加密货币的最后一个 Meta——Long 创始人 Nate

Hey, buddy, how are you? Welcome to the stream.

I'm fine. Everything is fine. Glad to be here.

By the way, can you hear me well?

Yeah, not bad.

Okay. The sound is not perfect, but it's quite decent. Dude, thanks for waking me up. You're on the West Coast.

Yes. How are you? I'm fine. Everything is fine. I actually went to bed about 3 or 4 hours ago. I didn't even count, but everything is okay. You know how it happens.

Dude, I'm grateful to you. By the way, Nate, his sound—the sound is not very good, but he—

Okay. Wait, wait. Let me try without headphones.

Okay, try it now. Nate, what the hell? My God. Is it okay now? Much better?

Yes, much better.

Okay, good. Oh my God, Nate. Cool, dude. Thanks for joining. I have a lot of questions for you, and I just wanted to chat with you because you're on a crazy rise right now.

Let's start with this: can you briefly tell us how and why you created Long? Where did the idea come from, and how long have you been working on it?

Yes, of course. That was a long time ago. I think we literally bought the domain about a year and a half ago. I think it's even longer.

The idea was quite simple. The first thing we saw 2 or 3 years ago was a world where the only way to get ahead was to list on top exchanges. That was the main strategy. Then came Pump, which I think was generally great, and we started noticing things like AI tokens. After that died down, other things came up.

During the AI summer—the AI meta—I started to get really excited about the idea of building capital online, just launching and building my own distribution. But I realized very quickly that these kinds of launch platforms, which are certainly great for launching memes or tokens and scaling activity, are not at all suitable for real-world assets.

At that point, I was looking at the different teams I was working with. I'm kind of a co-founder of a venture studio. Some of them tried to launch these coins on Pump, Virtuals, and other platforms, and I've seen many great teams fail just because they don't fully understand how these curves work. They fall victim to snipers, and then all the negativity gets directed at them.

So the main vision of Loon, even before we focused on stock pairs and RWAs, was how to create what I would call a launcher—a platform where we can create generational assets. A billion dollars in assets. That's what I want to be measured by.

I don't want to be judged by the volume or even the profit that people make. I want to be judged by the number of organic, generational assets I can create.

I spent almost a year and a half working very actively on the technology stack, launch mechanisms, go-to-market, and the types of assets we work with. I helped teams launch and tokenize on-chain startups, Web3 tools, and all of that. So I already have a good understanding of how to engage people from Web2.

Very quickly—around last October—I launched the app. It was on the Base network, where it could be instantly paired with any ERC-20 token on Base.

What was its name?

Moment. It was under the Loon brand. It was something like Loon. Yes, there were a few iterations.

Imagine that we can pair with any asset on Base. That wasn't bad, but it was a bear market, so it made no sense to create pairs with falling assets. Then it dawned on me: what is the only asset class, or at least a class large enough to have at least one coin that will grow?

It's the stock market. There will always be at least one stock that's going up, unless it's a crazy bear day. So this is where I was again almost a year ago. That's when I realized that stocks would change everything.

I literally pitched this idea to many venture funds and teams. I tried to implement tokenized stocks on Base, but people kind of ignored it. I'm really glad Robinhood took it seriously.

Then I realized that stocks are something we can use effectively. We can compose them. They don't require KYC, and they have good liquidity. Within 24 hours, I had an MVP launch of Long, and the rest is history.

I didn't know about this story with Base. That's a cool story.

Can you explain for the chat how exactly the launch mechanism works?

Yes, it's actually very simple. You can think of it as any regular launcher. You essentially go into our app, which is called Loon.

Usually, when you start at Pump or somewhere else, you just choose SOL or sometimes USDC. In our case, your underlying asset is the DEX pool that your asset will be paired with, and the only way to buy it initially is through shares.

We already support almost 60 stocks. The user can register, connect their wallet, choose any stock, and instantly receive a fixed configuration. All our launches start with V. The liquidity curve is the same for everyone, and we take care of the calculations to ensure consistency across all stocks.

The main difference is that we don't use a bonding curve. We don't have an exchange or post-processing, which means it's impossible to capture 80% of the supply, as you see on Pump. On Pump, it's 80% before going public, so anyone can buy it up.

In our case, this is impossible. Even with AI, which has a $200 million FDV and ultra-high liquidity, 20% of the supply is still undistributed. It's still locked in the pool.

It's almost like a continuous IPO, where you ensure that you always have enough supply to maintain the pool's liquidity. That way, it's really liquid and you don't sell it too cheaply to others, but they can still enter without too much supply control, which I think is great.

Thank you for that. I know this isn't something I was supposed to ask, but I'm most curious whether you can explain what this tool is, what these stocks are, and exactly what you're trading when you trade, say, AI against NVIDIA. What's on the other side? How does that work?

The coolest thing is that, over the last year, it's been really difficult because we've already created the pairs. We've done them all, and routing is the biggest problem.

I don't want to force people to hold, say, NVIDIA stock so they can trade NVIDIA-based AI. I want to keep it simple, so it's possible to move from ETH to AI in an atomic manner.

We take care of that ourselves. We have something like a DEX aggregator built into the application. There are other terminals that support this, but essentially it works like this: if I want to trade AI for ETH, I start with ETH. It's exchanged for USDG, and then for NVIDIA, which ends up in the final destination—our AI/NVIDIA pool.

It's like a Uniswap pool, a DEX pool that has a pair. That's the meaning of the word “pair.” You have NVIDIA on one side as the underlying asset, and a new asset on the other side.

So AI, for example, is denominated in the NVIDIA tokenized stock.

That creates all sorts of interesting possibilities, doesn't it? For example, when AI was launched on Long, NVIDIA seems to have gone up almost 20% since then. That's a huge figure for such a large capitalization.

Yes. Imagine that the liquidity curve is fixed. We know that up to a certain market capitalization, the asset will always be backed by a certain number of NVIDIA shares, meaning liquidity.

But if the value of NVIDIA increases, you still have the same absolute number of shares, but they become more expensive. So the FDV and the liquidity around it also grow. This is one interesting way to think about the reflexivity between stocks and pairs.

I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. If an AI coin on Long is in a vacuum—it's stable, there is no volume, and there are no buyers—it's not moving. It doesn't grow to 200 or anywhere else.

Then NVIDIA goes up 20%, and AI will go up with it without any external factors.

Exactly. That's right. If that were the case, there would literally be no trading volume.

The first trade in the pool will essentially set a new price that's based on NVIDIA. Even if you come in with something like 0.0001 or something like that.

Interesting. Can you explain? Many people talk about narratives that supposedly cause short squeezes in stocks, but let's forget about the squeeze and talk about buying pressure.

Can Boner, Hims—what volume do they need to create significant buying pressure on Hims stock with a market cap of $667 billion? How does this actually work with buying pressure on the stock side?

Personally, I don't think the idea of short-squeezing or rallying stocks works that way. I also feel that, in terms of compliance and ensuring that we were protected, we want assets to stay alive. We want projects to last longer, too. We need to change our approach a little.

The best way to think of it is this: your stock pair is almost like BlackRock for your stock. BlackRock isn't accelerating stocks. They accumulate them. They buy them all the time, 24/7, and they become so large as asset allocators that they can do all sorts of interesting things.

They can invest in index funds. They can, for example, take out loans against them. They can actually get leverage.

So if I were thinking about something like BONK and HIMS, it would be more about gradual accumulation. In the end, it could definitely work.

There are 2 components to Loon. One is the current circulating supply of tokenized shares—the issued supply. Because our liquidity design is very deep, I think that in the case of bonds or other asset types, I've seen them at their peak capture almost 40% of the total circulating supply on Robinhood.

In some cases, even 50%. When this happens, we work with market makers, and we also try to do it ourselves. Liquidity providers are forced to issue a new share offering. When you issue a new stock offering, actual over-the-counter purchase orders are matched against it because the tokenized shares are collateralized one-to-one.

So here’s how this flow works. It’s not about whether you can price the DEX. The DEX is something different. You should think of it almost as an oracle for the over-the-counter price. It’s more about how much pure new output you can generate. I think that if you check the share issue and the offering, you’ll see that all of our assets are growing by two or three times, something like that. It’s about how much you can grab from this new offering.

Essentially, we see most of our assets also becoming almost secondary markets for tokenized shares because they’re so large. At some point, you essentially can’t buy Hims or even NVIDIA without going through the Nvidia AI pool or the Heems bond pool. It’s just liquidity network effects and how arbitrage and routing work.

This is very, very interesting. I would say that this is a critical-mass point where the pair on our side reaches, let’s say, 10–20%, again depending on the stock, in terms of the circulating supply. It would be very difficult to see an asset completely collapse or lose all value.

Yes. So, based on how it’s been going over the last month, it looks like a crazy trajectory. Where do you think this is heading as a vertical? Where is this direction heading, and where is this niche of cryptocurrencies combined with stocks going?

Yes. I tweeted about it. I think that would be the ultimate goal of crypto, right? We’ve been thinking about this for so long: when will crypto finally reach a new level and become something more than just crypto?

I said that I see stock pairs as an evolution of the 3 biggest paradigms we’ve had in crypto. The first one is stablecoins and RWAs, right? Before that, you couldn’t even use crypto for real-world needs or even value assets in dollars. The second thing is prediction markets. Prediction markets are kind of the first application that somehow used crypto infrastructure to connect to the real world.

The third thing, which I think is the most powerful, is memetics—almost like price coordination. So I think stock pairs bring all of that together in terms of reflexivity, potential impact on the stocks themselves, their popularity, and also, obviously, price coordination around that.

I think we’re trying to do something completely different. I’m not trying to be the next Pump. I’m not trying to be the next Binance or anything like that. We are trying to build something completely new. It’s a bit similar to what we’ve seen in the past, but not exactly one-to-one.

The most important thing for me is to continue creating these use cases, action by action. Brand safety. It seems that the CEO of Hims subscribed to one of these accounts. Vlad subscribed to a meme account, the one paired with AMC. This happens because there is trust.

People believe that these assets, even if they grow very explosively, are quite stable. They know that there is support behind them in the form of technology and infrastructure. So we need to redouble our efforts to the point where this becomes something like a new mechanism for distributing shares, and it seems like we’re starting to see that.

I’ll give you one interesting insight. Today I went to Yahoo Finance and typed in Hims. There was a cool article about Hims being one of the most sought-after stocks lately, something that had recently skyrocketed.

Reddit doesn’t even suspect that some of the activity is coming from this weird Robinhood Chain and this weird protocol called Long. They have no idea that this comes from the on-chain coordination of crypto enthusiasts.

We need to understand that the stock market is not that different from crypto. In fact, it is becoming more and more like it, and I think there is no better mechanism for coordinating awareness and shared thoughts between people than crypto. We are already seeing this, and it is extremely exciting.

I think we’ll see more and more public companies, or, let’s say, fund boards of sorts. For example, if I’m an NVIDIA fan or maximalist, I might want to support something like that for various reasons. So we’re starting to see that. This is extremely exciting.

I also feel like Robinhood, right? We saw blood during the press tour of the White House. I have never seen a founder in the cryptosphere so confidently and decisively promote the idea of tokenized shares. This is inspiring. I’m grateful to be able to build projects on the Robinhood blockchain. So yes, I think we will see more and more growth.

Yes. This is a cool story about Hims. It also seemed like the AMC meme situation was—I mean, I have a lot of these coins, so I’m obviously optimistic—but it also felt like a kind of tipping point.

Certainly. So first, we can dig a little deeper into how each of the different assets is positioned on Long. I think each of them is very unique in its own right. I try to support everything using the skills I have.

I’m talking to the meme team. I think they’re cooking something crazy. I am very optimistic about them. I think they have a very unique understanding of narratives and distribution.

But memes are still more interesting, right? Because supposedly the CEO of AMC—what’s his name? Adam, I think. I’m not entirely sure.

Aron.

Yes, Adam Aron. Adam Aron allegedly printed and inflated the value of his own shares through new issues. I used to hold AMC shares; I was bullish on them a few months ago.

For me, what I see with this meme-stock thing is almost like we’re taking back control—people who see it as a meme stock, right? AMC is a meme campaign. So we are taking back control.

We use this super-open, super-fair system of tokenized shares, and we’re going to take control. We’re not going to let this one guy, this one person, the CEO, set the rules for how people should trade these stocks.

We want to break down the power structure, make it more equitable, and open up more access. This crazy clash between him and Vlad, and his tweet, which was just wild, was very, very interesting.

There are tokenized shares from many providers, right? I don’t think the legal structure of xStocks is much different from Robinhood. I would even say that Robinhood is a little better in some ways, and he chose Robinhood.

I think we’re seeing memes align with Vlad as a person and also with the story of Robinhood, and it’s going to be really, really exciting to watch.

The bill, yes. Oh, sorry, finish. Finish.

No, no. I almost think the craziest part about this is that it literally happened in June. In June, I think that was the last time AMC issued more shares—I mean AMC, the stock itself.

I wonder if we’re going to see something almost like the DAO wars on Ethereum, right? When they tried to compete over who would control it.

So imagine he prints more shares, the meme community grabs more of them, and that creates an interesting dynamic. I just think it could be interesting. We’ll see.

This is interesting. I really like it. What happened when the chain went down?

That was crazy. It was an important event. It was a little crazy.

When I first used Robinhood, I thought, “Damn, it’s really fast.” It was a bit like Solana. Personally, I have never used such a fast EVM network.

In EVM networks, there are concepts of soft forks and hard forks, which essentially occur when the generation of new blocks becomes very fast. I believe that there may be state conflicts there, and that is why the network may freeze.

Probably due to excessive activity, maybe due to memes and other things, the network “fell down” to some extent. But overall, I think their stack is incredible. The Arbitrum team is probably the best out there. Their stack is simply incredible. I think they are definitely the best.

Hopefully, we won’t have many such cases. This created some problems on our side, of course. For example, our indexing—everything just fell. It was funny. It was madness.

Why didn’t you release the Long token?

People asked me about that very early on, and I feel like that’s part of our thesis. Long is not about selling assets, or even about the project as such. I’d like to think of it more as an incubator, right?

We’re like YC or Techstars, only for community or equity assets. I’ve studied every launchpad on the market. I followed everyone on Solana, on Base, and on other networks.

It’s almost a universal truth that when you launch a platform token—or even if you start out with one—things won’t go exactly as planned. If you do it too early, the price may not rise high enough, and this creates a kind of ceiling.

I’m sure if Long had a token, we wouldn’t have AI. We would simply fight every day to keep the Long price going up.

The second point is that you create a kind of division into “second-class” and “first-class” citizens, where the Long token gets everything, and other assets say, “Oh, but we don’t have the Long brand and everything else.”

I actually want to share the brand with all the other assets launching on our platform. And the third thing is that I don’t really understand why we need our own token.

I think token redemption is interesting. There are really cool ways to increase the value of your token. But I believe it is worth achieving product-market fit (PMF) and strong growth first.

You also need to make sure that the commissions or revenue you generate are reinvested into the ecosystem in some way, perhaps through the automated liquidity mechanisms we are creating, or simply by investing in development.

I've always wondered why big platforms that have made hundreds of millions or even billions don't invest enough in growth. There has to be someone who is willing to invest $20 million or $50 million to systematically attract new capital, instead of—I wouldn't call it extortion, but—pumping money out of people.

So for me, that's the goal. This is what I strive for. I think it's much more complicated with a token. It's much more insidious. So I don't see us launching a coin anytime soon.

Besides, we have no investors. We don't need to issue a coin; no one is forcing us. We don't have to do a TGE. We are a stock-based company, so we have complete flexibility. I'm happy with this arrangement.

You correctly noted that on most launchpads, the token with the largest market capitalization is the launchpad coin itself.

Almost always.

That's right. You probably won't get AI if you have a Long token.

Yes, definitely. I'm thinking about Pump, you know. What was the highest market capitalization on Pump? Fartcoin? It seems like $2 billion.

Yes. Now, apparently, handsome [?].

Yeah, and I think since Pump launched its own platform coin, has there been anything that has exceeded $1 billion?

No, because the Pump coin is like—

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, that makes sense, I suppose. Again, I'm not claiming—

Yes. And if they don't pump up, then that's just the way the market is. This is a fair observation.

I've never heard you talk. That was cool, man. I really appreciate your time. I guess this is kind of a farewell, but I'd like to know what you're focused on right now. What are you working on now? What are you planning to release next? What is your priority right now?

You've already achieved the first phase of success, but what do stages 2, 3, 4, and 5 look like?

Yes, yes. I would highlight a few things. First, I want to do a quick overview of different assets to explain how people should think about them.

AI is a whole new beast. I'm trying to present it as if it's almost the liquidity you'd see in a Layer 2 coin or something like that right now. I mean, a blockchain coin. You can buy or sell AI for $1 million and the price will only change by 4% or 5%. That's crazy. This is an extremely liquid asset. It has liquidity of $50 million, in general, because we did a lot of cool, complicated things with it.

So this includes AI. With AI, I like to think of it as a very ambitious, audacious, almost cosmic mission, similar to Bitcoin trying to become digital gold. I would say that AI is trying to become, let's say, a tokenized Nvidia, or the equivalent of that. This will take a lot of time. I think it will continue to grow.

We have plans to legitimize this as a true new asset class. I believe this is a new asset class. This is the first thing.

Other assets—for example, I believe Hims will have a great owner, as will the Hims pair. I think this would be a great case for aligning with stocks that really need it.

Hims is not Nvidia. If you search for Hims on Twitter, you'll see almost zero interesting tweets about it. So I think it will be really interesting to watch this alignment. It's really cool.

As for the memes, I think it's a little different. I don't want to echo Corbett, who says, “Oh, it's like a GME moment.” This is not true. This is something completely different.

I think this is not yet included in the price. But it would be very interesting to see some kind of counter-movement against the board of directors or the CEO, you know, as an asset to the mission. So it will be very exciting.

We have more assets like MU. MU—that's really cool. It seems a bit like AI to me. It's based on Micron, and they're trying to implement the idea of building reflexivity with a memory tradeoff. The memory is kind of stuck. Some people are helping them with the technology stack, and I can build cool stuff there.

There are still many assets. I think some of them will grow as well. We'll see. I'm not trying to pick winners. When I see a good structure, I try to double my efforts and help the teams.

I feel like we need to experiment with different things: more attention-driven stocks, deeper liquidity, more narratives about memory, and so on. We will continue to push for this.

Safety is also very important. I'm going to launch a small update that will make it even harder for people to launch something by bypassing our interface. So there will be fewer bots and fewer risky things.

We've only had 15,000 or 16,000 launches so far, with a volume of almost $1 billion. I think this is unprecedented. I want to continue to develop this.

And, of course, I want to redouble my efforts. I'm literally trying to reach out to some CEOs of public companies and see if we can at least get their perspective. So we'll see.

Are there any answers yet?

Not yet, but I will say that I have a feeling that this shake-up of the situation has led to some of the biggest cases we've seen so far. So that means we're on the right track one way or another.

Uh-huh. What a conversation, man. 8:00 a.m.

Nate, you're cool, dude.

Yes. Thanks for coming, man. It was a real pleasure.

Surprisingly.

Yes. Okay, brother. Have a nice day.

I love you. I was glad to see it. Peace.

Thank you, brother. Goodbye. Damn, he's cool, bro. What the hell was that?