Stephen: This is your host Stephen Sargeant, Around The Coin Podcast. We get into a little crypto today. We're talking meme coins, we're talking wallet infrastructure, we're talking what it's like to build in the U.S. especially with the price of Bitcoin reaching 100, 000 of Bitcoin. Meme coins are going off the rack and the U.S. government is now going to be more pro Bitcoin than it ever has And Cryptocurrency and Innovation than it ever has before. We have Dan Mulligan who's coming in to talk about Tidus Wallet and all the amazing projects he's a part of, including Tari. Dan talks about his early days in digital marketing.

He gives us the lay of the land of what's happening in the ecosystem and what some of the main drivers are. He talks about Tidus Wallet. Basically, if the killer app for crypto was in one place, it would be in this app, in Tidus Wallet, about how you can do pretty much everything and connect to so many chains.

Super interesting conversation. Dan is such a relaxed person and gives some really great insights on what's happening now in the industry and what's going to be happening as we move forward, including touching on things like AI, AR, VR, you name it. We talk about this in the podcast. Hope to see you guys reach out to Dan.

He loves talking to builders and people trying his super app in the Tidus wallet. So reach out and let's go.

Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, Around The Coin Podcast. We normally don't get someone that has a little bit, they're dipping a little bit into everything, crypto, web3 protocols. We have Dan Mulligan. You're, you created Tidus Wallet, so why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we're going to go deep into all the projects that you're working on.

Dan: Yeah thank you. I've been in crypto for about six years started off in digital marketing, working with various startups, kind of moved my way into crypto full time in 2019, working for an exchange as a director of marketing, and that's kind of when the idea for Tidus Wallet was born bootstrapped it on the side, launched it about a year ago, And it's the crypto everything app.

The entire point of Tidus is to make DeFi super accessible, super easy, and super cheap for a regular person to access without needing a deck screener and a Twitter and all those different tools.

Stephen: What were you seeing at the exchange level? I used to work at an exchange, Bifnex, you know, very, you know, high frequency traders large trading partners. What did you see at the exchange? And you're like, Hey, this may not be for everyone, or it may be just for like a unique part of the industry, but for an everyday person, like our parents or somebody else, this might not be the best way to on ramp, off ramp, or even use cryptocurrency.

Was there anything that you saw? You're like, Oh. This is not the way I pictured it.

Dan: Yeah, I think in general, centralized exchanges, I think any product in crypto five years ago was just harder to use. Right? Harder to get on, harder to onboard, harder to know what you're doing once you're on there. Then all of the due diligence that goes into picking a coin, finding a coin when we weren't just in meme craze.

Right? All of that was super challenging for users. So, in my opinion, I think the whole industry just needed to move towards simplicity and accessibility. And now we're kind of getting there, right? We have things like Moonshot. Projects like my own Coinbase, Coinbase Wallet, all that type of stuff makes it a lot easier to use.

And I think when I was at the exchange, that was the most relevant thing. It was like, what are people doing? How do we get new users to actually onboard and stay versus people that are just hopping exchange to exchange for different types of trading contests or whatever you might be running during that time.

Stephen: What are your thoughts? Is it like, you know, maybe some of the critics are like, Hey, I think we made it too easy. When a 13 year old is able to create a token and rug pull it all in the same night. Maybe we made, you know, onboarding and offboarding and creating tokens a little too easy. What is your counterpoint?

Or maybe a, you know, exploration into that statement like

Dan: Yeah, so I think that kid, he had to have some level of tech savviness to do that. There's no way he just one day just was clicking around and then that happened. But yeah, it is super easy to do a lot of things like launch your own token now. I think with what's happening like regulations and the reason you're seeing Bitcoin pump and all that type of stuff will minimize how people could do that.

I think right now it's kind of a free for all and there needs to be some sort of guardrails put on it and that's where I think it will eventually go. But for now, it's a little too accessible, especially on the internet. You bond a token on Pump. Fun, then it's live, and you're trading, and you could pump, and you could do dump it, you could do kind of whatever you want with it.

I think that that'll kind of go away, but I think it's good for right now. It's good for the craze, it's good for the mania, it's good for continuing to get crypto as a brand, I'll call it, like, out into the world. Especially to younger generations that'll probably use it more day to day than any of us have till now.

Stephen: What are your thoughts on meme tokens? Especially you're helping a lot with the Tidus wallet. You're helping a lot of people get into DeFi. Things like meme coins, utility tokens. What are your thoughts about this meme coin craze? Everyone's going crazy. Is it very similar to the NFT craze in 2021? Where, you know, maybe 1 percent of those projects are meaningful and the rest is kind of like trading, trading baseball cards back in the 90s where, you know, everything was pretty much worthless.

But if you had a Beckett, you felt like you had, your cards were worth something.

Dan: Yeah, I think for meme coins right now, it's not exactly the same as NFTs back then. Most of the NFTs that you saw pump back then were projects that either was the same group moving around. I don't think true retail was really in that NFT phase really at all. I think it was a little bit of the outliers and maybe the cypherpunks that wanted to distance or do things past an exchange.

And now it's everyone. Now I have my little brother. He's 12 years old. He texted me the other day. He said, Hey, are you a chill guy? And then like sent me the meme. And like, as a dollar token, I was like, wait, what? And he's like, yeah, he's like, my friends are trying out how to buy this. And when you think of it that way, now it's everybody's kind of involved.

And I think it's just super high frequency versions of last cycle's NFT cycle. And it'll probably have the same end result, right? Where, you know, 99. 9 percent of it is completely useless. It is subject to go down. And it's a casino right now, but I think overall it is good for the space. The same way NFTs were, right?

How many celebrities and groups like that got onboarded through NFTs, whether in a negative or positive way, it did expose a lot of those audiences to NFTs. The crypto world.

Stephen: That's true. And like, once you get in, you kind of stay around long enough. What are your thoughts? You're a builder in this space, and we're going to get into some of your projects. But I think so much is going on in crypto. We want, you know, you know, somebody that's been in this space a long time, has seen at least two cycles like yourself.

What are your thoughts on Bitcoin prices? It just went over 100, 000. I don't know if it's still there as of today. But what are your thoughts? Is this good for the industry as a builder? I know, you know, when the price is down, it's easier to build. It's a lot more quiet. Now, you know, you can't go on Instagram without somebody telling you or teaching you how XRP is going to go to &3, 000 all of a sudden.

What are your thoughts on this mania? Or you're like, hey, you have to bring everyone in? And eventually, the technology will either keep the real players in, and the speculation will sift through some of these players that are coming into the space in this era.

Dan: Yeah, I think it's pure meme mania right now. I think it will die down. I think speculators will probably stay. I think this is the cycle where we get true adoption on a retail level, but more with longevity versus memes, coins, which people will leave and then they're going to be looking for a place to go.

And that's like why my product, and I think a lot of the other products that you saw launch over the last year. Kind of have that in mind, right? They're not designed just for one cycle, or they're designed for the long haul. And I think you'll see a lot of boomers and older people get into it, right? I think Bitcoin going to 100k is good for everybody.

As a builder, yeah, it's definitely more Like, notes to the grindstone, you know, whatever type of hustle when the chips are down. But when it's up, it's a lot easier to get people interested. People are more willing to listen, right? Everybody thinks that everybody is just constantly making money in crypto.

And therefore, it's an easier inroad if Bitcoin's over 100K. I think Bitcoin has a lot higher to go, just in its lifespan. I am on the Michael Saylor side of why not have 13 million dollar Bitcoin and whatnot and everything like that. So I think no matter where it goes, over time it's kind of up only, always.

Stephen: That's awesome. And, you know, taking it back, you've been in digital marketing before, Bitcoin seems like the ultimate, you know, if you had to market a project, an initiative, a currency, Bitcoin seems like it has some really great staying marketing power. What are your thoughts on digital marketing, especially now?

We saw Coinbase had the little dancing barcode, you know, early on in the days, like every exchange gave you 50 worth of Bitcoin. Of Bitcoin. If you signed up, I seen a little bit of that come back recently. What are your thoughts? Where, where should a lot of people, a lot of initiatives, a lot of projects and protocols, what are your thoughts on the digital marketing aspect of that with your experience?

Dan: Yeah, I think digital marketing and crypto is different than anywhere else, right, because you have the whole trading money element and then the KOL element of you could just pay certain people to push certain things and you might pump it, it might dump, and then that depends on all the tokenomics, investing, and the average person isn't going to do most of the research to look into tokenomics, investing schedules to learn any of that.

So I think that for marketing now, it's rewarding the user for action. Making something gamified. You see a lot of gamification in crypto. Everybody's trying to have an airdrop game. We have an airdrop game happening. Something where you just want to be in a constant state of rewarding the user. And then using that as a marketing tactic, you have an opportunity to earn for just doing what you would've been doing anywhere else.

Right? I think Coinbase does a pretty good job of that, right? They have a whole entire. Earn program where you could do modules and earn a dollar every time where it's a specific crypto. And for us, it's going to be you earn a percentage of the fees when you're trading on Tidus the same way you were to DEX, but this time it's across everything in the wallet.

So I think that that trend in digital marketing, A, it's always easy to market if you're giving away free stuff. And I think that you'll see a lot more influencers that were Web2 last cycle, come into the Web3 arena on a more official level. Like, I love the bouncing ad in Coinbase and you've seen all the big players do it, but I think now you'll have smaller dApps and projects that will partner with them.

Bigger KOLs because they're willing to do it because there'll be regulatory clarity on stuff, right? It used to be I couldn't run an ad or do something unless I'm paying somebody in USDC wallet to wallet And then it's like you may post it with the hashtag ad Maybe you don't and it was kind of you don't know who to trust and I think we'll get a lot of projects where they'll have official endorsements and it'll be On the smaller and larger scale.

Stephen: And when you do it that way, they have all these crypto investigators on Twitter now too. So if anything's a little shady, if it moves into a certain wallet, you're like, Hey, we can't do it via the traditional financial institutions. We definitely don't want to do it on an open blockchain. So you have to almost be very transparent of who you're giving funds or tokens to.

We've seen a lot of crypto influencers. Get hurt that way, right? They would, you know, pump the token, sell it off and rinse and recycle without just disclosing how much distributions they were getting out of the deal. I think that's why I get Kim Kardashian and a lot of other celebrities too. I'm curious what your thoughts are for protocols.

You mentioned, you know, jumping from exchange to exchange to get access to certain tokens or certain rewards. How do these protocols that market in the way of giving free things, how do they keep users and developers engaging? And that's a question for you running a protocol yourself. How are you going to maintain and retain, you know, the engagement that you initially get when you run these programs?

Dan: Yeah, for us, it's constantly rewarding. And because of the way we did our tokenomics, it kind of allows a user to just do things that they're going to do across every chain, right? Everyone is going to want to stake. Everyone's going to want to interact with DeFi. Everyone's going to want to swap. When you could earn yield on something that's 8 percent versus the US dollar, which may be getting 2 percent in your little bank account or whatever you're doing, right?

People want means to do that. And I think people haven't really woken up to decentralization and whatnot. Like. You can't buy everything on Coinbase and Coinbase Wallet, and then you end up with three different accounts. But if you're doing it through a wallet, or you're doing it through a decentralized, maybe Radium or whatever it might be, you access everything.

And that's where the real fun begins with crypto, right? Is accessing smaller projects the same way you would access a penny stock in a stock market. I think that, that accessibility is going to be pushed forward this cycle. I think 2025 is truly, When we see user applications, I think you'll see Robinhood take on a lot more crypto assets, but I think people need to do things in a decentralized manner if they want to access all of it.

I don't think you need to hop from exchange to exchange, I think you need to find a product that just does it. Everything at once, in one spot.

Stephen: Are we still in the wallet wars? I know Blockworks talked about this recently, about 2023, and it feels like 2024 was the war of the wallets, it almost felt like. You know, someone listed this, like, how many different ways can you create a whole, like, how much different quality infrastructure, what are you and your team kind of playing on, what are some of the shortfalls, and what are some of the trade offs, right?

We know, like, you know, less centralization also sometimes means less security, et cetera. So how are you kind of navigating this space with so many wallet competitors in the game?

Dan: Yeah, that's a great question. So for us, there are two clear front runners for everything in old wallet market share, and that's Phantom and MetaMask. Phantom's a great product. I've used it. It does everything you kind of need it to do, but it is limited on the amount of chains. It's limited on amount of actual functionality.

And if you're not someone just buying a slot of meme coin and you want to go deeper, it's limited in that capacity. And then MetaMask, I think everyone's sentiment on MetaMask, especially in the crypto world is kind of the same. It's been around forever. Wintoken, UIUX never really became anything. Fees are very, very expensive, limited in its mobility, and it has customizations, but the regular person isn't going to go and start dropping 18 decimals into their wallet regularly.

It's just not a thing that everyone will use. People looking to gamble will. But the regular day person, the other 6 billion people on earth plus, they're not going to do that. For us, the way that we differentiate ourselves is we just removed all of that. I don't need someone to have to go to a website or find out what something is on Twitter or do any of that type of stuff.

It's just in the wallet. And it's super secure because we're connecting directly to that debt. There is no, I have to click a link that I might be fraudulent on Google. Then I have to do three smart contracts. We've done all of that. Now it's two clicks and we're telling you exactly what you're doing and giving you the opportunity to learn about it.

And when you apply that to things like lend and borrow, now you could essentially take a flash loan against your Bitcoin in five minutes in the wallet. And we're the first people to do that. And we built it in a very modular sense. So you might see a lot of wallets that have a swap mechanism and you have to choose the chain first.

For us, it's, No, no, no. Every single chain you're directly swapping on that chain, it's showing you every token for that chain. You don't have to change networks or anything. Every time you change, it just kind of adjusts. The, what you're on and like the color of the screen, essentially made it really easy to use.

Now, the downfall of that and the downside of any of that is if there is a very obscure dApp that maybe we're not integrated with, you won't have traditional access. You'll have to go through Web Explorer, connect it yourself and do it the traditional way. And that on our app is just not the easiest part of doing it.

You have to go into settings and then go to web browser and so on. So that's definitely a limitation, but we feel the security that we And the simplicity and accessibility that the user gains is worth that tenfold.

Stephen: And it makes sense, right? Cause every time you add an extra layer in cryptocurrency, especially when you get into DeFi, that's another attack vector for hackers. That's another attack vector for a lot of these, you know, approval fishing scams wallet drainers. We're seeing a lot of that. What are your thoughts on, you know, this craze about wallet draining?

The copy and pasting mechanism, the wallet tainting, like, what are your thoughts on that and how do you protect users, or is there a way to protect users when it comes to those features?

Dan: Yeah, I think in a lot of senses, users are their worst, owner's worst enemy, especially when they're first onboarding. So, I'll tell you, when I first got on, I got nailed for it. I clicked bad

link the Discord.

Stephen: You got got?

Dan: Yeah, I got got. What happened was, I was in, it was for an NFT project, and I was waiting for the mint.

And, in Discord, the moderator, the admin's account had gotten hacked. So he, the, it was the admin, he posted a link and was like, hey everybody. And everybody that clicked got their wallet, like, drained for two or three sol, whatever it might have been, at a time. And, I remember that happening and being like, wait, why am I clicking a link in a Discord to access this in any capacity?

And how do we kind of get away from that entirely, right? So for us, it's don't give the users as many points of failure and they'll fail us. It's kind of as simple as that. And that's what Are

Stephen: people still using Discord? Because that was the concern with Discord is like you go in there, it's links, it's spam, it's like you really couldn't have too many useful conversations by the time you got into these larger projects. Has that changed a lot since 2021? Are you in there as much do you feel?

Or are people moving more away from that? Maybe, you know, siphoning their attention to things like Telegram, etc.

Dan: Yeah, I think definitely everything has moved over to Telegram. There are still a lot of projects and a lot of things on Discord. I personally can't stand Discord. I am much more of a Telegram person. However, I've also been in like, had people message me as me on Telegram and X, Y, Z phrase. So I think that's going to happen no matter where it is.

Cause all of these things are anonymous messaging applications, right? Whether you're on WhatsApp, Signal, it doesn't really matter where you are. There's going to be people, there's going to be bad actors, right? There's bad actors in everything. And it's something where the, you just shouldn't have to have that many devices in order to access DeFi.

I think that's what it really comes down to. I shouldn't, we have a slide in our slide deck. I'll have to send it to you after this, where it shows like the actual amount of points that a user has to get to before they really, meme coin early. Unless they're wildly lucky somewhere. Like if you want to do the research and it's like eight different tools that you may have open.

And the question is, is. No one's gonna do that. Like, I love the example of Roaring Kitty and GameStop and, and all that type of stuff because Robinhood is what enabled that to happen. It was almost in this, this strange irony of like, hey, you created this awesome thing that's now publicly traded and we're going to use it in order to hurt you.

And crypto doesn't have that yet. I think Moonshot is that kind of, but I think for other things in DeFi and all the other coins that kind of we're talking about, we could be that. And I think that you'll see more apps that are trying to do that.

Stephen: Who's your core customer base? I know we talked a little bit earlier. Basically everyone that's looking to onboard to Discord. But if you had to like segment, if you had to create your profile or avatar, this is our top customer. They're our best customers. Who's that kind of target group and maybe some other common use cases.

Dan: Somebody that has a centralized exchange account with a little bit of money in like ETH, Solana, and Bitcoin. And now they're like, I believe in crypto. I kind of get what it is, but like, what's, what can I do next with it? That, I would say, is our top customer, right? That's somebody that could just send all their stuff directly to their new Tidus wallet and they could start interacting immediately.

There's no reason for them to even on ramp with us if they don't want to. And they could kind of continue doing that and then they're in a really good spot and they can on and off ramp with whatever they're using and then they could really access everything through us. And then the other person is someone who's completely new.

Someone who wants to learn and maybe they're a little bit anti government or anti big bank, whatever their flavor is. They can come and they can easily get on board safely and in a matter where they don't have to worry or download a bunch of other things. They can just go. And they can have access to everything, right?

They can have Bitcoin, we are all EM chains, we're also the only network. Wallet that has Tan Network in it, where it's on the mobile app, not having to go through Telegram really at all. And then we also are adding things like Tari and other blockchains, kind of the ones that become more popular.

Sui, we'll probably add XRP at some point if they continue on there. This run that they're on and they kind of get an ecosystem growing. So I think as we constantly add, we'll always give users the opportunity, whether they're new or people trying to just hop on to access the newest, most liquid, most sustained and safe chains, knowing that they're not going to have to change anything.

It'll happen right in the mall.

Stephen: And how do you determine like safe versus like giving people, as you talked about, you know, getting into a meme coin early. How do you determine like, Hey, this is safe, but not yet proven. There's a lot of hype around it. There's a lot of transaction volume versus like, Hey, we're accessing this because it's extremely popular, but there is that potential of being a rug pull or something that isn't long term sustainable, how do you kind of bounce?

Cause you're not exactly there to play judge and jury. Also, you're not there to do due diligence, I think, for the most part of these blockchains. You're really just there to give people access. How do you see your role in that kind of ecosystem? And then, are you mitigating other risks outside of, like, your core ecosystem or users of the wallet?

Dan: Yeah. It's a great question. I think for us, the best that we could do is give you as much information as digestible as possible upfront. If you're on our app and you hit the Aave and you want to lend and borrow button, there's a little module where you could very quickly read about what you're doing, how it works, how interest works on there, and how the collateral works and everything.

And we make it really easy for you. If you're swapping meme coins, we have it where certain meme coins are verified, as in they've been bonded on pump or whatever it might be, and then coins that are completely not verified, We let you know. We tell you, hey, this is a token that has no check. It doesn't even have a PumpBot logo.

It could be anything. And then we're working on mechanisms where it'll let the user know, hey, this token, 97 percent of the supply is owned by five people. And kind of giving users at least some insight into key stats, right? Because we don't want to give anyone financial advice. That's not our job.

That's not what we're trying to do. But if we could give someone information that we think may be problematic and let them do their own research, that's something we definitely want to be involved in and do for our users.

Stephen: And, you know, when you think about what's going on between centralization and decentralization, layer 1s versus layer 2s, Where do you kind of sit maybe personally and like, how do you think Tidus interacts with, because you're interacting almost with all of these worlds in some way or shape or form, what are your thoughts on that, like with the role you play in the ecosystem from an interaction with L1s, L2s, and centralized and decentralization?

Dan: Yeah, I think we kind of go where the user wants us to go. For example, there's like, we have ETH, we have Solana, and we have Bitcoin. We cover the, the big three and all the accessibility you could possibly want those from an exposure perspective. And then it's the next tier of everything where it's Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, the big L2s, Polygon, so on and so forth.

And like, we offer those, but at the end of the day, we're much more focused on where there's a lot of liquidity, where there's a lot of true adoption and And usership across everything. We're not just trying to list change for the sake of listing change. You will never see us list an L2 and be the first person to list that L2.

And we have no idea who the founders of it are or anything like that, right? We want projects that are sound, that they're docs, that their tokenomics make sense, for example, and that they're excited to kind of adopt our users the same way that we want to adopt theirs. That's why, like, we love Tari so much because that's going to be something, right, where we could reward our users.

There's a whole bunch of awesome things at play. Naveen is obviously Doxt, and he's been around for a while. Those are the type of projects that we want to be involved with. And projects like Sui, right? Sui's been around for a while. Tons of funding. You have a lot of buzz around it. You have some people really building on it.

I think Near is another project. Avax, we just added, would be on that list. But we're not going to just be taking every ghost chain that exists and you'll never see us probably put Cardano on there, for example, or I think we will have XRP the way, like I said, things are going with that and that ecosystem.

But we want to do our due diligence and give users things that they could actually use for the long term.

Stephen: I'm curious why not Cardano, because that seems like, you know, a natural progression. And then they have like things like Cosmos that are kind of closely connected to it. What are your thoughts on, you know, or I'm curious when you say like tokenomics, that makes sense. Maybe give you an example of what tokenomics doesn't make sense in your opinion for what you're offering to customers.

Dan: I actually think there's not a lot of stuff that fits the bad criteria, like right now. Right? I think, though, when there's very clearly like a whale is manipulating it, or it's something where it's a fad chain, like I was, like, Blast, for example, I think Blast does a lot of really cool things, but I don't think it's something that would truly fit our user base, or that we'd be able to make and simplify in a way where it'd be super valuable.

To the types of people that are using Blast, right? And there's a lot going on in Blast, but that's just not what we're really trying to do. We're trying to give stuff that has real world adoption, so this way the interest rate that you're getting when you're staking something doesn't plummet in the middle of the bear market.

And it's like, wait, what is this? What's happening? And then there's this scare. I think from the tokenomics side, I think stuff like, That is just sustained over time. I think it has much less to do with the supply and all of that type of stuff. And it has much more to do with the token's utility. Like, is it a proof of stake?

Is it a proof of work, like something like Tari, or is it ETH and you have to stake it and kind of how do we work on that side? How do we give our users accessibility to that token? Is this a token where it's going to get dumped all the time? Like looking into those types of factors, right? Vesting schedules for, Hey, is our users there?

We're going to. Push this a lot and then in a year it's going to be something where it goes down super heavily and everybody is like, well, you push this product in our product type thing. So we really want to be careful about how we're integrating with things directly. And we're always open to working with projects too, right?

Like if a project comes to us and says, Hey, this is what I'm doing. And it's awesome. Then of course we want to be first, but we want to do our due diligence because it's a user first product at the end of the day.

Stephen: And maybe tell me about some of the challenges or if there is challenges, like you're connecting with all these chains and blockchains and, you know, infrastructure, lending, swapping. Is there any challenges of you being, maybe it's not a newcomer to the space, but maybe not as well known as, you know, the Metamask of the world.

When you're kind of entering these worlds, because I'm assuming you need some buy in from those chains and projects. I could be wrong though. I'm always wondering how do you connect with these projects and if they, they need to help you or support you in any way to make it a viable option for yourselves.

Dan: No, so we really hammer down like three, you mentioned Cardano before and like not want to put that in. It's because there's not going to be a ton for people to do on chain in there. Storing the Cardano? Absolutely. We'd love to kind of incorporate them in the buy, sell mechanisms, all that type of stuff.

Because it's a token that is super liquid, has a lot of trade volume on it, has a lot of retail popularity. But I, we want stuff where we can incorporate their entire ecosystem. In order to do that we go about it two ways. We always try to work with whatever the foundation is first, see if maybe we could work with them on a grant, or if they could recommend us projects that they think would be a good fit or are looking for kind of a mobile application, because there is a whole pitfall of, right, how many dApps need their own mobile app versus do not at all, or how many are on desktop only and have no mobile application, and we kind of work with those types of projects.

The good thing is the crypto world is super friendly. It is very easy to kind of reach out to people regardless of time in the In the space or how small your product is, everyone is looking to kind of work together. There is certainly a sentiment of, we all want crypto to be adopted and grow.

Whether it's Jesse and Mert beefing on Twitter about Solana and BASE, like basically co adding each other or whatever's going on. No matter what, it's all in the spirit of growing the space and driving like the best possible version of it. And I think that's like really what we're trying to do and what we're trying to push on is we want to give our users.

The best possible version of DeFi that you could get, regardless of price up or price down. You should be able to access things that are safe, secure, are truly replicating finance in a decentralized way. Like, that's what crypto was originally for, right? I mean, we all lose sight of that because of meme coins going up.

But at the end of the day, the whole point of crypto was to completely decentralize the financial market. Give it back to the people in a way where they could do as they please.

Stephen: And I'm curious, you talked a lot about, you know, pushing the industry forward. We just saw President Trump is going to be elected. He should be in there in a few weeks. What are your thoughts? How big is that, especially you're a U.S. based company? I'm assuming that you have some challenges when it comes to the regulatory system.

Are you encouraging, is this encouraging, whether it was You know, Trump or somebody else getting clear regulations and guidance. So, you know, exactly, as you say, the guardrails that you can drive within, or do you think that there may be too much regulation that might stifle some of the innovation that you might be building?

Dan: No, I think we've actually hit a point where we need the guardrails. I think whatever it's going to happen, it's not going to be incredibly heavy handed. That's just my opinion. Is that it will happen slowly over time through some form of adoption regulation. I think that Elon working on all of that type of stuff will probably help towards crypto, right?

He is very clearly a crypto advocate. He's pushed Doge. He's done all that type of stuff. Yeah. So I think it's all positive, especially for a US based company. For us, until you launch a token, there's not a lot to deal with from a regulatory perspective, right? We are non custodial, so it is your coins entirely.

We allow you to back up directly on your iCloud or your Google Cloud, whatever you might be using. But we don't ever keep your seed phrase or any of that. So for us, that's not been an issue at all. But when we plan to launch our token in Q1, those questions are going to pop up. And I think under the new the new guard, we'll be in a much better situation to launch the token, hopefully from the U.S., right? That would be really cool to be able to kind of be a part of that first wave of U.S. launched tokens that get to benefit from the new regulation. But I think it's good, no matter what.

Stephen: And you don't have Gary Gensler kind of like, you know, going back and forth on what he thinks is a security or not a security. I'm curious though you've had some, I think some thoughts about this what are your thoughts around when it comes to VCs? Because, you know, they kind of pushed you all away.

They were on the AI, you know, open AI hype train, and now you can slowly see them and crypto Twitter and everybody else went from being, you know, crypto experts, then they were NFT experts, then technology was moving a little fast, so they just called themselves futurists, but now they're back to being crypto and Bitcoin experts.

But VCs almost act in the same way, unfortunately. What are your thoughts about the VC landscape? Do you think there's going to be still more of a push for blockchain? Or do you think they're looking for this unicorn that combines both blockchain and AI?

Dan: I think VCs operate just in a slightly different market than the rest of us are also operating in. And that they're going to kind of move with the trends the same way you would move with a meme coin versus a utility coin, right? I think things will come back to crypto. That's not, I don't hop industries.

It's not something I've ever done. So when it comes to like us looking for VCs, I was sure to go with people that have been in crypto for a while or are in fintech as a whole and kind of driving that adoption side of stuff. But I think it's all going to come back to crypto. I think crypto will just be something and blockchain in general that just overlays on everything else.

And then it becomes like a strange subcategory with subcategories that has been around. Okay, you have, like, AI agents are happening now, then you have blockchain that is covering real estate, like, property and all those types of projects. And when you kind of just keep breaking all of it down, it's like, well, everything is kind of blockchain at that point, right?

I think that's where we're going to go, and I think VCs will want to participate in that. I think if you tie AI to almost anything, you have a better chance of raising money, though. And that's just kind of the name of the game right now. But I think it kind of will all just come back to the mean of, you know, Crypto, and how it amplifies and optimizes all of those industries across the board.

Stephen: you guys running any agents, either internally, from like a coding perspective, or even just like menial tasks? For, you know, creating fun meme memes on Twitter. Anything that you're using AI for?

Dan: I mess around with AI a little bit on the trading side more for my own personal fun than anything and one of our engineers is working on something that is a bug detector just for very little tiny minute things that it'll kind of take care of. It's like a little internal agent type deal. I think the whole AI trading thing is awesome.

I think more of it, I think it would be really cool to get models that are even more fleshed out than they are. We are going to build something where it's going to be text to trade, where you could kind of just give it orders right in the wallet, and then it'll just execute the orders across whatever chain you tell it to in wallet, things like that.

Adding in DCAing and being able to pay people on a regular basis is another thing we're working on, and that'll probably have an AI element where, hey, I want to pay, I want to support Around The Coin. I could send every 30 days 100 USDC directly to you, and I never open my wallet to do it. It's a subscription that's peer to peer, Like, we're working on a lot of fun things within the wallet that'll make it easier for the user and kind of bridge that gap and also have a little AI fun in there too.

Stephen: I love it. Like, that wasn't financial advice, but it seems like smart advice if you want to send, if you want to send us anything. We're more than happy to, to accept it. We just saw Stripe acquire Bridge. To be quite honest, me and a lot of people that work especially in crypto compliance had never heard of Bridge up until now.

I'm sure a lot of people deep in stablecoin infrastructure probably have. Yeah. Is, you know, looking at what you're building, do you think VCs and either, you know, larger Web 2. 0 companies and what we can call traditional tech companies are going to start looking at wallet infrastructure and see how they can bake that into some of their offerings, including payments and loaning products?

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I think you'll probably have on the payment side especially wallets, like we offer a wallet as a service B2B portion of the business entirely on like the back end, I guess you could say. Where we work with dApps that want to add a wallet and just have something incorporated. Or maybe you're a different financial tool entirely that just wants to add a swap mechanism or an analyzer or something like that if you're a portfolio viewer, that type of stuff.

So yeah, I think you'll see a huge shift where wallets are just built in and payment rails are built in to other payment rails like Stripe and Bridge and all that type of stuff, right? It'll probably just Like, I wouldn't be surprised if you opened your Chase app one day and you're looking at your checking account and then there's like a wallet button and you hit the wallet and you're in an interface similar to Tidus or something like that.

I think this is going to be the way of the world. I think digital debit cards is something that like we're going to be working on probably towards the end of next year of how do we get people to be able to just tap their phone and pay from their Tidus wallet just completely seamlessly with a bodega.

Or, right, a business like that. And I think that's where most payments and things are going. So definitely.

Stephen: And that sounds shocking, but here in Canada, we have something called Interact eTransfers, where you can send it, you know, funds via email, just having the person's email address. And exactly what you said, you open up your banking app, there's an interactive transfer button, you press it, and then that's how you can conduct your transaction.

So it doesn't seem far fetched if I wanted to buy an NFT, if I want to send, you know, if I want to use, as you said, tip or donate, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to have to be jumping around to all these different, you know, log into my Coinbase account, you know, connect my wallet, hopefully I don't, you know, the SDK package wasn't compromised and I lose all my funds.

There's just so many instances where you have to. For a trustless system, there's so many instances where you have to just trust that you're doing the right thing in crypto. I want to talk to you about actually, you know, speaking about VCs and, you know, the Stripe situation. You're LinkedIn, you're, you're hitting it hard, giving advice around startup funding, raise it, fundraising and the, as an entrepreneur, what are your like overall thoughts about that, especially as it pertains to like web three, where it's like, as you said, you have to try and raise, you know, get grants, you know, give away stuff.

I'm assuming we see a lot of those models. People don't survive them. What are your thoughts or advice to those that are building in web three, but also need capital to kind of move it forward?

Dan: I think with no capital, you could always build something, right? I think anyone could bootstrap. I think anyone, unless it's something that's completely ridiculous and has a ton of upfront cost, you could probably get whatever you're trying to build. Get done, built, much simpler than you ever imagined. So I would recommend doing that.

That's what we did, right? It would have been very challenging for me to raise any sort of money or even get any set of VC interest if I was just going in with no product. So for us, it was like, Hey, if we're going to bootstrap something, we should bootstrap it to where it's a live app this way, when we're pitching it, it's like, wait, wait, wait, we've already built something, we just want to be able to kind of bring it to market and scale up and optimize it.

And we raised our first round basically entirely cold. So, it's something where it's just a grind and Naveen and a lot of other founders that have been entrepreneurs for a long time will tell you always be raising. And just kind of be in a constant state of selling and talking and kind of networking and the whole network is your net worth thing is cheesy, but it's pretty true.

If you meet one person and that person introduces you and so on and so forth, that's how we raised our entire first pre seed was I was working at a project you. As a Chief Marketing Officer, we did really, really well, had a lot of users, I met one of the VCs, and then kind of just cold pitched him, and then it kind of dominated from there, and I think that just kind of really being on top of it, following up, it's a strange dating game that you're playing with VCs, right?

You're basically sending a cold email is the equivalent of going up to someone at a bar, and then you're kind of in this Conversation and dance of like, Hey, you're questioning me on this. I'm questioning you on this and you're going back and forth and you're trying to gauge intent and all that type of stuff before you could finally write, like get their number or whatever you want it to call it.

And I think that people don't realize how much work it is with one VC. There's going to be 10 touch points before you maybe even have them on a call, right? We've had VCs where we'll talk to them once. And then by the time they come back around, a month or two could gone by. And we've had four different emails that have gone out and they've viewed the deck twice.

And now you're finally getting that phone call. And I think it's just a really like never stop mentality and never really get discouraged. It's going to be a million no's and all you really need is a handful of not one yes.

Stephen: And, you know, you talked a lot about marketing and your digital marketing background. Do you feel that gives you the advantage in this Web3 space where there's not a lot of, you know, native marketers? I feel a lot of people are just kind of copying each other, putting out memes and like, okay, this is going to be our way of doing it.

Or just like, Hey, we got funding. Let's just give it all in some kind of grant. Like, do you feel that your digital marketing chops has been beneficial for you in Web3 versus even in Web2?

Dan: Yeah, I think it helped with building the whole brand side of things, right? And don't get me wrong, we just started, so we're in the process of raising a seed round. We're very, very early stage. But I think for us, like, our focus on brand and what we're actually trying to do versus trend chasing is what kind of sets us apart on the marketing side, right?

You're never going to see us wildly pivot to launching a meme coin. Or start just incorporating anything just for the sake of it or for the sake that someone may tweet us or something like that. We are much focused on building the brand side of things, right? And making Tidus something where people know that is something they want to use.

Oh, I could send it via my Tidus wallet or the Crypto Everything app is kind of our trademark thing. And that's what we want to kind of continue to push is brand over trends. And really becoming something that's trusted by a user in a place where, right, if you want it to be trustless, you want it to be decentralized, you want all that type of stuff, we have to be the brand that users come to and say, hey, these guys have taught me a lot and have been around for a while, and they're the cheapest, and Dan will hop on a call with you if you need to set up your wallet on a random Tuesday.

So like, that's kind of the type of personal touch that we want to do, and I think that is a very digital marketing and like old school marketing mentality that doesn't really exist as much today in the crypto side of things.

Stephen: And do you think that's why there's a criticism of like crypto not having a killer app? Because although you have all of these amazing projects, the open source nature of it, it's still all very siloed, and then to your point, you have to hit eight checkpoints to conduct one transaction or do something even remotely interesting.

Do you think that's what, like, what you're building makes sense because of, like, you're like, Hey, of course there's no killer app because there's eight different places where you have to do the thing that the killer app would do. Is that why you're trying to all bring into one place where they, although they might not be able to do everything, they could do the majority of the things they'd like to do all in one place.

Dan: Yeah, that's exactly our entire use case is, is why are you doing this on five different apps when you need one? And if you're doing it on one, it'll be easier, safer, and faster. Oh, and we're cheaper because now you're giving us the opportunity to micromonetize on things. This way, if you're someone that only wants to swap, great.

Well, now you get to swap for 55 percent cheaper than all of our competitors. And there's not a lot of apps where the price difference is that severe. And for us, it's also the side of like, There's so much more to do, why would you not want to take advantage of it? If I could go in there and I could gain some sort of yield on something in a DeFi app that no one has ever heard of, why would I not want to try to participate in that from a user perspective?

And we want to give everybody the opportunity to do so.

Stephen: Now, you know, you talked about a lot of the marketing you're doing on other projects and working on other projects. How do you stay focused? Especially now, you know, the price is going up. Everyone has a million dollar idea. They're trying to tell you how you can integrate AI into what you're doing to make the super app above the killer app.

How do you maintain focus and be like, you know, meme coins are over there, it might be worth it for a quick buck, but we really have to sit and think long term. How do you clear out all the noise?

Dan: Yeah, I think, so work, I'm a big time blocker, so blocking time is, is my thing when it comes to projects and working on Sunday and doing all that type of thing. I, that's, this is what I enjoy to do. So it's, it's not really working in that type of sense. And then I think for like, I think a lot of projects and people that want to kind of integrate with us, We just kind of, like, vet them the same way for everyone.

There's no one that's going to come to us and is going to be like, Well, why don't you guys do X, Y, or Z, and we're just going to take it and be like, Yes, we'll do that. So it's really staying the course and kind of staying the path across the board. Right? Like, meme coins? Hey, you could trade every meme coin you want in Tidus Wallet.

You could do it, you could have fun doing it, do whatever you need to do. But it doesn't mean now that we're going to become some sort of meme coin launchpad or we're going to start now like giving you notifications about meme coins and things like that. That's not where we sit. We want to give you access in the safest way, we will help you mitigate as much risk as possible, but at the end of the day like memes will be gone next cycle and I promise you that like Curve won't and Aave won't and all these larger projects with real utility and world changing applications, they're still going to be there.

So we want to focus on those types of things and making sure that that could scale and grow within our ecosystem versus trend chasing. Now, a lot of people would say, well, you're going to miss out on users and stuff, and it's like, probably we'll definitely miss out on users who are, Hey, I just want to use AI in a wallet, but we will not miss out on users who will be using Tidus next cycle if they start with Tidus this cycle and really having a low CAC, high LTV, Mentality is what we kind of apply everywhere.

Stephen: And what is it like, how do you acquire customers? Like you talked about CAC there, how are you acquiring customers? Like what is your cost? Is it mostly just kind of the rewards programs that you're giving out? Is that the majority of your thing? Or do you have like a large marketing team? Like where do you go from there?

Dan: No, my marketing team is me and two other part

Stephen: You?

Dan: Right. It's me and two other part time people. We are very guerrilla marketing esque right now as we kind of do the fundraising stuff. So for us, we've, something that we've had a lot of success with is, Like, sending micro influencers who are in the space and interested in what we're doing.

Personalized swag, really hitting, like, reaching out to them, building brand ambassador programs, things like that. Not just throwing money into the ether as far as users and stuff like that. Just to, hey, somebody will now onboard, right? They're going to bot our product a little bit, and they'll gain a little bit of an airdrop advantage over people.

Like, those are the users that we're not really focused on acquiring. So for us, we have a relatively low CAC to get people in, it's like 40 or so, 40 or 50, and that's, they have a wallet, and then from there it's, hey, pushing them to do different things in the wallet, right? And that's via content, it's via in wallet notifications, little ones, hey, here's how you could swap this, or check this out, or check out this mechanism.

And getting people to use it. We want to have a really engaged user versus a giant number up front that then half the wallets haven't moved in, in two cycles.

Stephen: I'm curious what your thoughts are on marketing in Web3 from the aspect that, you know, Absolute Labs came up with this like WRM, Wallet Relationship Manager. So instead of phone numbers and email addresses, you now have wallet addresses. And to your point, you could do things like airdrops, And notifications with your thoughts on that being like the chief source of like marketing going into web three.

We haven't seen a lot of that, but we know a lot of these big brands like LVMH, this is like kind of where they build their web three market is like getting those addresses and combining that with phone numbers and a ton of other data that checkpoints they have.

Dan: Yeah, it's going to be easier for a Web2 brand to come into Web3, but that's when we're hoping that Web2 brands will start to partner with people like us, right, and come to us and be like Hey, you guys have all these wallets, we're on this chain that you don't have. Let's say at a module where now I get like 10 percent off every time I go to buy a Louis bag or whatever.

It might be in Wallet. We could figure all that type of stuff out, right? I think Shopify and all those types of things will move towards crypto and will probably require that in one way or another. But I think it kind of goes back to what we talked to earlier with the Wallet as a Service stuff, right?

It's like, how does that infrastructure work? Because on the marketing side, It's super easy to just collect someone's email and then tie it to an address, right? Or just have them fill out their address in their email. But what are we going to do when now in your phone, when you add a contact, it also gives the ability for a wallet address.

And now that wallet address is something that you could Apple Pay someone. Right, directly to, right from their phone. So for Tidus, what we're building is essentially a phone directory type thing, I think Rabi has one that's really good as well, where you'll be able to import your phone, and then add exactly what I'm saying.

And now I'll be able to text somebody crypto from Tidus through that mechanism. That's kind of what we're trying to build. Yeah, so I think I think that'll definitely Be a big part of the marketing side of things, how we market, right? Now it's like, send this referral code to your friends and you can hit a button on all the things you just imported and you could push it to all of your, your contacts.

And we want to kind of build those types of programs, not just for us, but also for big brands that are incentivizing or collecting data in a way where they need wallets and they need to know what people are doing.

Stephen: That's awesome. I think I saw Metaverse on your website. Not sure. I feel like all the Metaverse gurus, similar to the NFT gurus, They've kind of moved into space, they call themselves Spatial Experts or Spatial Gurus now. What are your thoughts on the metaverse? Where do you see, especially now we're seeing slowly but surely the new the new meta products are coming out.

The new VR headsets are getting better and better. Where do you kind of see us moving, whether it's meta, VR, where do you kind of see this? And did you think it would have been similarly as gained as much traction as things like staking on Bitcoin

Dan: I think, so I'm a big fan of augmented reality versus virtual reality. I think things like the metaglasses and all that type of stuff are fantastic. I think that the way the world is moving in more that direction than the VR direction. I thought we would have been further along with VR from being very honest to you.

I would have thought by now we would have, I've been diving into much better and cooler and more immersive experiences, but no one seems to have cracked that really at all. And as far as the Metaverse for the crypto side of things, I don't think that's dead yet. I think that the NFT cycle kind of did a lot of harm to it because it was so many people trying to tie NFTs to things in the Metaverse, which is great on a lot of levels.

But I think products like Fluff World and, you know All these other kind of NFT projects that are building in the metaverse will have a lot of success if they could stick around until there's a way for like the regular person to access and do it in a very, just one to one way. But I think AR before VR, and AR will be huge I think in the next 3 5 years.

Like a part of everyone's everyday life.

Stephen: And we're seeing it more and more with like installations where people are taking pictures in these buildings. I think, I don't know if it's real, I'm assuming the Louis Vuitton thing I saw in New York was AR. You're seeing, you know, big buildings wearing jackets. I think people like that, especially if you can like, it doesn't matter if you're seeing it in real life, the pictures of that do really well.

I think on social media, it really conceptualizes a lot of the meanings of these brands. It sounds like you bought some Metaverse space besides Snoop Dogg. It sounds like you have the, you bought the digital property beside Snoop Dogg. So you're really pushing it now.

Dan: No, it's funny. I, I had Landon's Sandbox, I think it was, when it first, first, first came out. And I think I may have a parcel or something like that sitting in there. And it was like, yeah, there was this Snoop Dogg world. It was kind of all that type of stuff. And I think, like, that just has to figure out a way to integrate better.

Like, if it's something where, you know, If somebody's taking a picture and then you're appearing in the metaverse, it's, there's a million things that I'm sure we'll see. But I love like the meta glasses. I think things like that will just be more incorporated in daily life and people will be able to like get sales by looking at things and do and purchase directly there and walk out of a store with something like that type of stuff.

I imagine we'll live in a time where like if you could get things from a vending machine where the vending machine is essentially a glass box that. You're just looking at and getting fed whatever ads and stuff that pertains to you. I think that's where we're kind of headed. Very Blade Runner 2049 type stuff going on in that scenario.

Stephen: Or seeing self driving cars. If we get them to be flying on a regular basis, I think we're pretty close to that Blade Runner reality. We're going into cars with random strangers pretty frequent. I don't think we would have saw that when we were first born. Of getting into cars with perfect strangers and sending our children in them as well.

Or spending 17 to get a coffee because you don't want to leave your house and don't want to drive. I think we're seeing a lot of things that we probably haven't seen. What are your thoughts? The U S is, you know, Donald Trump comes in. He's already getting a lot of like industry professionals. We saw Elon and other people helping with like carving out some areas within the government.

What are your thoughts? If they called you and said, Hey, we need to rebrand this whole web three space and the U S what's like the first thing you're going to do what do you think they need to do to kind of get that, that industry stronghold that, you know, International stronghold that they definitely had, but it seems like they lost a little steam to places in Asia as well as Dubai.

Dan: I actually think that regardless of the head start that Asia and Dubai have, it doesn't matter. America is still where the rest of the world looks when it comes to guidance on a lot of things. And I think that regardless of who, is it like where we have Trump coming in and that's great for the industry and whatnot.

But regardless of anything, like, if the people under him are really understanding and know crypto, and it seems to be that he's putting people that are within that realm up front and giving them positions of power, then we're going to be in a good spot. I think adoption is going to be massive. I don't think that we need to rebrand anything.

I think as long as the U. S. says, hey, these are the rules, and. Everybody else, like, you could follow suit with us and, or you could do X, Y, or Z. And then I'm sure we'll, at some point, push for like a global standard of crypto because it is a global thing. Currency, it is by no means supposed to be geofenced or gated in any way.

I think that, like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if somebody asks me to rebrand it, I would say I like Web3. Web3, I like on chain. Those are the two, like, pieces of verbiage. I would get rid of most of the crypto side of it. I think crypto kind of has its own connotation to it where like cryptocurrency is one thing and then there's crypto and crypto is like this dark thing that it's associated with fraud and all that type of stuff.

I think Web3, I think being just on chain is something that's interesting, like I did that on chain, I think Base pushes that pretty well like on chain summer they did last year and all that type of stuff.

Stephen: And do you think we're going to be moving more on chain? Like you see AI, I don't even, we don't even know what to believe on Instagram, much less anywhere else. Do you think we're going to see that like this nexus of We're going to have to see AI and blockchain because we need real provenance, similar to what NFTs kind of had and we're trying to showcase is we need to know that this is real.

This hasn't been tampered with, you know, Filecoin is getting a lot of traction in that area of keeping, you know, the world's most important information. Do you see a real push to deepen in those kinds of infrastructures because of things like AI and deep fakes?

Dan: yes, I think that it'll probably be a blend though. I don't think that everything will be as decentralized as Tidus is going to be and wants to be. I think that there'll be a lot of things where they'll find the middle ground. They'll find that the thing I mentioned earlier about like blockchain subcategories where it'll be, Hey, this is something we don't want to go off the rails.

So we use blockchain to keep it on its own rails. Or whatever that might be or look like. But I think that decentralized infrastructures are going to be a huge part of what's coming next, kind of in. Like blockchain as a whole I think real estate, I think just real world tokenized assets are going to be huge.

I know a project that I speak to called Eldorado, they're doing a lot of things with tokenizing like mines, like an actual gold mine and then being able to figure out how to tokenize that and give investors in it yield and all these other sort of really, really cool projects. And I think that like, it'll be that, but it won't be 100 percent Web3.

I don't think the government or anything will ever be just as decentralized as Bitcoin or whatever it might be. But I think that finding that middle ground is what we're going to see happen. And that's going to have to come with regulation and those guardrails and the global monetary something happening relatively soon.

Stephen: That's interesting. Last kind of question here. What are your friends play? Like I'm sure you have a lot of technical people in your inner circle building a lot of things. Like, what are your friends playing? Are they touching on VR? What are they, what are they dabbling in for fun and on the weekends? Is it like getting back into like making fences on the barn, you know, getting back to the manual labor?

What are your extremely intelligent people doing? Because I, I feel like we get a lot of, you know, exposure to what, where the world is going by seeing what, you know, the true nerds of the world are doing in their spare time.

Dan: Yeah. So I'm, I'm pretty nerdy myself on my weekends. You could, I'm doing painting Warhammer figurines and being foodie and all that type of stuff. I like to go and touch grass every once in a while. Right. But for like most of the people, I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of really intelligent people in my circle.

And most of them are very much time is now. While I'm not going to, I'm focused on what I'm building in this space. Because I've been in the space for a little while. Most of my friends are in the space. Or they're in finance or they're an accountant or whatever. And it seems everybody is just really excited about like, what's next and what's coming with this new regime and, and kind of how is it going to affect my bags, but also how is it going to affect what I might want to build or can build or people looking at it now for jobs.

I know a bunch of my friends that are like, Hey, I could go and work in like crypto now because it's a thing where the company might be a part of the U S or whatever. I seen a lot of that happening. I think a lot of people are really focused on building like transparency is forged and they do a lot of stuff with Market makers and tokens and really helping with market transparency and helping projects do tokens the right way and automating it and making it super easy for people to access see.

And that's the type of thing that I think that people will continue to build is projects that are helping DS and all these other things come to market in a really perfect way where the token omics are sound, there's no pump and dumps, everything's accessible. Less predator, predatory things and, and whatnot.

Stephen: I love it. Where can people find you, Dan? This has been a really great, interesting conversation. It seems like you have a really, you really tapped in. To the various parts of the industry. Where can people connect with you? I'm going to assume Twitter is the place where you live. But it looks like you like to give back on LinkedIn and share some of your insights from, you know, building your companies.

Dan: Yeah, yeah Twitter @DanMulligann with two N's, same on Instagram, same on LinkedIn or just go to Tidus.com and then follow us there download the app and kind of check us out. And my DMs are always open for questions if you want to tell me if the app is good, tell me if it's bad, tell me if there's something wrong with it really love to kind of talk to actual people that are in the space and use it regardless if it's just storing some Bitcoin or swapping Chill Guy for PopCat or whatever it might be.

Stephen: I love it. I love it. There's some, I see some, I see some interesting meme coins coming through the pipelines launching soon. Interesting names to some of these meme coins

Dan: it actually gets worse before it gets better, though,

Stephen: Yeah, yeah. Some of these are like, I don't think you're allowed to put that on the internet. I don't think you're allowed to use that word, even if you're calling it a meme coin.

I don't know. I'm black and I even think you might not be allowed to use that word to reference meme coins. But hey..

Dan: Strange industry.

Stephen: I love it. Dan, thank you so much for joining the Around The Coin podcast. We'll encourage people to reach out to you and get more. I think you're opening up somewhere where people can try things.

There's a lot of projects like, Hey, you have to know what you're doing. You have to come here with a technical ability and you're saying, no, come, we'll bring you in. We'll make it super easy. And then we'll give you the options where you can try and dabble and do a little of these things right in one app, which I think is really important for a lot of newcomers to the space, especially now where you don't want to like put your whole bag into one transaction and you have no idea if you're clicking the right link or not.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you taking the time. It's been an awesome conversation. And again, check us out at tidus.com app store on desktop and get started. And like I said, my DMs are always open.

Stephen: Love it. Thanks so much, Dan.

Dan: Thank you.