The Social Platform Every Crypto Investor Should Be On!

you know about self custody. That's a great option, but you can also use I Trust Capital's Premium custody accounts also known as PCA. So with the rise of crypto scams and phishing attacks, a lot of retail investors are losing their shirts. I mean, let's be honest, right, it sucks to hear that exchanges are getting hacked. Well, I

Trust Capital does things a bit different here. They use Ford Bank as they're qualified custudents, so they're actually using a bank here, and they have partnerships with coinbased Prime Fidelity and Fireblocks. They are fully US based and their client experienced team offers direct phone support, so not many platforms offer this. This is very unique to I Trust Capital and folks, most recently we heard from President Trump that the United States is looking to unlock for one

case to be able to participate in crypto. Well, you can get ahead of the curve by us using I Trust Capital and getting started in that process. And folks, I'm a user of the platform. I have an account with them. If you sign up with my link, which is I Trustcapital dot com slash Thinking Crypto, you can get an exclusive one hundred dollars funding bonus. So go learn about this great, safe, and awesome way to buy, sell,

and custody your crypto. A great alternative once again with tax advantages and a lot of safety, very safe compared to many exchanges, and all the links will be in a description. Check it out. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and joining me today's two cent Timmy, who's one of the moderators on the cryptocurrency subreddit on Reddit and he's part of the Polygon marketing team as well. Timmy, great to have you.

I'm super excited to be here. I'm like, very excited. I've watched your podcast before.

you from and how'd you get into crypto.

twenty eleven. I'm like, no, I don't want to do this. I don't want to like whatever. Like and I would say, you know, like the cliche of like everyone's like, no, I don't understand this, it's magic Internet money whatever. I'll move on, uh. And then that person deleted off social media after her bitcoin over the year when it ran up. But my second intro to crypto was probably the bigger one that I actually started using. I would say, I'm

a clash of twenty twenty one cliche. So I my first crypto purchase ever was doge coin on Robinhood and it was just trading meme coins having a laugh. And it's funny because like I feel like Reddit and GameStop is what brought me to the doge coin like in

Robinhood trading world. But then once I got into crypto, I was basically hooked and like I really fell in love with the technology, trying to learn everything I could, and I think realizing that it was more than just a meme coin, and like I would say, fell in love with the It's funny because I never really spent time studying bitcoin, but all a lot of the ethos

in bitcoin are my personal ethos. I'm like, if I just spent time way soon I'm learning about it, I could have like I would have been all in at that point. Like so it's a but yeah, it's so basically a little over four years now and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

And I really liked the Polygon ecosystem kind of what Polygon stood for, where it was like giving sovereignty to the world, and that includes financial sovereignty, but just our founder Sandy've talked about like his mission is to give everyone sovereignty, so whether it's sending payments or having identity or all of these big things of Okay, I bought into that the Polygon subreddit was unmoderated that had very little content on it, and I literally sent out a

tweet saying that the subreddit needs motoration and I'd be happy to do it. And then I ended up basically was contacted by a couple of people on their team and community team, and they said, hey, do you want a contract? Like, we love what you do and have been contributing, so we think there's something here. And then I started working for Polygon. It's a I don't know's it's the beauty of web three where we say it all the time, you can just do things, you say things,

and then you make it happen. And that's really how it worked out for me.

who may not be very familiar with Reddit, right I am. I know a lot of the different subreddits on Reddit with crypto, bitcoin and so forth. Give us an overview of the cryptocurrency subreddit, and I want to make sure folks know it's slash crypto currency, right, yep, our slash cryptocurrent and see it's it's right. It's funny because some

people say just cryptocurrency subrought it. Some people say are cryptocurrency because our precedes every subreddit's so, but yeah, it's it's the largest cryptocurrency subrodit out there.

is because scams they're popping up all the time. New blockchains are coming out and some are legitimate and some aren't. And when you're in the industry, it's you develop tools to spot them, but if you're brand new, it's really hard. So our suburb it is more heavily moderated than so

on on Twitter would be used to. But it's intentional because what we want is there's really not a good place for someone who knows very little about crypto to start learning about it in a kind of like safe we I like to think of it almost like a walled garden where like we will give you advice, like here's general practices. It's really interesting because there's a lot of like I don't know, I would say it's more negative and more skeptical of everything than even I personally am.

As a community, like I like to take risks, or like I think the frontier of technology is really interesting, and I think it's really good for new people to have this like a massive community of like wait, be skeptical and it comes out to like the don't trust verify sort of opportunity, and it might go too far, and maybe at one point it was too band heavy. And I know people have talked about like they share

something and then they get banned. But it's like, well, you're sharing this new project that no one ever heard of. And if you can imagine a subword with ten million people who are predominantly novices, bad actors love using the subword to take advantage of people, like it's sure, it becomes the targets out like it's a it's interesting. It's a hard and delicate balance to find between letting new content and stuff, but I would say that's part of it. I think a lot of people who are genuine, like

when they reach out, it's nice to have. Like you and I met and we were talking like, Okay, this person's going to be genuine. If you start posting content, we can approve it. But a lot of people just go and it's like I don't know you from a hole in the wall, so like I'm not trusting that you're a good person, which is but yeah, it's there's content there, there's news articles get posted. One thing that

I think is really cool about the subreddit. And this is kind of a history story going back, but one thing I like about Reddit is they've tried a lot in crypto and web three. So I mentioned the avatars, but they also had something that they called the Reddit Community Points Program. So the way Reddit works in general is there's an upvote button and a downvote button, and you get karma if you're upvoted, and if you're downvoted, you lose karma. It's kind of what their point system

is called. And Reddit came out with this feature and they were piloting it in the cryptocurrency subreddit and then in a Fortnite subrunnit. It didn't do so well in the Fortnite subred up, and in the cryptocurrency subredit everyone loved it where each month, technically every twenty eight days, they would calculate the karma users earned and then pay out a ERC twenty token as a governance token to

users proportional to the karma that they earned. So if the total subredit generated one hundred thousand karma, you got a thousand, you'll get one percent of the distribution for that loud And what was really cool about it is it then acted as a governance token for the subreddit where each week the community would put up proposals about ruled on how to govern the subrudit, and then your

weight vote weight was proportional to what you earned. So it was a cool way of like, hey, the people who are participating in the most putting out the best content are the people who have the biggest say in the community. Reddit eventually sun set that program, but the moderators in the community are like, well, this was amazing,

we loved it. So now we're all we basically did a community takeover and there's this token that we use as a government stoken, which is I think it's fun and like this really like I said earlier and crypto like, we're like, this was fun. A centralized entity shut it down. Let's just take you over it as a community and make it a decentralized token and project. Well what's that token,

by the way, and is it erc twenty base as well? Yep, so it's called our cryptocurrency moons. When Reddit introduced it, they introduced it on arbitram Nova because at the time that was a super cheap blockchain and super fast. It then branche to Arbitram one so now it's basically on nova in one and there's a very small amount on a theoryum mainenet. But it's yeah, it's just an any token that people have fun with. And this is not

financial advice. You should not, but like if you don't know anything about it, like do your research on it. But it's because I participate in it, I'm like, it's it's something that I haven't seen anywhere else, and it's such a unique use case where it's like this is a community token for the largest subredit and then we

try to give it more use cases too. And I didn't get to this, but we let projects advertise on the subreddit whether they're doing amas or we have a spotlight where we kind of feature them, and they need to essentially buy the token, burn part of the token, and then we distribute it back to our community as well. So it's like this is actually a very circular economy token where if you're a project that want to get involved, like you actually have to give something back to our

users in a very like real way. So it's a it's different and it's fun and basically when we aren't when projects pay for their ames and moons, we put it back, give it back to users, whether it's distribution or we burn it to reduce the supply and things like that. So that's great. I mean, I in my hat, I'm like I can imagine like Bitcoin Maximal's hearing this and like it's a scamble, like all this stuff. It's a gimmick and it's not that, but like it's not

for everyone. But I'm just like it's a fun, fun way to power community where the idea is to benefit everyone, like participating in the ecosystem.

this subreddit has the appeal versus let's say X or other social platforms. And I remember, just to add some context, in my early days, I spent a lot of time on Reddit because it was much cleaner and it was easier to read through and pick up things because there was a lot of noise on X and there still is. But I feel like, you know, the subredits are cleaner. Yeah, no,

that's a good point, I think. So you have if I went to my ex right now, what I would see if I had to guess, is today's November tenth. So Monad announced the presale. That's going to be flooding the timeline. There's some drama, there's going to be talk about we pumped a little bit earlier today, so I'm just going to like see price chart after price chart, probably a little bit on the government shutdown. It's like it's this wave of information that it's really really hard

to find solid footing on Reddit. You can get It's like I want to go to our cryptocurrency because I want to see general crypto news, and then you go, I want to know what's going on with bitcoin. You go to the bitcoin subred and I want to know what's going on with Etheroreum. You go to the Ethereum suburd it. I want to know what's going on with Solana, I go to the Salona subreddit. I want to know what's going on with Polygond, I go to the Polygone sub reddit.

powerful is upvote and down vote. So what ends up happening is the best content goes to the top, and that happens on XSU with the algorithm, but the most uploaded post of caralments you see the most. But you

also get real feedback on what isn't good content. So when I first got into Reddit and was a novice to crypto, I said things on the cryptocurrency subreddit and got downvoted to oblivion, and I'm like that was probably a stupid thing to say, or a lot of times see you almost get let's say something slips through the automoderator feature, then it's a scam and moderators don't see it and they can't remove it. If that happens on X,

it's just out there forever and doesn't get removed. On Reddit, you can have users downvote in comment and say this is a scam, and like, actually, Reddit collapses and hides heavily downvoted content so it doesn't even get views or seen. So if you're a beginner, it's like, okay, you have this. It's way more curated, it's way more refined, and it's farder to manipulate. Like Reddit. One of the things Reddit is really good at is anti bought and anti spam features.

And I don't think it gets soken off about it as a company, but in the r cryptocurrency subword it you see spam and then it gets removed instantly by Reddit. And I think that that's really really good for novices to figure out. And then I think having the silos of this project, this project, like you can basically go to where you want and get the information you want

and it doesn't get flooded. And I mean, I have my own subredits and I have my routine of like, I'll go to this sub and that's up and that sub, but it doesn't. My brain is prepared for the content. So like, I'm also an NBA fan, My Twitter is filled with NBA content. When I may want to be a research project and on Reddit, I can go. Now, I'm going to look at the NBA sub run it at eight o'clock at night after my work died.

of like crypto and blockchain. You know, you mentioned the tokens, A sunseted that, but you guys kept it going, you know, specifically for the r cryptocurrency subreddit. But what about the NFT avatars that you mentioned that was on Polygon. Is that still enabled on a Reddit?

really well. Created the wallet over thirty six million wallets held avatars, which is insane to me because these were all Reddit users. And then I don't know if you paid attention to the NFT market over the last three years, but it hasn't hasn't been going well. The hype kind of died down and Reddit announced that they would sunset the program in January. So it's interesting they won't be minting any new avatars the ones that you bought and traded.

You can certainly they said, you'll still be able to use on Reddit. It can still be used as your little identity and play with it and then it's read. It announced that about a month ago, and it was really cool to see the community come out. In the avatar community just have started building new platforms to still participate in it. A couple of those are building on Polygon,

where it's not going to be integrated to Reddit. But if you can imagine, there were a whole bunch of artists and really strong communities, you just like these characters that were created. They basically said, like, we're going to take that technology. We're going to put it in our own smart contract where you can just mint like artists can go on and say here's what I want and

then you can mint it for I don't know. I think they set the price in to be wrong, but I think less I saw it of like between ten pole and fifty pole. You could meant your own like designed similarly to a Reddit avatar by these artists, and you can play around with it. So I think that's like, I don't know, Reddit, it has a special place in my heart where people are negative and they say Reddit ruins everything, and I don't I'm not going to make

a judgment on that. But what's really cool is when people say that there's enough people out there that go out and say like, well, then we'll just do it ourselves. I think of like the Futurama vendor me and like, well, I'll make my own like I'll make my own moons, I'll make my own Reddit avatars. And it's like that's just embodies Reddit because they're just like, well, we like this and work community, so that's what we're doing in this community. So I thought it was really cool to see.

Some people may have different takes, but I loved it.

society or other industries. It's not there yet. But once that interoperability and those bridges are built and more consumers are educated, you know as to why this is so important as technology and how the benefits it can have, then maybe maybe ready it will you know, bring it back, and even more platforms will have NFTs.

don't know, I want. Some of my favorite things are if I play a game and then I go on Twitter and I see the same person as a game, It's like, wait, you're here too. Like I've actually had people in crypto who I knew from a previous life. They're like wait a second, Like that's the same user name, and it's like, I guess we're interested on the same thing. But that discoverability is I think really important and really fun, and I think there's a pathway to that with Reddit avatars.

I've used it in many different ways, but you know, when it comes to markets we saw what happened with GameStop and AMC, and there's just a huge community there, especially around crypto as well, and I think it's so important to have it as a resource and you know, very different from X and and where a lot of crypto people hang out as well, but very good for beginners. And I don't know, yeah, I wonder if we will see a type of gm E AMC type of rise for certain crypto tokens.

is a community we want to tap into. I think in the age of AI am I how that's used for research. Reddit something like basically half of AI data, like half of AI prompt respond with like subreddit pages and Reddit post which is insane, and I think that we're seeing if you see trading or speculation or literally just research. If someone to like I want to send a stable coin to a friend, what's the best blockchain

to use? And they ask that in AI, it's going to pull from Reddit to get some information, and I think we will see that where it's like uh, and it takes time because AI is slow to update and models aren't like super responsive in faults, But that's just a part of the growing technology. I do think I'm hoping Polygon does this, but like projects that and we've seen other projects spend time and invest in Reddit. If your goal is to be like GMME, you're probably going

to fall short. But like you like no, there's a huge retail community of people who really want to learn and grow in this space, and we're going to take time and invest in those people as well, because I think, I mean, I don't know, you joined something early, you discovered early, and it leaves an impression on you, and I think that's like super important. And I think a lot of people, like I said, because it over moderates and people get banned and it's hard to introduce projects.

People turn off Reddit right away. And I think that's entirely the wrong idea. I think it's just like working within the system and figuring out how to leverage it to like maximize what you want to accomplish in the world.

pay attention. And I guess I'm a user, so the I use x more because of I have to. I tried to get like different news and interact with certain people, but I also have read a bookmarks, I go to Reddit and like, hey, what's trending right now in bitcoin? What's trending right now cryptocurrency and much more.

It's funny. I saw I have a friend who uniswap uh is starting to bull out their runnit strategy, and he reached out to me and all this stuff, and un swap somewhere it posted a question where it or something like where do you get your crypto news from? And I'm like, well, when I started, it was on Reddit. And now after a few years, I got my news for Rex and I share it to Reddit. You're paying it codes for that next generation of users. Got like, so,

like it is a I don't know. Yeah, I do think Reddit is important and a Reddit strategy is very important for companies to have because, like I said, it's just your true retail user.

you can share as far as Polygon, what's new there, what you guys are working on and so forth.

decentralized currency that you can use for payment. And I think one thing that bitcoiners are I would say upset about or like still up for debate, let's say, is bitcoin as an actual currency and like means of transact it certainly hasn't reached the level of adoption that the most bullish people thought for everyday payment. But Polygon is really focus on the payment sector and becoming the lead there. So we spent a lot of time working with different

stable coins. Predominantly it's USD because that's typically what's used for payments, but we are doing a lot with other types of stable coins as well, which is so exciting that people will actually be able to turnsact in their native currency. For a long time, Polygon was what we call a general purpose chain where it was built to scale ethereum and be good at everything, so you could send payments on Polygon, you could do NFTs, you could do game, and you could do defy. All of these

send on Polygon. And the as this industry was growing and maturing, you started seeing chains get more and more specialized and the like focus because they're like, we are going to be the best gaming chain, we are going to be the best DeFi chain, and I'm kind of tailoring their text sack to that. So Polygons have like payments are really the number one use case for crypto is sending money in a cryptograph fleet cryptographically secure way.

So we've been we have what we call our giga Gas roadmap, which is scaling up to one hundred thousand transactions per second and having no reorgs, almost instant finality.

We actually just had a hard fork called the Rio hard fork, where we have five thousand tps and no reorgs, basically finality within five seconds, which is what you need for payments, right, like you don't want to be a merchant, And I don't know, I make the joke about bitcoin all the time, like I feel like every time that I try to transform my bitcoin to a central exchange, like, oh, of course, this is the block that takes thirty five minutes to mine, Like I feel like I'm with that.

So that's one thing that Polygon'm working on is like absolutely owning the payments. But then crypto is bigger than that. So we have another product or initiative called ag layer, which is the interoperability solution. So we believe that chains will be specialized in the future and you're just going to have like app chains and hundreds of thousands of

chains probably who knows how long. But like the way that we're seeing blockchains kind of get spun up, now there's going to be a ton of blockchains we saw, I mean Stripe and PayPal are doing their own blockchain. So ag layer is this unified liquidity and information layer where the way I would describe it if you're playing a game on polaystation and you have a friend playing a game on Xbox right now, you can't really play with each other, and ag layer allows you to talk.

So if you go, hey, this is a really cool game. I'm a gamer. I like this game on Polygon, in this game on Immutable, like and there are two separate games. And I have an asset in this game that I sold for ETH, and then I want to use it to buy an asset in the other game. Like that's a painful process for a lot of people, Like you got a bridge and then you got to wait, like

and it's not good. With ag layer, the idea of like, okay, then you just take to eth that you just sold it for and buy the asset on the other chain and all the hard work takes voice in the background. But then another really cool thing with ag layer is we also just announced what we call CDK Enterprise, which

is bringing institutions on chain. So one of the problems that prevented major companies from going on chain and anti money wandering and not wanting to commingle fund with pink did tainted money or like it's it's something I never thought about, but like, oh, actually, if there's a DeFi pool and whatever blacklisted funds are in this DeFi pool,

you can't actually trade out of it. So we said, like, institutions want to come on chain, and we want to help them do that in a way that supports their initiative. So I think in crypto, I think people in general are tribal, and it's like it's us verst them. And one thing that I really like about Polygon, I'm like, we're not actually trying to destroy tradifi. We're trying to make trad fi better through blockchain power. So like we want to work together and we want to help you.

And then like, by doing this, we can help give people greater sovereignty, Like you're not going to it's almost working within the system that currently is, And like, how can we build a solution for traditional finance to come on chain and once they do that, things will get better. It's not Yeah, I would say, it's basically just an upgrade. Like we're going to just constantly work to make things better and improve.

hear the progress of polygons making. I'd love to get your thoughts on what's happening in the crypto market. You know,

we got lots going on with tradfi adopting at a rapid pace, a lot of folks tokenizing on stable coins, the banks launching custody, they want to want stable coins. What are you thought and how the adoption has searched for crypto.

will really take off. I mean it's I love seeing I feel like every other day there's a like this bank is offering bitcoin assets to its customers, and we just work with an institutional bankup gone that's allowing hole staking for their customers, and like seeing this come out over and over, I'm like, this is really really fun.

I don't it's funny. I'm with the markets. I'm like, I don't know what the price will be tomorrow, but I feel like I know where we're headed in the next thirty to fifty years, like that sort of thing, and there's always ups and down. So but no, I think it's super exciting, and I don't. I mean it's I feel like I'm a permeable with like how we're going and like irrationally optimistic. But I think, yeah, I

love seeing where the markets are at right now. In general, I think the cycle kind of got slowed down a little bit, but we're going to see call it all season or more assets. So, like, I know bitcoin, I don't think it's done with its moment, but it had its run up and we saw it was basically bitcoin and then I don't know, I throw a dart on a chart, and like you got these random ones that did their run. But we haven't really seen the asset class in crypto have its moment, and I think we

are going to see that very soon. Just I think it's I think part of it was it was so much easier everyone knew bitcoin, Like I feel like everyone knew bitcoin in twenty thirteen or twenty seventeen, Like doesn't mean they used it or could tell you exactly what it was, but they heard the word. And so when you're talking about ETFs and all of these things, like okay, bitcoin will have this traditional finance I don't know, boomer cycle.

Like all of my friend's parents, like mostly dads asked me what I think about bitcoin, like and buying it in their IRA retirement account. It's like, okay, that is that's progress, and I'm not going to say, like think negatively of that. But I think eventually, when you get millennials and gen Z getting older and I would say have more wealth and equity, then we can really see a lot of these other sort of I don't know all points really that provide a different value proposition than

bitcoin does. They will also see really huge girl I also think the market's really inefficient and doesn't really know how to price things right now, because that's also new.

create your own metaverse, will the theme be.