¶ Intro
Why would a web three company buy, you know, a genomics company, right, And so this follows on the heels of the same foundation's announcement a couple months ago early this year, I think it was January February, we announced a sixty five million dollar DECI fund.
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r l USD. You can earn up to five percent on that stable coin and five point twenty five percent on USBC. So if you do like to learn more about Uphold and all the great services they offer, visit the link in the description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward, and joining me today is Gerald Gallagher, who's the general counsel for SAY Labs and a board member of the Say Development Foundation. Jerald, Great to have.
You, Thanks for having me, Tony. Good to be here, Jerald.
Great updates happening around SAY So. I have a lot of questions for you and all the great things you folks are doing at the labs and the foundation and much more. But let's kick it off with your background.
¶ Gerald's background
Tell us about yourself and how'd you get into crypto.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely so.
I had kind of a winding I feel like very few people have a traditional path in the crypto but I've been full time in the industry on the legal
side for coming up on five years now. I started out so I did JDMBA and was coming out of school right around when like the ico bubble, you know, kind of grew and then bursts, and so crypto kind of initially was off the table, but I was fascinated by kind of the structuring, and some of those discussions ended up going into what I call like the heavily regulated industries, you know, VC doing life health insurance, fintech,
insure tech, some of those areas. So I was in venture for about four years prior to making the jump full time. And then the way I actually got sort of red pilled or kind of down the orange pill or down the rabbit hole, however you want to talk about it is a couple of my buddies are actually the guys who started Constitution Now. So we were living in Atlanta at the time. They so, so I shout out. Graham Novak and Austin Kane hit me up and say we have this idea. You know, we're gonna buy a
copy of the Constitution. And I said, that's a terrible idea, don't do that, and so uh so, yeah, and then you know, they kind of took and ran with that. The rest is history. So I had kind of very early eyes on that. I was one of three attorneys.
I don't want to claim too much credit for you know, contributing the structure there, but was one of three attorneys basically in a Google doc after they had raised fifty million bucks in the juice box wallet, trying to figure out how to go to Sotheby's uh and buy something with a juice box wallet from Sotheby's. So that was
my kind of initial exposure. I had been doing a lot of like capital formation work, a lot of sort of like heavily regulated structuring, and so that that was kind of the dive and I figured out, you know, maybe this this wasn't like the you know that was going to carry me through the next four years, but really interesting kind of early experience, and then ended up going ahead of legal into into another company from there, so that was kind of the beginning.
And then you're also one of the hosts on the Crypto and America podcast.
Right, Yeah, So that's been a blast, co host that with Eleanor Tarrett and Jackie Melnik, who does Token relations. Obviously, we were really really lucky to kind of steal Eleanor away from Fox. And you know, I can tell you that, you know, I really admire what you do because you know, hosting a podcast is no joke. From a commitment perspective. But you know, we've been really lucky to have the guests on that we've had, and you know, a lot of fun to work with them. So it's been good.
Yeah.
I know both of them very well. And Ellie doesn't live far from me. I think she's like fifteen minutes away. We met up for coffee and things like that, and I really enjoyed the conversations you three have had with your guests as well. Now, I really wanted to go
¶ Constitution DAO
back to accounts Institution now because it just fascinates me that you can buy a copy of the Constitution and it's amazing that you set up this Web three infrastructure to do so. And I'm not fully up to date with everything, but so you the dow still owns that that document, and what's the future plans around that.
Yeah, no, it's a it's a great question. So famously, they they actually lost the auction to Ken Griffith Okay, yeah, from from a citadel, so he kind of came in and like rugged them at the last minute. The funny thing is, you know, the beauty of crypto is that everything is transparent, including your balance, right, So if you're in an auction one on one situation with somebody else with deep pockets, you know, they can do kind of
real time calculations. So I need to beat you by you know, the fees and everything else built on top of it. I can beat you by you know, a dollar. And so what ended up happening with that, it was it was really interesting. Uh, there was a there was a token swap from ETH to the native token, which is called people. At the time, I still kind of contend. I think it was like the first true like meme coin, and so gas fees at the time were really really high.
If you remember.
This was like, you know, November twenty twenty one somewhere around there, and it was I think basically if you put two hundred bucks into the juice box wallet, it was going to cost you like two hundred bucks in gas to get it out. So they had a redemption period saying you know, hey, you know we lost get
your ETH back. What ended up happening is a lot of people actually left their funds in there, and then the token later kind of mooned after they had you know that, there was no constitution now, it was it was just a sert of wallet and a signature and it ended up moving like seventy x or something, which I think made some people very happy, but was like obviously a you know, really interesting experience for the team.
And then I think also like it was one of the best things that could have happened to that team. They all went to, you know, really interesting roles afterwards, some of them you're obviously doing interesting things already, but you know, yeah, it was. It was a really interesting, kind of very very bullmarket twenty twenty one experience.
But yeah, that was a fun time.
Yeah, it's so fascinating, and you know, I'm still trying
¶ Future of DAOs
to learn more about dows and what can be done with them. You know, does it make sense for a podcast that create a DAO and things like that, and how can it benefit the listeners and viewers? You know, how do you see doos in the future, you know, do you see companies building them or it's more crowdsource decentralized type thing.
Yeah, I think the there's a couple different, Like when you're talking about a DOW right like so decentralized atonomous organization. One of the hardest parts of that has always been this misnover of autonomous right A dow cannot like really run itself. Maybe we'll see like agentic AI start to change some things in that field. For me, the interesting piece has always been the structuring. What do you wrap that around right? Because in the US we have general partnership,
we have joint in several liability. This is how some other projects have gotten knocked in the past. So you can have something like an LLC that was basically what ended up going to bid at Sebeby's was an accredited investor LLC. You can have Miles Jennings and David Kerve worked really hard on this Duna structure, which is also pretty new, kind of untested, and then you know, there's sort of the classic kind of larger project. If you think about what a lot of these Caman foundations do,
they're a rapper for the Dow Treasury. So that's that's essentially you need legal protection first, and then the other thing is like what are you going to do with the token? So if you if you said something like a creator sort of dow or like a revenue shared dow. I've also done a lot of work on what's called a limited cooperative association that's kind of a one to one basically membership interest federal securities exemption, you can distribute
token and profits to the members of the DOW. I think we're gonna see it became kind of like a a like an overly abused term kind of in the last cycle. And you know, everything's a dow and nothing is a dow, and you know democracy is messy, coordination is messy. So you know, I think it'd be interesting where you have a group of people kind of contributing to a common asset, whether that's like a DeFi protocol
or you know, something like a common media interest. I've seen interesting ones around, like design collectives things like that.
I could definitely see something.
Like a podcast or a set of creators creating something where you know, the principles line up with the way you want basically revenue or money to flow back to the users and the holders and that kind of stuff.
I think it'll be interesting to see how that goes for sure.
Yeah, absolutely, And yeah I'm looking to possibly explore that, but I you know, I used to have a lot to learn, but I'm also thinking about how businesses can use it, maybe brands and things like that.
If makes sense, and.
Eventually, you know, there's further iterations, maybe those more unique things. I don't know, but yeah, something explore. All right, let's
¶ Sei overview
talk about SAY. So tell us about Say. What is Say? What's its mission and what makes it unique?
Yeah?
So, Say is a layer one blockchain built on the EVM. I think we recently announced SIP to deprecate some of the Cosmolaism architecture, and so we're just gonna focus on the EVM.
Now.
Parallel evm is is kind of the bread and butter of SAY. It was founded Say Labs, the dev shop behind the same protocol, was founded by Jay Jog and Jeff Fang who met each other at Berkeley and really honestly was like built during the Bear You know a lot of grit in that team, and we have some really interesting things cooking at this point. The I guess the main idea of SAY is that you take the speed of Solana and you combine it with the basically
deb environment of ethereum. So that's that's kind of the goal there.
Got it? And what type of protocol does it have?
Is it?
You know, like you have proof of steak, proof of authority? What protocol does it use? And you know, does that help with the decentralization and the speed as well.
Yeah, it's a good question.
So one is it is a proof of stake network, and then two is that decentralization question is really interesting, So say is decentralized.
At this point they're about forty validators.
The idea of decentralition decentralization is interesting just because I spend I spend a lot of time on the sort of the policy side of that, and I think if if you ask thirty lawyers to define decentralization for you, you're gonna get thirty different answers.
You know.
Uh, There's been a lot of work done recently for the market structuring bill on like whether or not there's control of one party over the network. So SAY definitely has a big focus on decentralization. I think the goal is to just make sort of the cheapest, highest throughput chain you know, possible and explore all the applications that can enable.
Yeah, for sure. And speed is such a big factor
¶ Speed and Scalability
for adoption. I mean, consumers they want things to be done at a click, up a button, they want load transaction fees, and I've noticed that, you know, Solana took a lot of market share from ethereum, not you know, certain types and maybe not enterprise, but just consumer interacting
with different users being able to make quick applications. So I think the fastest blockchains, and I don't think it's just gonna be one but multiple, will be the ones that get the real world adoption and powered as Web three infrastructure.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting point.
Solana, you know, was this kind of like all side chain, you know, back in when I'm sure you know when since you and I have been in the industry. You know, it obviously went through kind of the FTX drama and everything associated with that, but you know it used to get ragged on a lot, and so you know, full full transparency. I also came out was one of my first jobs as GC and COO of a company that spun out of Salona Labs, and so you know, definitely
a lot of respect for what they've built. I think you hit on an important point, which is Solana's mote
I think to this point has been rust. So if you if you got into Solana in sort of the previous bowl and you you force yourself to eat glass as they say, and learn rust, and then the bottom fell out or your app didn't work, well, you've learned rust Like you put all this effort into it, You're you're not going to go to another chain, You're just gonna build something else on Solana, And so obviously it
came back. It's got a very sticky dev community, and I think one of the challenges that Ethereum has had is there was the L two's right, and there were a lot of very interesting applications. I think there's a lot of very interesting academic work that's been done there.
But now there seems to be a big refocusing, particularly in this kind of EVM space that we occupy on building things for the consumer, building things that are fast, that actually work, you know, that that users can use right, which is which is obviously important, and then having the dev community be able to sort of jump and build you know, what they want is I think an advantage that will hopefully play out long term for you know, builders of the EVM.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
I noticed that with the recent upgrade around etherorem and just a realignment of focus back on getting you to lead on the layer one versus all these layer two roll ups. I mean, there's so many L threes, L four's.
Yeah, let's l it all. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's an interesting time for sure. Yeah. Sure.
And then so for per se and as an L one,
¶ Use cases
I'm assuming you're targeting tokenization and different use cases. Are there particular industries that you're looking to maybe find a swim lane in, or is just across the board?
Yeah, So I think when you're building low fee high tps, right, you want to attack use cases that need to utilize those features, right, And so I think finance.
Those types of areas.
You could say AI decentralized computing in general obviously needs to be able to invact enact very like cheaply and quickly,
but things like tokenization are obviously super important. The I guess the sort of new rails, you know, and I have this debate with a lot of people about whether we're going to get more exposure for traditional traditional assets to be tokenized, right, so whether you know, JP Morgan stock is going to be built on the back of something they say, or whether we're going to continue to get more sort of crypto exposure into mainstream markets.
Right.
So, the ETFs and you know, some of those areas, but for say, the focus right now is definitely finance. Uh you know, we're I think we're gonna talk a little bit about d s I AI and and you know a lot of a lot of those use cases uh you know that that need architecture, they can do what we do.
Oh for sure. So speaking of ds I AND it's funny because you can also maybe say sci fi. Yeah, there's news of say potentially acquiring twenty three and meters.
¶ 23andMe acquisition?
What can you tell us there? And if you are able to acquire this company, what would you know the use cases and utility be built around this?
Yeah for sure.
So I have to be careful here, you know, just because of where we are in the process, if we are involved in the process, right, So now I'll just kind of comment on what's publicly available, and then obviously, you know, we'd love to talk about sort of where where somebody could go with that or you know, a vision for a decide project like that. So yeah, twenty three and ME went into bankruptcy proceedings I think.
Maybe a month and a half ago.
Now don't quote me on that date, but that was actually after a long kind of process of seeing if they could find an acquire I know the founder was trying to pull a bid together. It doesn't look like that worked out, and so the company ended up in kind of Chapter eleven worlds. So when a company goes into bankruptcy, there's this very sort of long process, and it's very procedural where everybody kind of digs in and looks at the assets, and it's just how.
Bankruptcy procedure works.
More broadly, everybody kind of digs around and says, okay, well, I want the domain name, I want this business.
I went to a business.
And so uh say basically put out that you know, we'd be interested in h in the company. Why would a web three company buy, you know, a genomics company?
Right?
And so this follows on the heels of the say, the same foundation's announcement a couple of months ago, early this year, I think it was January or February, we announced a sixty five million dollar DECI fund. Because that was a big bet on a space that I think went through a time where it probably got overly dowed. I think that's, you know, to our our conversation about dows. Everything was going to be a dow and everything was
going to solve a disease. It sort of went through this phase kind of it got really buzzworthy, and then I think the biggest thing that probably happened there was FDA clearance. Sort of timelines do not align with token holder expectations, right, It's like just the mechanics of sort of true scientific applications versus expectations in a bowl market for liquidity and things like that just really don't line up. And to provide a little more context here, I mentioned sort of.
The health stuff.
My last job before I joked, my last real job, my last job before I went down the rabbit hole in crypto, I was at a venture fund, health Works funded by care First, Cross the Shield. I've done like some corp dev and like the biofarmal world, and so I've been really passionate about this space for like a while. So the company basically continue to go through that process. And now the auction is is May fourteenth, and that's
that's obviously publicly available. Why would a crypto company be interested in that, Well, if you look at traditional healthcare, it's one of the least efficient technology industries with probably the greatest economic impact on the United States, Right, So this number is going to be a couple of years old. But America spends something like four and a half trillion dollars a year on healthcare and health services. And that's out of a GDP of something like twenty one twenty
two trillion. Right, so we're spending nearly a quarter of our resources on healthcare and the outcomes are not improving. So we're spending more money than anyone, and we have worse outcomes than anyone. The reason is that the system is incredibly extractive, right, there's a saying kind of it plays more to like social media and things like that. But you know, if you're not paying like you are the product. And so we have a duopoly in the in the the electronic health record market, which is Epic
and Cerner. There's no interoperability there. The government, you know, puts out standards every few years. We recently had fire, which is an interoperability standard, and it's it's really like has not had an impact. So when you go into the doctor's office, everybody's been and to the same doctor, a new doctor, and you fill out that piece of
paper again. Right, And so one of the early applications that crypto looked at was, well, let's just put everybody's health records on you know, on chain, and what you find out is that the interoperability or the systems where you need to integrate with like pharmacy benefit managers, you need to integrate with payers providers, like there's all these different parties. You need the government to be able to know what's happening. It's it's really really hard. It's a
big complex system. Well, if you take that and then you combine the problems with d SI, which is that there's a huge cold start problem. Right, So I say I want to solve that's like hair dowt that's a real dow Right that basically wants to solve hair loss and things like that. So they do some novel capital formation and then they want to go solve this this condition specific disease.
Well, you have to go get all the.
Data on that condition, right, and so I kind of instantly need a big pool to start pulling from so that I can actually have researchers interact with that. I can develop therapeutics, I can do all that kind of stuff.
If you took.
Let's call it, you know, I think publicly it's it's something like fourteen million, you know, genomic records, you can assume that some people started deleting their data. You can assume that all that data is not perfect. So let's call it something like eight million health records.
Right.
That's a bigger starting point than any d side project has ever had in terms of being able to actually use and interact with high, high validity data. So the interesting thing is, you know, if you were to build like a big a d SI, kind of call it like a data lake, right, you could do a lot of interesting things where you're building not only with the legacy data, but also new data sets and kind of other other inputs.
So you know, patient records, things like that.
If you could have users submit that data and you end up with this baseline, then you can go to these therapeutics companies, you can go to AI drug discovery, you can go to clinical research organizations, and you can have this really high integrity compliant data because it turns out that storing things on chain actually is pretty secure and so so you know, that's that's kind of the the uh, the interesting thing about you know, building with a data set or something like that, you know, as
you end up I I I don't know if this analogy fits like one to one. But just again coming out of the Salon ecosystem. You know, Helium moved over to Solana in the middle of the bear right, and that didn't seem like a huge deal to a lot of folks at the time, but it was actually enormously impactful on deep in on Solana right because you had an actual IoT provider.
You had somebody who had actually.
Gone out and done all the contracts and gotten all the you know, permissioning and actually built the hardware and all that. So it's been very hard for other chains to replicate that kind of base layer. Right, if I want to build like a hive mapper or like a three D rendering software, you know, I'm not going to go to a to a chain that obviously, you know, say would love to support more deep in projects. It's
a very interesting real world use case. But that advantage that they had was was really powerful coming into the last the last cycle. And so if you could build something like that, like a Helium but for health data, uh, that's a that's an incredibly impactful thing because now you are the base layer of what anyone wants to build.
Oh, you want to.
Build your therapeutic for your your hair thing. Oh you want to go try to do you know, a fitness rewards program. Well, here's the starting point, and then you can just ingest this data and use it, you know in a way that also kind of shared is the economics in a very you know Web three way with everyone who's interacting with that data.
Hm. Well, I for one would love to see blockchain web three integrated into the healthcare industry to your point of going to different doctors and not having to fill out all those forms over and over again, and then of course having your data secure. And then eventually if you if web three is giving us ownership of our data,
¶ Data ownership
having that and I can choose who I want to release it to, I can monetize it. There could be a lot of benefits here. And obviously improving the efficiency between different institutions and labs and much more. That would be really great.
Yeah, And I mean data sovereignty is a huge piece of it, right, Like, you know, we talk all the time about you know, giving the economics and the control over data back to the people, and you know, you really need to mechanically be able to do that, right. It's it's one thing to say, oh yeah, like you know, you're a creator, and I pay these streaming fees and
that's all yours. But I can still shut down that AWS server anytime I want, right, and so so actually returning access and control of that data to users is would be incredibly impactful.
So, you know, at twenty three and meside, I'm assuming you're approaching different folks in the healthcare industry, laboratories and much more and looking to you know, get them to utilize the say blockchain.
Yeah, I think we're still in really early innings there. You know, we did hire a great head vs I Eleanor Davies, who comes with a great background, a lot of relationships there. You know, we have folks like myself and others on the team that have those relationships in
sort of traditional healthcare. I think there's still an enormous learning curve, Like if I were to compare it where we are now, even though it's been something that people have been working on for several years, we're probably in you know, maybe like twenty sixteen seventy, for sixteen seventeen for like the way payments eventually onboarded to crypto, right, we had to go through kind of the the everything is fintech cycle and then okay, you can do stuff
on chain, and then okay, now Visa signing deals with you know, you know, now we've got basically everybody has, you know, rain cards. Another great example. I think there was there had to be this transition to where not only does the industry get it, but the tech works well enough. And so I think we're just kind of finally coming into that phase and you know, maybe over the next like five to six years, we'll see some real integrations there.
Yeah, it's interesting you talked about that because I've been like monitoring different industries, like the real estate industry. What's happening? Are they integrating blockchain and looking at what the folks are prop you're doing. Obviously you got the d SI and then Deepen and much more, and you're you're seeing the move, but it's going to take years. It's not something that can happen overnight.
Of course.
Yeah, I think it's it's the the industry goes through these phases of getting really really excited about novel ways to solve a problem, right, and so I compare that that's kind of like the you know, they're obviously brilliant people, but sort of like the Stanford you know, Blockchain Institute kind of ZK crowd. It's like you get this really really deep, deep academic research, and like that is fascinating.
Nobody knows what to do with that, right, and then you go, you know, so in the next step and it's like, okay, well this system does work, right, Like I remember, I think I read something recently about the basically like the fax machine would never die because it was so efficient, and it's like that's you know, it takes time for us to go from like DARPA and you know, like four universities building the Internet, you know, to actually you know, the aol the little guy like
running across the screen, you know, having to unplug your phone line to plug it in, a lot of people don't remember that phase of the Internet, but that happened to you know. Now obviously we're all walking around with you know, more tech than you know, sent me into the moon in our pocket. So yeah, we're it's it's I hate it's it's like become such a cliche at this point, but like we are still so early, Like it's, uh, it's it's it's a really interesting time.
Yeah, for sure. I I often compare like where we're at as far as timeline wed analogy of dial up to broadband right and then eventually mobile networks and you know it's it took what thirty years to get there?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a slow it's a slow grind.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what's on your roadmap for
¶ Roadmap
the remainder of the year?
Good question.
Yeah, So I think, uh, what's what's top of mind is is, uh, you know, the podcast, So you know, Crypto in America is continuing to expand you know, we we obviously had a lad you know, tend of from from Robin Hood on. I believe that episode came out last week, and we're very excited about you know, the guests that that we're having on and and you know, uh, with say continuing to build that brand in that community
for say specifically. You know, I think it's gonna be an interesting time on the D side front, depending on you know, how how I guess the next few weeks or months here workout. You know, we're going to keep trying to build with you know, founders and applications in that space. We have a lot of interesting stuff going on in uh the I think I think we're almost ready, uh you know, on the agentic AI front to see some interesting stuff come out there. I know that it's it's kind of.
Uh, it feels a little hobbyist.
To me right now, but but you know, I think once you start really having agents that you can deploy
and build on, that's going to be exciting. And then obviously also we're just kind of watching the markets to see, you know, what's what's going to happen here, because you know, what we would love to see is a lot more uh a lot more founders and you know, a lot more builders launching things on say and you know, getting to those you know, kind of big, big, interesting company levels, and so you know, we're just excited to see what builders come build, you know, and that's that's really what's
fun about it for.
Us, Oh for sure. So I wanted to get your thoughts on, you know, what's happening overall in the crypto market.
¶ US Crypto Outlook
You obviously being an OG being here for a long time, you know, what are your thoughts on how this acid class has grown. We've seen a big change in the government more favorable to crypto trad fis here. I mean, they're hitting the ground running tokenizing, doing all types of things, launching ETFs and much more. What are your thoughts on how the market is matured.
Yeah, it's a it's a great question.
There are people who are a lot smarter than me on this, but you know, I'll try to give my two cents here. You know, I think bitcoin like as bigcoin goes, you know, the world goes. That's been the story for the last kind of decade. And if you also look at, you know, where bitcoin was going, it seems like it was pretty you know, obviously we had kind of the not super cycle, but sort of these four year cycles, and then other than that, it's it's really been heavily correlated as of late to kind of
the Nasdaq and the S and P five hundred. So, you know, people have been talking about bitcoin as digital gold for a long time.
I think recently we've started.
To see that that deviation a little bit, right, So, you had kind of turmoil from the tariffs and and you know some of the other sort of market volatility. Uh, bitcoin actually not suffering the way you would expect to see it in a traditional macro environment.
So that's been really interesting.
I think we're we're also starting to get some clarity on where the administration wants to go from a market perspective. You know, I think England signed a deal. Uh, you know, they're the president. I think today is in Sali Rabe doing a bunch of a bunch of interesting kind of economic development work. And I think for for the broader industry, you know, you mentioned the institutions are finally here, right.
We had we had a founder on the Crypto and America podcast recently, and I think you also recently.
Spoke to Bo Hines. There was a there was a great quote from bow.
When when he hung out with us on on Crypto America, which is, you know, what would you say to founders? And he said, you know, welcome home, right, And so you combine that with a thing another founder said to us, which was, you know, we won like the institution, they're here. And so I think the last three months probably feels like three years, you know for anybody who's who's really tracking things closely.
But I'm really excited to see.
The amount of not only liquidity that you know, trad five brings into the space, but I also hope we just really don't like replicate that structure. I think They're going to have some really interesting kind of product ideas, and you know, you're going to get some of these you know, interesting crypto folks in the same room with people who understand market you know, liquidity and volatility, you know,
have been doing this for thirty or forty years. That's one thing that the crypto industry is always kind of lacked, is they're they by nature of the industry, there is nobody who's been doing this for thirty or fourty years, right, So, you know, I'm excited to see the maturity and then
I think also the regulatory clarity. So if we can get stable coin legislation, market structuring and legislation passed by August, which is the you know goalposts that you know, the President's executive Order set out, you know, we're going to have a lot of folks who are sitting on the sidelines or we're thinking about going overseas get really comfortable building here.
And I'm really excited about that.
Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned you know, stable coin and crypto legislation. Boy, I'm hoping we get that done this year. That would be huge for the market continue to momentum, and you know, sometimes sometimes government moves slow, they get in their own way. They mud sling, of course. But if you know, if we can get that biparts and support and Trump signs it into a law, that
would be huge. I mean the amount of innovation, jobs, wealth they will be created, it will be huge, kind of like the Internet bill, uh in nineteen ninety six, I think, with Bill Clinton and stuff like that.
Yeah, I think it's it's the same.
You know, I've heard it compared to that that's the Telecommunications Act. And then also on the market structuring side, like Dodd Frank right, it's it's like one of these things. Stable coins should be a no brainer. I know there's there's some some fine tuning needed around. You know, there's concerns on you know, uh kyc AML, some of the concerns that have been you know, plaguing in the industry for for a long time. Those seem to be largely addressed.
And then and then yeah, I mean really it's off to the races with stables. One of the best quotes I heard recently and was, you know, if that passes, we're gonna have USD eight di Z. You know, we're gonna have every everybody wants to uh to be able to do instant settlement, liquidity, and US dollars, right, and that's how the global economy should run.
Uh.
So you get stable coins done, and then on the market structuring side, you know, it's like every kind of I forget if it was a staffer or remember somebody on the hill was telling me, uh, you know, it's like once a decade we get a shot at like
real legislation, right, like real financial reform. And so the crypto industry has been relying on the same rules that securities you know, attorneys were relying on in the in the thirties and forties, right, so like not not even once a decade, like let's let's go for once a century.
You know, let's.
Upgrade some of these laws to uh to actually interact with the modern financial system. And so, you know, like you said, I think that the mudsling it's obviously you know, you would be you would be silly to not recognize, like the hyperpartisan nature of the United States right now,
crypto should be a non partisan issue. And so I think it's it's just reality to know that you know, we need to update you know, some of the guidance and and some of the the the laws we have because frankly, like you know, there were some I mean, you know, it's a lot of it is is uh is sort of being not brought to light, but you know it's being discussed, you know, in an open way, I think within the government, even if you talk about
sort of you know, Gensler's approach and the last administration's approach to you know, things like Operation Choke Point and you know, other aspects that I think really the goal was just to hope that crypto just kind of died and just sort of went away. You know, Oh it'll it'll just kind of eat itself and spiral and we don't really need to worry about it. And that's clearly not the case, like where you know, we're not going anywhere,
you know it. It reminds me that meme you know, uh like first time right, like you know, it's we we can write it out. So very enthusiastic about hopefully getting something codified in the law here that we can rely on for longer than one administration.
That would be That would be nice.
So Gerald you're saying, I can't believe you're saying, is that you know tokens on decentralized networks distributed globally can't be you know, managed the same way as orange grows in Florida.
Unfortunately not. You know, it's really surprising that. Yeah, if you and I have never met and I've never made a promise to you that you know somehow, that's not the same as as me selling you an orange growth. So yeah, it's uh, you know, it's it's where we're at.
Yeah, for sure.
All right, good stuff, Gerald, I got some wrap up
¶ Wrap up questions
questions here for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
My own metaverse? So?
I think that I would love to do something. You know, I grew up one of the one of the first things I wanted to do was be an astronaut. I wanted to go to space camp and all that. And you know, I read too much sci fi, watch too much sci fi. So let's go intergalactic with it. Yeah, space nice.
That would be mine too. I love all things Star Wars and things like that. Yeah, rapid fire questions.
Favorite food, Favorite food, Man, you can't go wrong with a good mac and cheese. I and it can be there's a thousand different ways to do it. I grew up in the Southeast, you know, eating cream cheese instead of butter. You know, some people do the crumbs on it, you know, I don't mind. You want to add some things to it, you know, maybe some taco meat, maybe some lobster, but you know, yeah, mac and cheese.
Lobster mac and cheese, for sure. That is one of my favorite favorite musician or band.
Yeah, you know, I grew up on Red Hot Chili Peppers, so let's go. Yeah, I've seen them a couple of times live. I can't believe those guys are you know, still doing it? So yeah, Chili Peppers.
Yeah, then one of my favorite bands. I actually played guitar. One of the reasons I started to play guitar because I heard John Fruchante play and I'm like, Okay.
Everybody knows that riff that you know, it's like Californication or you know, Snow from the new album comes on.
Everybody. You know, it's a everybody knows that sound for sure.
Favorite movie, favorite movie. So I uh, I grew up a big guy ritchie finn. I think it's like one of the most just kind of guy things about me. And so the movie Snatch, Uh, you know. They came out back in I want to say it was like four or five, but it was a it was a great movie. Incredible cast. Uh you know Brad Pitt, Jason Stave was a good one.
Yeah, Brad is amazing in that because I first I thought the movie was like gonna be slapstick comedy or something like that, because just like Brad Pitt doing this, and then I watched them like wow, this is just so good.
Yeah, thats a good one. Uh, favorite book, favorite book.
So I actually got this one from uh uh Tim Ferris recommendation and I've been meaning to reread it.
I love reading.
You can see I got these, you know, the full shelves back there behind me. I. I hope I don't misquote the title. I think it's called Lion Tracker's Guide to Life. It's uh, it's it's not it's only about that thick but it is just packed.
It's by this this.
Uh basically entrepreneur who went back to uh South Africa, and and uh, the whole story is is kind of an entrepreneurial sort of self help journey, but told through this journey that he's taking tracking this like single pride of Lions and it's it's a really it's a it's a good read.
Yeah, interesting, I'll have to check that out. And when you're not working at say, what are you doing for fun?
I gotta be outside, right, I got to play sports man. We I play pick up basketball. I think kind of every every opportunity I get, and uh, yeah, it's just good to you know, get out there and get some fresh air, given that we're you know, staring at screens like this about ninety percent of the time.
So oh dude.
I was literally in the gym yesterday playing pick up. I'm onnly like five eight, but I have a good vertical and I've been playing since high school, so it's it's just the best. That's yeah, well, jeryal absolute pleasure. I love the updates that are happening on SAY and uh, you know, I'll have to have you back on and uh, you know, as things progress and maybe some big news coming out with SAY and acquisitions and much more. But thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me Tony. I really enjoyed it.