0:08All right. Um okay. So, Shayna, I actually scrolled back to our very first I think you DM'd me June 23rd, 2020. Not that long ago. Okay. Um we recently launched www.polymarket.
0:24And I was in the seed round on this.
0:26Very proud to be part of the part of the journey as the VC cliche goes. The first billion is the hardest. So, get What's the summary of the last 6 years for everybody here? Who here knows Polymarket?
0:39Actually, for those who don't know, give give What's the summary of the last 6 years?
0:42Polymarket is a prediction market. You can go and and trade events markets on events for anything and you can see the odds in terms of how likely things are to happen.
0:51Great. And um so, you know, basically, you know, we've been like I've just scrolling I scrolled this whole history. We got a lot of DMs.
1:01to let a DM fly to you and just hope I'd get a response.
1:03Yes. And you know, I sometimes I you know, like we'll see if you know, sometimes it's my responsibility if I've 12 hours off. But okay, so you started in DeFi, you broke through to the mainstream. By some measures, along with stablecoins, you're basically one of the largest apps in DeFi. You've got your DeFi web interface, you've got your mobile like fiat interface.
1:23Why don't you give an overview of like, you know, how did you start in DeFi?
1:26When did you come into sort of like the offline, you know, fiat world?
1:30You know, so right before this, you went and looked scrolled through our Twitter. So, that was wasn't part of the plan and it just brought me down memory lane. So, that was like a week after we launched. We launched June 16th, 2020.
1:41And I was just hoping someone would even pay attention to it or there'd be like a you know, announce of of money additional runway that people would want to would want to invest in. I remember like a weekend there we put up a polymarket for um Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex Mhm.
2:03Yes, I remember that.
2:05And I sent it to you and Balaji's like a big fundamentalist, like you kind of can't veer him, you can't get him to shill. And he you thought it was really interesting and you posted it and it was the first little lick we hit where it was like a little viral on X and people were looking at it and it was like, "Okay, this is a thing."
2:21Um [snorts] Look, I mean, it's been such an uh such a an unbelievable obviously very difficult, but also um inspiring and uh and exciting journey. I think uh ultimately like when you think about building on a frontier technology, it's like you kind of have to think about what makes sense, what will make sense in a decade's time, what from a first principles perspective
2:49actually can go the distance. And you want to be building from my point of view around those those types of use cases and just bulldoze through whatever the the hype or the the zeitgeist of the moment is if you don't think that you know, it has staying power. And I think like playing the long game like that is usually how things are, you know, where you get rewarded. And what I'm grateful for is like through all the years of soaking up all these different blockchain use cases
3:19I think there were really two important parts about how Polymarket was started on chain. The first was that these markets, you know, no traditional derivatives exchange, regular derivatives exchange, would have ever thought the juice was worth the squeeze to say, "Hey, let's go and self-certify or list an event contract on something really niche that uh is going to make no revenue and do and generate no volume that no one wants to provide liquidity for that may have useful price discovery, but beyond that probably is a really small business."
3:49Like no one was going to do that. It takes some broke kid that is sitting on his computer all day that can say, "Hey, you know, other people may not think this is that big of an opportunity, but I'm really passionate about it from a whole different perspective. Like, the idea of seeing the price of things and being able to use it as an information source, so I'm going to go try to figure it out." And yes, there are risks, and yes, I barely can even fathom what the risks are, but I'm going to give it a go anyway. And that experimentation is would have only been possible with blockchains, and I think now that you see prediction markets so ubiquitous, like, if it wasn't
4:17for the ability to permissionlessly innovate with these financial applications, uh, like, there would have never been the validation of demand that people would use this stuff. And then, [snorts] you know, the the the second element, I think, is just when you go and you build something new, uh, using new technology, it lets you go and kind of pave a pave a trail where whatever comes next, whatever the next challenge is, you just kind of get to think from first principles perspective and say, "Hey, what's the best way this
4:46could look hypothetically or in theory?"
4:48You know, if we work backwards and we go to the future and we say, "How did we get here? What were the the the right Lego blocks to put in, and what was the right path to take in order to to build this the right way?" And I think what was cool for what what we were doing was the fact that Polymarket was DeFi and web only, and not available to trade in the US, but that you could go and get the odds for all these really exciting things, and you couldn't just go and do meta odds.
5:11Like, if it was a forcing function for us to get really good at viral distribution, and to make this idea of seeing the Polymarket for something and seeing the graph and seeing the odds something that was, uh, commonplace that you'd see all the time. So, I think that that that first little taste of that was actually you sharing the SlideStar Codex.
5:27And, you know, actually, there'd been a history of prediction markets, like, Augur had been tried before. Many people had tried before you guys went vertical. Do you have a Do you have a theory on why that is? I mean, you were young.
5:38Like, when did you see you're like 20 when you started?
5:4121, but I was already into prediction markets. I mean, I I a huge Augur fan.
5:46Uh, you know, anyone who knows me from before Polymarket knows that I was just deeply passionate about it regardless and like saw this idea of you could create markets on anything as like this [snorts] very creative uh like you know, canvas to be able to go and come up with a handful of different use cases and that's why when people say, "Oh, you know, Polymarket, you know, you've made it happen and all this." I I still look at it like it's very small fraction of what's possible because [snorts] there's all these creative use cases that, you know, may seem fringe right now and may not rival what we have
6:16uh you know, in revenue anytime soon, but could be really impactful [snorts] and and you know, have downstream implications over a 3 to 5-year time frame that um you know, could eff eff things up like in a good way. Uh that, you know, like we already saw especially with a lot of the geopolitics and American politics like the the idea that Polymarket odds were were considered a relevant benchmark just changed the narrative and changed kind of what people got away with in terms of, you know, pontificating and talking
6:45out their ass. Um So, yeah.
6:48When do you When do you feel I mean, was it 2024 and the election that you really went vertical? Like you were kind of grinding along. Like what what did it feel like like on the journey 2020, 2021, 2022?
6:59Well, when you go and you build a marketplace business like you always want to know that you have sustainable demand sustainable supply.
7:06And I think one reason when people talk about these these crypto apps that like, you know, burn you know, they're kind of supernovas. They burn really fast. They burn high. They they they fall just as quickly as they went up. Um it's like if you just think from think just practically, like the demand is not sustainable. It's a function of some sort of irrational exuberance. Like people think they're buying something, it's worthless, but they think they're buying it. They think it can go 100X and they want to sell it before it goes back to zero.
7:33And [snorts] that's a cool game to play and you know, that's not to say people can't, you know, make a lot of money doing that. It It has never been what's excited me, but you just have to see it for what it is, which is it's it's, you know, a game of irrational exuberance and hot potato, where, you know, what goes up must come down. And one thing you always mentioned, Balaji, was like with with Polymarket, you know, if you're trading these markets, there's no exponential upside, right? Like, if you have yes shares in a market, the most it can be worth is a dollar. So, it's not like you can buy it and say, "Oh, this
8:03could be worth a million dollars one day." And, you know, you can kind of just blindly go into it.
8:07explain this So, that's something which is I've always thought of these as fun and recreational. Given that the upside is capped, right? Why do people buy into it? We were just talking about this.
8:17So, look, I think there's two elements.
8:20One is the the the crux of a prediction market is you have a question about the future, and you have a yes share and a no share. Everything's [snorts] fully collateralized. So, for every yes share, there's one no share. There's It's called a full set, and each is backed by $1. In this case, one $1 of stablecoin.
8:36And the yes share is worth a dollar if the event happens. So, when you look at the the Polymarket, you see the rules, and if that happens, you get a dollar per yes share.
8:44[snorts] So, when the yes share is trading on an order book, just like you'd see on an exchange, um whatever it's trading at, you know, say it's trading at 32 cents, that's implying that the present value of it being, you know, the net present value of it being worth a dollar is 32 cents, which means it's 32% likely. So, our design pattern was all about, "Hey, you can go see it's 32% likely." And see a graph that's designed to be even more informative than it is maybe a pro trading type of experience.
9:10Um and to to go to go back a sec, like when you want to build something from scratch like this, you know, you need to be thinking about, "Hey, for all the parts of the chain of of what I'm building, is this sustainable? Or is there some sort of, you know, mania that is making one part of the chain sustainable that won't be sustainable later, at which point like what you have will be bust?"
9:30And that's why when we started Polymarket, uh you know, in the first few days, we used constant product AMMs for liquidity. And so, you know, I had to beg and beg and like, you know, it was like a 30 30 grand that was like given as a as like people were putting in liquidity to these AMMs. And the idea was you couldn't be on the demand side if you wanted to buy yes shares or no shares.
9:53You couldn't buy a lot because the market structure was very inefficient with these AMMs, but it was a way to have liquidity and price discovery so that you could even test if demand even cared.
10:02So, that was step one. And I think over the coming years, you know, it was like, "Okay, we validated demand in the early days. People really cared about looking at the odds." And people actually found it fun to trade the markets.
10:12So, today it's all sports markets. What was it in the early days? Was it like crypto derivatives?
10:17Yeah, I mean, at the beginning the biggest thing was COVID. It was uh you know, I was I was it was the onset of the pandemic and you just see all these people talking about um you know, when will the vaccine be ready? When will shelter-in-place in New York be over? Uh you know, will it will there be like validation of of the origin of the virus?
10:35All these things, but you know, when you go build something from scratch end to end, you have to build a new ecosystem. It's just you have to chip at the wood again and again and you just have to think and iterate and experiment until you kind of find a sustainable way to do the next thing. And all that came together to your last question was that Biden-Trump first debate.
10:53Which I remember I was just sitting in a hotel room and you know, he's he's babbling and stumbling. And someone had said uh uh you know, on a podcast, someone who's really smart was like cuz you know, him dropping out was trading at in like the teens.
11:08Oh, that's right. That was the big moment. I did tweet that, too.
11:12A lot of people tweeted that one.
11:13You were really early with the Slate Star Codex. That one was when things started moving and you know, it was like maybe there was this effort to say, "Hey, you know, he's he's you know, kind of he's all fine and and uh Polymarket had his odds of winning tanking. So, conditional on him staying in, his odds were extremely low to win.
11:30And the odds of him dropping out were very high. So, it almost forced the hand uh of people to be able to, you know, do the hot swap.
11:36That's right. I remember I think I posted something like Polymarket is the news.
11:41Polymarket is the news around that, right? And the reason was That was a good one.
11:47That was a good one, right? Because now I remember that because there's an interesting cyclical relationship where on the one hand, you need a lot of attention on a market to get the liquidity. On the other hand, movement in the market itself causes a new cycle if it's an important enough topic, and that in turn builds liquidity, which is why you have kind of an interesting symbiotic relationship between the monetization of the attention and the attention itself.
12:12Absolutely. It is the flywheel.
12:15Um and you know, I think what ended up I remember at that time someone said to me, there's really two ways this could go, Shane. One is you uh one is Biden stays in and, you know, Polymarket's lost all credibility, and the other is he drops out and you build one of the most important sites in the world. And I was like, [laughter] Let's see.
12:35Um But but it's not really you, it's the market, right? You know, but of course the con the space as a whole, you know, people can be wrong in the market.
12:42I think that what I love about what we do is that, you know, some people really rely on Polymarket and they can't believe how accurate it is, and I think they think I'm sitting there like a like in my bedroom crunching numbers, and, you know, what's cool when you get to build something like this, especially with new technology, is like it delivers the value prop, and whatever the technical complicated efficient market hypothesis stuff is under the hood, no one needs to really know it.
13:06They just can go and digest it and get the value from it without getting too deep in the weeds on the technical Actually, though, you know, I I recall this, and I'm not sure if somebody did this with Polymarket, but given that you've got the historical data, you can I mean, you've got whatever thousands, hundred thousands, but I don't know the exact number of markets you've run at this point. You can backtest, and you can say, "Hey, if this was at 59% like of all the markets are at 59% like 1 hour before completion, right?
13:33Like what fraction of them actually closed at one versus zero and then you can bucket that in quantiles and you can actually do a calibration. I'm sure you've done that.
13:41Yeah, I mean that you just go on Google Scholar a ton of people have You know, people often times say like hey, well, how accurate is it compared to other things? And it's like what other things? You know, Balaji's really smart. He has opinions about a lot of things and you know, I'm sure there's a lot of people who are smart and maybe not so smart.
13:57Like you know, it at this conference and Um actually I'm going to I'm going to look that up the quantile plot because if Yeah, you got to look at the If it's somewhat correlated, if it's somewhat correlated, that's amazing.
14:07Yeah, well, it's just at least there's one canonical dashboard and and and you know, platform where you can go and check. And the thing is if you disagree with it, that's it saying hey, you think this is too low, go buy.
14:17You know, what this reminds me of is basically I don't know if you remember the 2016 election, Nate Silver, who I like overall.
14:24Um he he he you know, he's more based nowadays or what have you, right? But he had um he he was the one of the very few people who had like a non-zero probability for like I think like I forgot what it was. It was 20 or 30% or something 40% probability for Trump to win and everybody was so mad at him because everybody else was saying it's like 99% or and obviously those are probabilities. So how do you know whether it was 40 you know, you could still have 40% and and and have a one or
14:52a zero. But with what you have, if you've got a lot of prediction markets and 40% of the things that are at 40% an hour before resolve and 80% of things that are 80% an hour before resolve, then you could actually back test. So I'm going to go and look at that afterwards.
15:08So okay, so now today you you've gone from you know, the COVID stuff to the election stuff. What is the breakdown?
15:14What do the markets look like today?
15:16What what's Polymarkets kind of like like it's sports, it's you know.
15:19Yeah, I mean look like Look, I think in terms of going and building distribution and building reach in an organic way, I I think, you know, at a scale that um has been exciting. I wouldn't call it unprecedented, but really a viral scale. That always comes down to whatever is in the zeitgeist, you have the odds for it.
15:36And that may not drive the most volume, it may not drive the most revenue, but it is sort of what you sharpen your sword with and and how you can get things forward. I think the the big thing with Polymarket has been, you know, like our DNA is blockchain. Like I, you know, was in Ethereum into Ethereum when it started. A [snorts] lot of people have DMs for me in like 2013, 2014, like, "Hey, can you you know, you got coffee?" And and you know, everyone was like, "Who the hell is this kid?" And let let me on seen, but you know, I'm still a big believer in,
16:06call me crazy, but like financial legos and composability and um the ability to have open financial primitives and, you know, let the next kid come and figure out building an application where you can borrow against this asset in order to do this and you can build your own front end. And I think the financial building blocks possible with blockchains plus, you know, building with AI, it it it should be the the impetus for a Cambrian explosion of financial applications, but you need the
16:33foundational pieces for it to work. And I still feel very firmly that, you know, Polymarket can be a large part of that and I I hope that we can make it that case. And I think the big um theme with Polymarket over the past few years is like, when the scope of a business widens, like it's all cool being, you know, 10 person uh you know, on-chain app and, you know, having insane margins and not doing marketing and but you know, when you have a really big vision and there's certain things where you can go and and and scale gets a mass
17:02market that can go and open doors later on to be more experimental and and innovative, you know, you have to seize it. And I think that what's been Speaking of an open door, right? Like the SEC and CFTC have now put out some recent guidance, right? If you guys have all seen that's pretty important stuff.
17:20Um basically maybe the the true IPO, ICO, token offering it might be possible, right? To truly go public as a coin for like a legitimate company. Um you know, can have you been thinking about that? Is that something that's on your radar?
17:36Would you you know, are you interested in that?
17:38Yeah, I mean look, you know, what's most important to me is um our mission is to build the promise of prediction markets and and you know, as the scope of the business widens now you have a regulated US exchange, regulated clearing house, about to have an FCM and you have a DeFi international platform. You know, the the the regulators they're they're the most forward thinking they've ever been. They want to engage with new technology.
18:03They want to figure out ways to go and onshore things that make a lot of sense and have strong fundamentals but don't fit with the existing regulatory matrix.
18:10So, you know, I'd like to think we're on the frontier of that. We're working really hard on it. Um what I'm really proud about is you know, like I was saying it's all fun and games to have a really small team but when you go and have a lot of opportunity and you have a lot of things that have to get done and a lot of it is not being vision oriented and inventive and generative uh you know, if it's sort of either or if you go and are generative you're going to have the the core um fall apart or underperform and if you go focus on the core you're not going to be able to be generative. So, the thing that I've spent a lot of time that you
18:39know, some people who follow Polymarket have seen is like I've really gone and grinded out trying to find excellent people to to join the Polymarket team and I've been really proud of the people that we've been able to bring aboard and obviously I'm still learning. I have a long ways to go but [snorts] you know, to go and come full circle and build what I think can be like the the uh you know, the the de facto on chain product slash business.
19:00Um you know, it takes a village and you got to put one's foot in front of the other and there's things that may seem counterintuitive that you have to get right first. When it comes to what you're talking about you You I always like to I always like to think back to, you know, I was in the DAO.
19:16The DAO sale, you know, which ended up with, you know, causing Ethereum Classic is the DAO hack. Like, I remember being on Poloniex and seeing a trade and and the idea of looking at all the the DAO proposals. I mean, this is like deep ball knowledge of of of of blockchain.
19:33And, you know, I remember the Tezos sale and the first quorum and all these ideas and and DXDAO, which I was in the gen sale. I mean, it was this was so long ago.
19:43And [snorts] I truly believe like the idea for obviously on-chain assets with on-chain liquidity and like instant clearing, but also the ability to have an an asset that represents some, you know, economics in a company. You know, in the case of Polymarket, I'd like to think fast growth with, you know, I hope high growth potential. That's something that people actually use. The idea that you could have a stake of ownership in that that also has some sort of programmatic utility or like some sort of ability
20:12where if you have the share, you have the token, whatever it may be, you can use it for something. That to me has immense staying power and it is how the idea of stocks should work. And obviously, we work really closely with New York Stock Exchange and ICE.
20:24They're one of our biggest shareholders. And I know that, you know, between the regulators, as you as you've seen the way that the SEC's given guidance about it, as well as, you know, in the exchanges, they're thinking a lot about it.
20:35You know, I can't be prescriptive. I can't come in here and say exactly, you know, this is going to happen. I don't know it, but I know what we're exploring and I think that the idea, you know, the positioning for Polymarket to be able to pioneer a model where, okay, yes, we've raised a lot of capital and our revenue's growing and we have traction, we have users.
20:52Um some of the more traditional routes of, you know, bringing your equity to market uh and and liquidity, like if if you can go and have a counterpart of that that's on-chain that actually has real utility, I think that, you know, it would be a privilege for Polymarket to pioneer, maybe be the first to to to try and do that the right way. And in particular, what's what I think about it is like, you know, even remembering Livepeer in the early days, all these
21:21elements of thinking about tokenomics and and the intrinsic value of this token and how it can be used and how you value that, like there were some golden nuggets in that literature. And at the end of the day, though, like it's all a function of the underlying business and asset. So, I think what I love and I feel like what we did with with prediction markets on chain is like you want to go and read and consume all the nerdy stuff, and then you want to try and identify what has the actual what could have meaningful impact and what has
21:50substance, and you want to try and experiment to to be able to bring that to market. So, that's something we're focusing on. Again, not like legal advice or financial advice.
21:59Um every type of legal disclaimer you could probably say what whatever we're going to do, we're going to, you know, run it up the chain. But I think that that's really exciting for us. And you know, it's not like to me, the the ability to go and have on-chain prediction markets where they're global and they're transparent and the marginal cost of creating a market and then the experimentation of the outcome tokens and a market on this that could be collateralized with this and whatever is so potent and powerful that, you know, let it be known market in like the you know, I know that
22:27the US business has been growing tremendously and that's kind of gotten a lot of the a lot of the air in the room, but we have not lost sight of of the DNA and all the all the ideas that, you know, we had at the beginning that we still hope to make reality.
22:38Well, so let me tell you you know, it's funny because you and I come at crypto.
22:42There's many different kinds of ways one can come to crypto. You can come from it from the technical side, from the philosophical side, the capitalist side, and so and so forth. And the reason that I've always been interested in prediction markets, you know, there's this concept uh by Robin Hanson called Futarchy, like predicting the future with it. And I like that, but I actually am even more interested in Retroarchy, which is thinking of a prediction market as a verification market, right?
23:06Because, like, you know, let's say there's a horse race, you don't necessarily have great alpha on who which horse is going to win, but you have a very good record of which horse did win. So, you've got a digital history that's written, right? And that is actually under appreciated, having a digital history of what's written. So, you know, one thing A ledger of truth.
23:25A ledger of record, exactly, right? So, that's that's why, you know, cuz I'm an ideological investor, right? And look, I love I love capitalism. Capitalism's awesome, you know? But, um one of the things I'm interested in is right now your markets are curated, right? Are you going to open that up?
23:41You know, would you potentially, let's say, have trusted actors or companies maybe be able to curate to get more kinds of markets and so on. You know, Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, they write Markets and Everything, you know? Will you allow for more kinds of prediction markets on there?
23:55Yeah, absolutely. You know, when you talk about retroarchy or verification markets, I think I think it's inherently like a market that starts as a traditional prediction market becomes that once the outcome is known. So, by virtue of the market existing, if you look at the market and it's 99-1, you've got what you're talking about. And if you look at it and it's 80-20, you know that it's not verified yet. So, you know, I think that's kind of an inherent uh value prop of the markets. And And look, to me, that's where we want to head is we want to get to to be a a
24:24creative medium where people can experiment uh because there's just so many exciting use cases that one team will just never be able to do them all.
24:31Um You know, and with great power comes great responsibility, right? Like, you need the idea that we can go and let you know, spin up new markets and systematically figure out a way to bootstrap price discovery and go and find, oh, you know, the the midpoint on an order book for all these different questions. Like, that is like uh that's like a you know, a miracle, basically. Like, if you went back 10 years, that would have never before been been something people thought could be possible.
25:00Um and that came down to understanding consumer really well. Like back to what you said about the predecessors not really working. Like [snorts] a large part is for these marketplaces, the demand side, the retail demand, is so important. And without that, you you know, the less retail demand you have, the more you have, the higher the cost of getting liquidity is for these markets. And if you're going to have a ton of different markets, that compounds. You know, that can grow exponentially. So So you know, the ability to go and build something easy to use that has demand is what drives, you know, the ability to
25:28get price discovery. And for [snorts] what you're saying, you know, you need to go and have market structure right.
25:33You need to have an efficient way to subsidize markets. You need to have, you know, the ability to um create markets that are well-defined, unambiguous. And you know, anyone who knows me knows I've been talking about this for a while, but um you know, you have to get the foundations right. You have to get get your ducks in a row.
25:47Because if you go and you build something like that and you don't have it working end to end, like a lot of people have tried to do create their own market, and it's always failed because they didn't build up market place density to begin with. So, you know, I think good things come to those who wait. And you know, we've gotten closer and closer towards it in terms of community suggestions. But you know, there's just myriad ideas in terms of what you can make possible if you can go and figure out a sustainable way for people to create their own.
26:09So, on that, um you know, one thing I've been thinking about is if you make a sort of graph where on the x-axis is attention and the y arc axis is, let's say, value of the market. Like the outcome of sports game isn't that valuable in some sense. You know, it's only you know, there's I don't know, 82 games per year for like the Knicks or something each year for an NBA team. Um it's not that valuable, but there's actually a lot of money hinging on it um in sense of like the betting market.
26:38However, by contrast, let's say something like, I don't know, what what is the price of cadmium or or lithium going to be in 6 months, like a futures market. That's really valuable because huge amounts of money and economic value is like leveraged on that, right? So, to me, the kind of thing that'd be the most interesting thing for you to go into are markets that don't have a lot of attention on them, but that do steer huge amounts of money, you know?
27:06And maybe you could do news coverage around that. Like, I don't know how you think because you can use news coverage to drive attention on a market.
27:11Yep. I mean, look, I think the biggest thing and this is something that maybe underappreciated right now, hopefully not for long, is that once you're able to go and take a question or risk that does not have price, that no one knows how to price, and you know, you you post it on Polymarket, and all of a sudden now you have price, even if it's very low liquidity, that becomes a reference point for larger transactions to take place, whether it's OTC or as a swap, um or as block trade, which, you know, in the the the the spread may be wider for the larger one, but like, those are the
27:41compounding effects of once you can start going from zero to one in terms of a question that doesn't have price, then then goes to price. Um Yeah. You know, I think there's just It's just a really long ways to go. I'm just I'm so grateful I get to build this. It I It's never boring. It's never a dull day.
27:58What what is the most Maybe close with that. What is the craziest or most exciting thing that's happened since the last 6 years?
28:05Um Look, obviously the the moment where there was this arrival of Polymarket, which was, you know, when we had the validation of the election is kind of like the the obvious one. I I I know I kind of get a lot of flak for this, but with the the with the, you know, the Ukraine-Russia conflict and then the Middle East conflict, like, the amount of people on the ground who are relying on Polymarket Mhm.
28:26as an alternative news source without really knowing any of the details, like, that is the the vision coming to reality. Um and, you know, coming back to the sports stuff, like, you know, the ability to acquire a lot of users and the ability to to grow revenue quickly, like, that is important if you care about the big the big picture and the vision of all the things on the frontier because, you know, it allows you to reinvest in that and allows you to acquire users that you can cross sell. Um so, you know, by no means we have it all figured out, but look, I I I think that it is a very special time
28:55to be building in America, in finance, in blockchain, and prediction markets.
29:01And um look, I I think one of the most exciting things is that we're in a position where luckily, you know, we have the the means and I you know, I'd like to think the credibility and are engaging with the right stakeholders, both commercially and in the public sector, to go and make these ideas also just a lot more widely accessible. Like the idea of, you know, an on-chain platform, when we started Polymarket um in 2021, we gave our first DeFi legalization proposal to the to the CFTC, and it was a different era, and it
29:30we kind of got laughed out the room. You know, no direct feedback. It was like, "Hey, yeah, we like this, but you know, we can't do anything about it." Um you know, now it's entirely changed. Now I think that, you know, it's not it's not news, but there you know, there will be news coming coming soon where there's like real frameworks to go and bring on chain and and and um on-chain financial applications, on-chain prediction markets uh into America legally. Something we're very excited about as well. So, you know, I got a lot left to learn. I got a lot a lot a long ways to go. You know, wh- every time I come here, I feel like
30:00I'm going to feel more of a novice than the last time because the the ambition gets larger, but you know, grateful to be here, grateful for crypto, you know, born and raised from there, and never forget it, and um still a key part of what we're going to do. So, Great. Exciting.
