Episode 31: Growing SheFi

A conversation with Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi, about six years of building one of crypto's largest education communities.

The idea for SheFi arrived on a run in 2019. Love had been at ConsenSys long enough to live through the 2018 bear market, and as the first DeFi teams began to form she noticed two things at once: people were earning twenty percent on their tokens through MakerDAO and Compound, and none of the people building or talking about it on stage at ETHDenver looked like her.

Find more details about this episode on the Nexus blog.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Exponential, a Nexus podcast, where we talk about people, code, and capital. I am Daniel McBlain. In this episode, I talk with Maggie Love, the founder of SheFi, about six years of building one of crypto's largest educational communities. Why frictionless onboarding isn't what every user actually wants, and where the agentic and institutional waves are quietly converging. Maggie, uh, welcome to Exponential. It's great to have you today.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I'm really excited to talk to you. And uh, you know, when we were scheduling the show, I didn't know that it was gonna coincide with the six-year anniversary of ShiFi, but seems like great timing because we can uh take a minute to look back at all the lessons you've learned in that time and uh you know take it some time to look forward to. It's always great to celebrate the uh the milestone. So before we do all that, maybe you could just um tell us what it what is ShiFi?

SPEAKER_02 0:54

Yeah, most simply uh ShiFi is crypto and AI education for women.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Great. And when you started ShiFi, um, and you kind of had the the first concept of it and were thinking about it, what problem were you aiming to solve when you created ShiFi?

SPEAKER_02 1:13

Yes, so I had the idea in 2019. The name came to me on a run. I was meditating on like how to get more women taking risks with their crypto and small amounts in DeFi and saying all these words on the run. And I was like, ShiFi, ShiFi, that's a good name. So it felt very like divinely inspired, like this is what you're supposed to do. And at the time, you know, I had I'd been in crypto since 2017. I lived through my first traumatic bear market in 2018, was working at consensus, like tons of people got laid off. It was like, you know, bloodbathed, um, all the early ICOs crumbling. But out of that quiet period in 2019 came decentralized finance. You started seeing MakerDow, um early ETHLend or Compound. And I noticed people were earning 20% interest on their tokens, and new DeFi teams were being created in these companies, uh, in the company I was at, and uh there was no women on those teams. And I noticed that everyone at ETH Denver on stage talking about permissionless inclusive finance did not look like me. And so I was so excited about financial tools accessible to anyone anywhere in the world with just an internet connection. But I know making things accessible or available doesn't necessarily bring people into the space, right? Just because something exists doesn't mean that people even want to use it. So I didn't want to get left behind in the DeFi space. I wanted to learn what was going on. I was really fascinated by figuring it out. And then I just decided to bring uh my friends, my peers, my family, all the women in my life along with me. And I taught my first cohort in lockdown. It was called The Date with She Fi. And everybody brought wine on Zoom. And people were like, You're really good at this. This was a lot of fun. And I was like, Okay, well, why don't I start again? But really, it's that core reason I think a lot of us are here in the space. You don't need permission to access financial assets, you don't need to live in a certain place to get uh equal financial opportunity. And I wanted to make sure that women were not only participating, but had a seat at the table and building and shaping it. So that's really what uh got me to start ShiFi.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

That's really cool. And so um is the format still the the courses? Uh, because now ShiFi is is a global network. You you have uh people, um, it feels like you know, when you go to conferences now, you see people representing ShiFi and talking about and also teaching courses. So maybe you could just explain how that works. Is it still a course at the root of it, or is it um like what does it look like now?

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Yeah, and it's actually changing as we speak. We just had made a big announcement yesterday. So there's always been three pillars of ShiFi education, experimentation, and community from day one. So my philosophy was well, their information is different than education. So we need to figure out how to communicate these concepts to people with analogies and things they already know. Just take the terms they don't know, give them something they know. Then there's doing the thing on chain. That's always been in the DNA of ShiFi. Download your wallet, make a swap, stake, the at the time, mint NFTs, vote in the DAO, governance, whatever it was. And then I knew that trends come and go, but community outlasts all of that. And it's well studied that when people learn in groups in peer settings, they're actually way more likely to finish courses. So, and I just like had this intuition that community was going to be part of it. So those three pillars still exist. You're gonna, there's a course, it's uh about four to five weeks. We'll see, we're always shortening it and making it more compact for the busy professional. There's the on-chain experimentation through quests, you do a quest per topic, and then there's this global community now that's 30,000 women, non-binary folks, people in G Fi, which is mind blowing. Because when I launched it, I I launched it from lockdown in COVID. So that's four years ago, or six years ago, right? And I just couldn't have told you this was what it was going to be. But yeah, I had I had a suspicion all these components mattered. Now you're right, ShiFi is much bigger than just the course. The entry point is usually 90% through the course. And then people uh love it, love the mission, love what they learned, get jobs in the space. And so now we have this community layer. And um, many of the ShiFi grads are working at companies in the space. Um, many of them have become chapter leads. So we launched that program a few years ago. So you can organize in the name of ShiFi locally and work with you know a variety of partners in the space to do that. And um, we have ambassadors. It's really just so phenomenal how many people are inspired by this mission as well and want to take part. So that is something new. We really do have a very strong in-person community layer. We've hosted everywhere from coffee meetups in Austin, Texas, to 600-person summits in Bangkok for DEV CON, right? So you'll see us at these events too. And that's because I think that as much as we want virtual to replace IRL, it's just not going to happen. So to keep that community feeling really sticky, we need IRL. And then we're actually uh launching our first paid membership. So there's many uh paid memberships in tech. Uh, you know, there's women in AI, there's women in tech. And so we have a new paid membership tier for ShiFi, but it's going to be focused on career support. So really growing that community component um by providing more ways to stay engaged and participate.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Yeah. And I'm I'm kind of curious, um, just given the the pace that that crypto moves in this industry, um, and especially, you know, if you started ShiFi six years ago and and all the things that have happened in that time. Um I'm just curious, like, what about the the mission or or the way you you maybe develop curriculum or whatever it is that your course um what of that has has stayed the same and what if it has like changed? Or how do you how do you kind of like keep up with the the trends at the the pace that they move in crypto?

SPEAKER_02 7:23

You know, I'm such a product nerd, like a product about my course nerd, that I'm always fine-tuning the content to the point where here there are people around me and be like, Maggie, you do not have to update the stablecoins presentation. I'm like, there's been so many advancements. There's been, you know, you know, bridge being acquired by Stripe or whatever it is. And um also I not only work with my cohorts, I work with institutional clients who I cannot name, but I'm working with a large uh financial institution to educate their employees internally. So that's also a whole different lens that I have to take on my content, uh, you know, because it's like, well, how does how do stable coins relate to enterprises? Or, you know, when we talk about trading, do they really, you know, care about these? You anyone can launch a coin. You know, I feel kind of almost silly saying that. I sound very rogue. But anyway, when I started Chi Fi, I was like, great, there's MakerDAO, there's Ethland, there's Compound. I think Uniswap was, you know, recently launching. There's uh Nexus Mutual. I was like, great, there's like five DeFi protocols. Like, I got this. And then it was DeFi summer 2020, and there was yield farming, and there was Yam Finance, and there was Uniswap, and there was SushiSwap, and and uh, and you know, then I'm like, oh my gosh. And then MakerDow raised their minimum loan from like any loan. Like I was literally doing uh like showing women how to take out their loan on MakerDAO, and like I couldn't do it because it wasn't like by the floor price of like now $5,000. Then there's NFT, then there's non-fungible tokens. ShiFi exploded in that era because all these people had purchased non-fungible tokens and then were like, what am I doing? And people were like, send them to ShiFi. So we had a cohort of 600 in that in that year in 2021. So, you know, I've lived through OG, DeFi, yield farming, non-fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous uh organizations, uh, governance, privacy, layer twos. Like I don't even teach a layer two course anymore, right? So every trend I've I've covered and every important advancement I've covered. Um, but now, so six years later, it's really about what are the core things that are still around and that you can do. And then I uh have a background in AI, so I'm I'm doing AI as well. So, what still exists? Well, blockchains, wallets, core infrastructure. Uh, what DeFi is DeFi is one of my courses, which is like everything you can see from stable coins uh to trading to staking to perps, right? To um options and derivatives, like the full spectrum of what exists. Then we go into stable coins, swapping, staking. Uh, we are partners with the central end. So we talk about the metaverse, and I kind of combine it like NFT, other metaverse, and uh then we do AI. So it's like quite pared down from what I was doing the whole like think about 2021, 2021, 2022. There's like almost too many topics to try to cover. Um, but so the you know, the things that last and the things that are accessible uh to people from everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Yeah, and I I used to think like um that you know, this challenge of finding the entry point to crypto was was like a uniquely crypto problem because you're you you're talking about things like finance that are fuzzy for a lot of people, and talking about like you know, internet technologies, which are also kind of fuzzy for a lot of people. And so when you're combining them and then talking about these other aspects of um, you know, economic self-sovereignty or or whatever, whatever angle you come into the space with, um I yeah, I I just used to always think that eventually we we get to this place where these things would be figured out and it would feel easier to to grasp. Um but I find myself still talking to people, you know, I've been um in crypto for a long time now too, and and still when it comes up and people are like, oh, you know, what do you do? And oh we're for a layer one or whatever it might be, and you know, immediately it's like, oh, like you know, like it's like, oh, like this is gonna be a long conversation, right? And so there's still this like sense of like, I don't know, um it's hard to that learning curve. And I'm I guess my question in all of this is do you think that goes away where at some point the technology um feels more uh intuitive or fundamental? Or do you feel like this is gonna be a persistent problem in crypto where um it does take that like embracing the learning curve to kind of get up to speed? Um how do you think that like is that a solvable thing, or is that is will there always be that kind of like you know, onboarding situation?

SPEAKER_02 12:04

I mean, I could take either side of this argument. So let me take the it's going away with the in uh institutional adoption, uh with like privy, you know, being able to sign in with your email or or face ID across privy across like apps like the base app, the new Ave app, all these uh institutions plus app going app first, which I'm seeing a lot. They don't want you to know it's crypto. The sign-on experience is is nothing like that. Is not no private keys, no seed phrases, you don't even need to know. And so I could say, yeah, like crypto's definitely going there. And I think our hope is is that yes, everyone's using stable coins in the future. Like if I'm gonna be the the crypto maxi, everybody owns a bit of these assets. Uh, everyone's can stake easily. It doesn't, you know, earn interest easily, right? And I think we're we're seeing these, I would say like Ave, base app, and things that privy plug into this kind of like app focused world, centric world. You're seeing how easy that is. And then with the institutions coming on chain, of course, it needs to manage private keys and all that technical infrastructure needs to get better. So yeah, I can say like that's the end state, that's the goal, that's what I really want to happen. But as someone who teaches new people every day, and not all wallets are integrated with certain apps, it's like, oh my gosh, it's like, why can't why doesn't this thing show up? Why doesn't this NFT, this badge, show up in my wallet? Why isn't this working? It's like, oh shoot, if you can't use this to do this because of where you are, like I'm gonna do another demo of something like, and I'm like, we are so far away from this stuff being just easy to use, right? And I think there's it's great to have a lot of competition, but it's just even just at the wallet to integrate it to apps so people can actually stake or do X, Y, and Z is like, we are so far away. On top of that, I actually think that we've over-indexed on the ease. There are people in my cohort who are like, I do not do biometrics, I do not do email backup. Like the point of this is, as you said, for me, it's always agency and sovereignty. And now you're asking me to sign in with my face ID, Maggie. Like, explain that to me. So you're gonna see there's like crypto for different flavors of people, right? And and I think that's gonna always the seed phrase, the private key, then is gonna take extra steps, just like if you don't want to host any of your data, uh any of your iPhotos, or your photos on iCloud. Right. I think like with the Claude Mythos coming out, everyone's kind of like, yeah, maybe I should be self-hosting and hard driving. And that's always going to take a little bit more effort. Um, and even with AI, like, yeah, anybody can chat, but not everyone's leveraging AI to automate their life and get their time back. So, you know, maybe everyone can use their face ID to log into an app, but there's still some stuffs in getting the crypto into the app and the debit card doesn't always work, right? There's lots of things we need to fix. So I think I could take both sides of that where I see the current reality, which is like everyone's having a really terrible time buying crypto with their debit card, and like they have a wallet that doesn't integrate with one of my modules. And then I can see like the people that are going at first, it feels like a really non-crypto experience.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah. And I think there's also something interesting about this idea of um, I mean, what drew me to crypto in the first place back in the day was um a sense of building alternatives. So that kind of what you're just describing, like people could kind of choose their own adventure. Like if you want to um, you know, have all your assets on a hardware wallet and have that, you know, engraved in have your private key engraved in stone somewhere and do that, like that extreme. Yeah. That's great. Like, go ahead. And yeah, but if you're on the other side and you're just like, hey, I want to quickly and um cheaply um send money to uh a family member in another country, like I can do that you know from my laptop, no problem. Um and so I saw that as like, okay, this just provides all these alternatives for all these things we use. And and I feel like the thing that is interesting to me as somebody who's been following all the stories along for for a while, is that um it feels like we're trying to um you know come to to a place of like the super app or one app to rule them all or one one product to rule them all, and and like, oh, it's gonna have this appeal to everyone, where I really think the value of these technologies, this is a personal thing, is like I I think it is to just provide alternatives, um, which kind of I think is a little bit aligned with what you're saying about like that that could you know potentially be the future. Hopefully, some of it is easy to use and some of it might be hard to use on purpose, right? Um, where it's like we're not actually um optimizing for ease of use, we're optimizing for things like privacy or um whatever it might be. So it's just kind of interesting how those stories have changed over time. Um, but uh and we'll continue to because we're we're you know still trying to arrive at the the final place. But um but I do want to ask you about you've mentioned a couple times, and I know you have a background in AI, and it feels like one of the stories emerging right now or the the new narratives is um this interaction between blockchain and um and AI specifically, and and like you know, in the past few months it feels like um people are building agents, uh, you know, um agentic finance and commerce is becoming a real thing. Um, and it's interesting to see um where blockchain fits in all of that. And I'm kind of curious on your take, uh, especially as someone who teaches and and again has like that background in AI, like what how what are you thinking about or what are you looking at when you are talking about um blockchain and AI?

SPEAKER_02 17:58

Yeah, I think there's you know many ways to look at it. Like there's the total infrastructure layer with like news research, and I actually worked on a crypto ETH mining data center back in 2018 uh with advanced microdices. So I also have some of that background of like you know, open compute and like rent compute, and like we're gonna be able to aggregate all this rented compute to train models or to do any of that work, which I do think is compelling but very hard. Where I think the most obvious use case for the intersection is what we're seeing a lot of people talk about today is agentic, right? Uh internet native beings, let's call them, uh, would use internet native money. That makes a ton of sense, right? Right now we're trying to figure out how to make humans in the physical world use internet native money. That's not that intuitive. But I do think agents, the agent economy is going to be what really takes off. And actually, I remember sitting in a room with Joe Lubin in 2017 at Consensus, and he totally said, like, your car is gonna talk to your watch, it's gonna, you know, and in 2017, I was like, whoa, but like it's happening, and all that would be orchestrated through the blockchain, right? So we're seeing, you know, cars can have wallets, um, agents can have wallets, any machine can have a wallet. And we actually know blockchains are very good at coordinating machines. That's the that's the thing they're actually world class at. Coordinating the governance layer on top of those machines with humans, that's a little bit harder. There's too much, there's too much human in that. That's too much like applying theory to the ideal state of humanity. But I do really believe in agentic commerce. I believe Coinbase just announced like the first agentic marketplace. And I think that will where that will be where we see the biggest overlap when people um are giving their agents their own wallets. I totally see that. I totally see when open claw gets like more locked down and more secure that people could just give it its own wallet to spend on marketing ads or you know, uh more tokens, right? Funny to like the word token persists throughout all of this, but um, I think agents and wallets is where it's at, and if people figuring out how do I allow this thing I want to operate 24-7 autonomously, to make trades, to do whatever it can do uh with with the internet native money.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

Yeah. Yeah, it'll be it'll be really interesting. And I I um you know, one theme that we keep coming back to in this conversation is just how things have some things have changed and some some things have stayed the same uh over you know the course of past few years, and and it's kind of interesting to see what what will stick with the the um you know the AI blockchain story, what uh what becomes real and what becomes um you know, just just ideas I get you know maybe market tested but don't don't actually work out. Um and it's uh definitely an exciting time. I think some of what we're working on here is is related to that and um you know empowering agents to to take action on people's behalf. And um it does seem like the the finance and the the the blockchain space is like a great place to to do some of that early work and testing and see how it's all gonna come together. So exciting times for sure. Um another thing I I wanted to check in with you about sometimes it's great to hear from people um who are um working with communities and and get the the opportunity to interact with, you know, in your case, like students and and um people coming to crypto for the first time or or people who are uh deeply in the industry and kind of um part of part of the ShiFi network. What um what are you hearing that's exciting or or uh what are people kind of talking about or or has the the sort of attention of the community right now?

SPEAKER_02 21:53

Yeah, what are people talking about in the community right now? I mean, I definitely think. A lot of it goes back to uh AI. I think a lot of it goes back to institutional adoption, right? I think a lot of it goes back to, okay, I used to think about how do I take my skills and transfer them to like a five-person DeFi startup. And now it's like, how do I take those skills and transfer them to a stablecoin issuer, right? Or uh a more structured financial product. Um, I have members who actually are taking those roles at those companies and coming back to me and being like, okay, we have these crypto financial products, traditional financial products. Can you come educate everyone about what's going on besides just like the basics? Like they don't actually know anything about real world assets or on-chain assets. So I definitely think we I hear uh that a lot more. Kind of everyone's kind of growing up, and the interest is kind of going towards the growing up that that is crypto. Um, and so there's a lot of attention there, and there's just a lot of attention with AI because the She Fi naturally attracts curious people who were willing to jump into something before they totally understood it and uh have learned from being a part of the community. If you show up, you're going to learn something. And so I think everyone's really trying to wrap their head around AI. And why do I think that I hear it? Because now AI Twitter is DeFi Twitter 2020. Okay. My friend made $30,000, you know, this weekend vibe coding for 30 minutes. It's like the same archetype of like like FOMO, like get in now, like don't be left behind. And so that same energy, I think, is starting to make people be like, oh, like, you know, crypto's kind of moved away from that, like, have fun staying poor. And AI doesn't say it because I think they're maybe a bit nicer over there. But they definitely, if you just spend any time on the internet right now, it's headline after headline after headline and trying to make what sense of it, what's what's real. And so I think there's just a lot of attention going there, right? Because your stock, your portfolio drops, you know, five to 10% every anthropic announcement or or whatever, right? And I think that people in Chi Fi didn't want to be left behind in crypto and they're very keyed towards agency. And so this is just the next set of tools that you want to get up to speed on, and that uh give you additional agency in a different way than than crypto does.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Yeah. That's interesting. I actually I I totally have seen that like in my own feed. This um, you know, this sense that my my crypto Twitter has become AI Twitter. Um, I but I I didn't like think about what you just said, how it's kind of like the same playbook unfolding of like yeah, the the hype or like the the get rich quick kind of mentality. Um that is that is pretty wild. And it I guess it makes sense um given you know these sort of frontier technologies and it's like you know, the this the next gold rush, I guess. But um but yeah, I I wonder how that shakes out, and I wonder how the the like you know, maybe maybe we can take a lesson learned from from the crypto cycles and the boom bust and and all the things that have happened in between. And and uh, you know, maybe for experienced people it's like, okay, well, we're not gonna like get consumed by by what feels uh like a trend or a fad, but but it's also like you you do have to keep an ear to the ground to to kind of understand where everything's headed, right? So it's like that that push-pull or that tension that makes things kind of interesting, I guess. But um yeah, and and it'll be interesting to see, I think, uh this combination of blockchain and AI or or or crypto and AI of like um where those intersections really do matter um and where it'll it'll just be like a passing fad. Um and uh because it will bring it's kind of like you know, brings new people into to each of those, like whether you were in crypto or blockchain and now you're getting interested in AI or vice versa. Um, you know, I'm sure there's builders out there that are um have not built with with blockchain primitives before, and and maybe they, you know, because of what they're trying to build with AI, whether it's an app or or some kind of new product, um, you know, maybe that's what brings them in and gets them excited about um you know, decentralized finance or or whatever it might be. So definitely interesting times ahead of us. Um another thing that's kind of related to that question, um, but maybe a little bit different. Um this could come from your your vantage point, um not not just as uh the founder of ShiFi, but just um somebody who's been in the space for a long time. Are there any um like surprising or underreported trends? I mean, we we've been talking about AI uh a lot, so so and I think that is consuming everyone's attention right now. But anything else kind of like uh out there or or on your radar that you're you're seeing that um you feel like could could be the start of something or or just something you're paying attention to?

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Yes, I don't know if it's underreported, I would say, but you know, when we used to think about the top blockchains, it's like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, right? And uh open source, like all the values and ideals. And now there's this thing called hyperliquid, which is closed sourced, and it's like, you know, doing crazy numbers and perps, and they have like a stablecoin ecosystem, uh USDH, and I'm just like, wow, there's so much happening over there that's talked about, but maybe not super looked into. Maybe I'm just talking about myself where like I know there's this whole new ecosystem being built on this totally different financial primitive, still blockchain, but a lot, um a little bit different values, closed source, right? And maybe that's the way we've just seen like Kelp Dow hack and layer zero and the the uh drift protocol hack. So maybe there's something to be said for closed source has its place. Uh, but I think the it's going to be you know really fascinating to see like what type of new other applications can be built on on that type of ecosystem. Um, hadn't really thought about that before. Uh, I usually stick to kind of like the the majors and the the ones kind of us upholding similar value than ideals, but I think there's a lot, a lot happening over there uh that you know, I think the the USDH could maybe be a huge stable coin. It's backed by Tris, you know, it's more traditional, but it's you know that attached to that ecosystem.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely, I think, this new wave of um architectures and designs coming out in the blockchain space that are different. I mean, we saw that some of this um, you know, with the whole like modular design and and layer two kind of wave uh where people were we're experimenting with new kinds of designs and new kinds of architectures. And you know, you could say that that ran its course or or or at least it's out there and people are using those. And it feels like something like that is happening now. Um and you know, maybe that we we don't see like all the downstream stuff of that, like what those new architectures will enable or or what what happens um until uh you know the market comes back or until the next cycle starts or whatever. But I agree with you. I think there's there's something interesting there about um this kind of shift in how we once understood like what a layer one is or or uh a layer two and and what's happening now. Um so yeah, we'll keep it keep an eye on that for sure. And then um, Maggie, last question of the day. Um, and I I appreciate your time, but um I just curious if you have any uh big bet or bold prediction for the future, either as you know, uh in in your role, what you're doing now, or just you know uh somebody who's who's observant and and looking around and thinking about things. What and I'll leave future too to like you know, near term, far term, whatever you however you want to interpret that. Um just kind of curious uh what what you're what's on your radar or what you're kind of keeping an eye on.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

Yeah, that's a great question. I definitely had an answer for this when you first asked me. I was like, oh yeah, a great answer to that question. We've been talking for a bit now. Um a future prediction, what I think is going to happen. Um I do, yeah, I'll I'll take a more consensus. That's not very fun, but I do think that uh agents will be doing most of our you know transactions. I think like the chat box is uh going to be this maybe the last thing we ever look at, you know? Maybe, maybe everything just comes down to the chat box, you know, and then it's you've you've given your agent a wallet, so it's going off and doing all your transactions, managing your portfolio positions. There's something really nice about that separation of the chat box and the thing going off and doing something. I don't know, it feels really nice. It makes life easier, right? So um, I think we will be, you know, a very chat box native uh world. I know people are building wrappers and all that stuff, but I think it's all gonna just we're all gonna be connecting our on-chain life, uh off-chain life, everything's through a box, and the the agent goes and does things on-chain, and you're just like on your phone, like, oh right, like I need to, you know, allow you to do that thing, but from the chat box.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

The killer app of the internet will be the chat box, right?

SPEAKER_02 31:55

It's gonna be a chat box.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

The killer interface, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, you can see it. It's amazing. Uh, I mean, just how much that experience has changed uh in the past, I don't know, year, 18 months of um yeah, how we used to prompt questions and now like what what's happening in that chat box is pretty amazing these days. Yeah, yeah. It's uh bound to continue, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Bound to continue. And I think, yeah, I think crypto, crypto is a part of it. Another thing is uh because I'm teaching an institutional client, I and maybe this is the under, sorry, going back to the underreported question too, but like you think some of these chains, these layer ones, because you don't hear of them as much anymore, aren't doing stuff, they are in Wall Street. They are building private stable coins, they layer twos are being are piloting uh huge financial banks and clients. And I think I was just like really mind-blown. And like, you know, Polygon, we all know going payments first, right? Going basically institutional first. But that was like the big headline. But I'm like, oh, a lot of chains, just because we don't hear about retail token launch, DeFi summer 2020, come use our protocol, get get your tokens, do these five activities, get your tokens. But they're just like, we're not might not be making noise, but we're definitely w hanging out with Wall Street. So I think just like it's happening. You may not hear about it. You may think, like, what is that? What's going on? And because the retail interest feels light, but the appetite from Wall Street seems huge based on what I'm learning about these different pilots building their own layer ones, piloting on layer twos, figuring out how to build privacy in into the blockchain financial or Wall Street, you know, ecosystem, which I think has just been really refreshing. I'm like, oh, cool. People didn't just pack up and go home, just you know, quit. They're like, you know, that they pivoted and we might not see them at like ETH Ember, but they're going to institutional conferences for sure.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Right, right. Yeah, and that that um widespread or mainstream adoption we've been talking about for for years is is maybe happens more quietly than than we think, right? Like just um yeah, and what you're saying kind of tracks with other conversations I've been having recently, um, like on this podcast and and elsewhere about uh there's a lot of building happening and a lot of energy. It's just not that sort of like it's not on crypto Twitter or it's not like as public or or um it's not happening at um the events that we normally go to or whatever. So um yeah, that'll that'll also be an interesting trend to keep an eye on and and see if it that all pops at once or whether it's just this slow rollout of like all of a sudden we're using things on crypto rails and didn't didn't really know that that's that's what we were doing. Um which will be uh neat to see. But um, Maggie, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you joining Exponential and uh sharing your insights with us. It was great to uh to meet you. And um, yeah, just thanks again for joining.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

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