Good morning. Good morning, everyone.
GMGM, welcome to another episode of Homo Power Today.
Today is Thursday, April 3rd. And it is.
It's a. Sunny morning here in Chicago.
It's actually looking absolutely beautiful outside as long as you
haven't looked at any charts, which are in fact, the opposite
of beautiful. As Trump's tariff tsunami has
wrecked havoc across global market.
Stocks are down, crypto's down, the dollar is down.
Now the question is just how bad is it and what happens next?
We're going to break that down and all the news on today's
show. No, for OAK today, but we've got
Mando, we've got Logan. GM guys, Mando, how you doing?
GM What a day, What a day. Yeah, let's get into it in a
bit. But yeah, I'm doing good as
always. Lot to lot to unpack.
Curious for your reaction across the pond.
And then Logan live from Latin America.
He's he's bringing some some new perspective there from us for us
as well. Logan GM, How you doing?
Hey, good morning, Tyler. Beautiful day here again this
morning in Peru on the West Coast of Peru.
I actually saw a a noun sticker on my walk here this morning.
Wow, which was very surprising to me.
But yeah, things are things are going well here, aside from the
markets, of course. Where are you in Peru?
You're near Lima, or are you? I'm in Trujillo which is the
third largest city. It's like an hour, hour N flight
from Northwest from Lima. I believe how will they do the
sand the sand surfing stuff? I don't know.
There's surfing around here, but I don't know about sand surfing.
I don't know. Very many years ago.
Many, many years ago. Nice.
I have. I have not been.
A different, different life. I was 18 years old when I went.
Oh wow, Yeah. I've been to Brazil, I have not
been to I've been to Uruguay, but not I have not been to the
West Coast. So Logie, you'll have to give us
the the full recap once you're deeper into the journey.
I am surprised to say the least that that nouns culture has
permeated into the third biggest city in in Peru.
It was very surprising to see. I believe a noun ish sticker is
something about an art school. I was walking quickly to try to
get here on time. I'll have to take a closer look,
get a better picture on my way home.
Yeah, you will for sure. When I did that trip, I, I flew
into Columbia, I went down, but it was me and four other guys
and we, this was back in the day of like you would go to like a,
we went to, I think it was with STA travel and they like
organize your trip and they were like, you're going to fly into
Barranquila, which is like they, they were like, it's where
Shakira's from. You know, it's going to be
amazing. We turn up and Barranquila is
like an industrial city in the north.
And as soon as we turned up at the hotel, they were like, you
cannot leave, like you will just get robbed if you if you, if you
walk around here. That was a good start trip.
And no one spoke any English at all.
And we were like, oh, this is going to be we were there for
four or five months. Wow, that's quite the trip.
We'll have to unpack that at some point, folks.
We are going to talk more than our South American trips on this
morning show. What are we going to talk about?
This Trump tariff turmoil, What the fuck happened?
Impact on markets, initial reactions, bear case, bull case,
all of that. We've got recession eyes nearing
50% across markets right now. We're going to talk about in
coin outlook. We're going to talk about
Metamask shipping, a major update, this edge token that you
might be qualified for. And in the back half of the
show, folks, we're going to have the parallel Wayfinder team on
talk prompts, the future of AI agents, and a lot more.
So excited for that combo. Before we dive in, shout out to
our partners starting with Galaxis.
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follow at Wallet connect on X and Telegram to stay ahead of
what's next. We love our partners, as always.
Shout to them. Mando, if you're ready, let's
just get into it. Can you dig?
It. Yeah, that was not a great day.
I I thought Liberation Day would be a lot less than that.
Turns out he dialled it up to 11 on the tariffs and in some ways
simplified it and just went off to the people with the biggest
trade surpluses with the US. But in other ways that is just
going to lead to wild inflation in my opinion, if this
continues. So I thought this was not how
this was going to go, let's put it that way.
I thought he would target basically enemies or quasi
enemies of the US. Seemingly he's just stuck a
tariff on everything and some very, very high tariffs for a
number of different countries. This is going to affect a whole
range of goods and US based companies that create their
goods overseas. And yeah, like it's just, it's
not, that's not looking too good like a 90% tariff on Vietnam.
It's kind of wild. Also just put tariffs on even if
there's a trade surplus. Australia and the United Kingdom
both have a trade surplus with the US, both got a 10% tariff.
I said there could be a world, you know, where with
negotiations, everyone's tariffs come down.
This as a starting point is, is, is going to be very, very tough
for that to happen. I think that I saw some maths
this morning that the average global tariff now goes to the
highest level in history, very, very high levels of tariffs
across the board the like, So there's two ways you could have
done this math. You could have been, this is
reciprocal tariffs, right? The EU does have a 20% global
tariff on goods coming in. So he could have said, look,
we're going to do a 20% tariff on that and he could have gone
off India, which has very high tariffs and been like, look, you
have these tariffs on your goods, we're going to have on
that. That's not what happened here.
What he actually did or the Trump administration actually
did was they went after who are the countries with the biggest
trade surplus against the US. So Vietnam, for example, which
is getting a 90% tariff, doesn't have anywhere near has a high
tariffs as that absolutely nowhere near.
Yet it's getting a 90% tariff because it has such a big trade
surplus against the US. And that's because a lot of
goods are often made in Vietnam with a lot of cheap labour.
But Vietnam is a place into it as well, kind of pretty, pretty
friendly with the US since the since the war.
Actually, it's bit, it's like very pro US when you go out
there, it's kind of a like quite a lot of international companies
are based out there. It's just like, I mean, I know a
lot of clothes are made out there, all this sort of stuff.
So they've never really had like unbelievable tariffs against the
against the US and yet this is going to happen.
So and yet countries which do have high actual tariffs are
less, are seemingly less affected.
So you have these like really weird scenarios where like small
countries with a trade, trade surplus because the US are
getting taxed at like unbelievably high levels.
Yeah. So it's it's, I don't think if
you're doing economics 101, this is necessarily how you would
negotiate, let's say, because like, I don't know what Vietnam
can do, right? It's not like they can come back
to Trump and say, hey, we're going to drop our tariffs
because this that's not what this calculation is.
This calculation is literally just who's got a trade deficit.
And that's, that's something that isn't sold via negotiation
with a lot of these, if I'm honest.
Sorry, yeah, 46% versus Vietnam. But they've, they've, that's the
calculation that they've used to, to do it because they've
said 50% of that basically it's going to become a tariff.
So, yeah, like I, I, the maths behind this for me isn't math.
Like isn't what you would have done in a negotiation like this.
You would have gone, right. EU has got 20% tariff, we're
going to go after the EU and do those.
Japan has got very high tariffs, we're going to go after that,
that India's going to have very high tariffs and then you would
have negotiated with those countries to bring those tariffs
down. This is like a scenario where I
don't really know what some of these countries can necessarily
do in terms of and negotiate it down, which just means like, and
also this wasn't what was really flagged to people when people
said receptacle tariffs. I think they were thinking, you
know, like, all right, well it's going to affect these countries
and we can deal with that. This is actually more affecting
some of the global supply chains which which affect many U.S.
companies. You know, the reason why a lot
of these have Usus trade deficit, trade sub losses,
whatever, is because they generally import unfinished
goods into the US and then US either assembles them or some
sort of final process is done in the US.
So it really effects that. So it's a real breakdown of just
like global trade, this is an attack on global trade rather
than on attack on countries, which high tariffs.
So you're going to, the only way I see this, this now happening,
you're going to get massive inflation in the US like, and
the one ray of sunshine here is that ideally this causes
countries to then immediately come to the negotiating table
like this is the highest it will be.
So maybe like it's baked in, but it's also a case of like how
long this stays in place is also like the worry.
And yeah, it's really going to upend a lot of global supply
chains. So I, I think this is I, I
didn't think this is well done. If I'm honest, if I was in the,
the USI wouldn't think this was the the way done.
Like this isn't like a tit to tat thing, which is kind of what
I think the US were like getting on board with.
And I kind of understand, you know, like E us taxing us this,
we're taxing that. This isn't that they've
actually, they've actually gone after trades, the trade deficit
with all the countries. And then and, and that as a
logic is an attack on free trade, global trade.
And I don't think that's like the strongest of, of logics when
it comes to like economic growth, because I think trade is
actually one of the like underpins a lot of global
growth. So yeah, I, I think this is
maybe not the best way to have gone about that.
And I think stock market's telling you that everything's
selling off very, very badly today.
I personally think this is the sort of thing that can easily
cause a recession. Like the way it's been done
very, very easy could could cause a recession at
discontinues. And it's not one that's very
easily dealt with now with monetary policy because this is
going to cause inflation. You know, like if your clothes
are made in Vietnam, like Nike, your Nikes are made in Vietnam
and they're like, I forget whether the actual office is for
Nike, but like, or various clothing companies, like you've
just got a 45% tax right now on those.
That is going to drive up prices.
That's going to drive up prices. And that's not something that
just like changes like that. It's really not that that this
is going to take months. So and that affects their
ability to to fight it with monetary stimulus, which has
always been the base case of right rates are so high, they
can pump money, they can fix some of this stuff.
It's this is a difficult one now, like this is, this is
actually far more complicated to fix if this is the position that
was taken. And I think honestly, it was
taken in a very simplified way. Do you know what I mean?
Like, all right, we've got this one formula and that's how we're
going to look at look at them all.
That's the lens we're going to look at them all.
And I think part of that was just because it was becoming
difficult to work out like because some countries produce
it in China, then send it to Canada and then it comes into
the US. And like, so it's like, right,
this is the best way to do it. But this was also going to lead
one of the harder ways to negotiate them down because some
countries which will not be able to get to a trade surplus with
the US and that will also mean much longer negotiations.
And this will, this also effects inflation in my opinion way more
than than the other, the other, the other forms where it was
reciprocals and like you have a 20% tariff, we we're going to
put on a 20% tariff sort of deal.
So yeah, I think I am not a fan of what this was.
I I think this was not done well.
Yeah, very, very fair reaction. Logan, I'm I'm curious for your
thoughts as well. I think just quickly a couple
reactions on my side. I do think that the calculation
on how they got to this has been one of the, the biggest problems
with it. And now it there's even people
starting to uncover like Kobe, like did they literally just run
this through ChatGPT to come up with like a basic way to come up
with with this formula? And I don't know if that's been
necessarily proven or not, but the, the logic behind these
calculations and some of the countries on this list are, are
very easy to, to poke holes in, which I think is undermine some
confidence. And I'm with you.
I think the biggest thing for me is the uncertainty.
Like, is this just a negotiation tactic with the intent to
actually bring these down to more reasonable levels or not?
And if you're a company, how are you supposed to operate in the
near term if you don't know the answer to that?
Like, are you supposed to bet that these are going to come
down? Are you supposed to move
forward? Like this is our the new world
order? And I feel like everyone's in
this holding pattern trying to figure this out.
Like, that's where my head is this morning.
Logan, what was your reaction? Yeah, You know, I don't have
like, you know, too much additional to share, not a
macroeconomic expert. And you know, I think most
people have made-up their minds reading their feeds as to
whether or not they see this as a positive or negative.
The one thing I'll say, aside from some of the silliness, as
you alluded to here with the, the potential ChatGPT inclusion,
the herd islands thing, you know, where they're implementing
tariffs on an uninhabited I like man.
Anyway, the one thing I will say is I'm still very much
struggling and part of this is my own curation, so my own
fault, but I'm still very much struggling to see the, the
positive cases. You know, like my feet is all
the negatives and Amanda went through a bunch of them.
The the potential negatives, right?
I I'm just like I'm not getting enough of the argument for why
right now and there's not enough like pro counterpoints for me to
like get to a point where I'm feeling OK, you know, like this
can resolve itself. This can blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. I just, I feel you mentioned
doom posting this morning, Tyler.
I mean, like, that's kind of how I feel just because I'm not
getting any opium from from any sources of macroeconomic policy
or whatever. Like who who out there is
championing this aside from Trump in the administration?
And where can I go to to learn more about why I should be
thinking positively? Yeah, exactly.
But I still, yeah, I gotta wait for the podcast.
Exactly. So in the near term, I still
have to be, you know, kind of in this like whatever, you know,
I'm, I'm not an expert. I have no reason to think
positively because nobody else is showing me anything positive
about it. And the market is not reacting
positively either. So I know that's an
oversimplification, but it seems like that might be all is
necessary for this administration.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's also semi
consensus. We've got I.
Think just get into the logic of it like Vietnam.
I just checked it now chat CPT has got a 2 to 5% tariff on some
goods from the US. So like if you're in the US and
you think that that maybe you should have done a 2 to 5%
tariff back, right? And that's not what's happened.
That's why I think people are getting very confused with the
logic here. They think, oh, we're going to
go after Vietnam like Vietnam doesn't really have tariffs get
the US. They know a lot of goods do get
imported to the US, but it's because they included this in
the fine print there. Tariffs charge to the US is not
just tariffs, it's it's seen as currency manipulation.
So what this really effects is like low income countries that
have been, you know, like made in China, made in Vietnam, made
in like a lot of these countries which, which make the goods.
Actually, I don't know if that's what the US wanted from this.
Maybe they did want to onshore a lot of those like very low paid
that you don't really have the workers to make those goods, so
you're just going to make those goods more expensive for
yourselves. Yeah, I think there's, there's a
lot of nuance to it. I don't know that the average
American wants to bring all the goods that are created in
Vietnam back onshore. I do think there's but you can
be pro onshore manufacturing for certain types of goods instead
of all of them. I feel like looking at this
list, one thing that I I have seen to take and it does kind of
jump out it, it's heavy against Asia and is there some kind of a
kind of a global supply chain shift telegraphing these
numbers? That's that, that's, that is my
exact take away too, because I was like, if he comes off to the
EU kind of Fair. Like they do have a common
import tariff in the EU for, for various different goods and it
ranges from 5 to 20%, I think, depending on the goods.
Like any good that comes into the EU generally has a tariff on
it. We do do, like the EU does do
that, one of the few like big blocks to do it.
India does it, Japan does it. There are some countries that
abuse tariffs for this and that's they're not necessarily
the people that have been affected as much by this.
Yeah, looks like Latin America, Central America is all at the
10% minimum for the most part. So I think that is perhaps one
of the takeaways here. There's a lot to unpack.
Maybe, Amanda, let's talk about markets a bit.
So we've seen. The 10 year almost come under 4%
here. It's lowest it's been 4 the
entire year so far. I think you you've mentioned
stocks are down, I think S and PS down at 4% right now on the
day dollars down 2% as well. Crypto majors down quite a bit
as well here. So Bitcoin down a full 4 1/2
percent, 8 down 5% Solana 10%. So basically the further out you
go on the risk curve, the the worst of goods for a coin down
quite a bit I guess. What do you make of of this?
I think yesterday on the show you mentioned dips are meant to
buy. Have have you changed that
perspective a bit? Well, I said for Bitcoin, if it
goes to 80 K, you meant it like you meant to buy it.
Bitcoins held up actually remarkably well, like remarkably
well. And it continues to because
because gold is too and the dollar is a little bit weaker as
well. Honestly, this is the sort of
thing that could stocks could drop like a lot more like a lot
more. And weirdly as well, like, you
know, we spoke about how Trump could go after go after big tech
a little bit and then, you know, the average person wouldn't
care. Like in many ways, this does
affect a lot of the industrial companies in the US, you know,
like there's a lot of raw materials or labour or parts
which are made elsewhere that are then finished or created or
assembled or whatever in the US. And those businesses will get
massively affected by this. But this this is going to affect
a lot of companies. This like a lot of people
probably work for Nike, you know, is Nike a company that
necessarily you expected Trump to kind of go after for
something like this? And there'll, there'll be tons
of companies like this. I haven't gone through them all,
but like there's a lot of brand customer, consumer products
companies here that are going to be really badly affected,
really, really badly affected. So I think the I think this can
go like the real question is here, the reason why stocks
aren't down 20% is because there's an expectation that
there'll be some like negotiation between these.
Like like already you see that's not coming out like trying to
slightly downplay it and be like, oh, you know, it won't be
that bad and all this sort of stuff.
I think that's the hope. But then you also have not that
sort of commentary coming also coming from the same
administration because they don't want to be seen to be
saying, you know, we're going to walk all this back straight
away. And also this is kind of a
cornerstone of what they were going to say.
So I don't know like this is really going to affect global
the in my opinion, it's going to it's going to really hurt US
inflation and it can hurt a lot of companies in the USA lot I.
Think that's my challenge. And Logan, I'm curious for your
additional thoughts on this too. But I feel like, I feel like I'm
so conflicted right now. I'm just laughing because I
don't know, like it feels 5050 like this is negotiation tactic
and they're going to lower these.
And this was just a starting point.
And then there's also the other side of me that thinks this is a
part of the core populist agenda and they're trying to change the
world order and this is regime change and global trade change.
And we are at the very start of all of this.
And then if you if you set these policies and then walking back.
So like, are you not like at what Trump has done is follow
through on his promises? I think he can, I think his base
can at least be happy in that he's doing what he said he's
going to do. Now, if if you set this all up
and then you walk it all back or then are you not going after
those promises? So, so that that makes me think
they're going to keep following through with this.
So like, I don't know. I still haven't made-up my mind.
Logan what? Yeah.
No, I mean, I'm right there alongside you, Tyler.
Like, like I said, I mean, I can see the case, the case that's
been made here previously by this administration.
I, I understand to a degree, right.
But whether or not it's negotiation tactic, whether or
not the things that were displayed yesterday were
intentional, whether or not like some of those things, we just
don't know. And that level of uncertainty in
how they're putting forth policy and their future plans and
whether or not they wish to, to hold true to them, it just like,
I don't know how you can possibly comment on it with any
level of certainty or understanding.
There's so many little things that are going to change from
day-to-day that we've come to expect from Trump.
And yeah, I'm just, I'm at a, I'm at a loss to be quite honest
as to, as to like what the, the next steps will look like,
'cause they, it feels like he's left the entire playing field
open. Like he still has every card he
could potentially play, but that just sort of feels like how he
operates anyway, you know, because you can do, if he does
something really silly, you'd be like, oh, well, it's just Trump.
He's just being really silly. If he does something crazy,
you're just like, oh, well, it's Trump.
He's just being crazy. Like, I don't know, kind of
feels like that the guy who doesn't know how to play poker,
who sits down at the poker table and all, all cards are in play.
I don't know what to expect. I did find one bull take on the
timeline. There weren't many.
All right, I'll. I'll share this for some of the
bulls here and then maybe man know if you want to give
reactions to this and then we can move on.
I want to do a couple other quick headlines.
Kyle from from Milk Rd. saying the bull case are basically
tariffs are the highest they are going to be right now.
So we have countries removing tariffs, more negotiation.
He's saying inflation lower and then inflation was high because
of the scary. He's also been sharing those
true flation numbers. Think that piece is a little bit
more debatable. Fed rate cuts.
We did have the headline right before the show that traders are
pricing in now 50% chance of four Fed rate cuts.
So that is potential bull case, dollar lower trying to print the
amount of global liquidity higher stable coin bill valid
bull case reactions to this. Weirdly, like I think the case
for crypto is slightly different than the case for a lot of other
things, right? Like this actually does weaken
the case for the dollar slightly because it attacks the concept
of the dot US being the centre potentially of trade as much.
You know, if they're going to slap a 50% input tax on from
certain countries, then maybe they're going to sell their
goods to somewhere else. So the dollars over weaker which
which and in some ways that's meant that Bitcoin looks OK,
gold, gold looks OK, although it gold did fall as well.
Even on the back of this I but for stocks, I think this is what
I just told you There is like this assumption that you can
bring down tariffs. Firstly, that has not been the
reaction from the vast majority of of the countries.
EU said it would respond. China said it would respond.
Japan said it would respond. The only ones that have shown
restraint have been Australia and the UK, because I think they
know that like they'll probably be able to get their, their
theirs down. That would be kind of crazy for
at least them to face some sort of a tariff.
Most of the others have indicated, you know, they're
going to they, they just said that we're going to respond.
I don't know how aggressive that's going to be, but also the
the second bit of this is this isn't, this isn't an attack on
reciprocal tariffs, but like forget that word.
This is, that's not what this is.
This, this isn't this is an attack on anyone who has a trade
deficit with the US. And that is very difficult to
negotiate from for a lot of these countries.
Like they can't just like change the the trade deficit.
They can. If it was, if it was about
tariffs, then I think you can get into a deal making and you
know, that can be sorted in a deal, in a trade deal between
two countries and be like, hey, yeah, you've got these tariffs,
reduce them. You can't do that with half
these countries. Like and it it's show most
ridiculously, ridiculously lessly with the small countries
with like no, zero people like take that to the extreme.
Like there's no way that that country can do.
Like, it's not like. Maybe a 90% tax from the US like
so yeah, I think this is this is going to have a long term
impact. I, I think Bitcoin can do OK
here still like I'm not I'm not bearish on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin dominance is going well. It's Bitcoin dominance is going
higher again, right? 63% now.
Highs since 2021. Now that fixed up only to me.
Yeah, not great when our leading risk indicator, global indicator
is down 30%. I saw that last night.
That's when I started sweating a little bit more.
But this was the this was the chart I had my eyes on the the
most, but could still be a handle could could still be
painting that handle on the cup here.
So we will, we'll, we'll certainly see folks.
I think that covered that the tariff story.
I'm sure we'll be talking about it more on the days and weeks to
come. A couple other Web 3 lines.
I see our, our parallel guys in in the studio here.
We'll get to that conversation in just a couple minutes.
I guess while we wait, if we have the roll bit code, I
actually haven't had a chance to see that.
We'll get that out there. We'll we'll share that Tariffs,
of course, tariffs is the code for today.
We'll be doing those spins at the end of the show.
Metamask kind of snuck in with some big news.
Logan, not sure if you saw this. You don't need native gas
tokens. So you just got an AirDrop,
let's say on bear chain. You don't You can just do your
swap right there. Reactions to this?
How big a deal? I mean, it's going to feel like
not big a deal to a lot of people because everybody hates
Metamask and thinks they're so wildly behind.
And, and you know, in that case, a lot of wallets, things like
Rabbi have had things like gas accounts and other features
similar to this previously. So they they're not the first to
get get here, but it's a big deal.
I mean, these are, these are improvements that are necessary
to making it easier to interact on chain.
And despite the fact that the, you know, the incumbent took
this long to, to get here, whatever they got here, at
least. So I think, I think that
matters. I still use Metamask from time
to time. It's not my default wallet, but
I don't have the general disdain for it or the brand that it
seems, you know, most crypto participants actively do.
So I'm all for, I'm all for innovating, adding, even if it
does feel later good, because I I think that much like what
we've seen with like open C, for example, you make these types of
things, people may just start using it again just because of
their the habits, right, the habit forming that that came
from 2021. So yeah, I'm I'm all for this.
That's a nice positive for meta mask.
They've been, they've been doing stuff.
They have, yeah. I feel like they were kind of
like the sleeping giant kind of sitting on, resting on their
laurels perhaps. But now they've they've been
shipping again. So I like to see that.
And I'll admit I still use meta masks.
This is great. This is like one of the main
issues of onboarding for like people, right?
You bridge to a new chain and it's like, oh God, like what
have I got to do now? It's great, great, probably not
great there. There's some of the L1 tokens
we're still going down the road. If maybe you compare your your
gas down in in stables, I guess that will that will actually end
up being converted to the to the the currency anyway.
But yeah, it's still good. And they partnered with revoke
cash, they've got a revoke cash tie in now directly in the
portfolio tab. So I thought that was good.
And Logan, any last quick story here?
There was a bit of there was a surprise AirDrop yesterday.
This edge token is doing well. I think it's up 2X off the off
the bottom. I don't know a whole lot about
this, curious if you had a chance to dig.
In yeah, definitive is like a they may use a different word
for it, but more or less like a trading terminal, right.
So you can trade across different chains.
I've used I've used it a little bit.
There's some other competing products that I'm actually
blanking on the names of right now.
But if if you take a look there, Tyler, like you could click that
CBBTC tab and you can swap to I'm sorry, I meant to the left.
But anyway, you know, you could trade on a different chain, for
example. Yeah, as you open that up it, it
lets you over to the right. Yeah.
So you can, you can toggle from base and so no, no, you're good.
Toggle from base to salon or whatever.
So it's just like it consolidated a lot of the cross
chain trading that you may have wanted to do into one, into one
spot in a nice little spot to do so.
So yeah, I actually was checking some of my wallets because the
eligibility criteria here is rewarding on chain traders,
right? Heavy on chain traders from
things like Hyper liquid Photon bullets, etcetera.
If you trade a lot of salon of meme coins or maybe some tokens
awaiting you. Actually, the the few walls I
checked were not eligible. Womp, womp.
But nevertheless, free money, tokens, airdrops, we need them
right now more than ever. Thanks for walking us through
that. So folks, if you trade on Hyper
Liquid or Jupiter, go check that out if you're interested, you
might have some tokens. Breaking news, man, I just
mentioned, I believe is out of Macron here urging companies to
pause US investments. So I don't know that that's
necessarily what. Paul's US investments and their
response response to Wednesday's announcement of US tariffs will
be more massive than previous response.
Good start, Good start. Not.
Not what we wanted there, to say the least.
Yeah, if this is an art of the deal thing and all these, you
know, companies are like, you know what FM, we don't, we don't
really need them. It should be.
It should make for a fun fun next couple weeks, months,
whatever. Fun is an interesting order to
choose there. Yeah, fun, I know.
Yeah, well, I think we we went around the horn.
I'm sure that we there's a few other stories from the day.
Maybe we'll catch up on those tomorrow.
I want to make sure we have enough time to chat with our
guests here, so I want to welcome Kylos and Adrian here
from the parallel Wayfinder team to the show here this morning.
Folks. I think most folks now, if
you've been around, you know, the parallel game when the
longest running what, three games we've had.
Now that they've been going deeper into AI with Wayfinder,
they've got tge coming up for prompts.
There's a whole lot to unpack. Adrian, Kylos, Jim, how you guys
doing? Good.
Morning, good. Thanks for having us.
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Excited to have you guys on. So there's, there's a lot of
directions I want to go with this conversation.
We have a lot to unpack, but maybe just for our let's just
start with some background for any listeners out there who may
not understand the, the, the story, the evolution from
parallel, maybe give us the the quick history and maybe describe
where the ecosystem is right now.
Yeah, sure. So we started by building ATCG
and that TCG is available for download today in the Epic Store
if you want to play. And we kind of designed a number
of kind of games based on the assets that the TCG produced.
We have one of them in alpha today called Colony, which is an
AI simulation game where an AI agent is the player and you talk
to the agent and everything in the simulation is on chain.
And that game is in its kind of earliest alpha stage of testing
with community members and will continue to roll out.
And then we have a third person shooter that we've been working
on with our partners at B3, which is like a gaming layer off
of base. And that game is called
Sanctuary. And that game's slated to come
out in Q3 and kind of a happy accident in all this is, you
know, in Colony, as we built this AI agent that had access to
a restricted subset of smart contracts, you know, be it
mining or going to the store and buying something or whatever
else. Essentially, we created an agent
that was able to interact with blockchain networks in a very
limited way. And it begged the question.
And a lot of that was inspired by the Stanford Google Simulacra
paper, which was kind of an AI agent game, or simulation, I
should say, where agents kind of demonstrated emergent behavior
and started doing things that were unexpected, like planning a
Valentine's Day party. And we wanted to create
something like that. And so, you know, when we
stepped back from the creation of that game, we, we started to
realize, OK, well, we've got this base framework for an AI
agent to be able to interact with these limited smart
contracts. What happens if we make it
agnostic? What happens if we make it a
tool that anyone can use to simplify interacting with
everything? And, you know, I think Adrian
and I maybe mulled over that enough times to eventually say
like, hey, there's something really big here.
And we think it's, you know, monumentally ambitious, but very
valuable if executed correctly. So that's kind of how this all
happened. And that became Wayfinder, to be
clear. Yes.
So I think that that's a little bit of the the intro for wave
finders. Maybe now can we dig into like
what wave Finder is and then kind of exactly where it fits in
in the eco? Sure.
So Wave Finder has it's kind of a number of things.
It has wallets, you know, across Etherium, Arbitrum, Barnett,
Smart Chain, Polygon and others, as well as Solana.
And you know, there's a number of agents that that wayfinder
utilizes. So one of them is a transaction
agent to be able to say like, hey, like take the, you know,
ETH I have on mainnet Bridget to Solana and buy dog with hat or,
you know, reorganize my entire portfolio and optimize for yield
or just any type of transaction, right.
And then you have the, the smart contract agent where you can
say, you know, you're maybe a member of some community.
Let's use Prime as an example, just because it's close to home.
You can say, Hey, I want to create a contract where, and
literally you, you plan it to the agent.
The same way I'm explaining it to you is I want to create a
contract where once a week on Fridays, a winner is selected.
Use chain link RNG to do that. And anyone can deposit prime.
The minimum deposit amount is 50 prime.
You know, put a 1% rake on any prime deposited and converted to
USDC. If if someone wants to withdraw
before the draw on Friday, charge a 5% penalty and convert
that to USDC. And then on the Friday, select
the winner and they win all the prime of the contract and repeat
the process every week. And what it'll do is it'll write
the contract, edit the contract, deploy the contract and create a
front end for the contract for everyone to interact with it.
So essentially, and like, I think people have started to
share the, we call this code kind of nicknamed this Agent
Vulcan. Vulcan, Some people have access
to it right now. You know, thousands of people
have access to Midas, which is the transaction agent and a, you
know, limited subset. As you know, we're testing some
of the, the smart contract agent functionality.
And then there's other stuff like the autonomous agent.
And really that's things like, you know, if the New York Times
publishes an article that says the Fed prints, then perform
this transaction, you know, by X amount of whatever token.
So things that are conditional in nature.
So like if ETH performs this way, then do this.
And so that's like a very small subset of kind of what we're
working on a building. And then like on top of that,
there's, you know, an ecosystem of securing and educating the
agent. Because like the way this all
works is, you know, maybe actually let me step back and
say, like the, the world of blockchain and smart contracts
is ever expanding. There's always new, something
new popping up, a new token, a new network, a new smart
contract that everyone's excited about.
And so how do you expand the graph of knowledge that AI
interacts with such that people are incentivized to educate it
on these things and teach it how to interact with them when it
hasn't otherwise done so before? And how do you ensure that that
input information that someone provides that educates that AIH
into secure and collateralized? And really, you know, so we find
it fundamentally is, is, you know, guess it has wallets, it's
able to transact, it's able to build and deploy, it's able to
perform functionality independence independently based
on, you know, conditional environmental inputs.
Kind of like you have, you know, open AI would have access to
external sources like tools. And you know, you'd have
Anthropic who have, you know, MCP, essentially they're all
just tools that AI agents used to interact with the world
outside. So it's kind of this big new
idea of, you know, sitting on top of everything and allowing
people to do things in extremely simple ways.
And, you know, we've always kind of had this ambition as a space
of like, obfuscating the complexity.
And this does that because it puts almost like an intelligence
layer between you and everything.
And that's what people are I think are excited about because
they're starting to see this and use it for the first time.
And it is real. I, I've seen the excitement.
I, I'm, I'm friends with Andy 805 too.
I've, I've seen like the experiments that, you know, he's
starting to run and I, and I liked that and I had it up on
the screens. I think it, I don't have his
original tweet, but basically he, he used the tool, he, he
used natural language programming to say like, hey,
this is what I want to do, generate the code.
And it did it. And now he's actually like
working through the, the process of, you know, having developed
the code and now debugging it, which is something.
I think. Yeah, like I think he's actually
not even debugging it. He's saying can anyone see any
issue with it? Right.
He also created like a generative art collection and
people started using Wavefinder to mint that art collection,
which he used Wavefinder to create.
I'm sorry. I think it's this thing that's
incredibly powerful. It's almost like limited by the
creativity of of the person. Like, how good are you at
prompting? I think we've heard this like,
narrative of like prompting as a skill and we should all be kind
of thinking about how we're going to position ourselves and
become good at that. I think this is exactly that
case where it's like you are limited by your own creativity
here. Yeah, what what ideas do you
have here like the, the agents can can I can literally bring
them to life for you, which is very exciting.
And I feel like we're just still scratching the surface of this.
I am curious as you were going through the development, like
what was some of the like, what were the hardest parts?
Like I feel like we've seen the explosion of ChatGPT and like it
was limited more on the crypto side.
It felt like the the crypto data like back end was perhaps one of
the the reasons why it was lagging behind.
I'm curious like what what you ran into, you know, as you've
been building this over the last months and years?
I'll let Adrian speak to that, yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's, I would say like the data is actually quite
good these days. There's a lot of aggregators
that you can leverage like, you know, flip side and transpose
and things like that to be able to give agents like solid
context of what's going on on chain.
The hardest piece is more the like vendors to be totally
honest. It's the like tooling in the Web
3 space. So like a lot of these
activities that we were hoping that we didn't have to like do
ourselves, we ended up having to insert or in house a lot of them
just because it it was either like very unreliable or very
expensive for what it was we thought at least.
So yeah, I mean, in, in the short term it was like a little
bit of pain. But now we've ended up with like
a pretty reliable solid product, we think.
Everyone please battle harden your APIs and STKS if you want
to use them please. Yeah, we, there's a like we had
to put in so many redundancies to make sure that like
transactions land, to make sure that you can see like the
balances that are in your, like the actual tokens that are in
your wallets, like things that I would have taken for granted as
like a Web 3 consumer. It's tough.
Can we, can you give me the rundown again of the specific AI
agents? So there's Midas and like what
does Midas do specifically? So, yeah, so Midas is the
transaction agent, right? So it it performs like multi hop
transactions, simple transactions, bridges, you know,
depositing for, you know, into different kind of yield earning
at, you know, protocols, whatever else, which is really,
really basic as basic transaction as well as also like
extremely complicated multi hop transactions.
And then you have Vulcan, which is again, these are just like
nicknames. We'll probably change all these.
These are just kind of like us being losers when we were
creating it, making fun names, code names.
Yeah, code names. Exactly the second.
So Vulcan or, or the smart contract agent is able to write,
edit, ought and kind of deploy as well as build a front end for
smart contracts that you articulate to it.
And you can use referential information.
You can say like, hey, like, you know, let's use the supply and
mechanics based on Bitcoin and it'll do that.
And so then there's the autonomous agent.
And the autonomous agent is really about performing
transactions that are conditional on events.
And you know, and these, these are the ones were able to share
today, right? These are the ones we can talk
about. And then there is kind of like a
yield optimization agent, which is like, hey, I've got a huge
portfolio of tokens and this would kind of fall under Midas a
bit, but like I've got this massive portfolio of tokens,
optimize the whole thing for yield and it'll swap you in and
out of whatever is going to optimize you for the greatest
return. And so those are kind of like
the major pieces. But there's also like general,
you know, information availability as well, right?
Like you can say like, I don't know, tell me who, you know,
Popcorn Kirby is on CT or tell me who Anthem is.
It'll tell you a bit about them. And so I think like Adrian, am I
missing anything that we've released today to date?
Yeah. I think just one highlight for
the Vulcan agent is that you can, so you can do smart
contracts, you can use like external sources of information.
We also have some documentation preloaded so you can like if you
say, Oh yeah, I want to use, you know, the Oracle from chain link
for EUSDC on base, It'll know where to pick that up from
because it has like kind of a sub agent under the hood that's
going to do some research for you or Moonwell or Aerodrome or
pancake swap or I think a few other ones that we got loaded up
currently. It also can you can also like
vibe code pass if you want to. So the the the agent is like
capable of not only doing smart contracts but also creating like
new capabilities for Midas for the transaction agent.
So. Sorry Adrian, I don't think they
maybe we should just roll back. Can you explain what paths are
so that everyone understands what that means?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's basically just like
capabilities within Web 3 for the agents.
So if, you know, I wanted to be in like a certain Moonwell
Lending vault and that's not currently available for for
Midas transaction agent, I can hop over to Vulcan, give some of
the context if it doesn't have it already.
So like add, you know, smart contracts to the context of the
agent and then create a path. So like create kind of like a
macro basically that says like this is the information in this
is what it has to do. And then this is the information
out. So it's very composable.
And then if you want to, once you've created this, this macro,
this function, you can say like, OK, it's useful for me, maybe
it's useful for other people. So I'd like it to become public.
And if it becomes public, then that becomes like part of the
capability for anybody to use within these other agents.
So as people are creating stuff, all the agents kind of benefit
from it, and the person who creates it gets some sort of
reward. Yeah.
So essentially, as people teach Wayfinder new things, and
there's some like nuances to how that's collateralized and
secured and so on, it becomes smarter because it becomes
capable of interacting with more contracts, and there's an
incentive for that, and everyone gets to upgrade automatically,
right? So essentially it's this machine
that becomes better as a result of people using it.
This is so I was reading through this tweet.
I didn't quite the light bulb hadn't gone off.
Yeah, Now it has like this is a pretty big differentiator I got.
I want to get your thoughts on the broader crypto AI meta.
I don't think we saw that this type of incentive mechanism.
Now all of your users are incentivized to help build out
prompts capabilities, and then the agent gets stronger.
Yes, and and prompt is the collateral used to secure that
that information input. I think like there's a lot of
fundamental differences than what you've seen, like major,
major differences than. What you've seen like I mean,
I'm curious, so you all have been working on this.
You had the vision, you've been building it.
Meanwhile, from November to to January, we saw, I'll call some
slop AI reply bots see 9 figure valuations.
Like what did did that impact you?
Like what? What were your thoughts and
takeaways since we had this huge bubble blow up and then deflate
here while you guys were all heads down building?
I mean, it didn't impact us really.
I think like we were watching. It's not really what we're
doing. I think I'd consider those like
social agents really, right. Like they can't really do any of
the stuff that even Midas can do at its most basic level.
And that's not to say there isn't really a place for social
agents. And they don't you don't have
some kind of meaningful future. I just think that that Midas nor
Vulcan or Wayfinder as a whole is is even comparable because
it's not really supposed to be something that's like, hey, like
everyone can just talk to it as like a social character and you
know, it's funny and says stuff. It's more like your personal
banker, right? It's like, you know, the same
way if someone doesn't under most people don't understand
SWIFT codes and how wires are sent and you just tell your
banker you want to send a wire. And that's pretty complicated as
a process in traditional banking.
This is easier. You're just like, hey, I just
want to send money to this person and you're like, OK, and
it's done. Or you know, you're interested
in buying some mutual fund or whatever, you know, ETF or
something at a bank like you just like, can you put me into
this ETF? Or if you're self-directed, you
can just do it yourself. Really, this is like a way for
people to interact in a kind of structure and format with crypto
systems by but having support structure in place so they don't
have to know what DEX is to use, you know, where the best yield
is or all these different things.
It's just, you know, we as a collective educate Wayfinder and
therefore Wayfinder doesn't require the consumer to know how
to do any of it. It just does what it, you know,
wants it to do. It's a powerful model.
I think yeah, the the agents in that November to January time
period, I think just did something totally different.
And I feel like for that like chunk of time, that's what
everyone assumed agents in crypto were.
It was just like is like social conversation thought, which I
think we're really cool. Like they definitely had
utility. I think the space got a little
bit like noisy, to be honest. And I remember going to some
meetings and people were like, oh, cool, cool, cool.
Like doing little demos and, and people were like, yeah, that's
great, that's great. But like, how do I get it to
tweet at people? Like we we kind of, well, when
you step back, we kind of built social agents like a year before
all this happened, right? Because we built colony and
people were interacting with these social agents that were
performatively behaving in certain ways like sci-fi
characters from our world. We just didn't really think like
it was super valuable. And that's maybe an oversight
really. But like we didn't really think
like it was just wasn't a flag. We wanted to plant to be like,
we're going to create characters all over the Internet with these
these guys was more like we did that, but for a game.
But people definitely were like, are you going to do something
like it's happening? Like are you?
We're like, but we're not building that.
So we, we think, we think we made the right choices.
You know, we're, we're really focused on building something
that's of like extreme usefulness, like I think the
last like 10, you know, let's say there's 10 million of us or
whatever, obviously more, but you know, in blockchain and
crypto today, like I think the next 100 million people will
need a very different support structure than a green and a red
button. I think like a green and a red
button for buy and sell is even as simple as you can boil.
That is very analogous to money. Most people are very confused by
money to begin with and stock trading systems and this type of
stuff. So like, it'd be very, I think
we need a new solution and the new solution looks a lot like
helping people educate, educating them, making them feel
comfortable, absolving them of having to understand the
complexity, allowing them to make decisions and see what's
happening and ask questions. And, and that's really what
Wayfinder's designed to do. And if you want to be really
complicated, you want to run a really crazy D5 strategies, you
want to run, you know, portfolio optimizations, you want to build
and deploy smart contracts for people to interact with, you can
also do those things. But if we need to 1st service
that, you know, next 100 million people and I think that will
look nothing like the last, you know, kind of number of years of
products that we built and, and it's, we have never seen a
different product. They're all very similar.
They're all like you want to buy Bitcoin, green button, red
button, but it's like that's about it.
This is nothing like that. Yeah, if I, if I can jump in,
this has been really enlightening from my
perspective. And disclaimer, Prime Casher and
I've been following the the Wayfinder journey for quite some
time now. I really love what you guys have
been sharing here. It's analogous in my head just
because I've written some stories about the vibe, you
know, you're kind of like vibe coding for crypto participation.
You know what I mean? Which is really, really
important. And that's an
oversimplification, of course, but I'm, I'm generally curious,
like how do you plan aside from gating access and, and stuff to
get going here? How do you plan to onboard
people to this and, and make sure that they're aware that
this is possible? Because as you've alluded to,
you have built something different than those other AI
agents, right? And it has just much, much more
to it. How do you kind of break that in
their head, that definition of AI agent and AI interaction, and
ensure that they understand just just what can be done to get
them to on board and start interacting with crypto in a
different way? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes
down to, like awareness, right? And I think as we put these
tools in people's hands, we're starting to see people share
what it's doing and how easy it is.
And like essentially the consumer, the user of the
product or tool is becoming the Net Promoter, right?
But like, they're like, this is ridiculous.
I just bridged and did something that would take me 20 minutes in
like 2 seconds. And so I think like the delta is
so massive and people underestimate it, you know, and
we're still like not even at optimal speed on the application
in terms of compressing the LLM to, to see kind of optimal
processing times. And so I think a lot of it's
going to come down to two things.
One, like putting the correct messaging together to share that
message and, and in that message demonstrating it.
Like, I'd love to see someone sitting at a desk who's like a
really like, let's get Logan sitting at a desk who's, you
know, super capable, I'm sure with all the different tools and
tabs he uses to be able to do something.
And then get Adrian's or someone actually someone who's never
touched this stuff with wave Finder and asked both of them to
do the same thing. And I got like 50 bucks that
says the person who's never done it will get it done faster than
Logan would do with all of his tools and tabs.
And so I think like highlighting that like a super skilled person
who knows how to do this stuff, it would take you longer to do
it than a person who's never done it.
And it's just retyping the thing that was asked of them.
So I think like demonstrating like that almost like an Apple
approach, like Microsoft and Apple side by side to kind of
explain the difference. And then I think also like
there's going to be a lot of interest around the thread that
I think Tyler was commenting on, which, you know, we're working
on repackaging this into an iOS and Android app, Fire React
Native. So I think like the ability for
people to experience this for the first time, there's a lot of
curiosity around it. I think there's like a multitude
of ways in which this. And then on top of that, there's
the API. Like there's going to be times
where you're interacting with Wayfinder, you don't even know
you are like a great example is if you run, if you're out there
and you're watching this and you run some informational site that
has, you know, a bunch of token information or crypto
information, and you want to put actionability and share in the
value derived from the transactions associated with
that information. When our AP is ready, we'd be
would love to work with you. And so I think, you know,
proliferating that, that, that ability beyond just our
application, beyond just our desktop, you know, app and our
mobile app, I think making it available and putting it into
everything is the objective. And I, and I think lastly is
just like, you know, beyond crypto is like thinking about
how you can create viral moments and allow people to do things
that were otherwise very difficult and, and in that maybe
provide additional utility to all crypto.
Like, you know, still you have to go hunting down different
websites if you're going to go try to book a trip with, you
know, crypto. It's like, why couldn't we just
be the translation layer between like organizing your trip,
finding your places to stay, paying for that like a multi
agent framework. So I think there's a lot of
stuff that can go completely gangbusters viral here.
I think obviously we've seen the beginning of that excitement,
which in, you know, this released to a couple 1000
people. I think once we open it up, it's
going to be pretty exciting. I think that the strategy makes
sense to kind of having your users tell the story and do some
of the educating and paint the picture of what you can do as a
way to to onboard and get the message.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I guess my, I have similar question as Logan, but for me, I
see the vision that on a daily basis I'm no longer going to
have to click the buttons. I can use an agent to do this
for me and I want to live in that world.
What's been holding me back to date is the trust issue.
So like how do you get your average user to trust using
Midas or an AI agent to conduct transactions for it?
So, so I actually, I think that there's like an education
opportunity here, like you still just have a wallet and a
signature, right? And it's simulating the
transaction prior to your execution.
So you're looking at the thing you want it.
You said like, you know, I want you to take my USDC from
Binance, Bridget to Solana and buy X token or whatever.
You're looking at the transaction that you dictated
before you execute it. So like it's, I think a lot of
people have this idea in their head that I gave an AI agent
access to a wallet and therefore it's going to run wild and throw
my tokens all over the Internet. And it's like completely, it's
completely incorrect. None of the way Wayfinder works
is, is anything like that. So I, I think there's obviously
an education opportunity there. But I think like, you know,
coming back to the, the gross kind of conversation initial
kind of how, how you, how these things get traction generally.
Like, you know, I think you now we're sitting like over the last
two weeks or a week and 1/2 that we've given this to a couple
1000 people. There's now 1.3 million wallets
across EVM and Solana. And I think looking at, you
know, the example of Chachi BT is a great way to think about it
is like, what are those really exciting things that you're
like, I can't believe it's doing this and it's doing it so well
like like it does for Ghibli images.
And I think, you know, those are the types of things that become
net promoters and kind of explain, you know, those people
become your your growth believers themselves.
And they're the ones who are like, you have to try this.
And so I think our goal is to create the holy shit moments.
And like, you have to try this moments because it's infinitely
better. And I think that kind of points
back to that classical adage of like, if you're not 10X better,
it's not good enough. And that's really what we're
aiming for. So.
I see. I mean, maybe it's just my
Twitter feed, but I see it all the time, like people doing very
complicated transactions, posting their simulation results
and posting the like outcomes and talking about it pretty like
aggressively. So I think the community has
been doing an awesome job of showcasing its capabilities for
others. Maybe I need to curate my feed.
I see that unless doom posting and ship posting on on a daily
basis. But I, I do think this could be
a 10X product. So super excited for this and
what you all been building. And I feel like some culmination
here of, of years of effort coming.
I guess we, we, we could talk for a full hour.
We're already 7 minutes over. I guess I want to give you a
chance. What do our listeners need to
know? What do you want to leave them
with? How can they, you know, engage?
Yeah. So on the wave Finder side,
because we spend so much time on that, go to app dot, wave
Finder, dot AI and you can sign up and register and well, get
your wallet set up. So you're kind of in the
initiation pool to get selected for early access now.
So you can be the people who get to try it first on the parallel
side. You know, definitely follow at
Parallel TCG on Twitter. If you haven't, you're welcome
to download the game today on at the Epic Store.
I think this year's prize pool, we just had held our first
championships in Vegas. I think this year's prize pool
is significantly larger, definitely in the side 7 figure
range. Shout out to the Echelon
Foundation for arranging that and all of our partners and
everyone who made that possible. If you're into trying the AI
simulation game, you can follow, I think it's a parallel colony
or on Twitter. And you know, definitely
register to play that. That's coming out in iOS and
Android. You know, it's already in test
and alpha today and rolling out further in the coming weeks and
months. And then follow Sanctuary under
score B3 if you want to learn about our third person shooter.
And yeah, just thanks for having us, Tyler.
And you know, Logan, appreciate you guys and Adrian thinks, you
know, for all you do as well, making everything work because
it's a complicated thing to build.
Yeah. Well, thank you both for for
coming. This wasn't a very insightful
conversation. Also love having you on.
I'd love to have you guys back on in in the future as we've got
new agents running around and perhaps we're further out on the
adoption curve. And of course we didn't even
talk about that the tge coming up.
So good luck with with that. I know that's going to be a big
one and one of the folks have a lot of eyes on.
So Congrats, we'll be rooting for you.
Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you guys.
Bye. Bye.
Thanks for having us. Awesome.
Well folks, thanks for staying on with us.
That was a hell of an interview.