🎙️ Ep 257 is live 🥷 You Know Zcash, But Railgun Lets You Use Any Asset Privately Across All Ethereum DeFi ✨ Featuring @RAILGUN_Project Privacy Researcher @tsu_kareta youtu.be/-yl0pIABuMU

What if your Ethereum wallet had an incognito mode, without giving up the DeFi you use? “Railgun is a suite of smart contracts. And what they’re designed to do is create a private address standard. “So very similarly to how Zcash works, you have the public side of Zcash and private side of Zcash. Railgun is handling that private side of Ethereum.” “So what you do is you can generate a new private address with your seed and use that … private address, just like you would a 0x address.” “And so a lot of the research that happens around Railgun is how do you make it do everything that a public address can do? “Like, how you tap into the burgeoning economy that is on EVM and do that in a private way without doxing your wallet?” “And so you can sort of think of it as, like, the incognito mode for Ethereum.” ft. @DeFi_Dad, @Nomaticcap & @tsu_kareta of @RAILGUN_Project

What if you could get Zcash-style privacy without leaving your ETH, stablecoins, or DeFibehind? “A lot of the design language, if you will, and, like, the architecture of Railgun definitely tips its hat to Zcash. I don’t think we make any bones about that. “A lot of the premises, like, the shielding, for example, come from that nomenclature.” “What makes it different is that, you know, Zcash is, you know, primarily for ZEC. Now they’re … talking about shielded assets and this sort of thing that might come to fruition in the future, which could be really interesting. But the way it exists today, it’s for ZEC.” “And what Railgun is designed to do is be that sort of shielded mechanism for ETH, USDT, DAI, stablecoins. “If we look at the transactions that are happening in crypto, the number one thing is send stablecoins to somewhere. Like, people wanna use stablecoins.” “And so, yeah, I think that that’s really the … big difference: the access to DeFi and to stablecoins.” ft. @DeFi_Dad, @Nomaticcap & @tsu_kareta of @RAILGUN_Project

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The idea will change. Back the founder who can turn it into a real business. “I go through this cycle of investing and going through ups and downs of, like, 80 projects, and I come back to literally founder is all that matters. Like, founder, founder and team.” “You can have a great idea, flavor-of-the-month idea, but chances are you’re gonna have to pivot, iterate five, ten times along the way. You’re gonna get smacked in the face.” “I’ve always wondered what ‘get it’ means because this term was introduced to me by a guy who… who’s ex-Wall Street. You know, he’s always like, ‘They just don’t get it.’” “But I think what it translates to is, like, business sense, like, that very specific skill, the ability to convert, like, your determination and your intellect and your skills into a tangible business and have the business sense to run it well.” ft. @zeroxkyle, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

The next AI trade could be the app people actually use, not just another token with an AI narrative. “You run a trained model to get answers. And when I say Venice is tied to inference, I mean that VVV is Venice’s main capital token.” “So each Diem gives you a dollar of Venice usage per day forever on any model, and you create it by locking up your stake of VVV.” “Obviously, it’s great that the token has all of this. And what this translates to is that the market perceives this token to be the de facto vehicle to express their view of AI.” “But there’s a so much cleaner and simpler long where you can long, like, the model… Like, the app that people use directly, and that’s Venice.” ft. @zeroxkyle, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

Calling a token “fundamental” doesn’t mean anyone actually uses it. “So people get tired of memes… And so what you trend towards is fundamentals because that’s the only anchor you can really look towards to tell whether this project’s good. Like, does this project make money?” But moving from memecoins to “fundamentals” doesn’t eliminate the need to separate a compelling story from a functioning business. “Crypto is also really, really good at making a lot of meme fundamental projects.” Kyle points to AI-agent narratives as an example: the idea can have merit and attract investors, while the actual product has little usage. The next questions are about revenue, the size of the market, and whether people genuinely use what’s being built. His thesis is that capital increasingly separates the projects with convincing narratives from those with measurable traction—citing Ethena and Hyperliquid as examples. “Only the ones who have, like, real usage and real revenue grow to the top.” ft. @zeroxkyle, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap