E105: How To Get Rich With Crypto AI And Content (Without Getting Lucky) - Kaito AI Founder
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How to get rich with crypto, AI and content without getting lucky? The next 100X should be focused on Yapping. Every year, airdrop is above 10 billion. If you believe that in the future, social airdrop with a very solid mechanism can take 10% of the contribution within the initial airdrop. That's a billion dollar of value for the users. And to the right users, right? Yeah.

Yuhu, the founder of Kaito AI. The distribution center of crypto. For information, attention, and capital powered by AI. What is Kaito AI? Kaito is building a platform and a system where information and capital can be distributed in a fairer, more transparent, and more efficient way.

Attention is the currency? Why do you think that's the case? People are heavily, heavily being influenced by these things. Despite the fact that not every attention is worth the same, attention has fundamental value. And even in crypto as well. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? Yaps is going to be currency.

So let's change the tone a bit here. You built a beautiful, highly profitable equity business in the last three years and are now working on a token-powered business. Why would you do that? At the surface level, there are probably a few reasons. One reason is we always want to build a retail product. The majority of the people don't necessarily derive

sufficient value from using a search engine. Number two is we're in the business of solving problems. For the longest period of time, we have all these teams coming to us and say that, hey, you have search engine, you know what people historically said, can you help us streamline our KOL strategy? Talking about the algo, what are the current flaws and biases in the way the Kaito AI algo works? I would say the

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Welcome to the podcast, sir. Thank you for having me. So good to have you. I'm so excited for this one. I think a lot of people also will be very excited because you have this crazy mindshare online where everybody talks about Kaito AI, obviously. But it's kind of mysterious, right? We don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. You're just shipping all the time new things, but we don't really know. So I feel very privileged to be able to ask you questions today. We're happy to...

Maybe clarify some of the mysteries that people... Yeah, well, we'll see how it goes. I think the first mystery that people want to clarify about is you. Who are you? Yep. Well, my name is Yoohoo. I actually started to be more public probably starting from the beginning of this year. But we started building Kaito three years ago. Maybe a bit of a life story about me. So I was...

I was born in southern part of China. I was there for half of my life and I went to the UK. I was there for 15 years roughly. And when I started Kaito, I moved to Seattle. And two years ago, I moved to Singapore. That was a kind of a life rep hub. What made you want to become more public? Because you said you've been building Kaito for like three years, right? But you just recently started to be more public. Yeah.

It's actually one of the best decisions we've made or I've made at the time. So we launched Kaito right around Q4 last year. And I had to basically do a lot of education in terms of how people should be using it. We can talk about some of the, you know, the reason why we started Kaito. But essentially, it was a new thing.

It was a search engine and supposed to be helping people do research, you know, access information more efficiently. But a lot of education needs to happen because no one has seen that before. So I decided to be much more public with my trade thesis on some of the other tokens, but actually leveraging everything, leveraging Kaito, the platform.

So effectively, as a trader, I was kind of writing my thesis and telling other people that, hey, this is how you can be using Hytor. That's kind of the initial motivation of how or why I decided to be more public. What is your mission? I think maybe a...

funny Backstory about like what kaito actually means so kaito is a Japanese word and the three reasons why we call ourselves kaito the first one is

like all the early engineers were actually huge anime fans and they just want something that's you know related to Japan so we thought about like hey like let's come up with something that's Japanese and actually funny enough like all the all the other data platforms at the time either Nansen obviously has you know Norwegian

meaning and Mizarie actually also has different meanings as well. And we thought at the time that hey, why don't we come up with something that has some of the deeper meanings but also has some sort of relationship with Japan. So that was kind of the first inning. And the second one was it has AI in that.

So that was three years ago, actually. I don't came up with a name because as a search engine is by nature, it's an AI product. So you want to have AI within the name. So that was the second. And then the third one was really our mission. Our mission is, so Kaito in Japanese means sea, as in the ocean and people.

So what we want to do is to help people navigate the seal of information in crypto. One of the biggest struggles that I had was

like in crypto traditional search engines such as google doesn't really work and even searching on x is a very very painful process and i thought and also i'm a big hater on discord like we use discord but i just hate i just hate myself i just hate myself spending too much time on that and it's it's it's very painful for me so

I thought to myself, hey, we need to come up with a new way of indexing everything and then making it possible for people to access information much more efficiently. Also, at the same time, in crypto, there's so many scams and it's very difficult to actually access trust, you know, trustful information.

for the discord thing like i tweeted the other day i said the unpopular opinion discord is horrible i don't even understand why people use this product is it because there's no alternative and there was so many like people liking that and i realized it's actually popular right yeah uh so i completely agree with that i think it's pretty polarized yeah some people really hate it some people really love it into the gamer nerd i think to love it there's a pudgy penguin on the table yep

And I got criticized quite a lot actually since the last, the first time I had look at it on the podcast was 15 months ago. And for me, I was like, oh man, this is like the bored ape of this cycle and everything. So I started to ask a lot of my, I don't want to shield myself, right? I was like, I'm going to do this the smart way. I'm going to invite people who are much smarter and recognize in the space and ask them, why do you have a pudgy penguin profile picture? Why, why? And I asked a bunch of really big people. And then I was clipping that image

And people started to say, oh yeah, you're losing credibility. You're shilling Pudgy too much. And I was like, you don't understand. It's not even me. It's people talking about that, right? I mean, then Pudgy Penguin became pretty decent. So at the end of the day, some people listened, some people didn't, right? So let's change the tone a bit here. You have a CryptoPunk as a profile picture. Yes. And I have multiple previous guests, Jeff Yan from Hyperliquid, Jesse Pollack, Raoul Pal, and a bunch of other people who have the same profile.

Why do you have a CryptoPunk as a profile picture? I think part of, I think mainly two reasons. One reason is because I think that part of the community is really focused on building, which is slightly different. Every community has a different vibe and a different focus. And what I felt very, like what I felt, you know, deeply resonating with the CryptoPunk community is that

people really focus on building. They're very kind of builder-centric. And that's the first reason. And the second reason is probably, I kind of feel that the community is more mission-driven because people will be in a space for a while. The reason why they stay is because they want to create something or they want to build something that is different, that pushes the boundary of the industry. That's how I feel. What's your view on NFTs?

I think NFT will be coming back. Yeah. And Kaito also created a Genesis NFT, right? And it was, you know, a lot of lessons, obviously, but at the same time, you know, it has done relatively well. And to us, it's our first NFT

footprint on chain, like mapping some of the early users to have an own chain identity. So all of a sudden it becomes permissionless for all the other people to be doing things with it. So we've already seen a lot of, you know, either drops or collaborations or, you know, whitelisting or different kinds of stuff that interacts with the, you know, the

i guess the ft footprint and that's something that's completely different and we also have further plans to actually bring a lot of the stuff to the ft world not from a creating a creator perspective but actually you know i i can't share too much right now but that people will find out it may be two or three months nice we'll talk about the kaito nft obviously which did amazing

A bit later. You are very autonomous and you spend a lot of time alone in your early life. Yeah. Why? It just happens to be the case. And my parents are pretty much, they're always traveling. My mom's an interior designer. So she designed hotels, stadiums, all this kind of stuff. My dad's a professional CEO. So he's always traveling and in other places. So I spent a lot of time myself growing up.

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Very easy to use and the first hardware wallet created ever. As we like to say it in crypto, not your keys, not your coin. You can order your treasure wallet in the description down below. And now back to today's episode. Do you have siblings? I don't have siblings. How did you feel spending all this time alone? I think it's good and bad. I think that one thing that's very distinct is I don't have a lot of baggage in terms of

hey, like my family's where all my friends are in one place, I cannot move. For me, I made all my life decisions based on where I want to be. I moved from obviously China to the UK and, you know, spent some time in Seattle and all of a sudden just decided to move to Singapore. And, you know, that's having that conversation is amazing.

It means different things to different people. But to me, I have a lot of mobility. It doesn't mean that I don't love my parents. I love them deeply. But at the same time, it's like a more mobile lifestyle. Which makes a massive difference, especially for an entrepreneur, right? Yeah. You can benefit from this geographical arbitrage. Yeah. Which is, hey, like, I mean, I...

I had Mert on the podcast and he was just saying, he's from Turkey, right? I was like, but Canada. And he's like, man, like Canada is kind of going to shit. Like I just moved to Dubai. That's it, right? But everybody complaining, right? And if I think about my friends in Switzerland, I mean, Switzerland is an amazing country. Why would you leave? Most people would say, why would you leave? I'm like, because this is,

It's too boring. And if you want to build stuff like... I would argue Europe in general, too slow and boring. And I mean, Alex from Nansen would just say the same, right? You just go where the opportunity is and where you just feel kind of at the top of yourself. And that's not in Europe or in Switzerland, even if there is amazing life quality in Switzerland. And so...

I just think always about the same friend of mine who is like an entrepreneur in Switzerland. He's always saying, oh yeah, but I'm building something here. But if I was building it in Silicon Valley, the valuation are so much different. I'm like, just move to fucking Silicon Valley, bro. Like, right? Like, like,

But it's just at the end of the day, it's just a mindset, but it makes the whole difference. Obviously, if you're optimizing life for business and entrepreneurship and valuation, whatever, some other people might say, I want to be close to my family, which is fine too, right? Which is actually one of the reasons, one of the most important reasons I moved from the UK to Seattle when we started off KITO, because there was a much bigger engineering talent pool that we can tap into.

on the West Coast. And I think, I mean, obviously like if you think about entrepreneurship and investment, it's all about who do you bet on? Yeah. I think entrepreneurs

For me, the number one or one of the most important things for entrepreneurs is like, are you willing to do anything for your business to work? Right? Yeah. Would you move? Would you just leave some friends behind or like go where the opportunity is or not? Otherwise, it's going to be much harder for me to kind of believe in supporting you or backing you. Right? Yeah. And, um,

I had some arguments with previous kind of co-founders on like, "Hey, where do you want to live?" And I don't care where you want to live. You need to be... For example, in crypto now, I think you need to be in Singapore or maybe Dubai or probably in the US, right? But for example, being in Europe or in other... There's nothing happening. What are you doing? And also you have these bull markets, right? You need to be in the right place because network is everything. This would not happen if we were not both in Singapore, right? Yeah, correct.

That's so important. That's everything, right? So being able to have this mindset of being so kind of free and moving is so important. Absolutely. One of the places you moved to was London. Yeah. To work for Citadel. Yeah. I want to know more about Citadel. What did you learn there that you couldn't have learned anywhere else? I think a Citadel has this image of being a revolving door. Yeah.

I remember, so I was a captain of my class, managing kind of the global cohort. And every time we have a global orientation, I ask people, for those of you who are being at CERDA for more than six months, raise your hands. And it's typically like a third of the people. So it's kind of one of the most hyper-competitive place I've ever been to, much more than CERDA.

university entrance exam much more than job application and everything and everything is super transparent so people can see everyone else's P&L on a real-time basis. Is this common thing in financial industry or? I think in the hedge fund industry it's I'll say in the multi-manager

hedge fund industry is relatively common, although the different shops will do it differently. So there's a spectrum of how you, how transparent you want this to be, how much, how much tolerance for mistakes or drawdowns you have, right? So that's kind of a spectrum. How did you feel about that? Hey, everybody, I just can't see my P&L. I think it's, you know, after a few days, you get, you get very used to it. But obviously, like when I first went to CERDA, I was a,

I was an analyst and I wasn't responsible for the P&L. And obviously after five years, you're managing a big book. People also get used to it anyways. The good days, the bad days, and you never just celebrate the good days until you see the last. Things can change so quickly. You said only one third last six months, right? Well...

It's just for the orientation. But in general, I think people, I'll say that not many people will get through the first year. How many people make it through five years? Because you said after five years, you manage a group. I mean, there's also a life choice, right? So some people quit. Some people voluntarily opt out because either they go to other shops or they change the industry.

So I wouldn't. How relevant is your time at Citadel for what you're building today with Kaito AI? Very relevant. Why? Actually goes back to, so I quit Citadel in late 2021. I was actually doing the bull market. And so at the time I was going to join Millennium and then start off a team there. What is Millennium? Huh?

it's also linden yeah so it's a different hedge fund and it's essentially to build out a kind of another team there but um so i had this six month gardening leave non-compete

And then they forced me to obviously not do anything. I couldn't touch the market. It was actually great. I was, you know, using all my time trading crypto. That's like the best time in the bull market. You still get paid by your previous employer. But you get to, you know, basically use all the time to be trading crypto. How good were you at that? Trading crypto? How good were you at that? I mean, I was, yeah, I mean...

I was making good money. And also on the basis of all the money that I accumulated through the hedge fund period. I was making good money. But it was that process that made me realize that, hey, this is so inefficient. Just now we talked about spending all this time on discords, scrolling through Twitter, but always seeing outdated information. There's so much noise and all that kind of stuff. And there's no SEC filings.

You know, company can be tweeting out official, like very, very important official announcements through founder Twitter account. So the whole flow of information is completely different to the extent that I realized, hey, this is very inefficient the way that people are trading or accessing information, at least from a, you know, from a perspective of how I used to be operating, you know, my workflow. So I thought to myself, hey, why don't I just build a search engine?

that can really index everything and access everything and help me understand what's the most important. The second thing is when I was trading equities, all the people that I was trading against were institutional players and there was a very big focus on mean reversion trades. Things that you think make sense and that's deviating from you and then you make a really big

reversal trade until it makes sense and then you profit from that. Like I said, all the fundamental framework analysis, all that kind of stuff. In crypto, one of the biggest, biggest disconnect is there's so much momentum so that things can stay irrational for longer than you can ever exist.

So I need a framework that can really help me understand momentum, mind share, sentiment, and all that kind of stuff. And I need to know where the momentum is going. You said you've been trading for over 10 years, right? Yeah, roughly. You're a trader at heart. Because people might think, oh, he's building Kaito AI. He's kind of like a tech nerd, right? But you're a trader at heart. Yeah. Why do you love trading so much?

I don't trade as much today anymore, mainly because there's just, you know, obviously so much time that I need for building. But I think trading is the closest source of truth. And if you're making, like if you are having a thesis, the only way to prove that you're right is by making money at the end of the day, which would actually link

So some of the stuff that we'll be doing in the future, like we, like Hytal AI now has, you know, this label of info-fi. If you see yachts right now, there's no fi. So like deep down, I have a huge respect for market forces. And I think that will get you the closest source of truth. So it's something about being competitive and wanting to prove that you're right. I remember Chamath,

talking about social capital, right? And having partners, we'll talk about that, are actually also solo founder versus co-founders, right? And you were saying the problem was, I mean, you talk about training, he talks about investing, but like it's very personal, right? And at the end of the day, like you want to be able to pull the trigger on something that's very personal. Like I believe in that. And then if I am right, I will be proven right with money, right? And yeah,

It's kind of the same as building a company, right? You're investing your time. Like, I bet that this is right. Therefore, if I think about myself, probably most of the people who invest, you know, you go to school, you're getting grades, but you can't really show that you're the best, right? Because...

I mean, yeah, I mean, it's pretty objective. I mean, depending on the class could be objective or subjective, but you're like, I want to have a way to prove, I mean, maybe the word if you're insecure or just to myself that, hey, I'm right. So basically I can bet, right? And the entrepreneurship or investing or trading on kind of like the three areas where you can do that and be like, I was completely wrong or I was so right, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So it probably comes from this very competitive mindset of wanting to be more right than the others. I think there's certainly a big part of that. And many things I don't like about Citadel, some things I really like about Citadel. But one thing is there is a very, very strong ownership. You own everything. There's no ceiling to where you can go, how high you can go. What does that mean in terms of money?

There's no ceiling in terms of like, hey, because of politics, you can't be X. Because of where you come from, because of who you know. None of that actually matters. Because everything is in the numbers. If you're proving yourself, then you rise. And I think building a company is similar to that.

And crypto is kind of similar to that too, right? Meritocratic. Yeah. Which is what I think our generation and the younger generation, that's what they want. They're like, everybody's tired of like, hey, you don't have these 10 years of experience, blah, blah, blah. Obviously the experience will help you a lot to not make mistakes. But like, if you're really good at something, why would you? And if you're really passionate, you're probably going to be better than other people who spend more time, but we're not passionate, right? Yeah. How is trading...

in traditional finance, very different from trading in crypto? I think it comes down to, I think eventually the most important thing is who you're trading against. If you want to be the best investor trader in the stock market, and it's almost like, I think the reason why there's so many poker players in crypto is in poker,

The people who make the most money are people who know which games to enter. Not necessarily the best poker players. And the same thing actually is in crypto as well. You need to know very well who you're trading against. Which is probably not the case of the majority of the people who think they can trade.

make a living trading crypto or even trading stocks, right? Because if you think about Robinhood democratizing trading, right? And then crypto democratizing trading investing, it brings all these people thinking for some reason, for trading, everybody thinks they can be a trader, right? Can you explain, because you were a professional trader working for one of the biggest trading firms, right?

Can you explain what most people don't understand about trading? And what are you saying? Who are you trading against? Yeah. I think the biggest misconception is just looking at the survival bias and then think that, oh, like I can totally make it by doing X, Y, Z. But it never really works that way. Some of the most successful people,

They are really good at what they do in a very specific vertical. Either you are a massive degen, either you're a massive narrative trader, either you're a really good venture investor, like look at early stage deals. And it's very difficult to be good at everything. So you need to have that. And also even just...

be thinking about spot versus perp is also extremely, extremely different. And on perps, you often have to be, the majority of the time you can be idle. You don't have to have any positions. But when you're

your things, like timing is right, you need to really scale into conviction. That's kind of a very, very different way of trading versus holding spot, let it flow, have a framework. So that's very different. And the biggest misconception is I see people juggling around the different styles and that's typically how they get burned.

Yeah, and probably like the key takeaway from like for like kind of the audience, which are like normal people where the majority thinks they can trade beside their job or even dream of having like replacing their main job with like a trading kind of gig is most people don't even know what they're good at or they don't even know there's these different categories. And I should be knowing, identify myself as, ah, this is what I'm doing, right? Yeah. And if you don't know that,

You're probably in trouble, right? Yeah. Probably the first indicator that you're going to have some issues trading stocks or crypto. There is this AI words in Kaito AI, right? And AI is a big thing now in crypto, but in the world too. But it's actually not a big thing since that long. Maybe two years and two, three months, right? Since GPT November 2022. Yeah.

What's your AI aha moment? I think it was actually very early on. If I look back to our journey of building Kaito, so we started Kaito March 2022 and ChatGPT was launched end of November. I remember that moment very, very clearly. And I talked to my team. I was like, this is going to change fundamentally soon.

how we build the search engine business. And there's so many aspects that are completely changed. One of the examples I can give you is, so for example, if you search something on Google, then in the traditional experience, the first three links, the first three blue links will have to give you what you need. Otherwise, you think that the search result is just rubbish. Mm-hmm.

People lose patience once they go down to the fifth one. But if you look at Perplexity or maybe some of the other LLM-powered search engine, as long as there is one very precise answer in the first 100, LLM can actually go through all of this and then be able to answer your question and summarize that to you. So the whole trade-off, optimization, prioritization, retrieval,

is completely changed. And this is just one simple example of how that's changing our business. And very, very early on, when I think about the search engine business, people tend to really focus on the final user interface. Or it's a search engine using a LAMP chatbot, but actually you have to use it throughout the entire production process.

data ingestion, data labeling, cleaning, you know, all that kind of stuff before you even get to the final stage. And oftentimes the majority of the value is actually in the earlier stage. But it wasn't obvious to a lot of people until, you know, maybe much later. You're talking about search engine business because that's what you're in, right? Yeah. But you were doing trading before. Yeah.

And I suspect, maybe I'm wrong, that you've been familiar with AI much earlier than that, but in the trading kind of context, right? Yeah. How much have, because you worked at Citadel again, and it's so interesting, how much have traditional finance kind of mega firms like Citadel already fully mastered AI capabilities since a long time and been using these to build an edge and be miles ahead of

the average joe and jane yeah the little guy and girl trading stocks on their robin hood account yeah it always go through a process um so typically the hedge funds will get that first and then it becomes commoditized until a third-party vendor does it and then it essentially gets popularized so that's always the case because

It's going to be the same in crypto as well. I always had this thesis, if you're building an alpha platform, then you shouldn't open access to anyone. So from the very, very beginning, I made it very, very clear. Kaiju is never building an alpha platform. Because if you're building an alpha platform, with my trader instinct, I will be using that information to trade. I shouldn't open access to anyone else. That's how you maximize. Because if you're building an alpha platform, it's always going to decay automatically.

And it wouldn't make sense. You're going against your own headwind. And so if you think about the hedge fund business, they always extract the most value using the internal system. So I've seen a lot instead of I couldn't share much, but the amount of data that we have access to, nobody else had access to was insane. You mean at Citadel? Yeah. How early was that? Think about, okay, GPT moment, November 2022. Yeah.

Still today, most people think, oh, I can just buy a stock on Robinhood or some crypto and I can outperform Bitcoin or outperform, which is almost impossible to outperform Bitcoin. Most people don't want to admit it, right? But it's almost impossible if you look at medium to long term. But now, so GPT moment, November 2022. Citadel, you spent there, how many years did you say? Five years. Five years. How early...

Were you already using all that AI stuff that people had really no idea existed? Yeah, it was typically much earlier than a few years, I would say. Even, for example, when ChatGPT first came out, Ken Griffin was being fairly public about this. Everyone within the company would essentially automatically have access and embed into everyone's workflow.

The ROI calculation there is meaningless, right? So if the company, if the fund in general is making billions of dollars every year, then how much would it cost to run some inferences? And what's also interesting is recently there was, obviously there was kind of a Chinese equivalent of a new large language model that also developed by the hedge fund as well. But all that being said, I think,

you're always going to see that flow, like the hedge fund is going to be way ahead of everyone on the game. And it's, to be honest, like all the quantitative trading strategies are heavily using AI well before the prevalence of large-language model, right? Absolutely. Which, because I really want to talk to normies here and be like, hey guys, I'm not saying you should not trade, but like you should understand, right?

Talking about stocks only because crypto is more inefficient. Is it even possible to trade stocks and consistently make money today without AI trained algorithm? I think it's still possible, but it really depends on like picking your component, right? So when a long time before LLM, you know, when...

quantitative trading strategy came into the battlefield that essentially killed using human to trade on the back of news because you can never be quicker than a machine. Or at the same time, for example, when earnings report came out,

machine can quickly, very, very quickly digest it, understand the numbers, compare that with people's expectation, and the prices will instantly move. That part of the game is killed. What still remains to be made is picking a battlefield where you are betting on other strategies versus other human beings. You can be better than them. So identifying certain things that

can have third or fourth derivatives of repercussions and maybe you have a certain long-term thesis that no one else is seeing or maybe playing in a time horizon that no one else is competing with you and most of the phone strategies are based on you know they they get the results every year it's like kind of more short-term bit you know focused then you can you can come up with something else that you know can completely win

It's still possible, but I'll say in the way that normal people are trading, then you will for sure, you'll be losing to the majority of the AI strategies. And crypto is the same, right? Yeah. Because I was listening to this podcast with Alex Goode. I don't know if you know him. And the thread guy. And this guy is...

He was working for Palantir before. Trading Palantir. But that's why I'm asking you all these questions about Citadel. Because, you know, AI, Citadel, trading. Palantir, they do like some similar stuff for trading. This guy is so smart. And he was making consistent money using AI strategies for trading. But even he's like, oh man.

thinking about AI and agents and all that stuff. Like, I'm fucked. He's fucked. He says he's, and he's so smart, right? And then meanwhile, you have all these other people and I'm always trying to tell everyone in crypto, like, build something and buy Bitcoin, ETH, whatever, but like Solana, but Solana,

or be early to a community and right but yeah but the trading is it's impossible like it's almost impossible for a normal person you don't even realize who you're trading against right like you have these super hyper smart people who themselves think they're kind of in the future because of ai right yeah so so that's for me like the key takeaway is boring yeah everybody wants to hear like how to make the next 100x uh by uh closing my eyes and just like throwing a dart but like it doesn't happen yeah right

The next 100X should be focused on yapping. We'll talk about that. That's why machines can't eat your lunch. We'll talk about that, 100%. How did you get so fascinated by the world of cryptocurrencies? I think it's...

I think it's fascinating to me from two perspectives. One is trading. I was naturally kind of very, very drawn to it. The other one is the deeper societal and social aspect of it. Which is? Which is everyone has a fair shot. And there's no, there's no ultra focus on like your previous experience. Nobody's, everyone's new in this space, right? And so,

And you can be young, you can be old, you can be very good at certain things versus other stuff. And people are given hope of a way to essentially make it. I think I was fascinated by that as well. Not to the fact that I need that to kind of make it, but I want to be in that environment where everyone, I can see a lot of people rise from nowhere.

everyone is new to the space this is very important actually i remember 2020 i think it was where there was the d5 and c5 right they would call it cd5 wave yeah celsius block five i mean all these companies that blew up i remember mashinsky from celsius saying that right he was saying everybody's new like if you if you join now you're kind of like only six months

late, right? And I was thinking, I joined crypto in late 2018. I was thinking, yeah, but not really. I understand people feel they're late, right? Because it goes so fast and so on and so forth. But actually today we're in 2025, early 2025 and you're saying,

You're saying the same thing, right? Everybody's new to the space. It's true. Yeah. It's true. And even the people were like, you could think, oh man, the guy by Mashinsky is saying that it's easy for him to say, hey,

everybody's into the space because you already built this, I think, like they had 30 billion in AUM at that time, right? So you're thinking the guy, yeah, but this guy blew up, right? So like even the people you think, because you may be insecure or it's intimidating to think about crypto, you think, oh, there are so many miles ahead, like they can still blow up and basically get back to zero, like be even more

Less than you, right? So it's so important for most people who are intimidated, which crypto can be intimidating. Everybody is new to the space and therefore there's so many things that can be built. And people who are complacent, other people or businesses who are complacent will be very, very quickly overturned. What is Kaito AI? If you had to explain it to your mom. Um,

My mom actually follows us very closely, to my surprise. I've pretty much never explained what Kaito is to her, but she's following my Twitter. And, you know, whatever the stuff that happens to me, she understands and knows and tracks very closely. I would say, and that question, if you ask me today and ask me maybe 12 months ago and maybe in the next 12 months, I think I'll give you different answers.

And my answer today will be, I think Kaito is building a platform and a system where information and capital can be distributed in a fairer, more transparent and more efficient way. And then everything that we built in the past and what we'll be building in the future will essentially be centered around these. Why did you launch Kaito? Why did I launch it?

Because initially, I mean, the most obvious reason was I was the biggest user for Kaito and I wanted to build something that can solve my pain points. That was, you know, not going through Twitter search, not using Google search for any of the stuff that I needed to be and be able to listen to my or go through the transcript of my favorite podcast.

and all that kind of stuff in a very, very efficient way. So those are some of the reasons why I built it in the first place. You mentioned this term before called InfoFi. What is that? InfoFi is, in my understanding, basically using market forces to allocate, to signal the truthfulness of information.

So if you think about polymarket, that's kind of a InfoFi because it's using market forces as in people's betting to signal what's the closest source of truth to the election results. What did people use before InfoFi? So there are different spectrums. I think if you think about KITO, I would say there's kind of three different spectrums. The most primitive one is actually maybe there are four spectrums.

Actually, there are three. So the most primitive one is that information is disorganized. So you basically, like, you don't know what's valuable and then basically you just go through everything and then make your own judgment. The second phase is, I think, AI-powered. So using algorithm to try to make you understand what is better, what is higher signal, which is a lot of the stuff that what we did.

and what we're doing today. Even YAPs, for example, is trying to give people signal in terms of who has more influence and attention in the space. From a content level, which piece of content is getting more attention. If you aggregate that token as attention, then you get the token as influence, which is at the account level. And that's using algorithm. And algorithm is powerful because

everyone understands some of the bigger picture stuff if you say that hey who are the most influential people within crypto then people can give you a list but algorithm is very very powerful to solve the long tail problem right so you can essentially have a leaderboard for every single community and no one on earth will be able to do that

you can have a ranking for every single query that you're interested in. So search engine can essentially solve that problem because AI algorithms coming in. But that is still not the most efficient. The most efficient will be using market forces to determine all of that because algorithm can be biased and

And there's also a kind of a longer period of time that's needed for signal to surface. The market forces can be instant. It's scalable to the infinity because if you want to bet something that's really, if you want to bet big into something, you can deploy in theory, infinite amount of capital to really signal that. What does that look like?

Except the polymarket example, right? Yeah. Which was pretty amazing. Yeah. Especially during the election, we could see the power, right? Yeah. So got to stay tuned to what we're going to be announcing. Sweet. You tweeted, as a trader, I learned throughout my whole career to diversify my bets. Over the past three years, however, I learned to unlearn all that and just go max along my team.

looking forward to the next chapter of Kaito in 2025. Why is it so important to learn to unlearn? I think the most dangerous thing is you don't adapt and environment is always changing. And in my view, so Kaito and my previous trading life is actually very connected in a way that I learned all the best practices in traditional finance and I'm trying to replicate

some of that into crypto. But crypto is very different and building and trading is also very different. So they're very connected, but you need to have, but you need to unlearn a lot of the stuff that you did in the past.

And then to really focus on what brings the best value. So that's very, very important. I think even on a micro level, people in the space always need to unlearn, not be path dependent. Otherwise you're going to get really burned in the space. And oftentimes the biggest winners at any single point in time is people

is doing something that no one has done before and it's creating its own matter rather than trying to copy something else and that's the only staying power i would say in a fast-moving environment i don't remember who said that but i think someone said something along the lines of one of the most important uh kind of proof of intelligence is i don't know yeah yeah

I don't know, but I want to find out. I don't know. Instead of like, it's exactly what you're just saying, right? Instead of like being sure like everything is path dependent and like therefore because it worked, it's going to work. It's, I don't know, but I'm curious and I'm hardworking and I'll find out, right? Yeah. Because you actually, if it comes to kind of the,

you know, where the future of Kaito is going to be. We're in this uncharted territory, in my definition. We're doing something that we can't rely on any presidents to really make decisions on. That's so important. When I interviewed Jeff from Hyperliquid, I asked him, what's the future of crypto and what role are you guys going to play in there? And probably the thing that made me the most bullish on crypto

hyperliquid and him and I mean, obviously, they did amazing things. We're going to talk about them later, because I know you're so kind of pretty inspired by the team. But it's his answer was, I don't know. But I can tell you, I know, but like, I know, we have a good trajectory. And we're going to be able to, to, to, to guess and make the best bets on the future. Yeah, based on where we're at and the context, because we understand the context, instead of saying, like,

I know this is our five-year, 10-year vision and blah, blah, blah, which everybody's asking you all the time. I don't know, man. In crypto, it's even more crazy because it changes so fast. But the big green flag is that kind of answer. I don't know, but I'm confident. Let's get to the meat of this podcast. The mega trends of the future. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. The first one is personal brands.

why will having a personal brand become increasingly huge in the future? I think it's where... I think maybe two things. One thing is how social media is changing everything now. And that has really profound impact outside of crypto as well. So you've seen that in the past, mainstream medias are having such big influence. Now...

The top person within the media shop can essentially come out and, you know, like yourself, like have a very, very successful brand and business that can be valued in the billions. This is something that a human society has never seen before. And it's a huge trend and it's happening everywhere. In normal businesses, in...

you know the instagram matter the youtube matter all that kind of stuff and it's only going to be more and more in the future and then that's the first one and the second one is i think in the ai era people are going to really value personal connections because ai can do a lot of the stuff like even within crypto you can see a xbt or whatever the agents can

very quickly rise to the top, replace a lot of the very commoditized distribution channels. To the extreme, I think there will be a huge reversal or focus or emphasis on human connections. And that's why I think personal brands are going to be very, very powerful and very valuable. And at the end of the day, I also think that a lot of the times, actually, even just within our space,

When sometimes you look at a project, you look at the person. 100%. That's... That's the next question. That gives you the temperature. Absolutely. Oh, you look at... No, you look at X, you look at Elon. Yeah. Right? You look at Tesla, you look at Elon, right? And I understand the...

Do we say reticence? Like maybe it's a French word I'm using. It's like you don't want to do that, right? I understand that, oh man, this personal brand thing, I don't have time as an entrepreneur, right? But I ask this question to Raoul Pal actually because Raoul Pal, Real Vision, you look at Raoul Pal, right? But he's gone much more down the personal brand rabbit hole in the last maybe 10,

I don't know, one to two years, right? Which is like doing his own podcast channel, YouTube channel, all that stuff, right? Because at the end of the day, personal brand, yeah, Twitter, very important, but YouTube, extremely important. Instagram, all the other ones. The real game today is probably YouTube, right? I mean, depending on what you're doing, obviously. And I asked him this question. Do you think that it's still possible to make it big?

for an entrepreneur without working on your personal brand. So I'm asking you the same. I think very tough. You're always, you're creating a huge headwind to yourself if you're doing that. Yeah. That's what I think. I think even nowadays, like the docs teams are doing much better than A&R teams in this cycle. And people want to relate to that. Like it's a huge change. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Not only you want to know who you're trusting, right? With your funds or with your whatever, money or time, but it's all about thought leadership, right? Do I like the idea of this person? Do I like their way of thinking? Sometimes I don't agree with them, but like, am I learning something versus just buying a service or product?

that like the personal brand will make the complete difference if there's two similar products or services but one has a founder with a big personal brand yep and the other one i don't even know who's behind it it's kind of become almost i would say lame but like who are the yeah and you can see a big difference between the generations right yeah and i was like that i was like a boomer i mean you also right you said i just started yeah like and a swiss person you don't want to kind of

show off or talk, don't talk about money or you don't talk about yourself. You want to like do things, right? Look at my product or my service to see like if it's good, but that's not the world we live in anymore. Yeah. And I think that the decision in the consumer eye, in the user's eyes, will actually come much before they make the final decision because the product that have like a personal brand attached to it will essentially occupy so much more mind share

during the entire process that are leading towards the final decision. So that in a lot of the circumstances, the final decision makes, it's only natural and that people are not even making a decision anymore. And maybe for entrepreneurs or people who are kind of still against all of that or thinking, I don't have time, by building a personal brand, you're pretty much

diversifying your risk, right? Because if your product or your business doesn't work, but you still have the brand, you really have a lot of, you have social capital, right? Which is so important. It's like almost everything, the financial capital, you can go raise it, et cetera. Like social capital is much more powerful than financial capital today. So the first mega trend is personal brand. The second one is attention is the currency. Yeah.

Your favorite topic, our favorite topic. Everything is manifested around this. Twitter paying people. I mean, Twitter X paying people. Meme coin mania, key opinion leaders and people who have a voice being paid for this. We even saw that during the US elections with Kamala Harris hiring a bunch of celebrities to supposedly come to sing, but then just come and talk, right? And being paid millions of dollars just to do that. Yeah.

some personal brand are worth billions of dollars like mr beast right yep why do you think that's the case i think it very much comes down to that what people want to see right so it's how attention is being distributed nowadays that people want to see these things people want to make shopping decisions based on a you know person that you can relate to people want to

buy certain things and choose certain lifestyles based on people are heavily, heavily being influenced by these things and that have significant value. Despite the fact that not every attention is worth the same, attention has fundamental value in all of these. And even in crypto as well. There's actually interesting...

analogy in terms of how attention is so tied to liquidity. Like in the last cycle, the reason why some of the market makers are having so much influence is because they determine where liquidity goes. Even nowadays, you got certain exchanges that have a lot of power because they decide where liquidity is going to go.

And the same thing will actually go to attention because attention determines how much people actually look at this and also drives liquidity. And hence why, even from a more abstract level or from a more concrete level, it has significant value. Absolutely. Especially if everything becomes financialized, there's so many things to choose from and limited amount of capital. Yeah.

that the only difference is attention. Which one has the attention? And that's where it's extremely tricky for crypto is so tricky for traditional investors, right? Because they look at these fundamentals, P/E ratio, all that stuff. And they're like, "Yeah, but this one is making so much money, et cetera." But if there's zero attention, it could have the best fundamentals. No one gives a fuck. Therefore, no one will invest. Therefore, the price is not going to go up, right?

And that's so tricky. You have like additional kind of factors to factor in to be able to make an investment or trading decision in crypto. Yeah. Yeah. And it almost comes to the point and it's actually happening everywhere. It's not just in crypto. In a lot of the traditional markets,

you know, equities investing as well. So I used to be kind of invest in Tesla, you know, stock like these, you really have to understand social attention, all these kinds of stuff. And then if you think about our space, then it's almost like if you have very good numbers that needs to essentially manifest itself into a narrative or attention that someone has to, you know,

you know, talk about it. Absolutely. What do you think of the web to companies way of rewarding creators and users until now? I think we're still in the very traditional model. And I deeply think that's going to change. That if you ask me a hundred years from now, would sort of effectively what's happening right now, tech platforms are making money

huge hundreds of billions of dollars of money through a content that creators are creating on the platform. And then you have a bunch of obviously content consumers. And actually, nowadays I tend to call this attention creators, attention consumers. And then you have attention distributors being the tech platform.

And actually, only the very, very minority part of the people, the attention creators, are being paid. The vast majority of the attention creators are actually not being paid. Even within crypto, if you see how many people are actually getting paid by X, very, very little. And then the top guys are being paid 500 US dollar a month, which is laughable. But it's still...

So if you think about the tech platform, you have, let's say, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, X. X, since Elon Musk, is doing one step towards that direction, right? Yes. It's much better than the other ones, which are terrible. I was looking at YouTube. My friends were asking me, like, how much do you make on YouTube? I don't remember exactly. Maybe for a video that has like 150,000 views. Mm-hmm.

maybe a thousand bucks, right? Or I think the number was like per 1,000 views, $8 or something like that. I don't remember. Obviously, it depends where you are, advertiser, all that stuff. But

The takeaway is like, you're not going to go far with this stupid revenues, right? Yep. Which is why you even think about, should I... My rationale since the beginning of the podcast was, I don't want to have any ads. Yep. I have the ads from the sponsors because it's much more better. Yep. They pay much better, right? Yep. But... And also I can basically choose who is advertised. Yes. But the logic was not even that. The logic was...

I make so much no money because I make no money, right? $8 for 1000 views that I don't want to bother people who don't have YouTube premium, which is the majority with these stupid ads, right? Yeah. Then the problem I had was from what I understood, if you don't display the ads, you actually get less views

Like the algorithm favors the people who show the ads, right? Because it's good for YouTube, right? So then I'm like, oh, fuck, right? So the end result is like people have to deal with these stupid ads that bring me almost no money, right? Yeah.

So this is terrible. Yup. So I think up until this point is mostly indirect monetization through building your brand, through doing collaborations, through selling other stuff, which I think will change in the future. Nowadays, I think primarily is because platforms are very closed and they have huge bargaining power.

They have a choice. They have a choice. And think about how many complaints they have been in terms of on YouTube, for example, your channel is being shut. There's very little power that you actually have in terms of, you know, right? And the same thing actually goes to many other platforms. I think that's the first inning in terms of how do you get a fairer distribution of revenue share among the attention creators? Yeah.

And so that's number one. And I think the number two is how do you actually have a, like overall speaking, much more efficient distribution platform that actually involves all the market participants to have skin in the game. And that's a model that none of the Web2 platforms will ever have. But that's a platform, a Web3 platform can have.

If we think about YAPs, that is where YAPs is going. Absolutely. Yeah, I see where you're going. We're getting there. We're very close to getting there. Just thinking about X and Elon strategy, right? Yeah. What do you think of his strategy of rewarding X users with X payouts? What is it incentivizing? I think, so it's very clear that I think he's doing it in the right direction. There are...

there are good outcomes but also unintended consequences that came out of that which we can we can kind of relate to the apps program as well they've been kind of going through different waves but but obviously like

The intended incentivization is people are incentivized to be sharing more, especially content slash attention creators are more dedicated to X. Sharing more X, making your earnings here, be more loyal to the platform.

and create better content so that all the attention consumers can actually stay on the platform for a longer period of time. That's a very straightforward equation. But obviously, the unintended consequences, we've seen a lot of bots. Nowadays, if you see certain viral meme and then the reply session is never talking about the meme itself. It's just posting other memes, right?

It's completely unrelated. It's all dominated by bots trying to get impressions because the methodology that is very primitive, I would say. It's solely based on impressions and has nothing to do with the content. So basically you said they're incentivizing creator to create better content, but that's not necessarily true. More content, but not necessarily better content, right?

I think that becomes the unintended consequence being that it seems policy that you actually have so many more bots. What's the right way to reward content creators, according to you? We're obviously still experimenting. I think YAPs went through different phases. One common complaint about YAPs is why is my YAPs not increasing?

like why is zero zero etc as much as as much as we want to have like we want to reward everyone we need to have a mechanism that is it's almost a very very stringent so that so the best content can be can can be rewarded the most and the and none of the farming activities can actually gain from that system which is very very important because otherwise it will be

it will be a net negative for everyone. It loses all the purposes. The algorithm is never perfect. But I think one thing that's maybe consensual among, at this point, maybe majority of the people is the ones that are actually being surfaced are what people really believe are good algorithms

content or attention creators in the space. And people actually, nowadays a lot of people are going through the emerging Yappa leaderboard to see some of the smaller accounts that actually have very, very good content. Similarly, people go through the market leaderboard that people are creating daily content discovery based on this kind of stuff. And

And what's very unique about that process is we made it so difficult in a way that I think if we look at the kind of the farming, what we classified as farming activities, it hit the peak during Christmas. Absolutely. Yeah. When you announced...

Hey, you have a couple of days to earn that much, right? And everybody was going crazy. I was thinking, fuck, I should have done this podcast two weeks ago when we were, I mean, one month ago. And then now would be the perfect moment for the mindset, right? But absolutely. And fairly quickly, we saw people saying, fairly quickly, we saw people saying,

it didn't last long, right? This farming. Yeah, very, very quickly because people realized that it wasn't only any apps. And what's also really funny was we saw a lot of people

using clickbaits or engagement baits saying that, hey, I did this, I earned a thousand yaps, which is absolutely untrue because, and it's even around in a way that there is a public dashboard, but nobody goes and verify. And then people are just like, oh, holy shit, I should be doing the same. And then everyone's farming. But very, very quickly, people realize, oh, it's actually not working and it's actually hurting

your reputation, which hurts your ability to be doing anything else in the future. So that very quickly stopped. You said no one is going to the leaderboard. I don't agree. I'm going every day. You manage to, like you literally manage. You know, we all use X and maybe like a WhatsApp, Telegram, like a few paths. I'm going every day to freaking Kaito.ai, like literally, like literally.

Every day. So doing something right, I think. Okay, we're going to dive much deeper into yapping, mindshare, social score, all that stuff. Yep. Before that, we talked about Web 2, right? And rewarding users. So let's add the Web 3 component in the attention is the currency kind of concept. How is Web 3 reinforcing this attention is the currency concept? I think the market is implicitly doing that, right? So I think...

obviously like memes is a very, very pure form of attention. It actually put up a framework saying that the valuation framework for meme is attention multiplied by narrative. So the fundamental is your attention. And then the narrative is how much people are willing to pay for one unit of that attention. So within memes,

among the companies or among the memes that have the same attention than people compete on narrative. Like which one is bigger, like which one is more promising, etc. Which one is more unique and original. Among the memes that have the same narrative that people compete on attention. Like which one is getting more attention, etc. And I think that a lot of that, a lot of the stuff in crypto is being valued that way. Absolutely.

You mentioned before AIXBT, right? Yeah. AIXBT is an agent, an AI agent who provides, I mean, who? That, let's say it's not a person, that provides trading information about different crypto projects and gathered like 350K followers and a top mind share on Kaito.ai in a matter of weeks. You said, and that's like so linked to what you talk about right now. You said the value of AIXBT is,

Agent isn't its answer engine. Few would rely on it for trading decisions, let alone paying for it. But it's distribution. The reach, the brand, and the attention it can gather. It can garner. Welcome to the attention economy. And then we even had AIXBT replying to that, right? The attention is always more valuable than the product. You get it, Anon. Yes.

Can you explain that to, you said your mother follows you, so can you explain that to your father? Oh, that's tough. I think in a very abstract way, AIXBT is being valued as an AKOL rather than being valued as kind of an answer engine or whatever, like a terminal. That's just my perspective.

Because if you're being valued as a terminal, then you're being valued based on the willingness to pay for your terminal. But actually, that's not the case. And people actually very quickly realize, okay, it's making a lot of mistakes, citing old data. I can't really trust it. But people are so willing to engage with that because...

it has a very wide distribution. It can garner attention in a way that no one else can. And it also doesn't have any baggage. You tag a XPT, you get a response. You don't get that for any other influences in the space. And, you know, it changed the profile picture and it can change it back. Like, I think that's even also something, right? So for example, for me to change my profile picture, that's like a,

It's almost like changing my identity. AIXBT can essentially do an auction process if it wants to. And I use that as, you know, a revenue generation activity. You said before, personal brands are so important. People want the human aspect, right? But we're seeing in the crypto context that the biggest personal brand is an AI. And it's just now, right? So this is just the beginning. Yeah.

Can big human key opinion leaders even compete with AI KOLs? Yep. I think both were specialized in very different things. And as a matter of fact, if you see the leaderboard, AIXPT is actually the only agent that made it out there. And it's still heavily, if you count how many agents are out there in the market, right? So it's not on the leaderboard. So there's only one agent that really made it.

And part of the reason and part of the lead was also because AI doesn't rest. And it's not just kind of posting 24-7, but we also had a Christmas holiday. And all the other human influences basically took a rest. And ASBT was just churning out content nonstop, even during holiday. But actually, you see that dominance going down.

And nowadays, back in the day, SBT will be always number one, number two, at least top three. And nowadays, it will be just shy of top 10. So I think the power shift always happens based on people's attention in general. How much do people focus on an agent at this single point in time versus maybe a week ago? That's also kind of changing.

And AI expertise is so unique in a way that, like comparing with any of the kind of the web tool agents or, you know, let's say, for example, agent KOLs in the space, that it has a token. So it has a massive token holder base that wants it to do well as well. So that's very unique. That's very different. So that's almost like, let's say you're MERT. You tokenize to self.

you guarantee that, hey, like all my future earnings were going to be, you know, redistributed back to my token holders. I think you'll be by far the most popular account in the space by a mile because there's so many people want you to win as well. It's a double-edged sword, right? Yeah. Actually, I don't remember who said that. It was Keao Wong from Alliance.

This is social tokens, right? Yeah. Basically. But the difference is, I hear some people say the moment a celebrity or a KOL launched their meme coin, which is kind of like the same, it's the end of their career because it's so risky, right? Whereas the AI agent doesn't give a fuck. They don't have these emotions. They're like, oh man, even if it doesn't do well, they don't care, right? Yeah. So that's one of the big differences on...

why the social token almost make more sense for AI agent for the moment than for, 'cause you say, you're seeing the optimist side, which is a Merck launches his token. He will be super popular so long as the token does well. Then you have like a bear market, everybody gets wrecked. It's like a crypto project. Your token does well, your project is amazing. Your token doesn't do well, your project is shit.

For people, right? Yes. But I think historically there's a big disconnect. At least, I think people are giving benefit of doubt to AIXBT in the fact that this agent is not going to launch another token. And then historically what happened in the space is

There's a huge incentive disalignment for any celebrity to launch a meme coin token and then subsequently abandon that and not accruing any of the utilities because there's a natural disconnect between you make all your money on Instagram and all the other deals, but...

They have no obligation to do anything with a token. So you always end very badly. Frontech took maybe one step further, accruing some fundamental utilities. The key being the access, but still relatively loose. If there's a way, which I think we're going to try to do something and see if it works. And if there's a way to essentially tie that

you know, if you have a different relationship and dynamics between you, your fans or attention consumers and the attention distributors and the earnings in the whole ecosystem, and then make that basically, you know, you enforce the value distribution in a trustless way. Maybe there's a way for it to work. We talked about

KOLs launching their tokenizing themselves, right? Another entity that can tokenize itself is a business, right? You built a beautiful, highly profitable equity business in the last three years and are now working on a token powered business. Why would you do that? There are, I think there are at the surface level, there are probably a few reasons. One reason is we always wanted to build a retail product.

And fundamentally, I don't believe the way to build a retail product, at least in our business, is to have a freemium model or a light version that only gets very, very limited set of the features that we currently offer. And I also think that the majority of the people don't necessarily derive sufficient value from using a search engine.

it only makes sense for certain professionals and certain you know team so the majority of our you know the the users on the kaito pro side is you know basically project teams at ethereum solana optimism arbitrum eigenly baritone etc they have to make very good decisions on strategy they have to have a you know feedback loop in in terms of how the marketing is doing

you know, all this kind of stuff. Plus all the, obviously, liquid funds, VCs, and, you know, traders. And for those people, then there is significant value in using a product like that. But for the average, for the average people, they probably can't derive as much value as those people. Then, and I think the retail strategy is not to kind of just build a freemium model, which I think doesn't ultimately make much sense.

So that's number one. So we think about kind of doing something different. Number two is we're in the business of solving problems. For the longest period of time, we have all these teams coming to us and say that, hey, that you have, you have search engine, you know what people historically said, you have everyone's influence, you know, smart followers, you

You have KOL Mindshare, you know how people are performing, you know narrative and token Mindshare, all that kind of stuff. Can you help us streamline our KOL strategy? So in the past, people will be, you know, they're usually speaking the four different parts of that. There is the mapping part. So KOL mapping, which accounts are potentially relevant to you.

for the space that you operate, what kind of businesses, what kind of narratives that you're trying to convey to the market. And then it's the analytics part. Based on your profile, based on your mindshare geography, based on your current audience, which carriers will fit into your campaign strategy, et cetera. And then there is the outreach part.

After you pin down, okay, these are the 10, 20, sometimes even 100, 200 people. Then how can I outreach to these people? And then the fourth part is how can I do performance evaluation, attribution? Like who is doing better, who is doing worse, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. And the whole process is very painful.

And then teams have to go through that on a very, very regular basis and oftentimes a very, very inefficient way. And imagine, and everything is also kind of, the payments put forward in a way that you're paying people upfront and then measuring people by number of posts that they're doing. Yeah, it's the same as everybody was kind of acknowledging that the whole thing

a low float, high FDV, VC game was kind of fucked up, right? And coupled with that was the KOL game. And you have all these KOLs that most of them, they just do shit content, probably a lot of fake followers, fake, you know, it's very easy to fake your numbers. But it was kind of going hand in hand with this VC model. It was a playbook, right? And then you talk to, I mean, I'm an advisor to a few projects and I was like,

this is not there they're like oh yeah i need to go on i mean i can't i can't mention names but like i need to go on this space on this this whatever podcast or this this i need to have these kols and i'm like this is going to give you zero roi yeah and you're going to overpay like crazy and like these kills are paid way too much like way too much for for the

the return, right? Like it's terrible. But the project, they know that. They're like, yeah, I know that, but what else do I do? I don't have any attention, right? So you will pay way too much for very average attention or actually bad. Especially the projects who are not very crypto native. They come, they say, I need to go to these guys, a lot of followers. And like, this is, if you're a crypto Twitter person, you know, like this is a scammer, right? Like literally. But like this, this is a massive problem. Yeah.

It is a massive problem and I actually think that everyone is stuck in that game. And the project teams don't have any alternatives and they're desperate. And by the same time, the good actors in the space are also very disincentivized. And I can tell you some of the stories after. But essentially because of this structure, and actually oftentimes there is an ever-selection problem.

which made it even worse in the fact that the best projects maybe don't even have to do any of these and then they get attention. And then the ones that want to do it or, for example, from a different perspective, the best accounts and KOLs will never charge. And then they will just be organically talking about certain things. And then the ones that you actually pay for

you know, it could be a different game. So there could be an adverse selection problem there. So that's kind of the problem that we saw. And obviously everything comes back to these are the users who have been using Kaito for a long period of time, who have a very long standing relationship with all these teams. We can see the struggles and the pains that they're going through. And then

We want to find a solution to that problem. So that's kind of the second reason why we're thinking about YAPS. And the third one was strategically YAPS is also an insurance policy for KITO Pro. So KITO Pro actually, we index a lot of different data sources, Twitter being one of them, but also at the same time like

you know discord media mirror podcast governance votes research you know all that kind of stuff it's a very comprehensive social listening tool versus slash a research platform but twitter is so important in that we have no control over the access we obviously have a relationship with x but we have no control over the continuity of of the data but

Crypto Twitter is actually dominated. Social media in general is a very 80/20 split. The majority of the high quality content is actually dominated or produced by the minority of the people. If we have a mechanism that we can set up, a direct relationship or direct dialogue with all the people who have been producing very good content, then that becomes a very valuable insurance policy that we have.

So that's kind of a strategically why we're also doing that. What do you mean by insurance policy? Insurance policy being that, hey, like for example, for one day, Twitter decides no one can ever have access to Twitter data. Can we get the consent directly from the users and the most valuable users as you still have access? We obviously don't foresee that happening, but as a business, we're going to think about that business risk.

What's the single most important thing to focus on when building a token business that most crypto projects lack? I think for us, it's probably the demand side of the equation. I think without the demand side of the equation, then YAPS will be completely useless. And it will be just another social farming campaign or whatever that doesn't have any inherent intrinsic value. But that's very quickly changing.

Even just this week, for example, we had a movement, we had a story, we had corn, we had anime, and obviously we launched quite a field of yakult eatables before. And these project teams are using this whole new way to essentially incentivize the community in a completely different manner, completely public, transparent, and inclusive.

freely accessible to everyone. You don't have to be a KOL. You can fairly participate in the game. And everyone is being assessed based on performance and merits rather than based on who you know. Yeah, so ultimately you need to create something that's useful, right? And that makes money. Yeah. It's the same conversation we had with Jeff, actually. He was saying the biggest use case until now for KOL

Crypto is launching scam tokens. Basically, there's no underlying value because it's very hard to build a product that has actual demand, right? Yeah. Which leads us to attention, mindshare, and yaps, right? Or I call it to get views on YouTube, how to get rich with crypto AI and content without getting lucky. You tweeted. Mm-hmm.

Years of our SaaS business plus trust and relationship with hundreds of different teams brought us one thing that is unique, the demand side of the equation. Kaito built the apps because of demand. There's a real problem to be solved here. Just to start. What's the real problem you're trying to solve today? I think crypto is unique in a way that TGE is such a big event and everyone's thinking about decentralizing ownership.

But people historically struggle to find a very good way to do that. I actually read Haseeb's 2025 predictions. And within that, he wrote, obviously, certain projects they will be using. For example, if you're building a pub or exchange or whatever, then your points is basically your users. Whether they're farming or whatever, maybe it doesn't really matter because they're your users.

And then there are kind of a second tier or second category being that maybe you are infrastructure play. And historically, you essentially reward test net users, et cetera. But then nowadays, there's so much industrialized farming activities that would essentially crush the whole initial reward mechanism. Do you then look for alternatives? And then his prediction is people will start rewarding social contribution

plus doing more crowd sale because they can know that these are the real people. And you already seen these. I would say that EigenLayer probably led the trend back in September, then they distributed millions of dollars to content creators. And that was a surprise drop. We helped them essentially going back two and a half years of time

identifying all the accounts that have been generating meaningful content for EigenLayer. And after that, so many projects came to us and said that, can we also do the same? Because we know that these people are real and we know that we can put a content filter. We can leverage our land to understand everything that they said and actually understand

So in the whole game, so it's, A, there's kind of the demand side of the equation that people want to do this. People are willing to kind of set aside very substantial rewards to reward things like this. And there's also the other side that the technology is ready to kind of make a lot of the stuff that was previously just completely impossible. And so that was unique in a way that, you know, even right now we have,

So many projects in the pipeline want to launch the Appalachian leaderboard. And then they will set us up rewards for this. And if you really think about a very, very simple business or equation, every year airdrop is last year, for example, is 15 billion. Every year is above 10 billion. If you believe that in the future, social airdrop with like you can with,

A very solid mechanism can take 10% of the contribution within the initial airdrop. That's a billion dollar of value that we can distribute to all the users.

And to the right users, not the farmers. The right people. So it's just a win-win because the right people are being rewarded. And then you have a stronger community who will be your evangelists, right? And I think one of the misconceptions that people had was, oh, okay, then everything can be gamed. And then you have this leaderboard and maybe it doesn't make sense. But actually people have much more data than that.

If people want to assess your loyalty, people can see how much you've been talking about their project versus others. If people want to assess your value set, everything can be- It kills the whole like classic KOL game, which is I shield something every time I'm being paid for and then I forget them and I go to the next one, right? You can see that directly. Yeah. This is completely- It's so good. Finally, it's so good.

I want to talk about mindshare, yapping, social score, right? And criticism of the Kato AI algo. Yep. What do you define as mindshare? Mindshare is the shell of... It's like a shell of voice that you occupy in people's mind. So effectively, the definition is...

how much you are appearing, how much percentage that you're occupying in people's mind based on all the activities that you're doing. And mostly, for example, on Twitter, it's posts. Okay. But it's complicated in a way that you can't use. For example, if you have a mindset metric based on the impressions, it's going to lead to all the wrong answers. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's, you know, maybe the secret sauce is kind of how we calculate it, how the algorithm is evolving. And behind the scene, there's so much computation that was done. What do you tell the people who say, yeah, but you're the one deciding that for every KPI, right? Yeah. You're the one creating the calculation. Yeah. So it can be wrong or biased. Yes. I think...

So the most important answer is everything that we're doing now. So what we're doing in the future is effectively withdrawing Kaito from everything. So we're very well aware of the risk, as I put it. But there's a natural progression.

So as I kind of mentioned, I think the first inning was information is disorganized. The second inning is there is a relatively good or consensually good algorithm that does a decent job, but it can have risk. So that's what we're doing right now. So this is kind of the second inning. And then that's the third stage, which is financializing everything. Let market forces decide. So...

Very quickly will be actually just I don't know when this is going to be released but in January we're going to be launching an auction based Yappa leaderboard mechanism where Kaito doesn't get to decide which project gets launched on Yappa leaderboard. Actually all the Yappas slash the market will essentially decide who holds that spot to distribute attention. And the future will be more of these

So, yeah, I mean, that's the kind of the future direction that we're heading. And the whole narrative about InfoFi is essentially to solve that. But you need a natural progression there. You need a reference point. And that's kind of the algorithm part. And actually, if you really think about this, in the whole world, crypto is probably the only industry, as ironic as it sounds, that doesn't use AI.

to distribute attention efficiently because the so-called scams, so Twitter ads is completely useless. In every other industry, people are using algorithm to essentially make advertising decisions. Only in crypto is using the most primitive, most opaque, most inefficient distribution mechanism to do this.

So we talked about Mindshare. Let's talk about YAPs. What does a YAP represent concretely? YAP is basically tokenized attention. And the aggregate of YAPs to an account level is effectively, in our view, tokenized influence.

But before we talked about people who, you know, around Christmas, I want to earn YAPs and I'm going to start to do engagement farming and all that stuff, but it doesn't work. What does it tell about how YAPs are calculated basically? How do you come up with this deserves a YAP or a point, which probably in the future is going to be financialized, right? With the token. Yeah.

And this doesn't deserve it. Like, how does the algorithm think? Yep. So there's very much, the algorithm can be bespoke and custom made. So for YAPS, because it's a points program, when it's a heavily disincentivized farming and heavily incentivized

real engagement, original content, creative content, all this kind of stuff, then we'd essentially let the algo evolve in a certain way. But actually, if you see some of the community app leaderboards, they're being run on completely different algo because ultimately that's where these projects would essentially decide. It can completely be custom made. So for example, a simple example would be

in YAPs, you wouldn't be earning points just by vibing. For Kaito, we don't necessarily want to incentivize that. But actually for some of the community projects, they won't. So you don't have to be very, very insightful or original. Copy-paste that can also be fine as long as everyone is saying

For example, we're launching on Q5 or Oga Booga or whatever, Gmove. And the people essentially want certain subculture to evolve. And every community is very different in that construct and setup. So the algorithm will all be different. But what you're doing, you said is not... Desensitivized. Desensitivized.

That's how you evolve crypto into a better place, right? The problem for me of like a project can come and say, oh, we're going to do our own YAP and then we're going to twist the algorithm. Like they can still not change much of what has been done now because they just want the attention. If the founder is very short-term focused and wants like a huge valuation and then get the money and then leave, right? They can still...

say, okay, the algo should work that way so that we're maximizing for short-term attention and buzz and all that stuff and it doesn't really matter, right? So you need to have a human who is well-intentioned, right? Yep. I think we obviously, as Kaito, we have a North Star. We can maybe talk about this in a bit. We are, especially with a business that's already decently profitable and successful in people's eyes,

whatever we do, whatever we do, we, you know, we have a North star and a mission driven, you know, we're effectively kind of mission driven believers in that, you know, construct. So that, you know, that's kind of up until this point, how we've been selecting, you know, certain projects over all of the others. But I think eventually we'll be left to the market and you have to have, you have to put the trust into the market somehow that people collectively trust

people collectively but also that obviously there's going to be a part of our job as well like for example simple example if people are voting with yaps we'll essentially determine who gets yaps right if we're distributing yaps in a relatively good way then people with the right influence will essentially you can trust them with the right absolutely decisions

But over time, I totally see, I think, Kaito gradually being removed and withdrawn from the entire system. And, you know, and also, you know, part of the network, the ownership of the network was also going to be decentralized. And we've seen that for people who might, even me, I was thinking, can you really let markets decide? But we've seen it with Polymarket, how right and how wrong.

early they were on like US elections. So like it's kind of like the ultimate proof on markets can do the job much faster in a much more efficient fashion than anything else, right? Yeah. You built a social score. I look at that all the time. Social card, yes. No, because like you're thinking in crypto when you're trying to create good content of quality,

your numbers, all that stuff will increase slower than if you're just like engagement farming. It's the same on X. I'm talking about the fires in LA and the day after I'm talking about the Ukraine war and then I get my numbers and maybe the payout, right? Whereas like with your algo, like you can see, oh man, this thing seems to be really rewarding, like quality stuff, right? Obviously, everyone is biased towards their own content. The thing is quality. But

What is your concrete goal with the creation of a social score? I think, I mean, the whole social card was obviously part of the marketing campaign. But I think deep down, a lot of the metrics that we're really focused on is at least from the demand side of the equation, like what these high quality projects really focus on. So people are very fed up with fake numbers, right?

So we came up with smart followers. It's never going to be perfect, but it kind of takes one step further to what people want to see. And then the problem arose being that, okay, social graph can be relatively static, right? So you can have like people who may be respected in the past and now completely ruins everyone's trust and no one wants to be engaging with this particular person anymore, right?

So it can still have a relatively high smart follower, but actually the mindshare can be much lower today. And then that's a very dynamic equation. And ultimately, that kind of paints a picture

a better picture than you're looking at some of the some of the alternative headline data like for example how many followers that to be honest i think everyone is already doing that in the space in a way that like people for example if you click consulting peaceful profile that you'll be seeing how many people are you follow actually follow this particular absolutely so we're just doing that on a bigger scale and quantifying and tokenizing um attention and influence in a

in a kind of a more algo driven way. Talking about the algo, what are the current flaws and biases in the way the Kaito AI algo works? Yeah, I would say the YAPS points system has a more bias towards whether you like it or not like it, but has kind of a more bias towards how the inner circle perceives things.

Inner Circle means big people. But not necessarily big people. So it's based on a social graph. So this is an objective social graph. So if you think about the entire CT, so at this moment, 250,000 people have registered to be upper. The entire CT is rather, including some of the not very active accounts, will be 20 million different accounts, of which...

400K, 400,000 accounts or so will have a few smartphones, which I tend to think that this is kind of people who have some sort of social reputation. And within this, if you kind of just map out the entire CT graph, and then if you condense that to kind of the smallest circle, then these people...

historically would have done something different to have earned that social capital. And Vitalik, for example, today is number one in that social graph, not because he has the large number of followers. He actually doesn't. But actually he's followed by the most people. He's done something to have earned that social capital.

reputation and social capital. And if you extrapolate that to have a big enough social graph, then these people would essentially be considered as smart followers. But it's very dynamic. How many people are in this inner circle?

More or less. It's kind of in the tune of tens of thousands. Tens of thousands? Yeah. So the YAPs are more rewarded based on how many of these, let's say, 10,000 people

are interacting with your posts? Not necessarily, but that's kind of... Yeah, so that's kind of where the reputation-based engagement works. And the underlying premise is if you're able to get more reputable people to be engaging with you, for example, if you can get Elon Musk to be engaging with you, then

your content is probably worth something. But that's only one part of the equation. Even if people are outside of crypto Twitter, if they have big accounts and they interact with you, you're being rewarded for it.

TBD. Okay. Yeah. But obviously there is other metrics. For example, if you say that, hey, I'm going to the gym, all that kind of stuff, that's not considered as crypto-relevant content. So there's a lot of stuff. For example, we have a metric checking originality. And we can actually see the whole distribution. And it's a very normal distribution with a peak value.

on the kind of a close to kind of 100% part. 100% being that you're a complete copypasta. So a lot of people, they... So we essentially will kind of... So if you inspire yourself too much from other people's content, the AI will see it and will be like, this is not worth points. Interesting. Even just a kind of a direct translation. Because across languages...

paraphrasing, summarizing content. And it's very evolving as well. So what I said today could also change quite a bit. And kind of AI is also having that dynamic evaluation mechanism. There's also kind of a difficulty adjustment as more people come in, as more content comes in, then, you know, it kind of always adjusts. What's the goal of the Yap campaign?

I think YAPS to us is just onboarding. It's nothing more than onboarding. So it's very, very early. And we have the demand side of the equation and then YAPS is our way to bootstrap the supply side of the equation to get people to start being part of the ecosystem. But

It's not a product. I know that a lot of people already kind of, you know, check out the leaderboard and maybe, you know, find out some of the newer accounts, et cetera. But in my view, it's not a product that people can use yet. Like you earn your YAPs, you can't use your YAPs. And that's going to change very soon. The only way to earn YAP today is to YAP. Yeah. YAP points, right? Yeah. All refer people. Refer people? Yeah.

So does that mean that YAP points are part of the future token? Because I'm guessing like early users of the product. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm guessing YAPers. I'm guessing maybe NFT holders, like different ways to earn some points or whatever. Maybe you're going to create new ones, I guess. Can you tell us more about like the ways today and maybe the new ways to earn points? Because...

Basically, how to get more engaged in the community that we know is going to reward in a fair fashion people when you launch a token in the future. Yeah. We obviously can't comment on the distribution and who's going to get what. But I think in our view, we want to see two things happening. One is...

We want people, I think the ideal state is people keep doing what they're doing. Absolutely. And almost forget that there is the apps. And we're doing everything that we can to essentially get to that stage. And the second thing is we want this to be as fair and as a level playing field as possible.

And you actually see that nowadays, a lot of the very, very small accounts with a couple hundred followers can essentially make it a leaderboard. And we want to have this mechanism to improve in a way that good accounts and good content and good voices can be heard.

So these are the two things that we're definitely working on. But the first one is very important. We want people to almost forget about YAPs and keep doing what they're doing. That's actually, when I started, it was my thought. I was like, first I'm like, oh, I'm getting some YAPs. Then everybody's trying to game that, obviously. And then you're like, the first, because there was a guy who commented, I wrote that somewhere,

"Lol, I skip all these gamification services that try to reward you to tweet. They all fall and tokens aren't ever worth it because everyone is trying to farm it. Not worth my time and mental capacity." And for me, I was like, "This is the ultimate test to see if the farmers, right, how many days

well they continue or they realize oh i'm not getting earning points yeah so i'm going to stop and it happens so quickly a few days yeah done right i was like wow this is uh this is different from all of these other uh kind of protocols that can be kind of farmed and you end up in this or even just twitter x where you have all these noise makers right who end up getting rewarded with actual money yep one one other thing that's also unique is

We don't require people to be talking about Kaito. You can talk about anything. I would want to see you talk about everything rather than just directing all this stuff at Kaito. You mentioned the NFT before. You launched the Kaito Genesis NFT a few weeks ago. 1,500 NFTs minted at 0.1 ETH. That went overnight to about 4 ETH. So it's like a 40x overnight just for minting an NFT. Pretty amazing. Yeah.

Why do you think people value the Kaito NFT so much? I think one of the most important fundamental reasons was the majority of the NFT allocation was to the early users. Even to this day, they're using Kaito from the pro side. Yesterday, we also made a big launch for every single project team right now. They can track all their social KPIs

impressions, mind share, sentiment, breakdown in terms of attribution, what are some of the most popular tweets I had from my brand account, from my affiliated team accounts, external mentions, how do I break down my mention, mentions, mind share, sentiment, involvement, doing social listening across all the other platforms. These are

Our users are using our tools on a daily basis. And you tend to have a very strong conviction because of that. So I think that's one thing that's very unique. That's how you create value, actually. That's what Hyperliquid did amazingly well. You have the big believers and these people will be... Because they're believing, they're just holding the thing. Therefore...

if there is more demand and there is a limited supply the token or the nft goes up and i i tend to really not focus on the prices and everything but one thing that people told me was like there were only like 20 or 30 after he's been listed yeah which says a lot about i think how much how much conviction that our users are placing onto us

So what you just mentioned before is basically what you call proof of attention. Proof of attention is now accessible and verifiable on-chain and verifiable on-chain builders no longer need to ask for our permission to access our YAPs. We hope to make this a frequent update and ideally a border set. Yep. Let the innovation begin. What is proof of attention? Proof of attention is basically people's YAPs and, and,

In an algorithm, obviously, you know, that we designed and people have to be trusting the algorithm is working. But obviously, like all the public leaderboards is out there for people to sense check and verify whether that kind of aligns and everything is being updated on a real time basis that people can check, hey, over the last 24 hours, who is making the list. And over time, that if you have that trust on to people's YAPs, some sort of proxy for people's

for attention that people garnered and for the influence that's kind of being reflected by the amount of attention that they can garner, then that's proof of attention. What we did was we put that YAPS data, proof of attention, at least for the top 1,000 YAPs on chain, so that all the people who want to build on top of that

doesn't necessarily have to get our permission. And that's a huge enabler because as a builder, A, obviously it reduces friction. And B is you have peace of mind that one day this data is not going to disappear.

You can always rely on some sort of data that exists there. So since then, we have had voluntary collaborations. And oftentimes people would just essentially come to us and say that, by the way, we've done this using the data. And that is great. Can you give us some examples? We have a lot. So for example,

People are doing the, so I think Kuai was for example doing the incentivized testnet and then essentially wire listed all the NFT holders and YAP users. Soon did the ICO essentially give all the YAP users a discount based on the YAPs that they have and based on the social reputation that they have. So we supply that data. And

I think quite a lot of projects within the bear chain ecosystem, which are very focused on the social and connection side of things, are also doing the integration with the YAPS data. So it becomes, and we also just had a conversation I can't share, but it's one of the very, very prominent fundraising platform, ICO platform, that essentially decides to kind of open up

thinks about integrating with YAPs because they know for sure that these people are real people and they have some sort of influence and social capital within the space. And it becomes very composable, completely permissionless, and it's always going to be there. I had a conversation with Wiki, the co-founder of Virtuals, a few weeks ago, and he told me how much Jeff Yan and Hyperliquid

example forced them to change their fundraising model. They essentially said, we wanted to go and raise, but we're not going. We're not going to raise any VC money. You said the significance of Hyperliquid's rise goes beyond the product itself. It deep inspires all builders who come after. This is likely the profound impact it is making on the space. What did you decide to change at Kaito after seeing what the Hyperliquid team pulled off?

I think there are certain things that we're learning from Hyperliquid. And when I was posting that tweet, one aspect that we're already doing is I think that the Hyperliquid model inspired the builders to be thinking that good products can actually win in this market. You don't necessarily need...

to be changing narrative. If you actually have a good product, your users will stand beside you and support you. And if you take care of your users, then it can become a very, very powerful thing. And that kind of changes the whole relationship in the ecosystem. I think that's something that we're already doing because

We've always been very, very focused on building a product that people use. That's kind of in my bio as well. And I think that's very aligned with Hyperliquid. And then what I really learned from the Hyperliquid experience is once you have a good product and we're not doing everything perfectly, we're kind of taking a lot of learnings as we go as well.

and criticisms and feedback from the community, et cetera, that we need to create a very fair and good merit-based and relevance-based and maybe loyalty-based distribution system as well. And I've been praising...

the All Points program. So initially we're kind of, you know, debating between different setups. But I think ultimately, I think the HyperLiquid model gave us the inspiration in a way that points doesn't have to be, it's okay for it to be hard to earn. And people can have different ways. We're going to be introducing them. But you need to be very, very clear in terms of

what's the desired behavior that you want to incentivize. And so that was that. And also, obviously, like second thing is the how you think about the whole distribution. And what's the relationship between you and your users and kind of the broader distribution. That's kind of the second thing that we'll be thinking a lot. And you mentioned building a useful product, right? The reason why Hyperliquid has so much leverage is

and could create such an impact on their early users life and the crypto industry as a whole is because they have a good product and because they have users and they're paying. Basically, they're making money, right? - Yep. - You also created a business that is very profitable. You said Kaito.ai grew ATX last year?

Came to 110x. 110x in the last couple of weeks. We had a good December. That's a decent December, yeah. So there is probably something that entrepreneurs can learn from you in terms of thinking about the product idea and how to reach product market fit and how to go to market. How do you start a business when there is no comparison? I think it always comes down to the first principle. At least that's kind of how we operate. And first principle in the sense of

And not be afraid that something hasn't been created before, something hasn't been done before. First principle as in, is there a problem that is worth solving? And that is a valuable problem to be solving for. I think that's fundamentally everything comes down to that. Either you're building an equity business, either you're building a token business, I think it doesn't really matter. Ultimately, it's just a kind of a,

is a different distribution that you're thinking in the end. And these things can change over time depending on circumstances. But the thing that's not going to be changing is whether you're solving a problem that actually exists and whether people care about that problem or not. You said the only way we can collectively be a positive sum game in the industry

is if more entrepreneurs try competing new different products instead of slight improvements. I think I'm a firm believer in that. And I can give you an example where we've probably been asked millions of different times whether we want to do on-chain analytics because people perceive us as an analytics company. But the way that we're really thinking is...

If there are other people already done certain things, then we might as well just stand on the shoulders of the giants and then push the boundary somewhere else. Yeah. And I truly believe that that's how the whole industry can move forward. You don't think about, obviously I think marginal improvement is important, but I think that I've seen certain times that people being too focused on

you know, creating something. Even a lot of the time it's like, because I think part of the problem is PMF is very, very rare in this space. Like people are dying for that. And then people will just do everything to essentially copy the leader. But innovation doesn't come from that. A lot of the times that people want to be, hey, I just want to be a beta of that leader.

But as a space, we should be inspired to be doing, or at least not afraid to be doing something that completely no one else has done before. Or even if you, if you're inspired by certain things, then, then maybe think about it, an angle that's, you know, that's very value creative. So I actually, I, you know,

I think, you know, obviously a lot of psychos that people have been talking about, vampire attacks, all that kind of stuff. I think it's, as an industry, we should move away from doing all of those, but actually thinking about creating new things. You have a team, you have a great team, obviously, to help you do that. Proud of them, yeah. But you're a solo founder. Yeah. Is this good or bad? I think it's both good and bad. Yeah.

In my case, that just happens to be the case. I think the good thing is the team can be very focused and there's pretty much zero time wasted on debating certain things, which can be dangerous, obviously. And it can be vulnerable as well at times when things are not working so well. Do you have examples?

that we've been you know building obviously since 2022. it's not just all good times they're kind of one and a half years of bear in between many tough tough decisions we had to make even just 12 months ago like 12 months ago when we were kind of first launching because we knew nobody at the time and then all our all the people that we knew were you know

some of the VC investors. And then they looked at the product and then they were like, okay, I'm making this venture investment and your search engine doesn't give me a lot of information about these private deals. I don't know whether I support your mission, but do I really pay 10,000 US dollar for this? So that was even just like 12 months ago. Think about the adoption that we currently have and things...

Things can change very, very quickly when, you know, the adoption starts. But, you know, at times of difficulty, there's no one else that you can rely on, chat to. Obviously, like, I can talk to my team, but no one else is in the kind of exact same shoe as you.

Yeah, for the bad times, absolutely. It's great to have co-founders, but if it comes down to the same thing as we were talking in the beginning, which is trading or investing or entrepreneurship, when you have your gut feeling about like, you have your idea and you know, start and sometimes you can't really explain why this is the right decision. You just know it, right? When you have a co-founder and you have to explain why, it can be very hard, right? Or it can be like...

very frustrating and yeah absolutely yep it's almost like a marriage but not based on personality based on complimentary oh yeah oh you have exactly complimentary and you have people who say okay this guy has the vision and even if I'm a co-founder I'm not

I'm a co-founder for technical, for example, so I make my vision on the way we build the technical side. But the vision of the business is left to this guy because he's the kind of originator of the idea. It's very hard to have, like, I guess, multiple people who are originator of an idea and how it should evolve, right? Yeah.

I have too many examples in my own life with that, with businesses. Like I realized I always ended up, I always started businesses with co-founders and I always ended up being solo founder. Every business.

And it's exactly because of that. In the beginning, I was thinking, oh, I can't start this thing alone. It's too hard, blah, blah, blah. But then you have your gut feeling, they don't understand. Like they don't understand why I don't want to take the shortcuts here and the shortcut there and why I don't want to make money now because it's going to come in one year because first we need to build this, this, this, this, this because there's a logic. But I can't explain it. I mean, I can explain it but it's going to take me too much time. Like you should understand it. Like, you know? And it's, yeah. Yeah. I feel you. There is a...

on your website called Kaito Connect. I clicked on it. I'm early bird number 58,227. I felt very special. How does Kaito expand its social score or YAPs or tool set outside of crypto? It's definitely something that we're thinking a lot. I think crypto is unique in a way that

There is so much in the stake in terms of the value distribution. And it's so inefficient just in terms of the distribution as the status quo. So we obviously also, we know the space. So that's why we focus on that. But I think the two expansions that we're going to be looking to make is even within crypto beyond X, thinking about other platforms.

And the unique problems that's going to create is actually very interesting. If you think about TikTok as an example, right, then it becomes a multi-model because most of the content is not just text and it's video. But also sometimes you have certain content that's completely digital.

Just, there's no sound. And then you need to extrapolate, extract the text, trying to understand what's happening. There's no social graph. It's not like, you know, crypto Twitter. There's no reputation. It's kind of, reputation works in a very different way. And it's siloed, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. So it's very, very unique problems that people got to be thinking about. But essentially like,

you know, you have TikTok, you have YouTube, you have like all the other different things. So maybe you can do GitHub as well. Different things, right? You can do own chain reputation, et cetera. So even within crypto, you have multiple other platforms that you should venture out to. But I think it's completely compatible to anything that's outside of crypto. If you dream of a situation that we're able to redefine

the relationship between attention creators, attention consumers, and attention distributors within a space right now. And are we able to do this across all the other space? And with the added benefit that you can actually link everyone's identity across platforms. Everyone's identity, everyone's content across platforms. No one can actually do this today.

And none of the tech platforms actually will talk to each other. You said before we're not an analytics company. Yeah. I mean, what are you? Because even for me now, I understand exactly what you're trying to do, but I can't put a word on it. Yeah. I don't know. I think it was some sort of hybrid between tech and crypto. I'll say that the big difference when you think about an analytics company is...

For example, if Google has Google Analytics, you wouldn't be calling Google an analytics company. I would say that the core DNA of an analytics company is data science. And they have to be very, very good data analysts. We're not data analysts. We are software engineers and AI engineers. And that's actually one thing that's the most different.

if you think about some of the data giants in in crypto in the space they come from that part of the domain but we're different you explained like how you want to kind of connect these different platforms and create like social profiles based on reputation if you had to explain in like a sentence what's the big vision for kaito what would it be i think the big vision for kaito is

to come up with a better system and a better network that can distribute information, attention, and capital in a better way. And that will cut through everything that we do. What excites you the most about the future? I think to let people have the aha moment of realizing, okay, things have changed for the better. And that's kind of a, if you really think about

For example, once you put the builder's hat on, the happiest moment is never that you've seen certain people paid or whatever, but it's actually people will come to you and say, hey, I really enjoy using your product. It's the same thing that every builder will say to you. And for us into the future, all the stuff that we're doing around YAPS,

The single most important North Star from our perspective is whether this is doing something for the better. What's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months? YAPs is going to be currency. I think that's very important. I think some of the things are really interesting. For example, it's DEF CON and we hosted a Growth CON event.

you know what I'm saying, growth conference. And I showed a couple of different charts. And one of that was Mindshare. 12 months ago, very, very few people were talking about Mindshare. And then today, a lot of people talk about Mindshare. And we obviously, you know, certainly didn't coin the word, but we essentially built a lot of features around that so that people can

start relating to it, reference to it. And then, so now that becomes such an important word in people's mind. And starting from November or so, we start talking about YAPS, YAPING. I had this thesis of that YAPING nowadays is not considered or that was before we launched YAPS. I tell everyone that YAPING

there's a huge narrative change around yapping, that yapping is no longer negative. Yeah, it was negative. Absolutely. It's like you're just yapping on your side, blah, blah, blah, like ranting. And then I even remember, I think a year ago, I saw a column in which campaign, it was like comparing Gavin Wood versus Anatoly from Solana. And then they were comparing how many, you know, the number of tweets that you sent versus number of reposts.

that you do on GitHub. And it was a very big negativity towards founders only being very vocal on X, but not necessarily pushing codes on GitHub. I think that whole method is changing. Actually now founders are being praised if they have a very strong cultural presence on the community and on social side of things. And I think over the next 12 months that this

This will be more decentralized. And it's not going to be just for the founders. And we're already seeing a lot of that. For example, team marketing is no longer just the founder plus... In the past, it's the marketing department. And last year, it was maybe the marketing department plus the founder. In the future, it's going to be the marketing department plus the founder plus everyone on the team. And communities will play a huge part in that.

you know building that vibe and that will manifest into distribution how everything is being measured all that kind of stuff it's going to be a level playing field where everyone can participate rather than just a handful of people control the distribution so good i mean you talk about the aha moment like for me i completely had it

I mean, I'm having it every day more, right? But I had it like, I'm like, this is finally something that makes so much sense. And it's true. I'm just saying that like, that's why like a month and a half ago, two months ago, I was like, no one is talking about

to you right i mean i don't see you anyway like why like these guys are the mind share of kaito is like growing so much and like people talk about this thing but why and then i started to get more involved and the the with this yap uh kind of program just i connect i did a bit too late but i connect and then i just start to understand i'm like man this makes so much sense for so many things and we're just at the beginning right so

Thank you so much for doing this today. Thank you for having me. And thank you for what you're doing for the industry. Like it's so needed. And I mean, the crypto space needs more transparency for sure. And I have no doubt that your YAPs, social scores and everything else you have in store will have a profound impact on the way crypto protocols organize themselves, do business and reward their community in a more fair fashion moving forward.

Hopefully one day people will forget about Kaito, but we'll be leaving the network as our legacy. And then everyone can benefit from it and also be the building blocks of seeing that coming through. Amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. That was so, so, so good.