This episode reveals how the next generation of consumer crypto applications are moving beyond infrastructure to solve the critical challenges of user experience, asset discovery, and safety in a post-FTX world.
Introductions: The Next Generation of Consumer Crypto Builders
- Vishal from True Markets: Drawing on his experience as Head of USDC at Circle and Head of Exchange at Coinbase, Vishal is building True Markets, a non-custodial, hybrid CeFi-DeFi platform. It aims to provide safe, U.S.-based spot trading by leveraging qualified custodians like Paxos for major assets and non-custodial wallets for DeFi tokens, creating a safer alternative to traditional centralized exchanges.
- Patrick from Narrative: A college dropout building full-time, Patrick is the co-founder of Narrative, a protocol for trading on-chain and off-chain data in real-time. Using perpetual futures as the underlying engine, Narrative allows users to speculate on novel markets like "Solana revenue" or "Dead Internet Theory," aiming to abstract away the complexity of trading.
- Saul Kadir from Bullpen: Saul is the co-founder and CEO of Bullpen, an application hyper-focused on making on-chain trading on Solana and Hyperliquid as simple as possible. Bullpen achieves this through embedded wallets, seamless on/off ramps, and a curated user interface designed to help users discover and trade assets with the best available data and execution.
Core Beliefs: From Gatekeepers to Gateways
- The panel agrees that the crypto market is undergoing a fundamental shift away from the traditional "gatekeeper" model, where centralized exchanges dictate which assets are available. Vishal explains this is moving toward a "gateway" mentality, where platforms provide access to a vast universe of assets, including millions of DeFi tokens.
- This explosion in asset availability creates a new challenge: asset discoverability. As Vishal notes, "the availability of assets is what's going to drive adoption."
- However, this freedom comes with responsibility. The panelists emphasize the need to protect users from the dangers of complex products like perpetuals. This involves providing clear risk warnings and thoughtful product design, rather than just enabling everything without guidance.
The Friend.tech Effect: A New UX Paradigm
- Saul Kadir pinpoints a pivotal event in 2023 that reshaped consumer crypto: the emergence of Friend.tech. This application demonstrated two critical concepts that are now informing the entire space.
- Embedded Wallets: Friend.tech proved that general-purpose wallets are a relic for most users. By embedding a wallet directly into the app (using Privy, which was later acquired by Stripe), it created a seamless, Web2-like onboarding experience using a simple Gmail login.
- The Bonding Curve Mechanism: This mechanism, which automates price based on supply, fueled the rise of platforms like Pump.fun and led to the current "meta" of millions of new tokens being launched. A bonding curve is an automated market maker contract that issues and destroys tokens according to a price-supply relationship.
- Saul argues this shift has made centralized exchanges less relevant as gatekeepers. He states, "The gatekeepers are people, random people that launch coins, the devs. And so the trading experience is completely different now."
Technological Differentiators in a Post-FTX World
- The collapse of FTX created an urgent need for safer, more transparent trading platforms, a theme central to the panelists' products.
- Vishal emphasizes that despite the lessons from FTX, the incumbent exchanges have not fundamentally changed their custodial models. True Markets is built on a non-custodial foundation to address this directly, ensuring users' assets are held safely with a qualified custodian and are not commingled.
- Patrick highlights key technical considerations for modern app developers:
- Gas Abstraction: Hiding blockchain transaction fees from the user is critical for a smooth experience.
- Minimizing Choice Paralysis: Offering a clean interface with curated options (e.g., being stablecoin-native with USDC) prevents overwhelming the user.
- End-to-End Finality: This refers to the total time it takes for a transaction to be irreversibly confirmed. Patrick cautions that while L2s (Layer 2 scaling solutions) may advertise low finality, they are still bound by the settlement time of their underlying L1, like Ethereum's 12-second block time.
Curation and the Role of AI
- With millions of tokens available, the primary user problem is no longer access but curation. Saul explains that the key challenge is helping users navigate the noise to find promising assets.
- On-chain data provides a unique advantage, as all wallet activities, P&L, and trading histories are public. Early solutions involve tracking the wallets of successful traders, often called "whales."
- Saul sees the long-term solution as being driven by AI. He envisions a future where an LLM (Large Language Model) or an AI agent parses on-chain and off-chain data (like social media trends) to provide personalized trading signals. "The short answer to this is it's going to be a combination of AI workflows, onchain data, and probably off-chain data like social media."
Strategic Tech Stack and Ecosystem Choices
- Bullpen (Saul): Takes an opinionated approach, integrating only with ecosystems they believe are clear winners in their category, like Solana for new tokens and Hyperliquid for perpetuals. This reduces development complexity and user decision fatigue.
- Narrative (Patrick): Chose to build natively on Monad, a high-performance EVM L1, for both its technical capabilities and its strong, "power user" community. Patrick believes Monad has the potential to be a direct competitor to Solana.
- True Markets (Vishal): Aims to be chain-agnostic, arguing that the end user ultimately doesn't care about the underlying infrastructure. He offers a powerful reframing of the blockchain debate: "I'm not picking Solana over Aptos... The reality is, especially when you're running like a centralized exchange, it's AWS versus Solana, right? Where the gas fees are your cloud services fees."
Market Fit: Building for Today's User and Tomorrow's Agents
- The panel discusses who they are building for, with a consensus that while today's users are crypto-native, the future user base will be broader and may not even be human.
- Vishal targets the "retail plus" user—someone who is more sophisticated than a pure beginner, wants safer access to a wider range of assets, and is sensitive to high fees.
- Patrick introduces a forward-looking perspective on agentic models. He argues that developers must prepare for a future where a significant portion of on-chain volume is driven by AI agents, potentially reaching 90% within five years. This requires optimizing protocols for machine interaction, not just human clicks.
- Saul believes the user pie will grow as more real-world activities, like fantasy sports or creator economies, are tokenized and built on crypto rails, attracting new demographics.
The Path to Sustained Mass Adoption
- The panel agrees that one-off events like the Trump token launch create temporary spikes in interest but fail to retain users. Sustained growth requires solving core product challenges.
- The "Wow" Moment: Vishal references the need for an initial "wow" moment in the app, followed by a compelling reason for users to return.
- Can Users Make Money?: Patrick states bluntly that for trading apps, the most critical factor is whether users can (or believe they can) make money on the platform. This is the most powerful marketing tool in DeFi.
- Retention Beyond Trading: Saul notes that retention for pure trading apps is historically poor because most people are not good at it. The key may be in non-trading use cases, like loyalty programs (e.g., TYB) that use embedded wallets to reward consumer behavior without the user even knowing they are on-chain.
Product Roadmaps and Upcoming Launches
- True Markets: The app is live with market data. Trading for SPL tokens is launching next week, with non-custodial Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana trading available by the end of the summer.
- Narrative: The platform will be live on the Monad testnet in the coming weeks, starting with markets for speculating on Hyperliquid's market share and prediction markets before expanding horizontally.
- Bullpen: The web app is currently live for Solana and Hyperliquid. A major release in six weeks will make it the easiest place to explore and trade any prediction market.
Conclusion: The Bull Case for Consumer Crypto
The discussion highlights a clear shift from infrastructure to applications that abstract complexity and deliver tangible value. The convergence of embedded wallets, AI-driven curation, and friendlier U.S. regulation is creating fertile ground for a new wave of consumer adoption, driven by products that are safer, smarter, and more engaging.
