Background
Mint Season 6 episode 15 welcomes Richard Chen, general partner at 1Confirmation and a dune top wizard. For the next half hour we discuss all things venture investing, where data meets the creator economy, music NFTs, building a successful community, and so much more.
I hope you guys enjoy our conversation.
Time Stamps
- 00:08 – Intro
- 02:05 – Crypto Startups at Universities
- 05:26 – Balancing Data and Privacy
- 06:29 – How a VC Can Use On-Chain Data For Investments
- 08:14 – Understanding the Web3 Creator Economy
- 09:33 – A Crypto-Enabled Music Industry
- 12:01 – What’s Preventing Music NFTs From Getting to that Next Phase?
- 13:31 – A Breakthrough Artist in Web3
- 15:45 – The Overlap Between On-Chain Data and the Creator Economy as a Whole
- 17:18 – Metrics to Measure the Success of a Community
- 18:04 – Things to Look For When Collecting an NFT
- 20:21 – Data Products’ Role in Web3
- 21:09 – Richard’s Investing History
- 23:12 – Building a Successful Community
- 24:36 – Debatable Thoughts in the World of Crypto
- 26:37 – Thoughts on Web3 Social Applications, New Social Graphs, Etc.
- 28:10 – Web2 Social Versus Web3 Social
- 32:25 – Outro
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Richard, welcome to mint. Thank you for being on a part of season six. How are you doing?
Richard Chen: Good. How are you, Adam?
Intro
I’m good. Thank you for making the time, we didn’t get the chance to connect in Berlin. But I did see your magnificent wizardry talk at the dune con. So, props on that. And I have some questions to ask you about that entire ordeal, about your presentation. And I guess also just the general state of on chain data. But before we get into that, I want to know who are you? Let the audience know. And then more specifically, how did you get your start into crypto?
Richard Chen: Cool. Yeah, I’m Richard. I’m a general partner at one conformation and we’re a seed stage crypto venture fund. Some of our big investments include the seed round of open sea back in 2018, DYDX in 2017, super rare, Nexus mutual, a lot of the blue chip defi NFT projects we know today. I guess how he got started in crypto, this was around 2015. And I was doing research in cryptography in like with Dan Monet’s PhDs and that’s how I learned about Bitcoin Ethereum for the first time, then, like, thereafter, co-founded the Stanford blockchain club with a few other folks and really just went down the rabbit hole from there.
So, you actually seem like a community builder at heart, having co-founded the Stanford blockchain club, but also you seem incredibly technical. And, yeah, with a very, like investment sort of mindset, considering the fund that you’re running. I’m curious, how did starting the club lead to where you are today?
Richard Chen: Yeah, so I mean, this is back in 2017. And like, we would be inviting guest speakers. And other thing is like, there weren’t that many people interested in crypto at the time. So, you know, probably like a dozen or so in the club. And maybe like 40, or 50, who attended, like events. But it was a really tight knit community just to find like all the like-minded people on campus. And that really kind of translated well as like I worked full time in crypto and like understand crypto native communities, community building, kind of the ethos and culture.
Interesting. So, I co-founded the blockchain club at USC. I graduated in 19. When did you graduate?
Richard Chen: 18.
Crypto Startups at Universities
18, Okay, so what I feel like our paths have crossed in the past at some point somehow, but that’s really cool. I wouldn’t be here in crypto if it wasn’t for like the university ecosystem. And what’s interesting about where we are today, I’ve yet to see like more university based crypto startups sort of emerge and take charge. I’m curious, how are you seeing the current university landscape in terms of like crypto startups?
Richard Chen: I say the quality is still like a tear below. People who’ve, like been working in the real world for quite a bit. And I think it just takes, it’s more so like a mindset, like maturity and focus. And like, when you’re still a student, you have a lot of optionality. You kind of get distracted, you feel more FOMO and pressure, but you sort of like mature and mellow out the older you get. I think that’s a really important character trait of founders, especially working in web three, because you have these like boom, bust cycles, or crypto crashes 90%. And you need to have the stoicism and the conviction to like stick through a long term.
Yeah. Because three of the like three of the six most valuable companies in the world, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, were all born on college campuses. And the list goes on, like Snapchat was co-founded at Stanford, Reddit was created in a dorm room at the University of Virginia. I’m curious to see what sort of like crypto projects emerge out of that young, ambitious sort of energetic culture that that we have yet to see, like more either on a protocol level and application level, what are some things that you wish existed today? Like, if you had a wand kind of thing, taking inspiration from another podcast that I heard? If you had a wand to sort of kind of like, poof, you have this product that you sort of envisioned? What would that be as an investor, for example.
Richard Chen: I mean, like the list could go on. I mean, there’s still a lot like a big kind of open space in like scalability research. And, you know, right now, like, the big thing is, zero knowledge ZKEVM. But that’s just the very tip of the iceberg. And there’s still a lot of state of the art to be done in like, for example, ZK hardware, that’s kind of one of the bleeding edge research areas of creating custom ASICs, for general generating zero knowledge proofs. There’s a tradeoff space right now between scalability and EVM compatibility and you know, finding the right trade off, there’s a lot of projects working on that and like kind of picking the point on the efficient frontier. So that’s like one area, I guess another area like bleeding edge, I think AMMs is is like one of the top contributions that crypto is like made to like the world and there’s still a lot of research and kind of greenspace. And like the next gen designs of AMMs, like, constant function, market makers, replicating market makers, which basically you can replicate the payoff of a derivative with the spot markets. And so, this is like so much coming out of research. And like, that’s why I’m really excited about, like crypto projects are, like kind of taking this new ideas and research and then turning them into products.
Balancing Data and Privacy
Where do you think data products fall into place with all these new privacy-based primitives? Right, and zero knowledge proofs and all this new tech that’s sort of emerging? Where does data come into place in all this?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I mean, privacy is important. I think the next, the bottleneck of real-world data on chain is privacy is like kind of you look at like, what are the use cases, people want to bring real world data on chain, it’s like, cross margining. So, like using your Trad fi or Coinbase FTX bank accounts as margin, which you probably don’t want people to know your balances. So, like, that’s where privacy comes in. Even things like credit scores, healthcare data, this is like very down the road. Privacy is a is an important attribute that people want to bring their data on chain.
So very much used case dependent, in terms of what these applications will be sort of, like integrated with.
Richard Chen: Yeah, yeah.
How a VC Can Use On-Chain Data For Investments
When you think about as a VC using on chain data to make decisions, investment-based decisions, what is your mental model of sort of using like, let’s say a product like Dune, for example, in finding the right projects to invest in?
Richard Chen: Yeah, so I use dune like, every day, like more than I want to imagine.
You’re the top wizard on there.
Richard Chen: Yeah, I guess. So. Yeah, I just hit 10,000 stars today.
Congrats.
Richard Chen: So pretty big milestone. But so like, I use generally we divide our investments into like pre product and post product. So pre product like Dune, maybe you could get some insights into like the industry trend and like understanding the macro landscape of a specific sector, say some verticalized NFT marketplace, like vertical. But it’s still a lot of intuition and just developing DC like more qualitative, but if it’s post product, then you can use dune. And like really find hidden gems that aren’t really hyped-up Twitter narratives. But there’s real usage there and like getting investing early. So, I talked a little bit about this in my talk at dune con, but a super rare was like the perfect example, where this was during the middle of defi summer, all the DMS on Twitter were raving about yield farming and like they are kind of Too Cool for school kind of attitude with regarding NFTs. But if you look at the data superare was growing, 50% month over month. And that’s where we made the investment until I say like March 2021, when that’s when people did the big sale and suddenly NFTs became mainstream and it finally exploded. But by then it was kind of late to like jump on that bandwagon for NFTs. So that’s were using data like Dune you can really inform your decision making and get into good projects early on.
Understanding the Web3 Creator Economy
What metrics or trends would you look at to understand sort of where we are today as web three, native creater economy sort of exists? Like, how would you sort of measure the growth? What metrics would you look at to determine that?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I think, well, obviously that big KPIs are volume, like monthly volume growth for a lot of these marketplaces. I think one underrated metric is like distribution of collectors. And that’s really with the way you inform, whether or not it’s a organic community or it’s kind of this like narrative. That’s like kind of being forced. So, like, basically, the more equitable the distribution of collectors is like, the lower the Gini Coefficient, then I feel like the community is more organic. And that’s, that was actually one like underrated aspect of super rares community at the very beginning is, it was a very robust community. And there was a buy in from like, tons of collectors, not just a couple of whales that were kind of buying a bunch of stuff in shilling. I think that’s really important when you kind of measure the health of a lot of these early creator economy projects and markets is like, are there a lot of people like collecting and like supporting these artists?
A Crypto-Enabled Music Industry
That makes sense. One of the more interesting sectors that I’ve been, I guess doubling down on as the music NFT sector. I know you’ve made some investments in that category from catalog for example. I’m curious what is your thesis on, I guess like a crypto enabled music industry. What does that look like for you?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I mean, I think music NFTs is kind of the tip of the iceberg for like new search and discovery. Yeah, like music creation is like basically kind of filling the void of like what SoundCloud failed to do. And maybe there’s a future world where musicians are getting started don’t have to sign with record labels and management companies and like, have very onerous terms. Because music NFTs and like web three music gives them alternative business model for starting their careers.
So, when you see the current state of music, NFTs, is it evolving into what you expected when you initially made some of your bets or has it changed?
Richard Chen: So, I guess, volume wise, it’s gone down a lot in this like, kind of mini bear market. So that’s different than what I expected. I think another thing that was different on the flip side is like the growth of kind of on chain music creation and like these tools, like didn’t really exist a year or two ago. So, like our pay is a really good example that we invested in is like building a doll fully on chain. And you know, there are a lot of doll projects, just like in the traditional music world. But having like a crypto native doll is like really interesting when you can tie attribution to like creators of like different layers of the music, like people who create beats, people create like certain like synthesizer tracks, and you can layer them together. And with like NFTs in the blockchain, you can attribute those to the original creators. So, when someone remixes your music, you can kind of have this dependency graph and like down the road, you can tie in interesting business models like royalties where like, say you made a really popular beats and like every remix or who uses it, you get like some share of royalties. So, it’s a really novel zero to one idea that’s kind of just at the very tip of the iceberg. I like to see this experimentation.
What’s Preventing Music NFTs From Getting to that Next Phase?
So, let’s kind of brainstorm for a minute. So, as we continue down this road of experimentation, what other products or services do you think are missing, that are preventing music NFTs from getting to that next phase?
Richard Chen: I think it’s more of just like awareness, more so than mechanical services. And this is also another thesis I have is like, I’m more skeptical of like, big name, like mainstream artists, you know, getting into music NFTs because it’s usually, it tends up turning into a cash grab. And it’s kind of a, you know, innovators dilemma is like they have this really profitable existing business model. So, they could probably care less about web three, if things go south. Because they have a really nice, like, a fallback option to go through. So, like I feel like for music, NFTs like the thing that’s going to catalyze the industry has to be like a web three native artists like someone who became big only because of music NFTs. And you can look at like crypto art as an example where artists like x copy, Hackett Tao, Puck, maybe people and others, like they were not big traditional artists that were selling like millions of dollars at Christie’s and Sotheby’s like they only became big because of crypto. And they really understood the crypto native ethos. So, we’re just kind of waiting for that moment and music NFTs. And I think it’s bound to happen sometime.
A Breakthrough Artist in Web3
Is that measured through primary and secondary sales? Or is that measured using like traditional metrics, like Spotify streams, going on world tours? Like, how do you kind of categorize a breakthrough artist in web three?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I guess it will be sales. And I think like the value the NFTs is like comes from like the NFT appreciating, not like through like adding cash flows to the actually, I think that’s like, a big misconception a lot of people make, is they try to apply this web to business model to music NFTs. But if you look at it, like the amount of value capture is way more from like the NFT appreciating than, like earning some fixed income from whatever concert ticket sales they do, or whatnot.
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve been collecting a lot of music NF Ts either on catalog, on sound, whatever it may be. And I really enjoy the process of being able to support an artist through patronage and I actually feel a much closer connection to them, right? Because one of these group chats, are giving us updates. And with that, I remember, so I had Reo Cragun on the podcast, he’s dropped a bunch of stuff on catalog across other platforms. And there was this interesting sort of moment where he released a song for us in web three. It’s sold out, it did well, but the secondaries were still kind of lacking. And then when he published it in web two, it did really well on like the charts right. And then he posted this tweet, that his song, I think in the week got like 200,000 listeners, right? 20,000 plays. And I remember like literally an hour later, that sort of got reflected on the secondary sales of the music NFT itself. Right? And it was the first time I saw that sort of, that connection kind of play out in real time. Have you seen that happen regularly? It’s the first example that I’ve sort of come across. But are you kind of like imagining the success of these artists kind of playing in the same realm?
Richard Chen: Potentially, I can’t think of like other examples. I think like, I think web three musicians I follow like, generally sent you stay crypto native and like, are active on Twitter, but like, not so much on like, Spotify and like other mainstream channel.
The Overlap Between On-Chain Data and the Creator Economy as a Whole
Yeah, sure. You know, on top of that, Reo was on the podcast again, and one of the things he talked about, that he could do in web three as an artist, but he couldn’t do and web two is sort of like the data that comes with selling music NFTs and understanding who his audiences right? And something that you’re big about, obviously, is on chain data. I’m curious where you kind of see the overlap between on chain data and the creator economy as a whole. What does that sort of vision look like?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I think growth marketing is a good way to look at it, is like you can become a lot more like analytical and like, be more targeted in how you spend money on like promotion. And like seeing like which channels are working, which channels aren’t and this is not just like creator economy marketing, it also applies to like yield farming and other areas of crypto is, this reminds me of like, web two back in like the late 90s, where like companies would just like spending, like hundreds of millions of dollars is like burning money on like advertising before, like we figure it out. The industry figured out metrics such as like cackleberry, CLV, and others and like basically got a lot more targeted and like better at like customer segmentation, I think a lot of those tools will be important for like growing, for the creator economy and like growing these brands, measuring the effectiveness of each channel affected effectiveness of each platform, and really being able to have like custom tailored marketing campaigns.
Metrics to Measure the Success of a Community
What sort of metrics would you use today to measure the success of your community, right? As a crypto native creator, as your, yeah, kind of like issuing more NFTs, building community? What will that look like?
Richard Chen: I think like community like activeness is like really important. So, like, you can use like monthly active, like people who like post on discord in your like private discord server is like one example. Because like I’ve seen way too many, like token gated discord just kind of turn into ghost towns, like, after a couple of months, that’s a really important metric to track. Yeah, and like there’s a lot building off of that. It’s just how do you measure user retention and activeness?
Things to Look For When Collecting an NFT
Yeah, but I feel like that’s like very much off chain kind of thing, right? Like, yeah, understanding how active the chat is, right? But as someone who builds so many dashboards and analyzes so much data, what do you look at, let’s say before you buy an NFT, for example, as a collector even right? To understand the health of a community?
Richard Chen: Yeah. I usually on chain data, you could probably only look at sales, like sales type data, and distribution. So maybe you could look at like, kind of historical price charts. But that’s kind of a really basic metric. But like, I think like going back to what I said, In the beginning, like collector’s distribution is really important. Because if you have no buy in from a lot of owners then like that’s how you develop a more robust community rather than like a couple of whales who like buy up the supply and basically try to like shale and like pump their bags, which is more of like short term.
Yeah, makes sense. I want to jump back to privacy really quick, because I forgot to ask you a question that, I think is actually super important to note. I remember a while back Vitalik kind of tweeted this new token standard idea of stealth addresses for ERC 721 and as someone who’s the number one dude wizard has 10,000 stars on there is like the creme de la creme of a data analyst, right? How do you kind of feel when you see a post like that?
Richard Chen: I mean, Vitalik poses a lot of like interesting ideas and like on Eth research, like kind of implementing a lot of new cutting-edge cryptography and like there’s one like this one for like stealth transfers of ERC 721 he’s like written a lot about bridges. I had to trust minimized bridges. So, it’s great to see like kind of what I call like more purist ideas like what’s the best way, the most secure way to do bridging, to do like privacy. It’s this kind of question of implementation. Like, are there tradeoffs in implementation such as, like how much like gas efficiency, scalability, runtime, things like that? And also, like, are there any teams that are going to build what Vitalik is building?
Data Products’ Role in Web3
It’s in a world where something like that gets implemented, right? Where everything just becomes super stealth. What role do like data products play for example? In a, yeah, in an environment like that? What do you think?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I mean, yeah, you wouldn’t be able to track the individual transfers. But maybe it could be kind of like a chain analysis like product, right, where you track the inflows and outflows. So, you can see like how much usage is, but you can’t like necessarily attribute like individual users. That’s like one way to look at it. And also, it’s another way to look at it as like, kind of centralized exchanges. Like there’s a lot of data products that look at exchange inflows and outflows. But you can’t see like what exactly users are trading on binance or other exchanges?
Richard’s Investing History
Yeah, that makes sense. I want to jump into your investment career. Okay. You seem relatively young, you graduated a year before me, you have this huge fund, you’ve made a bunch of bets, you seem like you know, what you’re talking about? What’s your history with investing? Like, how long have you been investing for prior to doing it professionally? What does that look like?
Richard Chen: Well, I was doing like some consulting work for like web to VCs about crypto, like before one confirmation, but like, it’s just like a whole different beast for them. So, like, that’s why it made sense just to focus solely on crypto native, because a lot of the lessons that you learned in like web two, it’s like kind of the opposite, applies in web three. And like, I can, like, go on.
Please. That’d be interesting. Go into that.
Richard Chen: I mean, like, one mistake I see is like a lot of VCs, like, take founders who pitched well, and are good at sales, as like a positive signal. And I think, especially in web three, like ability to pitch VCs is like, not an important skill at all. And the reason is, because like in web three, projects are not operationally intensive. So, it’s not like food delivery, or like ride sharing, where you have to hire a lot of a huge operations team be good at people management, hire executives, do a lot of sales be aggressive, like, like launching a new city. Whereas web to the teams is like really small, like a lot of these defi, blue chip defi protocols are like only 20, 30 people. So, it’s a lot more product, community oriented. founders and founders that are really good at building stuff that users need. And like, they might not speak well to VCs, but they’re just really good at product. And that’s kind of a lot of, the kind of the hidden gems that we found like throughout the years in investing, is like founders like from like Dao, Nexus mutual, others who don’t have the traditional silicon valley polished resume, but just understand their product and users really well and they end up being successful.
Building a Successful Community
Hmm, interesting. Can you elaborate more on what it takes to sort of build a successful community? Coming from someone who started his career in crypto, I guess like building the Stanford crypto club, right? You understand the value of bringing people together and unifying them under a specific theme, for example, right? What do you look for when kind of like measuring and this could be off chain related stuff? Like how do you actually build like a great community in crypto?
Richard Chen: Yeah, it’s like ultimately authenticity and like finding people who are like intrinsically passionate about certain areas, not just join the discord like to like, kind of get alpha leak on like when they can like quickly make money and then leave. So, like, what’s really cool is like, a lot of like, founders were like potential coworkers who like met each other through like these discord chats, because they were interested in particular topic is like, for example, like the XE infinity founders, like met each other through discord because they were interested in gaming and NFT back in 2017. And like these, like people like living like in Vietnam, and versus Norway that’s like on opposite sides of the world that they would have never met otherwise. So that’s the great thing about community, is like finding authenticity, people who are intrinsically motivated about a topic and just like kind of bringing them all together in one place just to like bounce ideas and chat for hours, days.
Debatable Thoughts in the World of Crypto
Yeah. What are some hot takes you have in the world of crypto that you think most people would disagree with you on?
Richard Chen: Well, I gave two of them at the Dune Day and talk. I guess I’ll repeat the first one, which I think, which is like I think aggregators are overrated. Because if you look at the on-chain data, vast majority of volume is still going through the underlying marketplaces. And the reason so it’s because like these marketplaces, it’s still very much a winner take all business or like, winner take most business. So, when did uniswap has 63% market share, when open sea has 93%, when hop has a 73-market percent market share for bridges, users is kind of out of habit, end up using the underlying products rather than going to an aggregator. So that’s a it’s one hot take I have.
Any other ones?
Richard Chen: What’s a new hot take?
Yeah, give me the fresh one.
Richard Chen: Well, I guess this wasn’t, this isn’t really a hot take any more. But I was like, kind of sounding the alarm on Solana like back in January, of a lot of VCs were saying that, like, look at how much talent is going to Solana. And like my response to that was yes, like, it’s a lot of good, people who look good on resume, but are more of like tourists when it comes to crypto. And I was like, betting that a lot of these founders would leave when the crypto bear market happened. And I guess I know more and more anecdotes of like, I won’t name a specific project name, where that’s been the case where founders go back to college, go back to their web two jobs, or they like pivot to building on Aptos and sweet because that’s like the new Solana of the next slide of what is going to be the new slot of next cycle. Just like how Solana were EOs of the previous cycle.
Thoughts on Web3 Social Applications, New Social Graphs, Etc.
Interesting. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Noted. Another question I have for you is because you’ve already made a few bets in the creator economy. And you’re pretty public about sort of like your thesis. I’m curious what you think about this whole uprising web three social applications. And whether it be like new social graphs, etc. What are your general thoughts around that?
Richard Chen: Yeah, so we invested in forecaster that’s like our big bet in that space. And I think web three social has a good wedge in search and discovery for NFTs. And there’s been a lot of these like type of products I’ve seen, like being pitched of like, building a nice, like Spotify, like recommender algorithm for NFTs or kind of aggregating, like social data. And like when artists are announcing drops across like Twitter, and Instagram and all that. So, like, like a good search and discovery, token gated NFTs communities all in like one place is, I think, a good wedge for web three social products. And I think like, it also has to do something different. It can’t be like perfectly skeuomorphic with like what we have in web two. So, I think people have like a lot of social media fatigue. So just, you know, building Instagram, like UI is like not going to cut it. And that was like why Coinbase NFT failed, is like it’s it was like this Instagram like product that was super watered down. And kind of catching the tail end of the NFT hype, but wasn’t a product that people wanted to use.
Web2 Social Versus Web3 Social
How do we build a social network that works in favor of creators, whereas versus like, exploits that which we’ve seen, I guess, across web two, like what is web three needing to do better that web two fail at when it comes to social?
Richard Chen: Yeah, I mean, I think, I don’t think anyone’s cracked, like the decentralized Patreon business model yet, or like that idea yet. Where, you know, I basically like, it’s like the membership NFT model where like, each tier like gives you different access. It’s like kind of a buying like Patreon. So, membership, except this works better for kind of more blue-chip artists. And there’s also like a kind of a secondary market to like value the artists time and their work. And I know there’s a lot of projects like tackling this, but it hasn’t been cracked yet.
Yeah, I know, there’s a bunch of attempts to sort of go after that problem space. I’m not sure what would define it, whether it be membership NFTs, whether it be like new funnels to capture attention. I’m not sure, what do you think people are sort of doing wrong? Because there have been attempts, right, and there are attempts to sort of solve that problem space. What do you think is missing?
Richard Chen: Yeah, this is interesting, because I think it’s a product that actually suits better for existing blue-chip artists rather than like a new and upcoming like web three like crypto native artists. And like mainly, the big pin point is that the largest artists, people like Lady Gaga and like others, like they literally do not know who their top bands are. It’s like, it’s kind of bizarre to think that be given like 10s of millions, hundreds of millions of people like know who they are and listen to their music, but they don’t know who the top bands are. And like they just don’t really get that data from Ticketmaster or whatnot. So that’s like a unique pin point for them. But NFTs is still like this brand new. This brand-new industry that it hasn’t like crossed the chasm yet to these mainstream used cases. So, I think it’ll be like a while before, like these used cases, really like this, like kind of web three Patreon model like really takes off.
Yeah, I feel you, I hear you, I think because you already reference Lady Gaga, something that I bring on the podcast a lot is like, Lady Gaga, in my opinion is like one of the best community builders there are like she builds community without building community. If you go on Facebook, for example, and you search up Lady Gaga on Facebook groups, you’ll see all these communities formed around Lady Gaga. And Lady Gaga is not in any of those communities. Right? It’s just her fans sort of congregating because they like the whole monster brand or whatever, whatever she stands for, right? We’ve also yet to see that happen in web three, we’re fans kind of form in a decentralized manner around some type of, I guess, like artists or whatever might be like, NFT artists or crypto artists, or have we? Am I not catching the right one, they need to be on the podcast.
Richard Chen: You could argue Vitalik is actually that type.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s true.
Richard Chen: Like he like starting Ethereum and then now you have all these subcommittees within the Ethereum ecosystem that congregate around some like-minded topic, whether that’s like really deep like L one, core dev research, like infra stuff, or it can be like, you know, financial stuff.
That’s true.
Richar Chen: It can be like NFT, like more artists, creators, but like, at the end of the day, they’re all contributing to the network health and growth of Ethereum.
So, you’re saying metallic is web three’s Lady Gaga? Is that what you’re saying?
Richard Chen: He’s like, kind of celebrity figure, everyone loves him because like he’s so artistic and, like, just like it’s like so focused on like, building and like research and like, just doesn’t give a shit about like.
Anything else.
Richard Chen: Like been greedy, like, pretty much every other L one founder. And like, that’s how they get Ethereum ecosystem has like such a good culture is because it comes from the top. It’s not like a mercenary like get rich quick vibes.
Yeah, very true. I think this was great. Richard,
Outro
Before I let you go, where can we find you? Where can we learn more about everything that you’re up to. Show it away?
Richard Chen: Sure. I get emails. Richard at one confirmation.com. I’m Richard Chen 39 on Twitter, R Chen H on Dune and like, pretty much every social.
Cool, man. Cool. Well, thank you for your time. We’ll have to, thank you for your time. We’ll have to do this again soon, Richard. Yeah, till next time.
Richard Chen: All right. Thanks, Adam.
