been in this space a decade now, right? So, you know, you know a little something. So what is crypto for those who don’t know?
1:42BCrypto is --
1:43AYour best take, stream of consciousness.
1:45BIt’s money via freedom or freedom via money. It’s a permissionless network of assets, tokens, and other values and mediums of exchange that allow anybody to interact in a permissionless manner. So it’s true sovereignty over your own assets and your own capital. That’s crypto to me.
2:08AAnd what do you feel like people outside the space don’t get about it?
2:11BCrypto has a massive PR issue. You talk to people on the street about Bitcoin today and they’ll say, oh, I thought we forgot about that in 2021, you know. But obviously you come to events like this and you realize there’s a massive vibrant ecosystem, which I actually think is what crypto should be because it doesn’t need to be in your face. It doesn’t need to be like, here’s this next beautiful thing. It’s the plumbing, you know, it’s, it’s the layer that makes everything work in a quicker, cheaper, more effective way under the hood. So I think people view the speculative side of crypto as the entirety and the whole of crypto, when really it’s just financial infrastructure that’s really important to the future of the world and the financial system around the world.
2:58AAnd so for my 80-year-old great aunt, what would you tell her she should know about crypto? Why should she care?
3:03BShe shouldn’t. She doesn’t need to know anything about crypto. She should just use whatever products and services are of most efficacy to her and hopefully those should be crypto products and services from a financial perspective. So I don’t think anybody needs to know about -- I don’t think anybody should know it exists besides the people here that are building it. It’s just like we’ve reached peak speculation. When Donald Trump launched a meme coin, you cannot get any more speculative than the president of the most powerful country in the world launching a fucking meme coin, like draining liquidity for tokens all over the market at the same time.
3:36AHe really played us.
3:36BAnd you can’t get more speculative than that. So what we have to fall back on are fundamentals, and the fundamentals are just better technology. Like, your grandma doesn’t need to know about TCP/IP protocol. She doesn’t need to know about HTTPS. She -- like, those make her life easier and more secure, and that’s great, but all she needs to do is use the thing that makes the most sense for her. And if that’s crypto rails, great. If it’s not, that’s totally fine too.
4:01AOkay, well, I appreciate that. And so if I were 16 and I were thinking about my job, I want to work in crypto, how should I get ready?
4:07BI think crypto is in a weird place right now, and it’s bifurcating into 2 major groups.
4:12AThe first is bringing all of traditional finance on-chain.
4:16BThis is RWAs, uh, real-world assets, real-world assets on-chain, equities. So honestly, going down a more traditional financial career path if you want to work in crypto is a great play. Every big institution is getting into crypto. The other one is more like the gamblification of everything. The 3 big categories here are perps, prediction markets, and gotchas. I think all 3 of those are going to grow 100x from where they’re at today, and those are going to be massive economies as well. they ultimately do boil down to some sort of either hedge or gamblification angle.
4:53ASo I know perps. Perps are like leverage trading, right?
4:56BYes.
4:56AOkay. And then I know the speculative, like the markets, you said prediction markets, like Polymarket, betting on real-world events, price action, etc. What’s gachas?
5:05BGachas are loot boxes. So you go in, you buy a Pokémon card loot box.
5:10AYeah.
5:11BYou spend $100, you get maybe a $5 card, maybe a $1,000 card. Those are doing so much revenue right now. Right now, the 2 top gachas are Courtyard and Collector Crypt, and they both do about $50 to $100 million in revenue annualized right now. Nobody knows about it, but I think that industry is going to expand excessively because --
5:32AThis is the gacha interview.
5:33BOkay, this is the gacha interview. I think it’s gonna be --
5:36AYou just broke a story I haven’t heard of yet.
5:38BSo dude, go down DeFi Llama and the top 25 protocols by revenue, 3 of them are gacha protocols and nobody’s talking about it. And of course, Pokémon cards are hype. They’re really sexy right now.
5:49AEverybody’s investing.
5:50Binvesting in them. But people are starting to expand the loot box concept to Rolexes. They’re expanding it to Fortnite skins. They’re expanding it to so many different asset classes that have that sort of retail interest but gamblification element as well. And I think if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re interested in that, figure out what people want to have exposure to and build a gacha concept around that.
6:16AOkay guys, get after that. That’s a real opportunity. And I’m curious, do you have a message for the builders in the ecosystem?
6:23BI mean, at the end of the day, just keep your head down and keep building. I mean, I’ve been through a lot of crypto cycles. One of my favorite stories is in March of 2018, after the big ICO era, Bitcoin was at an all-time low. It dipped from like $20K to, on some exchanges, down to $3K. And I had to make it like, it was a really come-to-Jesus moment where it’s like, oh, is this all over? You know, like, I’ve been working on this for a few years. Should I just like throw in the towel? And I’m like, well, I’m going to ride or die here.
6:23BAnd it ended up being like a very good decision overall, not selling Bitcoin and just continuing to chip away. And a lot of times, especially in markets like this, you can think, is it all over? But then you take a step back, zoom out, and you’re like, okay, there’s a lot of substance here. There’s a lot of noise, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re a serious builder and you want to be taken seriously, you need to look 6, 12, 24 months out and you need to just keep chipping away because otherwise you’re going to be playing short-term games and you’re going to win short-term prizes.
7:24AOkay, I love that. I love that. Well, thank you so much, man. Where do you say you’re from?
7:31BI’m from Nashville, Tennessee.
7:32AOkay, a message for Nashville?
7:34BI love you guys.
7:36AHell yeah. Hell yeah. Well, and where can we find you on socials?
7:39BLarratt Gee, my first letter and the last letter of my first and last name. Switch those up. I can share it in.
7:45AYou just spell it.
7:46BYeah. L-A-R-R-E-T-T-G-E-E. Larratt Gee.
7:51ALarratt Gee. I got it. I got Garrett Lee.
7:53BLarratt Lee. Garrett Lee.
7:54AAre you like Asian?
7:55BNo, no.
7:56AOkay. Lee’s a fun last name.
7:58BYeah, generally.
7:59AOkay, very cool. And then we like to say booyah to end out our interviews, so let’s, let’s do it. 3, 2, 1.
8:05BBooyah!
8:06AAll right, man, thank you.
8:07BYeah, of course.
