Azura is building an on-chain trading platform for price discovery on anything — memes, beliefs, equities

happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. get on and we have our next guest coming into the studio. We got Jackson Dena. Um we will bring him in in just a second. He's here. Let's bring him in.

How you doing, Jackson? Good to meet you. I'm Yeah. Nice to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Uh would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company you're building? Yeah. Yeah. My name is Jackson. I'm building Azora.

It's a trading platform that uses onchain rails to effectively enable price discovery for literally anything. Uh political ideologies, memes, images, crypto, it doesn't really matter. Okay. What's the power law winning asset right now? How do you mean?

I mean like you say you whenever whenever you have a platform that can do anything there's always like one thing that's working really well you know your initial beach head I imagine that it's not it might be political ideologies memes but maybe the memes are the ones that are winning right now what's the most popular asset or what do you envision being kind of for like for poly market for example clearly election markets were the big driver of the of the last year um they have other markets But but election markets were clearly the power law winner for what prediction markets could do.

Um what do you see as being the first big market that you're excited about or you see early indications of a lot of attention and excitement around a particular subclass even though obviously what you're building can be used all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

Memecoins I I think though like we've bastardized the term meme. It it comes from the late 70s. I think it was Susan Blackwell defined a meme as a unit of information. Uh memecoins are not just like images of Pepe or you know what have you. Memecoins can represent literally anything.

It's just the tokenization of a phenomena. Uh which is why I mentioned things like you know political ideologies and whatnot as a memecoin could literally be whatever you want. Uh it just so happens to be funny images. But yeah what is the what what is the steel man for memecoins?

I I it's very easy to say, oh, you know, it's just gamed by traders who have insider information or bots and it's very fly by night. There's no durable asset value versus investing in Berkshire Hathaway or Apple that produces real goods.

And so I think a lot of people have been kind of uh even if they are making money on memecoins, it just doesn't feel as value creative as some other asset classes. Um but what what what is good about memecoins in your opinion?

I'll I'll also add that I think generally I have a high I personally have a high level view that there it's an entertainment product sure to some degree and from an investment standpoint it's interesting to think about basically betting on attention right where like when a specific meme coin has a lot of attention that's usually associated with with um you know positive price action but anyways uh don't want don't want you to think that uh John John's uh you know no no it's a fair question.

It's a fair question. I mean, I think that finance is a lot more abstract than we give it credit for. I sort of see it as like a almost like a consensus layer for for humanity or a coordination layer. It sort of tells us where to focus time, effort and capital.

Uh with polyarket markets for instance to a business like Bergkshire Hathaway um I think what Poly Market proved to the world that financial incentives help predict the outcome of events. So my my theory has been like what happens when there is no binary outcome? What happens when this is an omniresent question?

How do we feel about a certain thing? Uh you know memecoins today are sort of a very primitive mechanism for figuring this out. But like how does humanity feel about say a specific news headline or even like a religion or a tweet or whatever it may be.

Even though these are primitive vehicles, these are the best ones that exist today. Also, I think like even though memecoins don't have traditional fundamentals, they have a form of fundamentals. really isn't like a universal definition for fundamentals. Like how does venture value a business without revenue?

You know, typically typically, you know, revenue and net income is what we define as fundamentals, but what happens when you don't have those? Um, but I I think like, you know, memecoins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto. You could argue every single asset is a is a memecoin in a way.

What do you think about memecoins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend?

I I was noticing a phenomenon after Trumpcoin dropped that it was very bizarre and unexpected that the president has a memecoin but uh then when I started thinking about it I was like well Elon Musk was was kind of loosely aligned with Dogecoin for a long time and even Sam Alman is loosely aligned with Worldcoin and you could imagine that Worldcoin is kind of is kind of you know indexed or at least somewhat correlated with like Sam Alman's career and and Even people that are in more like serious less like meme token, meme vibe trading career paths have found themselves indexed to a particular memecoin through one way or another.

Do you think that's something that's uh like a a temporary phenomenon or something that will continue to grow? I I think it'll continue to grow. I mean this is how like every company sort of works, right? In a way uh every executive is tied to their business regardless of the fundamentals.

Like if you know, I mean, you could apply this for anything, but if some CEO of a publicly traded company showed up on a TV show slurring his speech drunk, I'd imagine it'd affect the stock price even though nothing has changed at the underlying asset, right?

I mean, Tesla commands what is it like 100x earnings because of Elon Musk. Um, so I think it'll be a growing phenomena. I I don't know if memecoins specifically are the mechanism, but I I think that like pricing in people is definitely a growing trend. Um, yeah. What else is interesting in crypto to you?

Cross prediction markets, um, stable coins, maybe just Bitcoin theories, uh, you know, where Bitcoin is in the narrative right now, store of value, etc. Uh, what else are you tracking? Every everything's interesting.

I I think the the the big thing that's interesting to me is sort of blurring the world, but like blurring the world of traditional finance and crypto. Like I think that one thing, you know, one big misconception is that crypto assets are fundamentally worthless. I mean cryp crypto is just a technology standard, right?

You can theoretically tokenize anything, treasury bills and bonds, equities, commodities. So I I think that when the world starts to see equities move on chain that that you know that sort of opinion of crypto will probably go out the window. I I think that stable coins are the wedge for this right now, right?

Like stable coins promise a very it's a very simple promise. It's this is one US dollar represented on a blockchain and and you know the world is sort of you know sort of warming up to the concept. So I think equities moving on chain is definitely one of the most interesting.

Uh I mean what would a world look like where you can trade Dogecoin next to Apple stock next to you know whether or not someone's pregnant on poly market probably very interesting.

Uh yeah, the the other the other thing uh we're kind of expecting this to happen at some point this year, but just private company shares coming on chain and and what happens when you can uh you know, it'll be interesting to see which which of those are authorized and which are sort of non nonauthorized and which which I'm sure I'm sure we'll see both of.

Do you expect that the next sort of high high level kind of meta in crypto to be around real world assets? I mean, I know uh we're not in it uh dayto-day. We obviously have founders and investors that are more focused on the show, but it feels like there's always sub metas and then kind of a more overarching meta.

And I'm I'm curious what your timeline is around seeing real world assets on chain outside of, you know, stables. Yeah, I I mean I I wouldn't even like draw the distinction as real world assets. Like I'd argue everything like all of this is real to someone. It depends on who you are.

Um I I do think equities moving on chain will be important, but the truth is like people like to use technologies for what they can do net new, right? If you tokenize equities, you can still trade those on old rails like with Robin Hood.

Um I I still strongly believe that like you know I guess like pricing vehicles for mimemetics like like meme coins will continue to grow in popular like effectively everything will be tokenized one day whe whether we like it or not.

And I think like you know there is there are some people who would call this like hyper financialization. Uh the way I see it is like if everything in the universe has intrinsic value then theoretically everything could have a price.

I think we do this every day right like in a decision-making matrix whether we decide to make food at home or go out to a restaurant we're weighing values against each other. Why not ascribe price is sort of the way I see it.

What's your take on NFTTS this day these days like uh digital art generally like the the the the JPEG onchain specifically? Um it had like a massive moment then kind of fell by the wayside but is clearly linked to so much of the of the trends that we're seeing in crypto still today. They making a comeback.

What do you think it? I I think it's a failed form factor.

I I wouldn't like totally rule it out, but you know, NFTTS, meme coins, predictions markets, these all represent a similar sort of like uh uh I I don't know whether like people are consciously or unconsciously participating, but it's the desire to price things otherwise cannot have prices.

That that's what that's what this represents. Now, whether memecoins are the, you know, the form factor or not, I I don't really know. Um, all I know is that predictions markets are, you know, definitely successful in what they've been trying to prove and we're going to see a a continued trend in that direction.

Whether it's NFTs or memecoins or another form factor, this will only continue. Very cool. What what can you say about uh Azora V2? I know you you've been teasing it a little bit. Can you share can you share anything for now? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the big themes with the product was abstraction.

I I think like if you guys have used any D5 products today, they're they're borderline unusable, right? You have all these different network standards and gas tokens and protocols and wallets and bridges and so on and so forth. Um, but we're going to go further down that route.

We uh we wanted to completely abstract away even the mention of blockchains and gas and you know, again, it should work out of the box like a fintech product. That that's that's where we're getting a lot closer toward. I'll leave it sort of vague, but that's that's that's what we're thinking of. Awesome.

Come back on when you're ready to share more. Yeah, we'll talk on being a part of this group. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Appreciate it. You know what should be on chain? Rolexes. Go to getb bezel. com. People have tried that. Your bezel.

I mean, actually, it's available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Seriously, any watch. Yeah. Get a hitter and then put it on chain. Why not? People have tried