Crypto Communities Are Officially Dead

Recorded remotely.

Hodl Up: Hello, James, and thank you for joining us on the show.

James: What's up, guys? It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Hodl Up: Always, of course. We know you're head of marketing at UMA and Across Protocol, but I want to know more about your early days in crypto and in marketing. Maybe you can touch on Risk Labs, and anything else you find important from that period of your life.

James: Well, I was born in... no, I'm just kidding. I won't go that far back. I think it's useful to talk a little about how I got into Web3. Before my Web3 life, I ran a marketing agency. I did a lot of early brand design, go-to-market strategies, and launch strategies for a lot of B2C consumer products and consumer packaged goods, and even, weirdly, some random doctor's offices and construction firms. We were a design and marketing shop. Right at the height of the pandemic, the good old days of 2020, there was a lot of turmoil, and I think that's when a lot of people got into crypto, because we all had a lot of time at home and were on our phones all the time. That's really when I started to learn more about what Web3 is, what crypto is, what DeFi is. I'd bought some random coins earlier. I was early on XRP, and it went up, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm making money. This is so cool." And then everything I'd made went right back down, and I thought, "Oh, I should have sold." You'd think I'd have learned that lesson then, but I repeated it in the NFT phase and many other phases too.

But the thing that really got me into Web3 was when a friend reached out and said, "You should check out this startup. The founder is looking for a co-founder to lead marketing." They were building what was going to be sort of the Upwork of Web3. This was at a point in crypto where there were some marketers, but not many. It was very developer-heavy, and not many people were in the industry as a long-term career. Come 2021, that started to shift. The industry was booming, but there weren't enough marketers. There were businesses that needed marketing, but not enough marketers in the space. So we were going to build this matchmaking service, like Upwork but Web3-style. Long story short, it didn't go anywhere. We shut down.

But what it did for me was get me really excited about what it means to build something for the future of decentralization, and to try to break the systemic cycle of ownership slipping further and further away from people. What I mean is, I'm looking at my iPhone here. You can make monthly payments on your phone. Everyone rents their flat. Most people don't buy their car outright; they finance it or lease it. It's even gotten to the point where, when I check out a pair of pants on a website, there's a little option that says "pay in four installments." This idea of ownership keeps getting further and further away, let alone meaningful assets, like owning a home or building real financial wealth over time. That's getting harder to do, and a lot of people would argue it's because a few at the top are hoarding, which makes it a lot harder for those of us who aren't at the very top to build that.

Decentralization breaks that cycle. It says it doesn't matter whether you're a major institution, a bank, or just some random kid with a phone and internet access. Anyone can and should have access to global finance. Sometimes that means really crappy things like memecoins, but it can also mean a lot of meaningful things. So I fell in love with it. I thought, this is the future of finance. This is how we break down geographic barriers. Anyone who's ever sent an international wire transfer knows it's expensive, it's slow, it's a pain in the butt, you never know what's going to happen, and there are so many scams. Crypto can solve that. That really started my Web3 journey. I could go off on more tangents, but I feel like I'm rambling a bit, so I'll pause for a second.

Hodl Up: No worries. I get what drew you into the space in the first place: the idea of ownership. And, at least for me, the idea of maybe getting rich overnight, which is what drew me into crypto. But the whole technology behind it... and the irony is that people don't understand that. Most of the people who joined in the last cycle joined for the same reason, to make some quick money, without really understanding how things work in the back end. I don't blame them, because the UX side of crypto has always been an issue that needed solving for mass adoption. But at the same time, people just skip the whole process of learning how things work. So, from a marketing perspective, I want to ask you how different it was to approach marketing in crypto, because when you joined, it was still the Wild West of everything. How did you approach marketing in crypto, and how different was it from the traditional marketing you did for other industries?

James: It was actually a lot different, especially back then, and even somewhat today. Back then, you weren't marketing to the masses; you were building a community. I think early crypto marketing helped prove that if you have 10 people who believe in what you're building, that's way more powerful than a thousand people who are halfway interested. Back in those days, everything was word of mouth. The way you found out about something worth knowing was through a friend who'd found out about it. We all had these alpha groups. It was Clubhouse for a while, and Discord, and now Telegram and all these other side channels, and it really became about the concept of community.

You're asking how it was back then and how it's different today. What's so interesting is that my first major role in crypto was with an NFT portfolio app, and eventually I worked for Rarible, which was one of the early NFT marketplaces. If you remember the NFT days, everything around growth for an NFT project was essentially an evolution of the core term "community." And the word "community" has such a range. It's such a spectrum. You can have a community at the most surface level. I go to the gym at roughly the same time, which means I tend to see the same people. I only know maybe one or two of them; mostly we just know each other because we see each other multiple times a week. That's the most surface-level community: we're there, doing the same thing. But community can be as intense as religion and belief. When you're part of a religion, it's not only something you do in the church or the temple or the synagogue. It shapes every part of your life. It's your belief, the way you show up with your family and friends. It changes the way you live.

I think early crypto communities were closer to religious belief than to friends who play basketball or go to the gym together, because back then it was belief in a project. We all wore the same clothes, these PFPs we'd put on our profiles. Every community developed its own lingo and little phrases, and it became this cult-like movement where you're not only financially invested, putting your money in, but also your time, your energy, your belief, your clothing. Every part of your identity became part of it. And that's what marketing was back then. You were trying to build a small network of core believers, and for the ones who did it really well, that community had massive growth and a ripple effect.

We watched it countless times at Rarible. Artists and projects would come in and say, "Hey, we want to do our mint with you. Can you support us with the drop?" The most successful ones were those that, well before their artwork was even done, had a core group of people who believed in them. The artwork didn't matter. It could be a penguin, an ape, a monkey, a turtle, a bug, whatever, and all of those existed. It didn't matter what the NFT was. What mattered was that the team could build belief around what they were doing. That's what marketing was. It was the same for Rarible, a little different because it was a business, but we had a core group of people who believed in what we were building. People who loved Rarible were diehard Rarible fans. They wouldn't touch OpenSea with a 10-foot pole, because they believed in Rarible. Over time that started to change and evolve, but that's what it was back then.

Hodl Up: But how do we preserve that? Because that's what I miss about crypto as well: the whole concept of being part of a community and swearing you're never going to sell. I got the short end of the stick most of the time, because I didn't want to sell projects I believed in. It felt good to be part of something and have late-night discussions with some random guy in Malaysia. It was just nice. But I feel we're regressing as an industry, in the sense that we're going too far into traditional marketing. And with the death of InfoFi, and I'm not saying whether that's a good or a bad thing, things change quite a lot on the marketing side as well, and we may see different approaches throughout 2026 and beyond. I want to hear your take on this.

James: Oh man, now you're going to get me fired up. If I've been rambling so far, this is where I'll really go off. To answer your question of how we preserve that, you have to deeply understand what's threatening it. Know your enemy. It's the same in sports. If you want to beat a team, you have to know that team: who their best players are, who the keeper is, who the striker is, who the star is that you need to watch out for. In this realm, you have to understand what put community most at risk.

The sad part is, since you bring up InfoFi, I squarely put the blame for the degradation of community on the questing platforms, which I think were early-days InfoFi. They didn't call it that back then. It was people who knew they could get an allowlist spot, an early or cheaper mint than everyone else, if they posted about a project 10 times and were super active in Discord. What that did was bastardize the core meaning of community. When I join a community, it's not because I might get an airdrop. I put my time and energy into projects personally, outside of work, when I believe in the team and think what they're building will be around 5, 10, 20 years from now.

But if you flip that on its head and say, "Actually, we want to reward short-term belief, not long-term belief. We want to reward the person who says they believe in this project because they think they can make a quick 20 bucks," then you get a churn cycle. Your community is super active pre-TGE, or pre-NFT launch, or before whatever the financial moment is, and they'll swear they're long-term believers, diamond hands, that they'll hold till they die, that they believe in this founder and this project. Then the moment the airdrop happens, the token dumps. I can't even count how many times we've watched this happen. It happened with Monad, and it's happened with countless projects before. Monad is a really good example, because they built this community for years. It was coming, it was coming, "We're launching, we're launching, we're launching," and then when they finally launched, after years of building hype and excitement... I guarantee you that the day before launch, if you'd gone into that Discord and asked, "How many of you are here for the long haul?", people would have been all over it. A million reactions on Discord, a million people posting about it. And I would argue 99% of those people are already gone. They've moved on to the next project.

So when you misincentivize, and reward people who are inclined to spend time not where they truly believe in something but where they think they might get something out of it, then once they get that thing, there's no reason for them to stay, because the transaction is complete. It would be like going to McDonald's, ordering my food, taking it, and then staying there forever. That just doesn't happen. With a transaction, the interaction ends when the transaction is complete, and that's what happens here.

So when we ask how to preserve community, I actually think that's probably the wrong question. It's too far gone. The old days of community are a distant memory for most people. But the big first step, and I'm so glad about this, shout-out to Nikita at X, was the way they changed their API availability for these folks. That was a game changer, because I think InfoFi not only ruined the crypto timeline, it ruined community at its very core. People were no longer there out of belief. They were just there to farm and move on. Platforms like Kaito, this is not what Vitalik was talking about when he wrote about info finance. This is not what he meant. He didn't mean AI slop regurgitated on the timeline. Vitalik is a brilliant guy, and what he meant by info finance is not what it turned into. So I think we shouldn't preserve community. We should let it die and build something new. We should completely change the way we think about it, because otherwise we risk repeating the same cycle.

Hodl Up: That was the coldest statement I've heard in quite a while: "We should just let it die." But I want to talk about both points, yours and Dren's, because crypto is evolving, and as an industry it's evolving quickly compared to other industries, probably because of the technology we have in our hands right now, and the connectivity. The whole world can enter the crypto industry with just a few tabs and an internet connection. I think InfoFi is dying, and it's good that it's dying, because it destroyed our timelines. It destroyed our sacred place for crypto, which was Twitter. It was the best place before Kaito and everything else came along. But as a marketing guy, what do you think is the next step for crypto projects? What type of project is best placed right now to achieve mass adoption, or to make a boom? Personally, I think it's consumer apps. I'm going to mention Polymarket. I've been mentioning it for about six months now. It's not even just a project anymore; it's a giant in this space. What they did was amazing, because they're a consumer app that focused on building a good interface and doesn't even mention crypto in any of their ads, to be honest. Maybe a tiny bit of an ad mentions crypto somewhere, but they're focused on what people want, and they're onboarding people without them knowing it. So what could be the next sector to blow up in crypto and create these communities, or if not communities, that emotion and excitement we used to have about crypto? Right now, people are building, but it's the same things over and over again. I'm kind of at a crossroads right now.

James: I feel that, and I agree with you. I think Web3 in general, the entire crypto industry, is at a tipping point. It's hard to talk about this while we're watching tokens dump today. I made the mistake of looking at my portfolio earlier and thought, "Ah, I've got to stop looking." I know it's red today, and that's okay. But we're on the verge of potential mass adoption.

One example you're bringing up, which I think is a really interesting case, is that I'd argue the number one app fostering mass adoption is one that has continually and purposefully avoided marketing itself as a crypto app. Just like you said, the technology the blockchain offers lives under the hood. It lives in the infrastructure of Polymarket, in the back end, and the front end, the user experience, is just another app. I think they've tapped into some very psychological and sociological things. The concept of betting has been around since the dawn of man, and they've expanded it so that basically everything is something you can bet on. Whether or not that's healthy for humanity is a different question; there are probably some negatives that come with it. But at its core, there is demand for it. It's a simple app to use, and they don't make you jump through the hoops the three of us have jumped through after being in the industry this long. The number of times I've gone, "Okay, I'm opening a new wallet. I need to write this down. Here are the 12 words. I've got a spot where I keep them safe, and I have a backup." If you make people jump through 300 hoops every time they want to do something, they'll stop doing it, because it makes their life worse and makes things harder. But the whole point of the blockchain, and the decentralization we talked about at the beginning, is that it should remove barriers. It should make moving money easier, faster, and more accessible, removing geographic barriers, but also letting us just do it instantly.

So where I hope we're going, and I'll put it that way, is that the new wave of Web3 applications won't look like Web3 applications. They'll just be applications, and Web3 will be part of the infrastructure under the hood that lets them live and transact and be the most efficient version of what they are. A really good example: imagine eBay. We all know eBay. Its peak was maybe a decade or more ago, but people still use it today as their primary marketplace for buying and selling things. Imagine if eBay moved to the blockchain, and instead of high conversion fees when you buy from a seller in a different country, it was all instant payments in USDC, USDT, or whatever currency. Imagine if seller reputation were on-chain, a permanent record. If you sold something fake, it would follow you forever, and you couldn't scrub it away by creating a new username. Imagine the trust layer we could build, and all the extra bits of technology that make it possible. When I think about where blockchain goes, it's taking everything we already do in Web2 and asking, "What if we leveled it up? What if it evolved and became better and faster?"

We talk about this at Across quite a bit. For those who don't know, Across is cross-chain infrastructure. At its core, we do bridging and swapping. You need to move from Base to Arbitrum, we're there for you. You need to swap from USDT to USDC, we're there for you. You want to bridge into Hyperliquid, we're there for you. But we've always said that the end state of our business and our product is when people are using it and don't even know it's there. It's just under the hood. Bridging becomes part of the back end, rather than an experience where users have to go to a bridge. It just happens in whatever app they're using. We're getting closer and closer to that, and I think the industry is moving that way really quickly. So that's where I think, or more accurately where I hope, we're going: an evolution of real user apps that are made better because the blockchain helps them evolve.

Hodl Up: I fully agree. But for so long, I used to be against this. Not against better UX or a simpler, seamless experience, but against the fact that people were getting into the likes of pump.fun without understanding the whole idea behind it. They didn't even know how tokenomics are supposed to work, or what tokenomics even are. That's why I was against it: people were getting in and not getting real value out of it, because they were just in it for the money. But now that I've stopped and thought about it, when I learned how to send emails, I didn't have to learn the whole back end of how sending an email works, and I don't need to. I don't think there will ever be a time when I need to fully understand how email works.

At the same time, you mentioned Polymarket, and I agree that abstracting everything so that users don't even realize they're using crypto is good for mass adoption. But the industry worked so hard for so many years to shake the stigma that crypto is just gambling, which isn't true. And now the major platforms onboarding people through these abstract, seamless means are all kind of gambling and high-risk platforms. I'm not necessarily against that. I'm just saying people are still getting in for the wrong reasons. Then there's the other issue. We had an episode a couple of weeks ago about taxes and the whole CARF thing, and there are countries that make you liable for taxes even on a single crypto transaction. If you're making hundreds of transactions in the back end without realizing they're crypto transactions, what issues is that going to create? I just think there's a lot people need to understand, especially on the regulatory side, for the industry to fully move on. But that's just my take.

James: I agree with you. I think it's interesting to look at what the real use cases of crypto are. At the end of the day, the most knowledgeable users will probably benefit the most, because they understand it most deeply. But in the same way, I understand as a concept how we're doing this recording, but I couldn't tell you all the infrastructure behind the scenes: which servers, AWS or Google, where it lives, whether it's uploading in real time or streaming like Netflix. How does this work? I don't know, but I still get to reap the benefits. I'd argue that people with deep knowledge of how it works, who are builders and can leverage that technology for what they build, benefit the most. But we benefit from it too.

A really good example is the massive movement in stablecoins right now. It's so interesting, because back in 2020 and 2021, I remember people saying, "This is a scheme. You can't have a digital asset pegged to the US dollar. It's all a fraud. These people are all money launderers and scam artists." But now look at the real use case of stablecoins. Take the Turkish lira. Anyone who studies global finance has heard what's happened in Turkey. The economy there has not been stable. Back in 2016, it was maybe two to three Turkish lira per US dollar. Fast-forward to today, and it's over 40 lira to the dollar. That's a massive devaluation because of government and economic instability, all the reasons that lead to that. But imagine that back in 2020 you'd started to see the trend, the lira trending down, and you'd learned about blockchain early and said, "I'm going to take my salary and put it into stablecoins. I'm going to keep my savings in stablecoins, because it's a less volatile currency." You're not only hedging against devaluation; you're protecting your future and your family's finances in very meaningful ways. It wouldn't even mean you're wealthy. It could simply be hedging against what's happening in the country.

The same thing happened in India. I forget what year it was, but literally overnight, certain banknotes, I forget exactly which, were declared no longer valid, and people who'd held on to that cash immediately lost all that money. What if you'd known you could hold it in a stablecoin and protect yourself against that volatility? That's a real-life use case that doesn't require in-depth knowledge of technical white papers, but you still reap a major benefit if you understand the basic concept.

Hodl Up: Stablecoins are literally one of the... I don't know if I can say product-market fit, but everyone uses them because they need them. People who use them only use them because they need to. You're not promised life-changing gains, like in betting or memecoins or everything else. You're promised utility.

But I do have to disagree with Dren on his point that crypto is only being used for gambling and betting and whatever, because I'm a big supporter of DePIN projects as well. I think DePIN, and RWAs too, but we'll get to that another day because it's huge, is in my opinion the sector with the biggest potential in crypto, because of how it works. There are projects that monetize your Wi-Fi router. You can monetize charging stations for electric vehicles. You can monetize everything. And coming from a country like mine, these are things that could benefit people, not only money-wise. They could benefit people by providing better service in areas where centralized parties don't get involved or invest their time and money. Take internet connectivity, for example. In rural areas, and even in local coffee shops. In my country we have a lot of freelancers. Young people freelance a lot, and they want a change of office from their bedrooms, so they go to a local coffee shop to work, but the Wi-Fi isn't working, and no one cares. But the freelancer cares. So there are quite a lot of places where you can apply crypto or blockchain technology, and it doesn't have to be through a token. It can be just the technology, with incentivization coming some other way.

So what I'm trying to say, sorry, Dren, is that there are quite a lot of sectors in crypto that can and will benefit everyone in the world, humanity as a whole, in the future. But yes, right now, I watched a video on YouTube that's literally the truth: there's a gambling pandemic, and not just in crypto. Everyone wants to gamble. There are neobanks where, when you open the app, you get a free spin for a chance to win €100 that day, and then you can buy more spins for a euro each. You're a bank, and you're promoting gambling on your own platform. So I don't think crypto is the problem. I think it's enabling a lot of things, but the problem is people and the economy itself, because it's getting really hard to get ahead by working normal jobs. You have to do something out of the ordinary, gamble, or take crazy risks. Thank you very much for coming to my talk.

Hodl Up: I fully agree with you on 99% of it. What I meant is that the platforms making everything so seamless and obfuscated that users don't know they're using crypto, most of them, the big companies onboarding these millions of people, are in some way or form related to high-risk activities, like gambling, or pump.fun, which onboarded millions of normies into the space. But I agree with you. That's why we're in this industry in the first place: because we like the technology and what it represents.

James: It's interesting, and what's funny is that I agree that crypto has enabled a lot of speculative financial outcomes. We have to be honest about that. Why did I buy X, Y, and Z NFTs? Did I really believe they were going to be the next revolutionary AAA game studio and outperform teams that have been building games for decades? No, let's be honest. I was hoping they'd pull it off, because then I'd know I got in early and could make some money, but I was also placing a bet. All the way down to memecoins, which nobody really believed in. Maybe there were one or two memecoins people had a bit more belief in because they saw the virality, but it wasn't true belief. And if you pull the thread further into speculative finance, like perps trading, or even what we're seeing on Polymarket, there's a financial motivation for many people when they first step into the space, which is natural.

I think that first step sometimes isn't the best first step, because when those people get burned, and I've seen this with many friends, they get burned once or twice and they're like, "Forget this. I'm out. I don't want anything to do with this. I lost $10,000, and I don't want to do that again." So we have to be really careful about where we onboard people, because the gambling side of crypto isn't going away, in the same way casinos aren't going away. That exists. But there's also this side of crypto that paints a picture of hope for a decentralized future, and for better infrastructure and rails for cross-border money movement, which is meaningfully powerful for the everyday person. That's the stuff I think we need more users to understand and know. If they want to toy around with the casino every now and then, do it. My parents go to the casino maybe once every couple of months just to have fun. To them it's like, "Maybe we win, maybe we lose, then we'll go out for dinner." It's their night out, like going to the arcade. They're just having fun. Have fun, trade some memecoins, maybe you'll make some money. Don't count on it. You'll probably lose, and that's okay.

But the real use case, the real power, is when you look at what the blockchain is and what it represents. We actually talk about this at UMA a lot. Imagine what it means to have an immutable ledger that never goes away, is always accessible, and is public. Imagine what that could do for information technology, not just financial technology, but also for the preservation of history. One of our developers launched the Library of UMA, which is a historical record of all the Polymarket disputes that UMA has settled. The example this engineer gave was that throughout history, when one country conquered another, one of the first things they'd often do... Actually, my wife and I were at a museum this weekend, and I was thinking about this, because you look at the statues, and how many of them have their noses broken off, or their arms broken off and defaced? That's the way conquerors try to manipulate the historical record. They want to show that they conquered this people, and not just conquered them, but erased their memory.

Imagine if those statues were immutable, preserved forever from day one. Imagine the depth of knowledge we'd have about our history if we could access the things that were burned to the ground and that we just can't access because they're gone. Fast-forward a hundred years. What would it look like if we actually took the recording of history seriously? What if, with what's happening in the United States, instead of letting one political party or another dictate how events are recorded, the general populace said, "No, we know what's happening, because we're in the streets and we're the ones affected, and we're going to document this, and this documentation can never be burned down, because it's immutable and on-chain, forever." That's pretty powerful, and it has massive implications far beyond "Might I make a hundred bucks this weekend trading memecoins?" It sociologically changes the way humanity consumes and digests information. That's powerful, and not enough of us talk about it or share it with the general public so they can understand there's more value here than just the casino. The casino isn't going away, but that shouldn't be where people stay. If that's their entry point, let it just be the doorway, and then let them get to the rest of it too.

Hodl Up: Blockchain as an idea, as a concept, and even in practice can be used not only economically but in politics as well. You just mentioned history, preservation, and verifiability. It has 100,000 amazing use cases, but people want to try to make money first, because it's a young industry, and I don't blame anyone. When I joined... the first time I ever heard about crypto was back in 2017. We mined some Ethereum back then, and then I didn't hear about crypto again until 2020, when I started trying to make money. So it was always about money, even for me. I have to accept reality.

But now I want to change the topic 180 degrees. I want to talk about UMA and disputes, because a platform like Polymarket needs a decentralized oracle for disputes. I didn't know Polymarket used UMA when I started using it. Then I took part in a specific market where I was 100% sure. I caught it at the perfect timing and everything was going well, but then it was disputed at least 20 or 30 times. I still believe the whales did something to manipulate the disputes and everything that happened with that market. But that's the power of decentralization, the power of the masses. I'm not saying I have any facts; I don't have any facts that the whales did it. That's just a personal belief. But as head of marketing at UMA, how do you deal with people like me, or people who are even more vocal than me, who talk about this over and over again and don't let it go?

James: For Polymarket Global, and I want to make a distinction here because the US app launched recently, UMA powers Polymarket Global. The US app is a bit different because of regulations; it actually needs a centralized dispute and resolution layer. So that's separate. But for Global, UMA has been the resolution layer for, I don't actually know how many years now. It's been a long time. And when you're dealing with the concept of truth, what's true and what isn't, the stakes are high, and they should be high. People should get fired up about it. People should get upset when they think what they view as true is being challenged. That's exactly the appropriate response, and on the marketing side it can be difficult to deal with.

I'll talk about your case in a moment. Let's not talk about the specific market, I'll talk about it more loosely, but set that aside for a moment and think about other scenarios. At the core, on Polymarket, people are betting and hoping to make some money. Who complains about the outcome of a bet: the winner or the loser? It's always the loser. And of course they do; they just lost money. And maybe, in their mind, if they get loud enough, they can overturn the outcome. One thing that's really cool is that UMA's track record is 99.8% accurate, maybe 99.7, 99.8, whatever. It's almost 100% accurate. Look at the lifespan of Polymarket and the number of markets live today. If you want to see something that's up and to the right, it's Polymarket. The number of markets being proposed every day is insane, and so is the volume going through Polymarket today. I think everyone thought that after the last US election it would start to go down, because that was a big one and everyone was excited, but it was just the beginning for them. So 99.7 or 99.8% is pretty damn incredible, and we're really proud of it.

But what's hard is that the 99.8% is silent. It's the 0.1% or 0.2%, whatever it is, that's loud, because those are the people whose core belief about what is and isn't true is being challenged. That's hard on the marketing side, because how do you deal with people coming with torches and pitchforks who are adamant? But the way I've been viewing it lately is that I'm actually proud they're upset, because it means the work we do really matters and the stakes are high. Not just financial stakes. There's that, but for most markets it's small; most people aren't putting their life savings on bets. Even bigger than that is the concept of truth. We're already seeing it challenged every day in the news with AI and the evolution of AI videos and photos. Our parents' and grandparents' generation, I think, see a photo and just assume it's real. "Oh, that's Bigfoot. You do know that's not real, right? That's just an AI video. Bigfoot didn't go to McDonald's today. That's fake." We have to preserve truth. That's just an example.

Hodl Up: No, Bigfoot wouldn't go to McDonald's. He'd go to Burger King, obviously.

James: So for me, the way we look at it from the marketing side is, first, it's an honor to be able to field that kind of intensity, because it's about truth, and truth matters a lot. And sometimes, to be really honest, there's a bit of a gap in understanding how the system works. You're pointing to it, and I'll call it out here: what's really crazy is that there have been so many accusations of UMA whales manipulating votes, but not once has there been on-chain data to prove it. The best part about UMA is that it's all on-chain. Everyone has access to it. And I guarantee you that people like ZachXBT and the deep analytics groups like Nansen and Arkham have looked, and not one time has there been actual proof of manipulation.

Does that mean it's perfect? Does it mean it's foolproof? No. That 99.8% isn't 100%. There's room to improve, and we're getting better, by the way. It's actually really fun. We're leaning into more AI technology and more ability to instantly consume information and data to verify things. It's incredible what we're able to do now, and the evolution is happening. What I would say to anyone who's upset about how a dispute was resolved is, first, I'm sorry. You probably lost some money, and that sucks. But that's the game of betting: you win some, you lose some. Second, setting aside the fact that you lost money, that feeling of wanting to preserve truth, don't ever lose it. It should make you angry. You should fight for it every time. We're doing that too, and we're trying our damnedest to get it right 100% of the time. We've definitely got some work to do, but it's an ongoing battle, and something we're evolving with Polymarket. And it's kind of crazy, look at the world we live in, to be able to have this arbiter of truth, the ability to decentralize truth and put it in the hands of the people. That's really fun, and I like that we get to do it.

Hodl Up: As we've been talking about this specific case, we just mentioned how blockchain preserves truth on-chain. But yes, I was part of the 0.2%, by the way. I'm probably going to be the loud guy. Whenever I lose a bet, I'm going to accuse everyone else, because I always win. But what I'm trying to say is that that's the scary part about decentralization as well, because people with power could somehow... I'm not basing my statement on facts, but it's a thought that always crosses my mind: what if it gets manipulated? What mechanism does UMA use right now to keep whales from manipulating a dispute or anything else? I'm not saying this to attack UMA. I just want to know, because I'm a Polymarket user, and the whole concept of this decentralized oracle amazes me. So I want to know how it works.

James: It goes back to the Schelling point concept that Vitalik wrote about a long time ago. The most basic understanding of it is that when you put a financial incentive on truth, that layer of financial incentive is enough to protect against manipulation. Every time someone has tried to influence the outcome of a vote, and every now and then we see people in the Discord comments arguing hard for "no" even though it's 99% "yes" on Polymarket, well, it's obvious they threw a bunch of money at the "no" side, hoping to profit from flipping that 99%. Whenever you see that, that person is financially motivated to try to sway the vote, and everyone else is financially motivated to preserve the truth. So at its core, the mechanism needs more voters, because the more voters you have, the more you can decentralize truth and the verification process, and the better it becomes. It becomes a lot more resilient to edge cases where people try to manipulate things behind the scenes.

Then there's all the technology and work we're doing. As I was alluding to with AI, it's incredible how quickly we can now verify the score of a sports game, for example. We're getting to the point where you almost don't need humans involved in the process at all. The buzzer sounds, the time ends, the winner is announced, that information goes online, and the oracle can take it and put it on-chain, all verified automatically. It's kind of incredible, and we're getting better and better at it, and that will only progress as technology improves. I'm not on the engineering team, so the UMA engineers would probably have a more eloquent answer about how we're working on the technology to make it more and more airtight. But I hate that you've had a negative experience, and I want you to know that we care very deeply about preserving what's true. It's not always easy; sometimes it's actually quite difficult. And we're doing our best to make sure we reach the right outcomes.

Hodl Up: Look, the facts are that I've lost a few markets, but I've won a lot more. I'm just basing a question on my personal experience. But to viewers, to anyone listening: the experience was smooth. Even when you lose, the experience is smooth.

James: You can't win them all, right?

Hodl Up: The thing is, I understand his frustration, but at the same time, if I were among the people who won and the real outcome was a bit complicated, maybe I'd plead the fifth and keep my mouth shut. I wouldn't try to make it a situation. If I'm losing money, though... At the end of the day, it's a betting platform in a way: you either win or you lose. People get lied to every day by the media and the news, and most of the time they don't raise any questions; they keep their eyes closed. But as soon as money is involved, people find a way to make it a bigger deal than it actually is. I'm not saying it was right or wrong or anything like that. I'm just saying that because money is involved, that's why people question the validity of some things.

Now I want to touch on Across as well. You've introduced this intent-centric model. I want to know the core design philosophy behind using intents, in a more general sense, because the cross-chain bridge space is competitive. And what's the endgame for a unified Ethereum ecosystem, in your view?

James: I love that question, and the answer is actually really simple. First, the whole concept behind the intents system is that 99% of crypto transfers are $10,000 or less. The data shows this, and if you look closer, about 90% are under $1,000, or maybe under $500; I forget the exact breakdown. What that tells us is that most people use the blockchain for small things, and when you're moving small amounts of money, you can't afford to wait 10 minutes, and you definitely can't afford to wait an hour. I don't know if you remember the old slow withdrawals from Arbitrum, the seven-day withdrawal waiting period. No one can afford to wait seven days to withdraw their funds. Seven days ago, the market was completely different from today. The value of my withdrawal changes so quickly.

So what we've done is create our solver network, or relayer network. There are about 35 or 40 relayers, last I checked, filling these orders, and it's a decentralized marketplace. We do it this way so that, say you want to move 1,000 bucks from Base to Arbitrum, that order goes into the marketplace and one of these relayers fills it. The ones who earn that small fee that goes to the relayer are the ones who perform the fastest, safest, and most accurately. Those are the ones who win the orders. And the reason it's a decentralized marketplace is that when multiple vendors sell apples, you get to choose which vendor has the best apple and the best price, and you as the consumer benefit, because they have to compete for your business. It's the same here.

So at their core, intents are incredibly fast. Most L2-to-L2 transfers happen in a second or less. That's key. They're really cheap, because filling these orders doesn't require much capital. It's a small fill and doesn't carry a ton of risk. But we've also made them very secure for the end user. While that transfer is happening, once the money leaves your account, the risk isn't on you. I don't know if you remember the Wormhole debacle, five or six years ago, however many years ago now, I'm losing track of time, when all those user funds were in limbo. It was a nightmare, one of the worst incidents in interop and in crypto in general, with tons of money lost to vulnerabilities. What we've done is say no: the relayer has to fill that order before finalization on the blockchain. So the relayer takes the risk, not the user. The user walks away with the funds, then we wait for block finality, and the relayer gets repaid for that fill later. So the relayer inherits the risk.

And this is the key piece I want to emphasize: Across has made every decision with the end user in mind. How do we make this the fastest, cheapest, most secure experience for the end user? We don't want the user to carry that risk. Other bridges don't do this. There are others who use an intents model, but they don't have a decentralized relayer network; they have a single relayer. What happens if that single relayer has a vulnerability, or fails, or something terrible goes wrong and there's a hack? Now every user's funds are at risk, and we've said no, that's not an option. Would it be easier for us to have only one relayer? Absolutely. But that would mean you, the end user, absorb the risk, and that's unacceptable to us.

We've also added mint and burn. Beyond the 99% use case of small transfers, we now have mint and burn through CCTP v2, powered by our friends at Circle. If you haven't talked to them, they're incredible, a brilliant team. We loved working with them, and Across has implemented a really awesome use case for CCTP transfers. It used to be a two-step process. If you've ever used a bridge like Stargate, for example, you bridge and then you have to go back and claim. What Across has done with Circle is abstract away that second step, so it's a one-step process for you, the user. I think Circle's limit is up to 10 million US dollars at once. If you're a whale or an institution, and you need to rebalance or move a large amount of funds around, we make it all happen in a single action, without you having to come back and claim. And it's really fast. With CCTP v2, I think the average fill time for large transfers is 5 to 7 minutes or something like that. So huge shout-out to Circle, and it's been really fun to add that functionality. Now we're not just the best bridge for small users, but I think also the best bridge for large transfers.

Hodl Up: Bridges have been one of the weakest points in this industry for quite a long time, in my opinion, and it was about time someone like Across Protocol came in, fixed this, and filled the gaps. But to wrap it up, because, as I can see, we could talk about crypto for five hours or more...

James: I know. We need a part two.

Hodl Up: We're probably going to do a part two soon. But to wrap up this first one: what do you think will happen on the marketing side of crypto? Crypto Twitter, crypto TikTok, whatever: how will people share this industry's message on different platforms five years from now? Crypto Twitter is dying, people are going to LinkedIn, but LinkedIn doesn't work the way crypto Twitter did, and most normies don't use Reddit for crypto. What do you think will happen in the next five years, man?

James: Marketing teams will have to mature. It's no longer just Discord and Twitter. You have to expand your distribution networks. I think advertising is going to come into play in a major way as we compete with other businesses and products, and it's going to look less like the old crypto marketing we've all grown to know and love. I know it was a jarring statement when I said "let community die," but what I really mean is: let community die so that it can rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. Something entirely new, better, stronger, more resilient, more powerful. That's where I think we're going. I think it will be a blend of traditional marketing fundamentals with this new addition of what we hope to see: an evolution of community, community 2.0, the rebirth of community.

Hodl Up: Sounds good. Sounds amazing. I do like the statement, to be honest, because there have been quite a lot of crimes committed in the name of community in the past few years. So I think we should just reinvent the whole idea of community in this space. James, thank you again for joining us today, and for your time, your insights, your opinions, and everything.

James: Thank you both. It's been a pleasure, really, and we should do it again. There's too much to talk about. Thank you both for having me. That was very, very enjoyable.

Hodl Up: Huge shout-out to James. Super insightful, and super helpful for anyone who wants to know more about how crypto marketing works and what the likes of UMA and Across are doing. We went into a lot of topics today.

Hodl Up: And the thing is, we talked about everything except the projects he's head of marketing at. We did mention them and go into a bit of detail, but we talked about quite a few general things. What I like about James is his takes on Twitter. If he had the time and we had the time right now, I'd just talk about his Twitter.

Hodl Up: Because he's very unfiltered.

Hodl Up: He's unfiltered, but he tells the truth. He talks about the reality of the industry. I've talked about InfoFi with people a lot, and they're like, "Of course it's normal to have InfoFi to incentivize people," but we got AI slop. We got no good content from InfoFi. I never saw a good tweet from an InfoFi campaign.

Hodl Up: Huge shout-out to James for joining us today. It was a really nice episode. It's going to be a long one; our editor is dying right now thinking about editing it. So thank you for joining us again, guys, and we'll see you in the next episode.