JB Carthy: 0:00

Welcome to Helios Horizons, episode 27, and today we're checking in on Injective with Cooper Emmons and heavily involved in the business side of Injective and pleased to have you on today. My man, how are you?

Cooper Emmons: 0:13

I'm doing well. It's an absolute pleasure to be on with you as always, jb, in this Helios Horizons, and excited to hop into a few subjects that you find interesting and also kind of spew on a few things that we think are quite interesting on the side of crypto and its evolution of adoption in the coming year.

JB Carthy: 0:34

No, definitely it's an exciting time, obviously, after the elections at the start of the month, things have gone a bit crazy in the house. It's been a bit of a wild ride for the last three weeks and before we hopped on, before we hopped on air and you were just saying about, um, the holidays over in america, thanksgiving, spending it at home. You're looking forward to having a little bit of time off, hopefully. I'm sure you need some time to recharge after like what's probably been like a hectic few months, you know.

Cooper Emmons: 1:03

Yeah, in all honesty, it's great that I will have time to get you know, reacquainted on the side of kind of a lot of the messages and backlog of of cool partnerships and stuff we have going on, so there's no time for rest. Interestingly, a lot of the injective guys are based in the U? S for some portion of the year, but a lot of them are not actually, uh, we're not actually born in America, um, and, and that actually brings this kind of grind culture surrounding kind of you know what, what the hell is Thanksgiving? Uh, so it's a, it's a, a, a great piece, and I think that we'll we'll stay hard at work, uh, through the rest of the week no man, I don't.

JB Carthy: 1:46

I don't doubt that you guys are just like shipping, like things, so relentlessly, obviously like there's a lot going on on the ai side and there's stuff with like native stable coins coming, and you guys also there's like external stuff, like the coin 50, and recently was a huge announcement. I think um underplayed a little bit, people not recognizing we're in chat about um, all those things and hopefully dive into them a little bit more. Um, but yeah, how have, how have things on your end been over the last maybe three months or so? You guys built up to the injective summit and which was massive. I actually really wanted to get over but wasn't able to, wasn't able to make it in the end. But how? How was it like? How was? How was thailand? How was bangkok? How was hooking up with the community? What went on?

Cooper Emmons: 2:34

yeah, great questions across um I have. Can you hear me well?

JB Carthy: 2:40

I can, yeah, absolutely great, awesome.

Cooper Emmons: 2:43

I'm having some issues with my AirPods right now at the moment, but, yes, no, I have never been more bullish on the Injective community than I was at kind of DevCon. And specifically surrounding the Injective Summit gave me real, real vibes of my first ever conference, which would have been Solana Breakpoint I believe 2020 or 2021, where you saw just this incredible group. I mean, we had, I think, over 10 projects on network fly, you know, across the world to come to our first ever in-person summit. I think we had close to over 2,000 attendees. We had, I think, way over 10,000 folks tuning in via Twitter stream or YouTube stream or LinkedIn stream, et cetera.

Cooper Emmons: 3:31

So we couldn't be more excited about the trajectory of the ecosystem and just to see and meet a lot of the different builders. I think a great example is Dennis, a guy within the community built the first ever predictions market app. But in addition to this and much more importantly, he came out. We got to meet him in person. He's an incredible builder from a great Web2 background and now he's shipping all this injective AI agent stuff which is getting a lot of great support and community support et cetera. So all of that to say that could not be more excited, you know, to see the community continue to expand and I think, as the different applications across the ecosystem continue to evolve and you know the protocol generates more revenue, that there's a lot more opportunity. You know, in achieving the mission statement of creating a more decentralized. You know in achieving the mission statement of creating a more decentralized, you know, financial system, so we're pumped for that.

JB Carthy: 4:31

No, 100 percent. Man, how big was it Like, like, how big was it kind of to get the chance for the first time to like get all the builders together in the same room and for you guys to probably get to meet them all you all probably had good time and how, like, how big was it? Was it a? Was it a great moment, a good event?

Cooper Emmons: 4:48

yeah, yeah, I mean I I thought it was our best event yet. Obviously we're going to try to make every event our best event yet. Um, and I know you know the marketing team's already hard at work on our end, um, of trying to put together something, something else. Um, obviously you know bangkok. It was incredibly hard for me to get there. Um, I can't imagine for others, um, you know so. So you know it was great. But you know, I think that there will be stuff in the future that it could be even better, and we'll also bring our entire community together again no for sure, like I, I definitely hope the next time around, when you guys host the next one, that I'll get to be there.

JB Carthy: 5:25

We actually had our own kind of like in-person event with Helios in September and we had it was called the Collabathon. It was something we kind of thought up ourselves, and so Kevin, who is the founder, helios co-founder, and Lucas, who kind of looks after a bit of strategy he's actually here in the house and he's also over in America for Thanksgiving as well. But we came up with the collabathon, which was essentially trying to bring a few talented builders, a few talented creators together for maybe like 10 days over in Barcelona in Spain, and we actually built a product called Helios Connect Name not so imaginative, but essentially it was just trying to build a bridge between ecosystems. So we're like staking providers for multiverse X and injective and we wanted to find a way to be able to recognize and celebrate people who delegate on both chains, who, like, support us in every way, and there was no way we could really like verifiably cross reference wallets to understand, like who was behind them.

JB Carthy: 6:31

So essentially now with Helios Connect simple tool, but people can register with their injective wallet, they can register with their multiverse X wallet, all done through smart contracts, all decentralized, and they can basically just verify that it's one person behind two accounts that are both staking with helios, and we can hopefully in the near future and reward all our reward, all our, all our community, as, like I think everyone in this space is always focused on giving back to the community, and because it's such a big aspect of um, like obviously they're the people who help you us grow as like as companies, as entities, and but also because, like it's just the ethos of the space, the decentralization and putting things back in people's hands, and so it was nice to do. And then actually, we got the chance to go to I'm obviously over here in the uae, but injective, we're sponsoring, we put a little post up. Injective, we're sponsoring the hackathon over here, the Bybit.

Cooper Emmons: 7:28

DMCC yes, the DMCC. We've seen some great projects come out of that that are building on our end as well, but glad to see that incredible innovation in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and it seems like a regulatory environment specifically over there and a regulator that's friendly towards the crypto space, you know, and it's really exciting to see those different types of environments that are, you know, you know, very, I guess, positive towards what we're all trying to achieve.

JB Carthy: 7:59

Yeah, no, definitely. And we yeah, no, we got to, we got to visit, we got to present no, definitely, um. And we yeah, no, we got to, we got to visit, we got to present, um. And it was just brilliant to get the chance to bring our ideas in front of people, to share ideas with others, to hear other people's ideas, and there were some great ones, I think the winner and the winner had and some innovations around, like wallet security and maybe reactively helping people to recover lost keys and through a new like innovative and kind of mechanism that I have yet to fully comprehend or understand, but the judges who are smarter than me and thought we'll leave that for the smart people their target market is me, because I'm stupid enough to lose my keys and then, like, the judges are saying it's a good idea.

JB Carthy: 8:47

So, um, yeah, like it was great to just get a chance to meet everyone, it was great to see all the innovation and obviously we got a nice picture with the injective logo and but yeah, like on what you were saying about, like thailand, I think in-person events are just so important because, like, say, behind the screen it's sometimes hard to like get a connection, get a feel of who's in the community, who you're interacting with, and I think just those in-person events and they just add something a little bit more tangible, a little bit more energy, a little bit more enthusiasm. You get to build better connections and then we all go back to our different corners of the world behind our screens and we just get back to work, like you know I couldn't agree with you anymore.

Cooper Emmons: 9:27

We have those incredible experiences and then it's just back to work and shipping yet again. You know, um, so agreed totally. But, um, congratulations, it sounds like a great product. I'd love to you know, see it, or understand it, or figure out if there's any way that you know our community can do more with it and take things from there yeah, no for sure, man.

JB Carthy: 9:48

Um, but say like over, over and over on injective itself, like like we touched on the start of the conversation, you guys have some major things going on obviously, like ai for the last like two, three years has like really hijacked like all the tech narratives and it seems like its importance is just like amplifying by the day and so how important and injective obviously last few months have seemed to really, um, really incorporate and welcome like development on the ai side and how important was it for you guys to once you saw the narrative emerging of like the importance of maybe AI in a wider technological sense and then you saw it maybe emerging as a significant addition to on-chain services and on-chain actions how important was it to like get it integrated and start building for it as quickly as possible.

Cooper Emmons: 10:42

Totally so. There's two pieces of this. The first is that Eric, our founder and CEO, actually had this built several months ago and the point of it was essentially, if you're a developer building on Injective, it should be very simple and it should be like ChatGPT or Claude, where you can just go and say, hey, I want to build an exchange, how does it work? And this was something that was built literally like several months ago, that we had enabled, et cetera, and then all of a sudden, we see this kind of big, massive rise and push through the AI agent space and it teed up as a great opportunity for us to really, you know, just push things forward in a very quick and fast way. And, you know, it's so funny.

Cooper Emmons: 11:34

I spent time with our CTO this past week and was doing some meetings and he, you know, plugged the entire thing in and he was just astounded by what a great experience it offers and how you literally can create your own tokens.

Cooper Emmons: 11:52

You can go on there and say, hey, how much volume has been done across this market, get better insights, so a really cool tooling that I think that we see in crypto and specifically the crypto industry lag behind with regards to actually providing innovative products, and I think that AI is a case where we're actually seeing progress there, and to be part of that progress, or trying to trailblaze that progress, is something we're super excited and definitely going to spend a lot of time on. So, yeah, it's funny, you know you always hate to hear like, oh know, he's ai x crypto project, um, but uh, it's actually something that we, you know, believe on and are leaning into on the product side of things to actually create better experience for users, developers and otherwise yeah, no, I think, like ai x, crypto is the new, like e slash acc, like you know.

JB Carthy: 12:44

But, um, yeah, no, I get, I totally get what you mean. But I think you guys have a track record of anything you implement comes comes at a high quality and it is of no surprise to me to like, like, um, understand or learn that you guys have been planning for it for like a good amount of time and and then it just was the opportune moment. It was just the time, ready to release into the wild and to see what people can make of it, to bring with it. And what do you think are going to be like the biggest, the biggest innovations with AI and on the integration of AI on chain, and what do you think are the most important advancements that can help bring? Will it be making development easier? Will it be making it easier for users normal users to adopt and use the technology? What do you think will be the most important advancements that come from AI technology on the?

Cooper Emmons: 13:39

chain.

Cooper Emmons: 13:40

So I'm not a developer, but from being not a developer and trying to do technical things, I think, for instance, debugging is, I think, a huge piece of the experience specifically around developers and essentially, to be able to have technology and some of these large language models that could really debug a lot of the issues and point you to how can I fix these small issues while still utilizing the actual creator's essentially creative approach towards what they're trying to build, I think is a huge unlock for the entire ecosystem on our end, for builders across the space, so I'm super excited about that.

Cooper Emmons: 14:22

From a user perspective, I think it unlocks a lot of stuff on the finance end, right, a lot of people don't understand a lot of the very specific nuances with regards to how different financial products work. I think that these types of technologies can one better explain and educate these things to them, but two, also allow them to construct these types of products and applications much more seamlessly. So let's say, hey, I want to create some form of a yield product. They might not know that some forms of yield products are callers, right, which are buying, being on both sides of a call and a put at the same time on the same asset, like, for instance and I think that that's an interesting angle as well, you know, in terms of how the user could have a much better experience. But, yeah, excited about that, just in general.

JB Carthy: 15:12

No, definitely. Do you think we'll get to the point, like you were saying, where, like I think you kind of half answer the question, but like where ai is just going to help people ship ideas like so much quicker than even than even it was already happening? So it's going to get to the point where the idea, the process of bringing a product from ideation to execute, execution and launch, is just going to be like narrow so much because people will essentially be able to like open up an ai agent and I agent and they will be able to go I would like to build a exchange that has these sorts of features and then, like the smart contract, will be able to essentially spit out the development and debug itself and so people's ideas. It used to be a case of where people had an idea and then they had to be able to speak the language of the computer to be able to bring it to launch, but now it's a case of where the computer also speaks English.

Cooper Emmons: 16:10

Exactly. I think that was said very well.

JB Carthy: 16:13

No for sure. So it's just going to get to a point where developers are just going to be able to, like, bring ideas way quicker and and things are going to happen a lot faster. I think actually I was reading recently where I'm not sure what the law is called, but there's a law of computing that and for as long as computers have existed and they've, on average, doubled in power every 18 months, and I think AI as a technology is, on average, doubling in power every six months, which is just wild. So it's it's insane to think of when you see, think of how far computing has gone and that only on average, has doubled on doubled in power every 18 months. So I think it's like what used the technology that used to, that it used to take, or the processing power it used to take to put someone on the moon, and is now available like in an average, like laptop or phone.

Cooper Emmons: 17:00

And it's amazing to think of, like what might be possible with um, like ai, considering it's doubling, or it's doubling in power three times as fast, and where we're going to be maybe a year from now, you know totally and not, you know, not to go on a tangent, because it's not something I'm an expert in but, um, I've read and done quite a bit of research into all that is then going to be, as you're, you're noting, based off of electricity constraints and the amount of power that you have access to. So obviously, I think that you know that's a big, big piece of it.

JB Carthy: 17:30

That's quite interesting yeah, definitely, but maybe even blockchain could like solve some of that and distributed computing could solve some of that in terms of like, like the processing power ai needs could be distributed across a network of computers and like blockchain validator nodes, with rewards given for people contributing AI processing power and essentially allowing people to a decentralize the revolution or the AI revolution and be make it more cost effective and for users, you know, and rather than companies having to set up major processing centers and like at a huge upfront cost, maybe the work of AI could be done on a distributed level.

JB Carthy: 18:15

The same way, like validation happens of networks on a distributed level, and but that's something that who knows where things will go, but I'm sure it's going to only get more exciting. And other things you guys have going on as well and interested to hear more about, like the ausd and the agora stable coin that's that you guys announced recently and why that is so important. And, yeah, a little bit about like agora and the native stable coin and why having a native stable coin is so important to injective and why it's such a big um advancement 100.

Cooper Emmons: 18:50

Yeah, no, without a, you know, for the past few years, obviously, and we still, to this day, utilize ERC-20, usdt, which we're also, you know, big believers in. But you know we need to offer our developers and our users the best experience, and to do so, having a native token, which essentially means that the asset is minted and redeems natively on the chain chain, is a huge unlock because it opens avenues and opportunities such as centralized exchanges like, let's say, bybit or Coinbase, being able to support the deposit and withdrawal of tokens directly to and from your wallet on the injective kind of chain, so that, in addition to a lot of the other cool initiatives that Agora is working on, a lot of their institutional kind of backing and liquidity constraints you know they often talk about rent seekers and being able to, you know, find the right incentive alignment between developers and, you know, applications across the network. So that's you know why I'm super excited about ausd, but you know there's many other things similar coming down the pipeline that will be just as uh, exciting no for sure.

JB Carthy: 20:01

Like what on it maybe. What will this? What will the native stable coin or what will a usd kind of? Oh sorry, that is my fire alarm in my apartment.

JB Carthy: 20:11

That's just going on it goes off on average about four times a week and sometimes it repeatedly goes off, so I'm gonna go outside. Good thing you know where I've met. Oh yeah, well, on a on a practical level, like what will ausd kind of unlock for injective that is missing right now? Like what will having a native stable coin allow injective as an ecosystem? Or the developers and the builders of, like DeFi apps what will unlock for them that would not have been possible with like a USDT or USDC that is not native?

Cooper Emmons: 20:53

Yeah, so like what are the key differences you mean?

JB Carthy: 20:58

Yeah, key differences for developers or key differences for products, if that makes sense.

Cooper Emmons: 21:05

Yeah. So the key differences for developers is that the asset will be able to essentially be much more composable and it won't be a wrapped asset from another chain, and it also opens up a lot of ability. You know a lot of people don't like working with wrapped or bridged tokens and in this case, you know for the first time, we'll have a native asset that's minted on the chain. So it creates much more activity from an injective standpoint, which is bullish, right, because then you can take injective minted you you know AUSD and push you know a lot of great things across Cosmo. You can push a lot of great you know markets across centralized exchanges and then that's great for the underlying chain on the injective side, right. So it's really being acknowledged as essentially you know a proper and fully operating L1 to have these assets being deployed and minted natively on your chain. So that's why we're very excited no 100.

JB Carthy: 22:00

It drives kind of value back to the chain rather than, like a like, maybe driving value to other chains and be like maybe alleviate some security concerns of like wrapping and bridging assets, like you know, like like ease of use, security, convenience, um, on all levels yeah, no, I was muted, sorry.

JB Carthy: 22:25

Yes, no 100 um, yeah, no for sure, and like on on that, like on the defi side of things, you guys I saw announced, um, an ice helix trading contest recently and so you had, you guys had the first one, the first one maybe a few months ago, I believe, with the giving away a couple of g wagons and and it must have been successful, because I saw the other day you guys announced giving away a tesla for people who in the next trading contest. So maybe a little bit about like, yeah, why the trading contests are so important and maybe yeah, no, I mean a lot of centralized exchanges are doing it across the board.

Cooper Emmons: 23:06

We have a great team that's really leading the charge in the Helix growth side and it's great to be working alongside a lot of those folks. But essentially, you know a lot of those folks but essentially a lot of these centralized exchanges to gain traction, give away some prizes, and the Helix team is very excited to be giving away some prizes, starting with this Tesla, for different traders across the board. So super exciting stuff and definitely would say go check out Helix and go trade there for your option, know option to win some of these different prizes. Obviously, I think that you know if there's a second one rolling out, who knows some of the stuff that will come later yeah, no, I think it's hard to it's hard to up one up g wagons and teslas.

JB Carthy: 23:48

But when you, uh, when you guys did the trading contest the first time around with the g wagons, did you notice like these sort of like incentives and driving a lot more users to the chain and maybe even having an impact on things like um, yeah, yeah, of course we saw massive surges in protocol revenue, in the amount of users both on chain and also on the helix front end, um across the board volume surge.

Cooper Emmons: 24:15

Obviously, as I noted, revenue surge. We see a lot of great user acquisition and then the goal is to create those users and have them be sticky. So then offer a suite of different apps and products and services that can keep those users around long-term.

JB Carthy: 24:31

So the goal is really to funnel them in showcase and give them a reason to try it out and hope they have such a good experience that they stay around for the rest no 100 and I can definitely um vouch for using helix is like um dabbling in the trading and using helix that like it's just obviously backed by like injectives, like speed, cost and and just usability that it provides like a really nice um trading experience. And I thought you guys also um recently announced a new market on helix, like zion and the pre-launch futures of zion, and which is super exciting. It's really, it's really unique kind of feature that I don't see on many other and decentralized exchanges where you guys offer and pre-launch futures of yeah, and very bullish on the, the zion team in general.

Cooper Emmons: 25:22

um, know those guys super well and glad to know that we are supporting pre-launch uh perps for for the asset currently and you know, obviously you know it seems like they're gonna have a tge sometime soon and, you know, definitely stay aware for a lot of the different activity. As you know, I think a lot of users probably noted they're doing some form of airdrop to the Injective community. So you know I was super happy to check my wallet and realize that I was, you know, one of those members and you know, very excited for that project in general I think all the ninjas in the audience are happy.

JB Carthy: 25:57

I think that the zion airdrop is going out to the injective ninjas. So like and to be fair, like the ninjas are like the earliest they've been around since the earliest days of injective um, or at least for the last, like year, year and a half, and so seeing it through like the ups and the downs and like, I think, all the ninjas here in the audience as well, is representative of that. Is there any kind of like you were saying there, like you're super bullish on Zion. Is there any kind of planned integrations, partnerships between Zion and Injective?

Cooper Emmons: 26:30

So we're working on a host of chain abstraction initiatives with that team and essentially how we can provide the best user experience, but they're a team really focused on chain abstraction and making crypto usable and we're excited to team up with them. Don't have a lot of insight into when those things will go live or what's happening there, but yes, there's a lot in flight there.

JB Carthy: 26:55

No, 100%. And what would so? Obviously not going into detail about the specifics of the integration between yourselves and Zion, but what would advancements like chain abstraction unlock for Injective and unlock for potential users? For anyone who's not too familiar with it yes, 100%.

Cooper Emmons: 27:15

Or injective on unlock for potential users. For anyone who's not too familiar with it yes, 100%. So chain abstraction is this new buzzword, but essentially it just means that things can be more usable. So the clunkiness of creating a wallet with a Metamask or a Phantom or a Kepler right that entire experience is super clunky and it should be as easy as when you log into your email and you use your email, or you log into your bank account and you use your bank account, or you log into your Robinhood app. And chain abstraction and a lot of the integrations there will essentially create a bunch of different enhancements to several product offerings across the Injective ecosystem to allow them to work and be utilized in a much better way.

JB Carthy: 27:54

No for sure. I actually think, um, if we think back to like even we've we've all been in this space like a decent amount of time, I'd say most of us um in the audience and definitely us chatting and we can think back to the times when, like you know, you started five, six years ago and and the start of your journey was downloading MetaMask. And then it's like this-.

Cooper Emmons: 28:18

I remember that exact moment vividly. I was like what the hell is this Chrome extension with a Fox face on it and what the hell is Uniswap? And literally probably about five, six years ago. So I couldn't agree with you more and I think that it's so funny. So I couldn't agree with you more and I think that you know it's so funny.

Cooper Emmons: 28:43

You know, I just saw that this Hak Tua girl is going to launch a meme token, which is interesting, quite interesting on that end. But my point is is that so many different people? You know I received a couple of texts how do you buy the quote unquote token, the quote-unquote token, and just to think of a normal friend on the street that, hey, go download this extension called MetaMask and have a wallet and there's a seed phrase and write that down, because if you lose it, all your money's gone by the way. And then you have to go to some app called this, this and this and watch out for slippage and all these different pieces. It's not even worth me going through the trouble to try to onboard that person because they're probably going to quit on the. You know the way through that process and I think that having tools and working with teams and integrations like Zion will be absolutely huge, you know, to really advance kind of. You know the crypto products in general.

JB Carthy: 29:40

No, definitely I could not. I could not agree more. And all those sentiments about like early experiences with meddling with extensions and wondering what they all do and trying not to lose seed phrases and trying to understand what's important and what's not important and how everything works, and like double checking, these like massive address strings are all like um, hopefully going to gradually become they are already, but hopefully become gradually more and more abstracted and simplified and by technologies like zion, but apart from even on the user level. So you kind of been heavily involved like business development and stuff like that. And how important do you think like abstraction and these sorts of technologies is to even like attracting bigger companies and industries to start adopting the technology and building on top of the technology and if that makes sense yeah, um, I mean, I think, I mean I, I think it's all there to be built upon right.

Cooper Emmons: 30:37

Like you see a lot of great teams, like we had Magic Wallet at our summit. We're utilizing them right and I think many others are. I think all the opportunity is here. It's really just creating the right product experiences that can work and be utilized very quickly.

JB Carthy: 30:53

No for sure 100, and like maybe, uh, what I kind of meant more so and is like, let's say, bigger companies, like let's say like a mcdonald's or a starbucks or a nike or an adidas or some of these bigger companies and I know actually zion, they like we had them on an earlier episode of horizons and they were talking about they. They did some interesting um direct marketing and experiments where people could download the wallet and directly do activities and then, like, receive very direct benefits as a result of that. So it's like okay, download this wallet and try on this virtual pair of sunglasses and you will receive like five dollars straight into your um right, right, exactly you know what I mean.

Cooper Emmons: 31:40

Like you have all these different yield farming opportunities for all these crypto native people. What if you really created the web 2 version that that allowed you to seamlessly utilize that? I'm excited for a lot of the plans and development they have, you know, upcoming outside of them just being, you know, friends and builders that interestingly, they're another team. That you know is not essentially this. You know one cycle team, right. You know I personally have so many problems with these one cycle teams that you know just focus on. You know, essentially, like you know, runway through one bull market and essentially, I've seen these guys build and pivot quite a few times and have a lot of respect for them and what they're doing and excited for all the integrations and stuff we have coming in the future.

JB Carthy: 32:26

No, definitely, we've been keeping an eye on them as well and pretty excited to see what's coming on that end.

JB Carthy: 32:40

And actually another piece of news and leading on from that maybe a little bit and chatting about the crypto market as a whole is injective where recently included in like the coinbase coin 50 index and which I thought was like a massive piece of news, and especially when you consider okay, and as like bitcoin, obviously now in an etf and it's now an institutional product that banks can buy and invest in and hold, and ethereum as well, and and it's probably going to get to the point where other digital assets and other digital digital assets become more and recognized and valid for bigger institutions and to hold as part of their treasury or hold as part of their and hold as part of their order balance books, and having something like injective as a part of the coin 50 to me was like okay, it's, it's getting that recognition and as one of the key assets in the entire crypto space.

JB Carthy: 33:41

The index put together by probably one of the, if not the leading crypto company in the world or crypto exchange in the world Coinbase, yeah, and what were your thoughts on it in terms of its importance and what it means kind of for INJ and Injective.

Cooper Emmons: 33:57

Yeah, I can't speak on anything injective token related. I'm a software company trying to build products. However, I can speak and obviously not financial advice but I can speak on what the financialization. I studied corporate finance for some time as well and essentially what indices mean for a financial market and why they're so important. So, essentially, this concept of institutions coming to crypto has been this buzzword that you've heard for so so long. That's existed for so so long and essentially what it means is that you have two flows of capital. Traditionally, you have this speculative capital that's literally saying, hey, you know, I think I can, you know X token. Or you know, let's take into account, you know I think that Bitcoin is valuable for X, y and Z reasons and you know I'm going to buy it. Or I think Polygon is, you know, bullish for X, y and Z reasons and I'm going to buy it. And just that single, you know token. And then you have and that's what has existed in crypto to date right, and that has been the main form of kind of capital.

Cooper Emmons: 35:07

Inflows have been into that specific investment by investment type of piece. What has opened for the first time here and is being kind of spearheaded by Coinbase 50, is, obviously, you have the ETFs, you're adding Bitcoin and ETH now, but this Coin50 index essentially allows for more institutional flows across an entire sector, right? So you say, hey, you know, I want to bet on the entire kind of, you know, crypto industry and specifically the longer tail blockchain types of things. Longer tail relative to something like a Bitcoin. You essentially have opportunity for that and you have very large allocators potentially coming in and adding massive flows of funds into those assets.

Cooper Emmons: 35:52

So it's a really big deal to be included in those types of things. It a lot more of, essentially, volume throughout markets because people have to rebalance portfolios. People have to, you know, continually add, you know and size up their portfolios. So, needless to say, I think that's like really where it's at in terms of the longer coin alt market space. Right, because you can have the people that log on and buy these different things kind of $100 at a time in terms of investment side of things, but relative to someone coming on and onboarding $100 million at a time, there's a much better distribution mechanism and quite excited for what that has in store for the broader crypto market, not injectors specifically the broader crypto market, not injectors specifically.

JB Carthy: 36:40

No, definitely, and you obviously have far more kind of expertise in it than I do coming from your background, but it definitely seems that, like giving these like as you were saying, bigger institutions who have larger amounts of money to distribute and are probably less likely to take specific, concentrated risks, but may still see the potential and the upside of the sector as a whole, and this sort of vehicle to be able to get really broad exposure rather than having to take very, very specific risks on specific, as we were talking about tokens or price actions of specific assets, could definitely attract more consistent and solid flows from people who are more assets or investors on a higher level that maybe invest in asset sectors. They might invest in the S&P 500. They might have a portfolio of real estate. Rather than just having to enter the market, navigate the specifics and pick individual tokens. Now they can just get that exposure and in a more kind of passive and um lower risk way, like you know exactly that, exactly that.

Cooper Emmons: 37:53

I think you hit the nail on the head no for sure I I appreciate that.

JB Carthy: 37:57

Um. No, it's like we we literally have so much stuff to talk about. Um, like all the things even going on in the injective ecosystem and some of the, some of the projects building and I know I was actually looking recently at neptune I think they're like putting a push on and to really drive more liquidity to lending markets in december, like hydro are coming with some loop staking and which is like another innovation in terms of allowing people to maybe make their, make their state I and j more efficient and and earn greater yield on it and and then like obviously I'm I help out with levana as well and we're looking at like heavily integrating, like the ausd, ausd stable, to like drive and really deep liquidity for um, like really high leverage bitcoin perks and in the when it goes live in a month or so, and but how like, how important or what are you most excited about in the like ing ecosystem at the moment? What, when you look around at all the things being built, what things kind of catch your eye and what like gives you?

JB Carthy: 39:08

a bit of excitement, you know totally so.

Cooper Emmons: 39:10

You have one of the best founders in the injective ecosystem, uh, on this, uh, I can see him in this in this space right now and that's captain cookies with a founder of talus who's done some incredible things within the ecosystem, and obviously I wouldn't have my PFP that you see here and many other folks that I see in the audience without incredible founders that build great products. Again, I think you guys should check out Talus. Talus is an incredible protocol protocol. Probably a lot coming there, um, but you know, in in. In addition, um, I'm super excited for kind of, you know, like a lot of the new development in the tokenization space, so we have some things cooking. There are many months in the making. Can't speak too much on it just yet, but essentially at a high level, the concept is that on any other layer, one blockchain, you can mint your token or you can mint your real world asset, but you can't do anything with it, right, you have to go find or create your own utility out of thin air. Injective is quite different in that its module set, and namely kind of the exchange module, can foster instant liquidity for that token, and we're quite excited about that in general. So I think that there'll be a lot of interesting use cases there. I mean, I think we touched on the iAgent stuff Incredibly interested in the iAgent stuff.

Cooper Emmons: 40:32

I think the memes and the meme community have been absolutely fantastic over the past couple of months. There's been a lot of great community push and hype there. I'm excited for a lot of the DeFi, as you noted, across Hydro, across Neptune, across many of the new things that are coming. And Eric announced at the summit there will be some big plans with the first multi-VM environment and an injective EVM. So I think not a lot of that's out there in in the area but, um, you know, has been excited, exciting as well no, the me, the memes have been wild.

JB Carthy: 41:07

Man like it's like. Um pump phone has just are like caught caught the news recently but some of the some of the stuff going on in over on the memes on and pumped off fun was just absolutely wild for the last like week or so. It seems like whenever, whenever the markets pick up, like the memes just find a new way to like spice it up, spice up what's going on and but you guys actually like and we even like. This is why there's so much stuff to chat about, all the things you guys are shipping and constantly building. You guys launched a meme bridge between like Solana and Injective recently and I think is QUNT or the Injective Quants. They're like the first project, I think, that are going to use it to port some of their liquidity over onto Solana to allow, like, more people exposure to their token and stuff like that. But how important was it for you guys to build a bridge like that between ecosystems?

Cooper Emmons: 42:07

Yeah, it was huge. I mean, right, the Injective community is massive and fantastic. You know, it's my favorite community. It's what I think. You know I think the most interesting and the best group of people. However, you can never deny that. You know there are some other communities in crypto that a lot of our ninjas are a part of as well, such as the Solana ecosystem, that are just massive, right, and having our communities be able to directly interact with those communities is huge, right. Nobody wants to be on a silent island. Everybody wants to be able to directly interact with those communities is huge, right. Nobody wants to be on a silent island. Everybody wants to be able to work together and collaborate towards a more beneficial Web3. And that's what we're working on, and obviously, the meme bridge was just another push and effort towards that same vision and goal. Matt ROWE, md, phd.

JB Carthy: 42:56

No goal no, definitely, and it works both ways, like you know. So, um, so the, the qunt will go over and they will create some culture and maybe um, create a little bit of a narrative or attract some attention to the token and and then, as a result, people explore the community, they start to understand the origins of it, they start to understand, maybe, some of the inspiration behind the art and the ninja culture and all these sorts of things. They might start to like, get involved and enjoy it, and then they come back over and, like you touched on captain cookies here they head over to talus and they pick themselves up a ninja and then all of a sudden, and it's's like you were saying, breaking down those barriers and between ecosystems and making it like not so that we operate in silos or islands, but it's just kind of I like this thing and it's easy for me to go use that thing or get that thing, or I like this thing, but it's over here and there's the opportunity to like access that pretty easily with low friction, the opportunity to like access that pretty easily with low friction. And I'm very much a believer in like the, the kind of mantra of like rising tide lifts all boats and if we all just work together and if we all just like operate with the best intent and just put our best foot, best foot forward and like like operate with good intent.

JB Carthy: 44:16

Most of the time, good things happen. So it's just not trying to like capture all the value for yourselves or ourselves or any one of us in particular, but it's just like okay, go out, do good things, build cool things, which is like what you guys have been doing for the last like three, three years. I actually think you've had the, you guys had the third. The third may not anniversary very, very recently. So for three years you guys have been building cool things, shipping cool things, and and now it's just trying to like give other communities, or give other users that might not yet be aware of the cool things that are being built, an avenue to like be exposed to them.

Cooper Emmons: 44:52

You know yep, exactly that, um, exactly that, uh, excited for, for a lot of those different things to to come to fruition and, kind of, you know, get out there no for sure.

JB Carthy: 45:06

So what I'll do. And now we're coming up to like 10 minutes to go, um, or like a few minutes left, and so I'll just, if there's anyone in the audience who wants to like, hop on the mic. Maybe ask cooper a question. You're unlikely to want to ask me a question when cooper's up here, but, um, hop, maybe ask cooper a question. You're unlikely to want to ask me a question when cooper's up here, but, um, hop up, ask cooper a question and request the mic. Would love to hear from anyone in the audience, and but while we're waiting to see if anyone hops up or if there's any questions and we've chatted a good bit about like injective and specifically what's going on in injective but what are you most excited for in the overall crypto space? Maybe looking for the next 12 months, if that makes sense.

Cooper Emmons: 45:45

Yeah, on my end right.

JB Carthy: 45:47

Yeah, on your end.

Cooper Emmons: 45:51

I'm most excited to see what products find actually mainstream adoption. So I think that there's a lot of people that have been held up by the concept of regulatory uncertainty, and I think a lot of those concerns are going to be cleared up in the next 12 to 24 months, and I'm excited to see how the space evolves. I think we're going to see a big evolution. We're going to see a big evolution, um, and I think we're going to see a lot of these, you know, uh, not so serious projects.

JB Carthy: 46:23

You know really, uh, essentially differ from the projects that are, you know, much more serious, and I'm excited to see that happen in real time no for sure, do you think maybe the situation like in obviously there's no way of really knowing exactly what's going to happen, but you think, like the environment and in america will like and the like, the outlook that it's potentially going to be a little bit more favorable, will definitely have a positive impact on the space over the next and like next two years or whatever, yep that's right.

Cooper Emmons: 46:53

I mean I I again right, you know, not political in any way, shape or form, right, but I think regime change and specifically that towards the crypto industry being within the large I mean the United States capital markets are the largest capital markets in the world and I'm very interested to see what comes of that and how the you know kind of industry evolves at large.

JB Carthy: 47:22

No, I agree and I think most people here in the audience probably would share. I think we had a crypto judge was coming on to ask. I'll invite him up to speak again. I think they got disconnected. Disconnected and but if, if crypto judge doesn't happen to connect and get on, and I'll leave you with one and final question before we maybe call the day for the evening, which is, and what should people, if you were to pick maybe a couple of things that people should really look out for with injective over the next like six months. What are you most excited for in Injective itself?

Cooper Emmons: 48:00

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to be excited about, but I would put it into a couple different segments. So the first thing that's the most exciting is this multi-VM environment, which more will come out soon. You could obviously go back and take a look at Eric's keynote at our summit, but that's really probably the most exciting thing for kind of Q1 of next year from my perspective. And then the next pieces are surrounding, I think, real-world assets and tokenization and the utility that can be provided for those things. The next piece is the ecosystem and the different DeFi activity that will be occurring across the ecosystem. I think the next piece is AI and a lot of the enhancements in AI that are coming at large. And I think, lastly to touch on is the meme culture that we see to continue to grow. So those are kind of the four buckets that I'm excited about, but lastly, just most excited about the ecosystem continuing to grow across the board and getting bigger, better and stronger no for sure, man, I I I can agree with you.

JB Carthy: 49:04

And lots, lots to look forward to almost too much to list and I really appreciate you coming on and thanks so much as always for giving up your time.

Cooper Emmons: 49:13

I'm sure like you're super busy you have so many commitments dude, this is always such a pleasure and, jb, you've been such a great community member within the Injective community for forever and always. Collaborating and chatting is the best. Thanks for having me on and thanks for putting this together. It's always the best and the most professional, the most organized and looking forward to doing much more in the future. And thanks to everybody for tuning in.

JB Carthy: 49:37

No man, I appreciate it much more in the future and thanks to everybody for tuning in. No man, I appreciate it, we're gonna, we're gonna close it on that. I can't. I can't top that.

Cooper Emmons: 49:44

Um man, a pleasure like the munches in here on the salon and we got. We got everybody in here, so this is awesome stuff. It's ncaa. I see all of the incredible injective ninjas out there, so chat soon. Appreciate you guys. You know, if you celebrate thanksgiving, cook that turkey. I will be um, but not stay online and stay in the trenches as we continue to build the future of Web3 together.