Stablecoins, Virtual Power Plants and Venture Investing With Smac

Welcome back to The Gwart Show! Today, Smac, partner at Compound VC, joins us to talk about why stablecoins have become the dominant crypto narrative despite being "boring fintech," DePIN opportunities in energy and water networks, venture capital market structure issues with massive fund sizes, the lack of creativity in crypto development, and why most social crypto apps are features not companies. 

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Follow our guest on Twitter: @0xsmac

Notes:

• Compound VC focuses on pre-seed/seed stage investments

• $100M checks at $3B valuations more like growth investing

• Stablecoins captured outsized narrative due to lack of innovation

• Virtual power plants represent distributed energy networks

• Crypto needs more non-crypto native talent for creativity

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

00:16 Who is Smac?

01:53 Market overview

03:25 Are stablecoins the killer use case?

06:09 Stablecoin are just FinTech

09:51 Let a thousand stablecoins bloom

13:16 Decentralization & stablecoins

16:04 Users don't care about centralization

21:47 Worldcoin

24:20 DePin

25:19 Virtual power plants

30:20 ElLipsis Labs

31:21 Water harvesting

34:17 Venture funding is too high

41:21 Funding NOT infrastructure projects

43:25 What's interesting?

52:23 Friend.Tech

1:01:24 Wrap up

👋 The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs is building Atlas, the blockchain purpose-built for verifiable finance. You may know of Ellipsis Labs by their first product Phoenix, a fully on-chain orderbook DEX that’s done over 50 billion dollars in unincentivized volume. They are one of the strongest teams I know in crypto. If you’re interested in working for a mission-driven company, Ellipsis Labs is hiring engineers passionate about crypto and finance to work on Atlas. You can learn more and apply on Ellipsis Labs’ Twitter “at Ellipsis_Labs”. Don’t forget to check out Atlas too, @atlasxyz on Twitter.

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