Kyle Samani on Multicoin's early Solana bet, DPIN reaching escape velocity, and crypto's political realignment

you. What's happening, dude? I'm doing great, guys. Uh actually in Vegas right now. I'm actually looking at the sphere out my window in my hotel. It's Bitcoin Vegas going on. It's a fun time. crypto company sponsoring the sphere right now or or maybe we TVPN should buy the inventory this very moment.

I think I think y'all's faces would look really good at 400 ft wide and tall. I think that we should just be live broadcasting this there. That's the that's the real alpha. Um it's great it's great to have you on. Um what uh bunch of places so I I don't even have context. What what event is happening in Vegas?

I think Katie Han is there as well. Is that correct? Bitcoin conference. Bitcoin conference. Can you break it down? What are you expecting? what's happening on the ground. Yeah, it's Bitcoin Vegas is going on. Largest crypto conference ever. More than 30,000 people at Venetian Palazzo.

Uh Vance either just spoke or speaking shortly. Um David Sax is here. Bo Hines is here. Ross Albert is here. David Bailey, Michael Sailor, tons of tons of folks uh are all here. Senators here, Lumis Hagerty, a whole bunch of other folks. So, uh politics is here, Wall Street is here, industry is here. Yeah.

Uh very very exciting time in crypto. And what are the key indications or news items that people are looking for? Are there people still hunting for uh different companies to establish Bitcoin reserves or news from the government?

Like what are the unanswered questions that people are looking for hints as to which way they'll break? Um I think probably the biggest questions are how is the Bitcoin strategic reserve going to be funded?

Um, you know, Senator Lumis has proposed uh the Bitcoin bill, which would which proposes open market purchases authorized by Congress. Um, that hasn't made it very far in Congress, but it's at least in the public domain.

Um, you know, when the executive order was signed by President Trump a few weeks ago, um, it said that they can kind of fund the strategic reserve using revenue neutral mechanisms. And so, there's a lot of discussion today about what exactly does that mean? Mhm.

Um folks like Bohe and David Saxs and the administration are are certainly working on figuring all that out. They haven't shared anything publicly yet, but there's a lot of discussion about that. There's a lot of discussion around Bitcoin L2s.

These are kind of ways to bring DeFi to Bitcoin um with like two or three or four asterisks after that end of that statement, but like a lot of people are trying to figure that out. Uh and then obviously the kind of hot subject of the moment is these Bitcoin treasury companies.

Uh the most recent of which I believe is DJT. um which is I think it just announced a two and a half billion dollar offering. Yeah. Wait, is that Truth Social? Yeah. Yeah. Truth Social has GameStop announced today GameStop announced large purchase. Yeah.

In some ways all the regulatory stuff happening right now feels like the kid who didn't do his homework until two minute or two minutes before the exam or something and is just cramming because crypto has been an important industry for a decade. You know, people have been investing in this category for a long time.

But now it's like the government's like, "Okay, let's figure all this out.

" Is that just because we've really finally gotten to adoption and breached the technical milestones or or do we and and I guess the question is like do you expect us to get through this regulatory kind of crunch period and then go back into build mode and if so like what are the technical milestones that we're that we're trying to build?

What what's coming on the horizon after we get through the political arc that we're in right now? Yeah. So I mean the reason we're here where The reason we're kind of in this moment is like a lot of stuff building over the last 10 or 15 years and was really accuated by the Biden administration.

Um I I don't think our industry would be as politically relevant and as politically active uh if it were not for the Biden administration so strongly trying to press on the the scales against against industry and industry really mobilized against the Democratic party in a meaningful way.

And my sense is that most political strategists probably will tell you that like on the margin the thing that moved the election in both Congress and then the presidential in 2024 was the crypto industry in terms of dollars, reach, anger, PR kind of etc.

Um that now has kind of swung from uh very uh frustrating administration to extremely accommodating and welcoming administration that we have today. the work that Bill Hines and David Tax are doing in the executive branch is phenomenal. We're seeing awesome stuff out of DOJ, SEC, and CFTC on an almost daily basis now.

Uh and then the other big item is Congress. Um there's the stable, you know, uh the the Genius Act in the Senate today. And then there's market structure that that's coming pretty shortly. Um all that stuff is happening.

Um so I think the reason we are where we are is like uh like the pendulum is like kind of swung from one extreme to the other. I feel pretty good that we're going to kind of basically get industry is going to get I think most of what it wants in the next few months.

Um and that just then provides the foundation for crypto to really permeate all of software. Um crypto systems are at their most basic level just systems for moving money around. Um and they're much more better and efficient and global system uh systems for doing that.

And so my my hope is that once we get these final things done from Congress and then the executive branch, then you see Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Yeah. Embed crypto into all of their respective operating systems. Um you have AI agents, you know, trading with crypto, whatever.

And now crypto financial rails truly permeate global software.

Do you think there'll be a realignment from the left around crypto or do you think like because it did feel like it was bipartisan for a little bit or at least it was just ambiguous on both sides then it kind of broke right but it's such a big industry that it feels like maybe the Democrats might want to say hey like we're it's a it's a big tent we're we're also pro crypto.

Yeah, I mean, um, there's certainly a handful of prominent Democrats who have been pro crypto, folks like Richie Torres, Senator Jillbrand, there's some others. I'm sure I not remembering their names off the top of my head.

Um, and we've been donor, although we're primarily donors to Republicans, we are selectively donors to to some of those folks that I just mentioned. Um, the party as a whole, I would say, has not really realigned and embraced crypto. And I I say I'm fairly surprised by that.

It just seems kind of like a self like an own goal here. Mhm. Um there's a handful of Democrats who like ideologically hate crypto, most notably Senator Warren. Um but like the vast majority of Democrats um in in in in Congress kind of like don't care or are like pro crypto. Sure.

Um and so I I've been surprised by the like lack of warm embrace. Makes sense. Jordy uh uh mutual friend Jared Madfz asked me to ask you what are you excited about in crypto that no one else is talking about yet or very few people are talking about.

Um I am really excited for DPIN and this is a category that's been around in crypto for a few years now and we were very fortunate to help pioneer some of our early investments like helium. Um but the deepin things are starting to really work. Helium, I believe yesterday or the day before was their first day ever.

They had a million customers um on the Helium network in one day. Uh Helium, for those who don't know, is a is a decentralized wireless network. Anyone can stand up a hot spot in their house and provide wireless coverage and other people can like use your network and pay you for doing so.

Um uh we just invested recently in a very high-profile uh defend project called De0ero which basically is bringing private fiber to uh anyone who wants to pay for private fiber per bite of data and it's going to go live over the summer.

Um and it's going to tra it's going to really change low latency trading on on public blockchains. Um there's a handful of other kind of major deepen teams like Hivemapp or Pipe Network and a number of others that we're involved in.

And I think these are, you know, crypto is fundamentally financial in nature, but like finance is hard for people to grasp. And these what's cool about these deep pin use cases is that they are like fairly easy for for people to to understand.

Um and the first handful of those things are really starting to achieve escape velocity. That's great. How'd you meet the Salana founders? Um you I met Anatoli first. I don't actually don't don't know who introduced me to Anatoli, but I was in uh uh San Francisco in April of 2018. Yeah.

And I was at a co-working space and I met Anatoli on a Saturday night. Um and uh I was sent he had sent me the white paper for the proof of history and salon consensus white paper. I remember I read it and it was absolute trash. Um and I I was like I have no idea what this does.

Um but someone told me Anatoli was really smart. So I met with him and a after meeting with him that the thing that really stood out to me was of all of the L1 f all of the L1 founders were like very academic in background and their pursuit and approach and Anatoli was the opposite. He was like I hate academia.

I don't ever want to write a [ __ ] paper. Um I don't ever want to solve an unsolved problem in computer science. He's like my only job is to like let other people solve problems and then I'm just going to like apply their solutions to making my software go fast.

and his whole career at Qualcomm and Dropbox and other places was just doing that. And I was like, I like this guy. This guy does not sound like all of the other L1 founders. Um, and so we we started to kind of back salon from very early on. Obviously got to meet Raj shortly thereafter and rest is history. Yeah.

So I mean was was that investment did it feel like it was out of your sweet spot? like were you stretching in terms of what you were pattern matching against or was it like delightfully contrarian in your mind? Um I mean look at multifin was very young.

We were six months old at the time we kind of made that first investment and I don't think we had even a sense of like what is our strike zone or not. We just kind of were like young and running as fast as we could and seeing what happened.

Um in hindsight I would say it like multicoin generally likes to invest in more blue oceans than red oceans. Um, and investing in an L1 was certainly a red ocean investment.

Um, and so when we invest in in Red Oceans, uh, we just want to be like have a pretty pointed view on why the player we're betting on is is like the standout player. Um, and as I was just saying like just at the founder level, Totally's background was completely different than than the other L1 founders.

Um there's a number of other things that kind of stood out but but that being the primary one I would say now with seven or eight years of history looking back I I don't think the Salana investment like stood out as being fundamentally like out of strike zone. We knew we hated Ethereum.

We knew that like there was problems and we were looking for alternatives and lots of people were showing up saying like look I have an alternative and so in that in that sense it was like very kind of shot on goal. What's been your success rate of identifying new metas like you know uh before other people?

It feels like in crypto if you're if people that are trading are trying to trade, you know, specific metas and then identify new ones, but as as a VC, you really need to identify things two three years sometimes, sometimes even more than that. Uh otherwise, you're just going to be too late, right?

Once the thing is is already big, you don't necessarily want to invest in the fourth or fifth player in a category. Yeah. I I feel very fortunate. We've been involved early in in a number of of I guess metas for lack of a better word. Um first probably being like high performance blockchains being Salana.

Second uh probably being deepen starting with with Helium and Hivemapper. Uh more recently we've been very uh focused on um privain privacy. Um most people in crypto have been talking about zero knowledge proofs for god five seven eight years now.

Um we've scrapped all that and we've made big bets in fully homorphic encryption which is a totally different cryptographic approach. Um, so those are probably the three like I think really big ideas where we were we were pretty early.

Um, and there's a number of other areas that are like smaller where I think we've been early.

Um, in terms of where, you know, the meadows we're like focused on today, um, I'd say it's like it's pretty obvious stuff, but like getting stable coins in the hands of people who want stable coins, we've invested in a number of P2P exchanges that make it possible for people in emerging markets in which have capital controls to get stable coins despite their local governments.

Um, and so that we that's a lot of lot of focus area. And then we've been thinking about what are as more stable coins come on chain, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of that? And then we've been going along a lot of those things in both public and private markets.

The uh helping, you know, people with capital controls um get on chain is interesting. It's kind of like crypto's outlaw roots in a little bit, but but very missionoriented is saying we believe in economic freedom. they're, you know, willing to go in into certain markets and deliver that. So, very cool. Very cool.

Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Uh, hope the conference is great. Come back on the show anytime. Uh, enjoy. Jordy John, thanks for having me. Awesome. Be here. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Next up, we have Ben Pastnack. Uh, founder I met years ago because we were both building in consumer packaged goods.

He's gone on to crypto. I've gone on to media. Um, but excited to get the update from him. Probably has to be the most viral new crypto app. Yeah. In at least a year. At least six months. At least six months. I'm excited to chat with him. Uh, so Ben, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Believe in something.

Believe in Ben. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to see you guys. How you guys doing? It's