Mike Green here to interview Dan Morehead.
Dan is the founder of Pantera Capital.
Fantastic history in the industry, doing macro for Julian Robertson back at Tiger Global
and ultimately transitioning to running his own firm which has become incredibly focused
on the bitcoin and cryptocurrency environment.
Dan is going to come to us and talk about the opportunities in crypto as well as his
insights on how this develops forward in terms of the social dynamics.
Really excited to talk to him, can't wait to see it.
I think the biggest opportunity is this way that tokens are allowing the value and protocols
to go to the developers and the early community members.
I think it's a really important invention.
In the previous era, the inventor of the protocol would essentially get almost no value, and
then a capitalistic enterprise would build an application on top of the protocol and
often end up with monopoly power.
And if you look at the US, the top five most valuable companies in the US are basically
data monopolies.
With tokens, you're going to be able to distribute the value of the protocol to the developers
and the early community members, and I think you can end up with a really, really different
distribution of wealth.
And the importance is the protocols now, the people who develop it will get shares in the
protocols.
They'll distribute it to all their community, and then the community members will have a
stake in its success, which is very different than the capitalist companies out there right
now, where most users and most of the popular digital sites, you have no stake in their
success.
When I think about the dynamic-- when you say the early users, and the early adopters,
and the developers, is it materially different from stock options, for example?
Or I mean, that's a way to share ownership.
Sure, but those are on equity ownership of a company.
The best example would be the developers who built all the protocols that are currently
the backbone of the internet essentially got nothing for their efforts.
In the most extreme case, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web and got no financial reward
for that.
However, Google, or Facebook, or the other data monopolies that sit on top of the web
have now garnered all the value.
With tokens, you're distributing the value of the protocol to all of the developers and
the early users.
So the team that builds it-- Augur is a great example.
Joe and his team have built a really amazing system.
They and their early users are going to garner the value from having created this.
And so I think when you look back in 15 years, you're going to see this era as being really
a seminal moment in finance.
And I think the transaction that really catalyzed it in my mind was Kik Messenger going to tokenization.
So as I said, we have probably 50 to 100 token issuers out there already.
Essentially, all of them are development projects that have yet to release an actual, live product.
Augur will be the first one to go live on Ethereum in a couple of months.
But as amazing as it is, it's still in development stage.
All the rest of the projects that have been announced are in the development stage and
who knows if they'll actually be able to build the code for it and get a community.
Whereas in this case, Kik has been around for nine years.
They have hundreds of millions of accounts.
They have tens of millions of active users.
They are going to open source their entire code base and convert their $120 million of
venture funding into tokens.
And so all of the developers that build cool, interesting applications to go on this new
Kin network will share in the success of the network.