The Last Episode

This may be the last time I say these words as well, because in this episode, I'm going to explain to you why I'm sunsetting the show after seven years of weekly content. So 18,000 minutes of recording later, if you've been on this journey with me, lend me your ears for the last time in these 10 self-indulgent minutes. And let's dive in. Web3 offers a brand new Petri dish.

Our job is to buy great tech at great prices. AI is also libertarian. Enable use case that people haven't been able to do today. the next hundreds of millions of players and they will come to the market through mobile.

My personal reason why I could be bullish in the next 12 months is... BlockWrench is not a licensed financial advisor and is purely for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions are personal and the show may discuss assets that the host or guests have positions in or may be actively buying or selling. All investments carry risk, so consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.

Now I started this show seven years ago in February 2018. And back then, Bitcoin was $7,000 and nobody cared about this industry. DeFi wasn't really a thing yet and Solana didn't even exist. And in that year, I remember a lot of crypto funds just shutting down left and right and there was no media coverage of crypto at all.

The entire market was one-tenth the size that it is today. And in fact, we're so early in the space that this humble little podcast here was the second podcast in the entire world to discuss Solana. And I was barely out of college back then. I was working my first job at a consulting firm and doing something that I wasn't that excited about.

But every day that I go home at 9pm all the way until 2 to 3am, I would be researching and editing episodes for this podcast. And that was the one thing that I really looked forward to every single day. Each of the episodes back then, because I didn't know much about the industry, took about eight hours to research and initially they would just last 20 to 30 minutes but i record every single one of these episodes in my 300 square foot studio apartment with horrible lighting and this bed sheet behind me for the acoustics and then i edit everything on my little laptop and i should you not it would crash every single episode but i enjoyed every single minute of putting the show together for you guys because through the show we documented the growth of the industry from a underground niche to a worldwide phenomenon.

And just to give you a sense of how far we've come as well, today, a single DeFi exchange trades 20,000 X more volume a day than the biggest one when we first started the show. And the entire market cap of crypto has grown from $300 billion to $3 trillion with a T. And one of the most important applications of last year that shaped the entire conversation around the 2024 elections in the US was a crypto application. And it had 8,000 times the open interest than it did back in the 2020 elections.

So when I do this show, I talk about projects and the market and founders, and often we're very, very zoomed in. But now, as I have the opportunity to take a step back and look back at how far this industry has come since we started the show, I am honestly just blown away. Now of course with these ups also came the downs and BlockWrench was here to provide a source of hopefully on intel for events such as the FTX crash And I was especially surprised that the written form of my FTX coverage was viewed by folks like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman and that was particularly surreal to me Now, for the show itself, a personal victory for me was also being able to interview my favorite band growing up, which is Annie Child's Dream.

Now, just as the show followed the ups and downs of the industry, it also gave you guys at home a glimpse into my personal career. Because through the show, I met Kelvin, who was my former boss and partner at my first gig in crypto at a fund called Spartan Capital, which was one of Asia's first crypto hedge funds back then. And as Kelvin's right-hand man for four years, we built the fund into the best returning fund in APAC for two years in a row. And it was the ride of a lifetime because we grew the fund from under $10 million in under management to almost 500 million when I left.

And in no other industry, I think would I be able to have access to someone like Calvin with decades of experience in financial markets and also have that quick trajectory in my career. And I would not have been able to do that if not for the podcast. So in a way, all of you guys who've been supporting me gave me my real start in this industry and I cannot thank you enough. And more importantly, I think, through the podcast, I also built enough of a platform that I started building relationships with founders and some of them became my first angel checks.

And some of these investments became profitable enough that I was able to compound them from trading and so on so that I'm able to seed my current prop fund tangent with my own money. In fact, this podcast was also where I met my co-founder for my prop fund back in 2019. So while this show has mostly run at break even throughout its entire lifetime, to say that it has advanced my career by decades is a massive understatement. So for every one of you who followed the show and supported me through the past seven years, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

And I hope that some of the content we created was at least a little bit useful to you. So if it's so great, why am I sunsetting the show? There's mainly three reasons why I came to this decision after seven years. Number one is, I think my job as a content creator is done.

Now, when I first started the show, most of the content in crypto were podcasts that were bitcoin related or trading related and while i'm a fan of both what fascinated me the most was actually the promise of crypto itself to append existing industries so i shied away from any price discussion and instead spent a lot of time talking about products and projects in defy and as the market expanded and evolved i followed along and started to talk about nfts metaverses dpin dsi you name it so maybe in a little bit of a presumptuous way, I kind of saw my own job as a content creator to be that of an evangelist.

I wanted to teach the public on the potential of crypto and cypherpunk technology. And I saw that as something that was missing from the discourse in the space. Now, you fast forward seven years later today, it's a totally different story because there are so many decent podcasts out there now even a few very great ones that I follow religiously and they all cover specific verticals news events in more depth than I can ever do So I love to introduce more people to crypto I feel that I can happily pass the baton over to this newer generation of content creators And in fact, when I first started the show, I always knew that this day would come.

This is exactly what I wanted because it means that the industry that I've dedicated my career to so far has become way more sophisticated. In fact, if I'm still the only guy talking about products and how exciting crypto is in my bedroom, I'm going to be pretty worried after seven years of spending my life on this industry So I consider this a bittersweet ending to the show now the second reason that I wanted to stop the show is Also the realization that what I want to create isn't really what you guys are interested in anymore now, this is somewhat related to what I just talked about but I simply don't feel aligned with the type of content that I know I will have to create to keep growing the show to a bigger and bigger audience now the funny thing is as i say this we just had our most popular episode of all time since the inception of the show which was our meme coin episode which had more than 115 000 views on youtube alone in fact most of our trading or market related episodes are always the most popular and a big part of that is because people are interested in what my guests and sometimes i have to say about the market given that we have a track record in investing in some of these markets and I really noticed that I think in the beginning of 2024 so I started to lean more into that type of content but recently towards the end of the year I took a step back and really thought about what really was the point of this show to begin with and I came away with the conclusion that you know market views aren't really supposed to be the point of this show especially my market views this show was never really about me when we started it was all about interviewing people in this space it's about pushing crypto forward and I always saw that mission as bigger than any of us, you know, me especially.

So when the show moved on to more about my opinions than my guests, even though it was what you guys asked for, it wasn't that interesting to me anymore. And especially because the episodes where I have the most fun doing are often ones that I talk to founders or, you know, quirky tinkerers or even maverick investors talking about experimental new products or a new thesis they're developing. And those are the episodes where I get the most fun because I learned the most in those episodes and I feel like I'm sharing something that's pushing the space forward because progress is happening at the edges and not necessarily in the casino.

Now that sounds probably a little bit hypocritical because as a fund manager myself, I have no qualms about speculation, trading, or gambling, but as a content creator, that just wasn't the discourse that I wanted to contribute to. So needless to say, also sharing liquid market views is also a thankless job at times, right? You share the right view, someone will say that you're, you know, shilling your books or talking your books. If you share the wrong view, you know, people are going to come after you for losing the money.

If you don't share any view, then people will say that it's not actionable and you're LARPing. So the more I kind of dove into the market side of things, the more I realized that there's really isn't any point in sharing my market view. It's pretty much a thankless job. So I'd rather not do that.

Now to put a more positive spin on it, I very very proud of everything we built on the show and very grateful for everyone who supported it Um and it just feels right that it should end before the show is forced to become something that I don really want to see Finally the last reason probably the most pertinent and most important reason is just my personal time. I started the show as a way to meet people, to get a foot in the industry so that one day I can build my own company.

That was always the selfish side of why I started BlockCrunch. And for the past two years, 99.9% of my time has been spent just doing that. And some of you caught a glimpse of this via our On a Tangent mini series, where me and my co-founder talk about our journey and starting the prop fund, our investment process, our thesis, what we look for, our thoughts on the market.

And our goal for Tangent is always to become the best performing investment vehicle in crypto. And in this market, in an increasingly challenging market, this is going to take way more time and focus and finding the best founders in crypto, working with them all the way to navigating the treacherous liquid markets. It's going to require more than full-time dedication. And even though I've built out a great team at BlockCrunch that has helped me a lot, I just don't feel like I can give this podcast the attention it needs to be great.

So instead of just letting it fizzle out like a lot of shows I've seen before, I want to go out on my own terms and go out right after we dropped our most popular episode and close the show with a bang. So there you have it. That is my main reason for sunsetting the show. So what's next?

In terms of what's next, I'm still dedicating my career to advancing crypto. But now I think the best way for me to do that for someone with my skill set is to invest in founders behind the scenes who are pushing the industry forward and leaving the content creators to people who are more passionate and are more dedicated to this specific means of furthering the industry. Now, I still think the best days of the industry are ahead. But the big battle here is still the battle for public acceptance, because if developers don't see the benefit of Web3 and broader society dismisses the benefit of a trustless and censorship-resistant money, then the whole game is simply lost, right?

All of this was pointless. So to that end, while, you know, seven years in, I really don't think we're that early anymore to crypto, we are very, very much not done. Now, if you've listened to this episode up to this point, I'm guessing you at least somewhat tolerate the show and my ramblings. So i'd love to keep in touch with you if you're keen to keep following me i'm going to be sharing some of my long form writing on my x account periodically You can follow me there at mr.

Jason choy I have no plans of bringing this podcast back, but i'm going to leave A lot of the episodes still up in case you want to access them In fact since I announced on twitter or x that i'm sunsetting the show A lot of you guys have reached out on dms some even in person at events recently And some of you have told me that this was the first show you guys listened to That brought you guys into the industry And hearing things like that honestly just made all seven years of work worth it.

I don't regret a single moment of it. And I'm deeply, deeply grateful for all that this show has done for me. And hopefully the show has played a little part in your crypto journey as well. So for the last time, thank you so much for listening to my rambling.

And since I won't see you on the next episode, this is goodbye.