Web 3, Blockchain Scaling, and Bitcoin with Diego Perez de Ayala of Frictionless Capital

0:04 Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex Kahaya. Plug in as we explore new frontiers with Web 3 and the decentralized future. Hey everyone and welcome to the Index brought to you by the Graph, where we talk with the entrepreneurs building the next wave of the internet, web 3. I'm your host, alex Kahaya, and on today's episode of the Index, I'm excited to welcome Diego Perez de Ayala, managing partner at Frictionless Capital. Their investment endeavors revolve around next-gen blockchains and dapps within the Web 3 ecosystem, engineered to support the next billion users.

0:45 Diego, thanks so much for being on the show. For those of you listening, you might know Diego as Solana Legend on Twitter. He's been a huge advocate for the Solana ecosystem and I'm just super excited to hear more of your story. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me on. So maybe just to start out, tell me more about who you are and how you got to be working in the space that we're in now. Sure, I went to traditional finance. Throughout. I studied finance and applied economics at Cornell. I took a job in investment banking. I worked in M&A for almost four years I guess typical experience, right. I was doing Excel and PowerPoint for 16 hours a day, did a bunch of M&A transactions.

1:28 It was an intense period of my life. I think it gave me a good background in terms of hard skills. A background in investing capital markets kind of formed me as a professional. But ultimately I always had one foot in the internet sphere. So I tell people, I kind of grew up on the internet. I was watching YouTube since the platform came out, played a ton of video games, mmos, spent a lot of time in internet communities in general. Right, I played more hours of RuneScape and World of Warcraft than I'd like like care to admit on a show like this, but a lot of the people in the industry did as well, right, and you know whether it's collecting magic, the gathering cards or playing these video games, we kind of all live the same life differently, which is what I joke about.

2:15 But it was through MMOs, actually, that I made my first crypto transaction in 2013. So I kind of discovered Bitcoin when I was in high school through gaming I held a little bit of Bitcoin kept with it. I bought some ETH as well. Later on I was pretty much a passive holder of crypto, more of an observer. But during COVID I was working from home. I had a lot of time to just go deep on this stuff and I was completely enthralled by what I was seeing and what I was reading. I was early to Solana. I discovered the chain early on and I realized the world and the scope of what was being built was just way, way, way broader than what people realize.

3:02 As soon as I peeked behind the curtain I realized there's giant applications and platforms and some of the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff. So at that point I was kind of hooked. But that's initially how I got into the space. Tell me more about that, though. Let's dig into that a little bit. Why were you so hooked? What was the thing that inspired you so much about Solana and in general, just like the Web3 space? Yeah, I came at the space from a slightly different angle than most people. The traditional crypto investor got involved maybe in Bitcoin and then Ethereum and then kind of went from there. Maybe they had bags in both. I'm relatively younger. I didn't really have a lot of bags of Bitcoin or ETH, so I came at things not from the angle of a bag holder or someone who had a preconceived bias, more of a user.

3:52 I mess around with Ethereum, did transactions played with DeFi. It didn't feel like the future of France. I'm not going to lie to you. I came at it much more from an end user perspective. I was looking at it and I was saying, look, objectively, this is a terrible user experience. I was accustomed to Web2 platforms. This was not even close, not even the same universal performance. And then, when I used Solana, it felt like fiber optics right, it felt like going from dial up to broadband and then fiber optics. And I think that was the light bulb moment for me where I said, look, if you can have a blockchain that has thousands of distributed nodes geographically and it has this kind of performance just instant feedback it's kind of hard to argue that that kind of user experience is not going to be just superior over time, right, like good applications, by definition.

4:47 They have low latency, their performance, they're fast, they're cheap and I think betting on those different variables right, faster, cheaper, just instant feedback, that's just more in line with the world we're living in today. The performance of the network unmatched. And, like any ETH, you just can't build experiences like that. The UX just doesn't work out, and I experienced that. The similar thing I mean I talked about with Logan, your partner, the example of dial up versus high speed internet. I was born in 86, right, so I'm 37. I didn't have a computer until the 90s and I remember dial up, the ringtone. It's taking forever to actually make a connection. And I also remember the first time I sent a transaction on ETH with any kind of meaningful at least for me money and just like sweating bullets, like is it going to get there?

5:36 And then it finally shows up and but with Solana it was like night and day. You know, first of all, phantom's UX was so good and it's still pretty good, and just instant transaction speeds. And then you think about what that makes possible and things like compressed NFTs and stuff, and I think there are other chains too out there that are trying to push the envelope there and I'm excited to see that. I'd be curious to hear from you what are you seeing that's exciting? Right now, I mean, it's a bear market, sentiments down, but typically I think this is actually some of the best times to build. So I'm curious what you're seeing in this market that you're excited about. The landscape is super interesting, I mean just at a like surface level or maybe at the financial level.

6:17 There are networks and protocols and applications and infrastructure that have only improved over the last two years, but they're priced cheaper than ever. So I think there's an insane amount of like deep value in liquid markets. I'd say most investors are not particularly nuanced on the tech. Many VCs, you know, say they're technical, but they don't really know how to talk about the stuff from first principles. I think there's, you know, unfortunately, a situation where a lot of the fundamentals have gone out the window just because the macro picture is just so like, has been so horrendous for the last year and a half. But Overall, there's incredibly exciting projects and I think people always ask me this, even on Twitter.

7:00 They're like what's the next big thing, what's going to be the next theme or narrative of next cycle? And truly it's in times like these where innovation happens, or real innovation, where new primitives, new businesses, new applications get created, and these are some of the main characters of the next run, and I think it happens time and time again people kind of run with those 2021 narratives and themes until they're completely exhausted and dead and then new ones rise from the ashes and they kind of lead the next run. So I think we're squarely in that point of the market. I think next generation blockchains with parallel processing, high data propagation, minimal fees are incredibly exciting.

7:46 I think that's where developers and users will find the biggest sandbox of experiences and things to build, and that's what we're investing in exclusively at Frictionless. We are so high conviction on this. We're not going to invest in any legacy based technology. So on that side, infrastructure is still very exciting. There's massive projects like FireDance are being built that I think are not only one of the top projects on Solana but one of the top engineering projects in all of crypto, and I think people don't talk about them enough. But even stuff that's off chain, that's still in the industry. Right Centralized exchange business, I think, is wide open. There's room for a new entrance. I think that's a very, very proven business model, one of the most established.

8:31 So we're excited for a lot of different stuff. Really, it's just the innovation and things like backpack XNFTs, compressed NFTs you mentioned Just new experiences, new primitives that have never existed before. On the exchange, when you make a really good point known business model, but tons of innovation needed, especially in the wake of FTX and you look at a cube, which is Bartage's new project that's taking a lot of that stuff that happened in a centralized environment and still in keeping it on chain, keeping it more transparent and doing things with custody that are really interesting so you can self-custodate your assets. And that was the big issue with FTX not your keys, not your coins, right? You're making me think about a couple of things. One is the reason why I love doing this show is because I like connecting people and I like telling their stories and I'm really interested in telling those stories, the ones that other people are not going to see, necessarily if they're not really paying attention and steeped in the industry.

9:24 And it makes me think about back in, like 2018, I think it was around 2018, whenever we were close to the bottom of that bear market. That was after the big ICO boom. I was at ETH Denver and I walked up to the third floor and they had this art gallery and the ETH community is definitely artsy, a lot of culture in that ecosystem, and so I was not surprised that there was art, like I had been to a bunch of these things where there was art, but they had this whole room dedicated to this thing called NFTs and I was like what is that? There was this eight year old who made this really cool buffa corn. That was animated and her dad was like the top selling artist on Super Rare and Super Rare was like two guys, like literally like two or three people on the team at the time.

10:07 I can't remember exactly the date, but that was before anybody, and it was like 12 months after that when NFTs started blowing up. It took a while. It's funny as, like an investor, as an entrepreneur or somebody in the space, you kind of get these. The most important thing, I think, is pattern recognition, like when you had that feeling you're like, wait, this is something different. You know you got to start digging in a little further. Like at the time I didn't dig into NFTs but I was like something struck me and I didn't quite register it With Solana. I saw it Like Solana. I saw it in the people that were behind building the project and that was back, you know, very early before they had Mainnet launched. Are there entrepreneurs or specific people you see building stuff right now that maybe people haven't heard of, that you are open to sharing, Like what they're working on or you know different, some exciting things that might be that insight people are looking for.

10:57 Maybe not the ones that are kind of more in stealth, but I mean, people have talked to quite a bit about Backpack but I still think there's a big information gap between the magnitude of like what these guys are building versus what people and their understanding is. I think Armani and Team are doing something super special with XNFTs. I mean this is truly one of the most creative and innovative projects I've ever seen. We're very, very like, fortunate to back them. But I think, just generally, xnfts are an absolute canvas where you can paint almost anything. I mean just the concept of tokenized code. Why hasn't someone done this before?

11:39 It just blows your mind. You spoke about wallets too Phantom, truly like the end state of wallets. Right Doesn't look anything like Phantom or MetaMask. You know private keys won't be held. Add the application level, they'll be on your phone. They'll be in a secure hardware on play, similar to saga. Right Are money. You know, the reason why I give him so much props is because he's building for a future that doesn't exist, but it's going to 100% exist one day. And I think that level of foresight of Building what essentially amounts to a cross chain operating system which today looks like a wallet, is absolutely insane and mind breaking.

12:20 I mean just ios itself right, approve that interacting with apps natively is just the easiest way for consumers to do it. And in many ways, crypto feels like what one? You know, you've got all these different websites. You have to go to one one, to another. You know it's like. You know it feels like those web portals, it feels like early internet days, but for crypto all over again, and crypto is about to go into like it's web, to air of like mobile apps and a much higher degree of Just usability than has ever existed in the past are money is a perfect example and actually had him on the show recently. I think his episode is going to come out soon. So if you're listening to this episode and you don't know who he is, anyone hear his story straight from him you should definitely check out.

13:04 Check that one out. But X and FT is our huge innovation and it took me a pretty long time to wrap my head around it, like to really understand it. But the way I look at it is, it's like it's tokenized code, it's like a website that is tradable. I think your example of of native interaction on a phone with an application is a really good one and for, like less technical folks listening, when the iPhone first came out, all the apps you used if you used any were on websites, and it's any. You could go on chrome right now and interact with a bunch of different web applications from chrome on your phone and it's not going to be that great of an experience, like kind of wonky. But as soon as you download the same app like Gmail, all the sudden it's got like all these bells and whistles and the user experience is like way, way better and this is kind of what Diego is talking about, like X and FT is, are the thing that ties everything together in a native experience.

13:57 It's the technology that allows that and it didn't exist before, and it's a simple idea and the thing that I love about it too. It's simultaneously like great vision from Armani, but it's also repeating what we have seen in the past work really really well, which I think is kind of, if you're an entrepreneur, like looking for what to build right now, and you can actually look at the evolution of Web one to Web two and start thinking what's missing, that needs to exist, that this technology can allow, like where's the combination of this new technology plus what already worked? I also want to say this, and I mean this in the best way possible I think you and Logan are, like, as fund managers just from having like talked with Logan and now you a bunch You're a smaller fund, like, from my understanding, like first time fund managers I think that you have some insights into the industry that other people don't, and I think the next cycle, like people are going to know who you are.

14:47 That's another reason why I wanted to have you on the show, like I think you guys are going to do really well. I just agree with a lot of your theses. So again, if you're listening to this, you should probably follow Solana legend, go follow Logan and keep track of what they're saying, because they're scolding them hills. So Thanks, thanks a lot, alex. I appreciate it, and our point of view is pretty contrarian today, but make no mistake, I think this is 100% where the industry is headed and I think all of this is just a result of the first principles thinking that Logan and I have done. We've done years of research prior to starting the fund and we've boiled down block chains, so their core, fundamental building blocks. We cut out all noise, all narratives, all the themes, all the kind of you know, smoke and mirrors.

15:29 That's that that exists in the industry, and we're just breaking it down. We're comparing the tech apples to apples and we're just like look physically, at the engineering level, what needs to happen for block chains to scale to mass adoption. And, as it turns out, the path is pretty clear. It's not like a highly debatable topic where you know you ask a hundred people and you get a hundred different answers, like there is, you know, objectively, better way to scale block chains. And I think once you kind of find that North Star of you know, identifying the chains that are going to scale the fastest, then you really just cut down the entire blockchain industry to just a few chains that are taking this approach right, and those are the ones, the only ones who are investing in, whether it's the infrastructure itself or the applications built on top.

16:20 Thank you, cutting through all that noise and just having an extremely pinpointed view of the tech is what's allowed us to just go extremely deep. I don't have to spend time in 20 different ecosystems, or you know. I just need to drill into the ones that are actually going to scale right and I think, getting those that ecosystem presence and really just focusing 100% of our time on the tech that scales the hardest. I think it's kind of like funny when we talk to people and they tell us that we don't need all this block space, right, and that the blocks aren't even full and we won't need that much data propagation and performance isn't that important, and it's kind of like arguing you didn't need broadband.

17:03 You could just say on dial-up, right. It's kind of like a kind of a bad argument and it's one that demonstrates just a fundamental lack of foresight, because people are always asking us like what's the killer app? What's the chat GPT of crypto, what's the first crypto application with global scale and users? And I'd say, arguably it's not an application, but stablecoins themselves are a fantastic product, but aside from that, people keep asking why these applications don't exist and we're kind of just like because infrastructure hasn't been supportive. Like I'll throw a hypothetical right, alex, imagine we had $30 million in funding and we had to build a global application right, and we had a lot of Pokemon Go, something that got a billion downloads and hundreds of millions of concurrent users or monthly users, and the tech sack that we're working with was something like Ethereum.

17:57 Right, we had 10 minute confirmation times. Block times are 12 seconds. Gas fees anywhere from five bucks to $500. What kind of killer app can you build with that tech? Yeah, 100% agree with you and I think it's a great, great analogy and I think about my experience building the Olaplex and working with other founders in the space and we have had to invent the wheel so many times like reinvent the wheel, rather, because just stuff didn't exist, like basic infrastructure, like indexing, and now that stuff's a lot more mature on Solana over the last two years, like the pace of maturity for an ecosystem Like Solana especially has been kind of breakneck pace.

18:38 A lot of people ask those questions. Maybe they don't have the experience yet about what are all the different building blocks in the infrastructure layer that actually need to exist for an ecosystem to function and for apps to be buildable. Right, you need good RPC providers, you need indexing. You don't just need the blockchain. Right, you need developer tools that sit on top of that. I think a big hypothesis I have at the enterprise level is that you need tools that are Web3, tools that feel like Web2, tools, that they're just used to these Web2 APIs. They can hit and build apps that scale. You don't have to worry about how do I construct a transaction, how do I make this thing efficient on chain. They just consume APIs and I think all that infrastructure is being built in our space, but it still has a ways to go.

19:21 And one question I want to ask you is what do you think is the aspirational why behind Web3? Why does this matter for people that are listening to this show, who aren't us? We care about the tech, we see what the benefits are of Web3, but for people who are not in the space, why does this space matter at all? Why should they care about what's being built? I'll answer this in the simplest way I know, which is to say that Bitcoin changed the world forever, and I think it introduced the concept of self-sovereignty and self-custody and it solved the double spend problem and it did a lot of other fantastic things. But at its core, crypto is about people owning their own destiny.

20:07 Whether they're creators, whether they want to own their own assets, they actually want to own them, not in a fractional reserve banking system where your money isn't even there. So here's the problem as great as all those things were that Bitcoin introduced, you can't take those wonders and those properties and that magic of self-custody and even tokenization and smart contracts from Ethereum. You can't take those to the masses without a chain like Solana, because they're the only ones that are scalable. So we've had three steps. We had the Gen Zero with Bitcoin and created the concept of blockchain, the philosophical foundation for all of this.

20:47 Then we had an improvement with Ethereum. They brought smart contracts, programmability and just vastly increased the scope of what can be built. But now we're gonna take it to the third step, which is building on those two steps. Now we're gonna make it scalable, and that's exactly what Chainslake Salon are doing. And why are we here Because we're here to scale and take these wonders of composability, interoperability, all these things that are great and amazing about blockchains. We're gonna take them to billions of people via applications, via products, via platforms, multi-sided platforms, all of it. Empowering billions of people to control their destiny and I smiled when you said that, because that's literally Olaplexa's tagline is control your destiny.

21:35 And it's the why I'm building in this space is because I believe that the true power of our space, of Web3 is enabling individuals, brands, enterprises, entire cultures to control their destiny, because the way that the world is organized right now, that your destiny is in large part controlled by other people I mean I think that you have freedom of choice and everything like that, but your money sits in a bank that you don't control. It sits in a bank account, the software you use is probably closed source and it runs on centralized data aggregators that gather all your data.

22:16 I mean, you and I know the narrative and I think a lot of people know the narrative that, like Google and Facebook, they own all the channels for customer relationships. Like no brand can survive forever when you don't control your relationship. Things like wallets running on open source software, on open, permissionless blockchains. That's how you get control back. Individual customers have access to their own cash, their own resources, their own assets through self-custody and then, because they carry that with them, brands can access them, enterprises can access them. Other people can access them in whatever ecosystem they're a part of. I don't know, it's kind of a hard thing to break down, but it's so fundamental and important. One thing I would like to see change in the slotted ecosystem and in the ecosystem in general is I would love to see more and more open source software like Fullstack, just because I think it's so important.

23:06 It's such an important aspect of the idea of being able to control your own destiny. Like everything I build is open source, because I want the people who use it to have that control. I also just don't believe it's that important to be closed source. Like I think that that's not as big of a strategic advantage that people think it is. Like in the closed source SaaS world, like people get out executed on closed source SaaS products all the time. It's got really nothing to do with whether it was open source or not that they got their whole business model copied. So yeah, we align a lot. We align really well on that topic for sure. So what's next for you? Like I mean, you've been in the space for a while, you've got the fund. I know you've been like really active in NFTs, but like what's coming up next for you in the near term, like what are your goals?

23:48 How can we anybody listening participate in helping you succeed? Yeah, I mean I kind of tell people I'm in my post-NFT phase. I had a crazy summer in 2021. As many did, I minted Solana Monkey Business. I went down the line and I grew my Twitter very rapidly. I think I got 100,000 followers in my first six months. But truly, I was so involved with NFTs not because that's like the scope of what I'm interested in that was truly and honestly, if you were a person on the ground floor of one of these ecosystems, that was the biggest thing happening. So I immersed myself completely in that movement. And I think what's missing a little bit in this space is investors that can do exactly that.

24:32 They can sit on the ground floor of an ecosystem and they can be tapped in, not two, three, four, five levels removed, but actually right there with the users, with the people building the tech and using it directly. And I think a lot of times perhaps I gave VC investors a little bit too much credit. A lot of people you know really just don't even use crypto or you know are just not that involved. They kind of just play them manager game, which I understand. But Logan and I are truly seeking to be the most value add investors in crypto, like when we back founders, the ticket is just the starting point. Right, we're trying to go the distance and we're trying to Just actively help them as much as possible, and I think what's next for me is, honestly, that like, you'll see frictionless backing the top companies in the space and you'll see us working very, very closely with founders To make their visions reality.

25:28 That's the ultimate way I want to play the game. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life. So, truly and honestly, that's what you're gonna see. You're gonna see us partnering with top tier companies, whether those are platforms, infrastructure applications, and really just trying to get this tech into the hands of billions of people. I mean, I can speak from experience how important it is to have people on your cap table who are willing to go to bat for you when times are good and when times are bad, that they invest like a lot of time and energy in the companies in their portfolio. A coin fund was the lead in my last round and they have been absolutely amazing. Like, good or bad, they jump right in and try to help us solve problems, because building companies are hard and like they're really invested in your success and so For everybody that I took money from has been helpful at one point or another.

26:12 It's also really helped to have to your point like there's there's people who are actually users and involved in the space. I think there's also people who are that and have built companies more than one, ideally in the past have been super useful to me. Like like Vinny Lingam is a guy that it comes to mind, like he's built several different businesses and I can like text him and he'll text me back like right away with help, valuable advice, clear cut advice, even if it's stuff that he knows I don't want to hear, but he's going to give me the right, the right direction. So, yeah, I just if you're found out there you're looking for to bring people into your capital. What Diego is saying is is really important consideration when you're evaluating who to let into your round.

26:52 So we're going to the top of the show here. And what have I not asked you that I should have asked that you wanted to talk about? maybe some spicy takes. I would love some spicy takes that are going to go viral on social media. Let's go, here we go. I may regret this. I think a vast majority of the industry is middle curving Solana and next generation blockchains. They don't think scalability and performance matters because they're Fundamentally misunderstanding how better infrastructure leads to better applications. I will also say that there's a massive amount of bag bias in the space, to the point that billion dollar investors are completely blinded by their bags and unable to See reality when it's directly in front of their eyes.

27:46 And all of this is contributing to a historic and asymmetric investment opportunity in next generation blockchains, which we intend to take full advantage of. I love it. Yeah, and for people listening, like bag blindness, it just means you own a lot of that asset, like you own a ton of ETH, for example, and so all you see or pay attention to your project on ETH and you're kind of blinded by it, by the fact that you're so incentivized financially to keep investing in that space, which is all like, look, it's understandable, it's a hard thing not to do, but I think you're right. I think that people who are not looking in the direction that you're looking are going to miss out. So kudos to you and best of luck and thanks for coming on the show. Thanks, alex.

28:27 You just heard the index podcast with your host, alex Kahaya. If you enjoyed this episode, please give the show a five star rating and subscribe on Apple, spotify, google or your favorite streaming platform. New episodes available every other Wednesday. Thanks for tuning in.