Stabledash Live 3/3 - WisdomTree, Paxos Labs and Catalyst

Exposed to what's happening in crypto. Now when you go into, like, more creative industries, I have lot of friends that are in, like, advertising or, like, film production. And for them, it hasn't clicked as much. To them, it's still kind of speculative. But when you talk to somebody who's coming out of Morgan Stanley or anybody that's in, like, a fintech adjacent field, it's kind of, like, clear that the trend is shifting this way. You're seeing SoFi with SoFi USD.

You're seeing, like, a lot of large institutions are already trying to either have their own stable coin or offer crypto and platform. A lot of, you know, investment firms are offering crypto, like, capital management. And so I think this is just becoming very obvious for people in the fintech side of things. It's gonna take some time before it trickles and permeates into the rest of society in general. But I I think it's just a matter of time. Right?

I joined crypto in 2017, and I thought it was you know, enterprise adoption was coming, and it's almost ten years later. And it's finally here. And I think that's the reality. Like, we're in maybe the best political climate for crypto. No comments on anything else, but probably the best climate for crypto. A lot of institutions have kind of, like, gotten over their fear of being associated with tokenization and cryptocurrencies.

And I think we're just gonna see that trend continue and kind of, like, ramp up as we go through maybe the next two, three, five years.

You mentioned so 2017, that's I mean, that you you might you're tenured now in the crypto space. Did I see that part of that journey was with with Tron?

It was. Yeah. From 2019 onwards, I was at Tron. How how was how was that time?

Especially, you know, even we still look at the space where, you know, that Tron holds as as you with USDT still being this solidified player. I mean, I remember going back to my time at RISE, the amount of requests I got from emerging markets for, do you support Tron? Do you support Tron? And and being somebody in The US, I was like, Tron? Why? So, you know, what was that time like, and how did that begin to shape your, I guess, your perspective on where this market was heading?

I mean, I think Tron was an absolutely insane ride. As a director of marketing there, I've seen a couple of different cycles, you know, got to be in the weeds of a lot of really creative campaigns. I think just, like, back then, we knew that the political climate would shift. And a lot of the work that we did was sort of, like, towards that direction. And even, like, in 2019, you're talking about USDT on Tron. This was, like, right when we had onboarded USDT and Tether, and started working with them.

And we had a goal to, kind of do better than USDT and Ethereum. And within, like, two, three years, we were overshadowing that by, like, a large number. And that was very much due to, like, boots on the ground adoption in, like, emerging markets. And it was just, like, one of those things that, like, struck true to me there that, like the reason I came onto crypto was because from you know, I'm from India and, like, capital difference, sending money back, just like FX, it's capital.

And it just became, like, the easiest way to do that. And it was such a a moment of realization that, like, this is how adoption was really going to take off. It took me some time to, like, move into a space where I was working in stablecoins directly, and I'm happy to be in that space right now. But it definitely, like, set the cadence for

what was to come. It is crazy how fast it's changed. I think, you know, we're a little bit over a year of doing this. Remember when I left my last role and I told people, hey. I'm gonna just focus on, like, stable coin content. It still hadn't, like it was obviously people knew that they were important, but it had not you know, we weren't seeing news every week, and it was kind of this, like, stablecoins? Like, that's kind of boring, don't you think? And it's crazy.

A year later, it's like, there's six there's 20 news stories. What what are you looking forward to? And when you I I guess, actually, more what I'm asking is you mentioned boots on the ground activation with Tron. We're in this age right now of AI slop content. You're probably more empowered of a marketer than ever because of AI. We obviously use a ton. We're not a massive team. How has that informed your go to market process?

How are you seeing clients wanting to be engaged and wanting to learn about these concepts? Do you mind repeating that question? Yeah. I guess I'm asking, you know, we we've kinda made this bet, I'd say, with this livestream that people are getting overloaded with AI content. There's more research reports than ever. There's more LinkedIn posters than ever. It's faster. You can you can get out of tweet faster than ever, especially when it comes to learning about these complex topics. How do they wanna learn?

How does that inform a go to market motion? Is this events? Is this livestreams? Is this webinars? Are we almost, like, taking this, like like, a step back five years to how people want to learn and and kind of want to do those things that aren't scalable? So I guess I'm asking, what's your approach and what's your outlook as a marketer? Maybe less of a stable coin approach, but more of a market marketing philosophy and where AI fits into this picture.

Yeah. I mean, I think AI has made life a lot easier, but also a lot harder in some ways. Like you mentioned, there's just so much content out there even from, like, podcasts to we're just, like, in a content overload at this point. Right? And what I'm seeing is people are try starting to shift more and more to real authentic connection. In San Francisco, for example, like, hackathons are just, a very, very common way for you to just, like, try and get people to get to know you and get to know what you're building.

And this has always been true about marketing and advertising. People don't buy the product. People buy the people behind the product. And even this is, like, true for large sales, like, motions. Right? Like, during COVID, a lot of us moved to this remote work, remote, like, meeting process, whereas sales has often been, like, this in person effort to travel and meet these people.

And so for me in marketing, we are trying to make more of an effort to be at the places that our partners are gonna be at, at the places that our customers are gonna be at. How do we create moments where they don't feel like they're being recorded and they're being let listened to, but rather they have safe spaces and chat and past conversations where a lot of this is nonattributable, but we can learn a lot. How do we have red team sessions with them where we get to learn from their lessons?

These are the things that we're building out as, like, a marketing function. That being said, I don't think that, like, AI just goes away. Right? Like, we have a one person design team and a one person marketing team right now. We're a very, very, very lean team, which means that AI tools have become really what we turn to to make sure that we're able to keep up the pace and the cadence.

I I think, like, AI image models and video models are truly, truly spectacular, and our designers have been able to churn out so much work that, otherwise, I would have had a staff before to do. Right? And you need specialized skill set to do three d modeling, and all of that kind of work has become simplified. I'm very anti AI content writing, though. I think it's just very, very obvious when somebody has used AI. Right before Patzos, I was building an AI project myself.

And, like, just like this AI tweet slop that you've kind of see, and the it's the attribution is wrong or the tags are wrong or the m dash and it's x not y. Yeah. This there's so many just, like, obvious telltale signs at this point that as a marketer, it's almost about taste more than it is about your ab ability to execute.

Taste. It's interesting that you brought that up. That's I think that's been a big big focus of us of ours as well. You mentioned something with the hackathons that I've heard I heard from somebody else recently as well of this notion of getting into a space, going into it's not even that it's, like, an exclusive event, but just the fact that it's a safe space that's not being recorded that you could only experience if you're there in person.

I guess, has there been any interesting stories or maybe products that you've seen kind of started to get ideated out of these, or, I guess, even just on the horizon for Paxos Labs? Like like, where where do you see see you guys going throughout the rest of this year?

I can't really speak to Paxos Labs specifically. We've had a lot of internal hackathons that I would say that have been super helpful in terms of, like, how we've been shaping our product, but nothing public. We're not really developer facing at the moment, and so we don't really have a big, like, developer community presence. Things that I found that have would've been interesting interesting when Coinbase was building out x 04/2002, they did a ton of hackathons in San Francisco. Mhmm.

And I think, like, saw a ton of very interesting projects getting built and kind of coming out of that space. You saw CrossMint sort of, like, doing a lot of things during that space as well in San Francisco. Right now, it's about Clobbot, and everybody is building and kind of, like, improving and adding new functionality to it. And I think that's, like, an like, another interesting sort of arena. So it seems to be more in, like, the AI space that I'm seeing a lot of this happening. Right.

I'm not seeing a lot of hackathons in San Francisco for crypto right now, otherwise.

Are you gonna be at a very stable conference this week?

It's a very, very hard conference to get a ticket to, but

I'll be around. There's a bunch of side events happening. So we have San Francisco office now, and so I'll be around. Well, if you're a runner, we're doing a, a it's actually a stable dash the morning next Thursday, the the the morning before the conference that's that's open to anybody. So, if you're a runner, I hope to see you there. But otherwise, throughout this year, I mean, please keep us in mind.

If if anything else is going on with Paxos Labs, a new stable coin comes out, we'd love to have you back on the show to to dive into it. Think of us as, like, your your PR assistant to to come on and, you know, news, pair it with some some video content, and we'll go from there. But, Anjali, it was great to meet you. Thank you for coming on the stream today.

Thanks so much for your time. Have a great day. Bye, Zach.

Man, Paxos Labs, that's a great one. If if you if you're ever interested, go go dive back into kind of the USDH stuff on some of the stable-.com. We and even on on our YouTube channel on our website, the the conversation was with Bo around USDH was was really great. I'm just continue I'm just curious to to see what continues to happen throughout the year with these issuers. And I think this Alio stablecoin, with the privacy centric, I don't think this is going to be the last one that we see.

But it's just been interesting to see the different approaches from from different stablecoin issuers, but also how Stablecoin issuance now is not the main game. It's it's, you know, what are the auxiliary tools around this that developers and projects need. We have our last last guest ready to go. They might be getting set up. Will z, can I get a thumbs up, thumbs down, sideways thumb if he's ready to go? Cool.

Let's bring him live, and then I'll I'll start this transition, and then we'll dive into some kind of more marketing go to market talk today, with Will Will Leatherman. He's a partner here at StableDash. He's also does a lot of work, in the founder led content space. He's worked with us on some research reports, and we have some exciting things, in the pipeline to dive into. So we're just waiting here right now to to get him, get him live, get him prepped, get him ready to go on to the stream.

But like I mentioned at the end, if you are going to if you're in San Francisco, even if you're not going to a very stable conference, we are going to be hosting it is the stable dash. We're partnering up with CAS who's been a great supporter of this show alongside alongside defense, alongside Arculus, Altitude. Thank you for all our sponsors. But like I said, CAS is actually going to be giving away one of their gold cards, as well as a few other cards for participants, that come to the StableDash. It'll be a raise.

If you don't want a raise, come anyways, get some exercise, meet some other Stablecoin people. But like I said, we can also like I said, we will be doing a bit of a competition there. And it's a I think the gold card's worth, like like, $10,000. So shout out Rags and Cast for for partnering with us. But it's just been you know, they've they've had an awesome year, great product, and just been a great team to work with. So look like looks like Will is ready to go.

Will, you wanna give me a thumbs up, and then we'll play this transition to to get you on here.

What's up?

What's going on, Will? We're ready to go now. What's up, Zach? How are you? Can you hear me? Oh, that might be on my end. I just lost my audio really quick. All good. Can you hear me? Yeah. I can hear you. My headphones popped out on my foot. So did, and it pulled my extension cords. Man, the amount of times I've done the we go to hit the transition to the oh, and then pull back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I hear you. I hear you. How are things? Normally, Drew's the one controlling all of that.

But, Will, it's great to great to have you on the stream. How are doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. I mean, we've got to work a ton together in the past. It's crazy to think over a year now. It feels like just yesterday, we we kinda started StableDash. But you've you've kind of been somebody that's behind the scenes. You've been working with us.

If anybody's gotten to know us, worked with us on the contributor program, or gotten to even go a little bit farther when we were more back in our our content go to market days, you probably met Will. But, Will, maybe just give him a high level overview who you are, what you've been, and what you've done, and what you're doing.

Yeah, man. I appreciate that. I know a year a year has gone by so quickly, and, like, the evolution of what we've been able to do together is pretty insane. I was I was reflecting on this actually of, like, I don't even know how to best describe myself anymore. Like, forever marketing person. I'm obsessed with media and content. Have spent, you know, most of my career working in content in some capacity, former creative director for, like, fashion and beauty. And now I've been working over yeah, man.

And then spending the last five years in crypto and fintech doing b to b marketing. And so I I feel like I love my solution. But at the same time, all the themes that we've been talking about of, like, taste and aesthetic kinda being this thing that is so hard to replicate in this AI era. I'm I'm grateful I got that experience to kind of be on the the creative direction side of things. And so, you know, to finish out that thought, content person, I love data. I love research and anything AI.

You know, it's actually was just I was pulling up this this LinkedIn post you had the other day. I'm trying to share it, but I don't know. I'm having a hard time, like, getting it right. But you made this comment. You said media is changing right in front of our eyes, especially for b to b businesses. And then you talked about some of your highest leverage bets for the next decade. And you said conversations are a scarce asset. Media consumption is migrating. Creative quality is a differentiator and having taste.

How does that influence the approach to content, the approach to research, and how do you balance that a bit with these AIs? Because we were just talking with with Anjali about she's like, I don't use AI at all for content writing. I know you'd be on the the exact you're probably on on the opposite side a bit. But how do you see these two worlds intersecting? And Yeah. I guess the farther question would be influencing research.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, look. AI, I think, has just raised the floor for everyone. I think it's especially, you know, we're we're sitting on the side of things of, like, people are adopting it in our world. I think there's some industries that haven't really started to touch it yet. And so two things simultaneously is, like, it has raised the floor for everything that you do. There's more pressure on quality because you can do more research. You can pull more insights. I think there's more pressure on volume.

But as the floor kinda raises together, it sets this precedent of, you know, what needs to actually be going out as far as, you know, what I referred to earlier is, like, taste. I think quality and style and personality need to be there and become such a defensible asset. You know, in the marketing world, we call this brand. And so brand is becoming ever more important, which I'm loving I love seeing.

Also, simultaneously in this, you know, things that we've talked about and I think bonded on early on is the importance of being able to sit down with experts and have real conversations between two people is so obviously the future of media for me. And it's kind of ironic because, you know, we're kind of reinventing the talk show a little bit, but it truly is the one piece of content that AI will never be able to replace. And so People are trying.

You seen the the the shorts where it'll be, like, two AI avatars, like, interviewing each other?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sure. Right? Like, we're always gonna see creative uses of whatever new technology. But I think what you guys are doing here is a perfect example, what TBPN's done. And and, you know, again, it's kinda the same as what we see on, you know, TV, but pulling in experts to actually comment or have a conversation about what these trending hot topics are versus anyone being able to go to ChatGPT Deep Research and just say, like, give me a summary of this.

The the quality and the bar of the insights and the conversations coming out of, you know, an interview are gonna be substantially higher.

Yeah. That's a great point. I mean so this is a good segue into our our contributor program. And if people have been following us, they they've seen these articles. You know? We've got to work with Kenny Chan from Coinbase, Max von Wallenberg from MoonPay, Berhan from KeyRails, Mary from LoopScale, Natalia from Nava, the Nova. The list goes on. And if you're in this in this category of, I think, founders or builders in the space and you're interested in this program, please reach out to one of us.

But we've seen this recurring theme where people want to create content. They want to have these conversations, but they're not content writers. They probably don't wanna do a research report. They don't even wanna really go write an article. How how has that experience been, and kinda what does it take to to run this contributor program and to bring some of these articles to life?

And and how should even, I guess, the generic term would be builders think about, you know, working in programs, you know, working on programs like this with with StableDash or even other firms that are maybe offering to help them to cocreate content?

Yeah. I it's been an honor being able to work with the contributors we have selfishly. It's so incredible to be able to talk to these really intelligent intellectual individuals who are clearly painting the way for the future of this. And I think where, you know, this concept of new media and and bringing real conversations to life and and transforming that paired with an industry that's evolving so fast is kind of the perfect intersection.

You know, stablecoins, cross border rails, payment infrastructure, all of these things are evolving so quickly. And so it all comes down to, like, the core idea of building trust. You need trust to be able to get any of these key points of these what these companies are solving across to legacy players, institutional adoption, whatever it is.

And so where I see the contributor program creating, you know, such a benefit for the industry is we're giving people a platform to be able to tell their story, demonstrate the value that they're providing to their customers, and really build, you know, trust around the product that they're they're building for for the industry. And I think research, you know, you know, is one of those things that, again, like, you can't imitate with AI.

And so by able being able to bring in people like Kenny from Coinbase and Max from MoonPay who are living every day in this evolution to come on and actually talk about, you know, things that are important to them, things that they're seeing. Sure. Maybe we're talking about their product. They're obviously building it for a reason. But being able to share with everyone else in the industry who's listening in and wants to be on the cutting edge of, you know, how that evolution is evolving.

And so we talk let's let's take this a step further into into research. Because we we've talked about this a lot. Like, what is the evolution of our content? Content? We go from this video, and then can we take this in this these insights and is it an article? And can we go a step deeper? You know, I I've mentioned I feel like I broke a record at this point, but I'm hearing these recurring themes throughout this last three weeks of doing the show. I can't help but think, what is that gonna look like in three months?

Mhmm. Pairing that with that's very similar to, say, you know, Max at MoonPay who's sitting on customer calls for three months, and he goes, wow. I've heard this topic brought up how many times. I should write about it. What is your approach to research? Where does that fit in into a team's go to market motion? Because we've seen just this almost resurgence of the research report in the past. I really wanna say year, it feels like, and you've done some great work with m zero.

You've done the state of Canton report with, with defense. How should teams be thinking about research, especially in this age where I don't wanna say that all research reports are the same. There's definitely a bit of recycling of topics. But how how where does it fit it into a go to market motion? What is the purpose of a research report even? Maybe let's start there.

Yeah. Yeah. I let's start let's start at the end, and I'll kinda answer up the chain. The purpose of a research report is to be able to aggregate data that you know, in this industry, maybe it's on chain, maybe it's not, but aggregate that data to be able to prove or demonstrate a thesis. And for the research report programs that we've been running, it's been a great opportunity to for companies to kinda stake their claim in what their thesis is. What are you seeing?

What is, you know, a very, you know, simple one, but powerful would be, know, what is the stable state of stablecoins? What makes enterprise grade adoption necessary? Being able to the get then go and host conversations with the key players who are enabling that transition or enabling that thesis to come to life becomes the core asset of this. Those conversations are where you unlock new insights.

You get to hear from people who are boots on the ground building these industries, their perspective of what the evolution is. And then you as the company can publish this report and share and demonstrate your expertise and understanding of the industry. From

yeah. Go for it. No. I was gonna say just a quick question on that. I think there's a there's a notion sometimes that, like, all the research reports are is to collect an email address to then pull people into, like, a marketing funnel. Would you say how much of that is true, and how much of that is, like, if you're thinking that you're missing the point on, like, the true purpose of a research report?

I I mean, I operate a lot, and, like, two things can be true at the same time. Like, sure. You know, from a business standpoint, a business objective, yeah, we wanna get people that we can talk to about our our business. You can also view it from a media landscape. Right? Like, you can say, oh, people are just doing research reports so they can post more social clips. Sure. But is that the core objective? It shouldn't be.

The core objective of a research report really should be focused on gathering true insights that help the industry propel forward. I think that's why we're all in this world is, like, we believe in this, and we have spent the last you know, I've been doing this since 2017 trying to convince people that people should care about crypto and blockchain.

And so this is just another mechanism and another lever to be able to demonstrate true value that we're providing, and being able to, have, again, have conversations with these leaders that are also spending every day trying to propel this industry forward. Now when I publish it, sure. I might ask for email because to me, that shows that you're interested in, you know, understanding more about what I'm talking about.

And, hopefully, you'll be interested in the other things that I'm talking about, and I wanna send those to you directly. But, you know, I I think there's two sides to it. Right? It's like we want we're all building in this industry together for a specific reason to educate people and to propel things forward being we like being on the edge of innovation.

But at the end of the day, we most of us have businesses to run, and it just happens to be a really effective strategy to then be able to repurpose and create a lot of derivative content around that. Because one of the things you mentioned before is, like, people are having sales calls where your customer is literally telling you what pain points they're experiencing.

And if you can aggregate all of those together and build a research report or build a report that answers all of those questions that they're experiencing, that becomes your best piece of sales collateral as well. And that's where kind of the content repurposing derivative mindset comes into play of, you know, most people have, you know, really interesting insightful conversations every day that just kind of fall flat there.

And what we do and what we try to, you know, promote is how do you take those insights and put them as many places as possible to get more people to see them, which educates the industry, but also, yes, builds your credibility and promotes your business.

I know that's one of the areas. And and we we did a first run of this, I think, two weeks ago with, the BBNK report with Coinbase and Artemis. I think that's something we're excited to to really refine as a motion and as a go to market partner, I guess I don't know if go to market partner partner is the best term. But as a partner to organizations, obviously, we wanna partner with you.

But, really, anybody call to action that's launching a research report, like, candidly, it is rare that I'm going to sit down and read all 50 pages. But I will skim it, and I will watch a clip on my on my Instagram or my LinkedIn feed or my ex feed. And I'm definitely more apt to go put on a thirty minute video while I'm doing the dishes that breaks down everything from this report. I think Drew even sent me something. You know, Stripe came out with their annual 2025 letter.

They just published a video of somebody reading the whole letter. Like, that that was it. It wasn't a conversation. It wasn't that. And it, like, even just has me thinking, like, is audio research reports you know, we've even talked about audio articles on our site. Like, how do people want to engage with this information, especially in this brain rot, short form content, attention spans decreasing. The other flip side that's been brought up by Drew is do we publish these?

Do people want a physical material where they can leave their phone at home and say, like, hey. I wanna go, like, dive really deep into this report. I think we've seen that with Arena Magazine or Quarter's done that with, earnings calls. How how do you think about like, because you mentioned derivative content. Okay. We we made this 50 page research report, but how do we get people to read it? How do we surface the most valuable insights?

Yeah. I mean, the the consumption of media is obviously evolving. You know, I think one of the the big kind of examples that I'll call on is, like, the evolution of, like, CNBC being recreated as TBPN on YouTube and live streams. Right? Like like, the format hasn't necessarily changed, but where people are viewing it has. And we can continue to look at the evolution of that. Obviously, there's a rise of short form video, and people want clippable segments where they can just kind of ingest in a second.

But I think the through line, and and we see this obviously with, like, attention spans falling, is people will want to be able to consume media the way they wanna be able to consume it. Some people might opt for the physical book and, you know, want to actually be able to touch the page and, you know, highlight with their favorite highlighter.

But at the same time, you know, most people, and I'd say the younger generation, and, you know, maybe there's some curve where it then goes the inverse, but most people wanna be able to, you know, listen to it while they're doing the dishes or doing some other thing. I think one of the the coolest examples I've seen recently was the individual who took all of the Epstein files and made an, yeah, an AI generated podcast out of it. It's like, yeah, who in the world has the time to go through the entire Epstein files?

But if I can listen to it in a, you know, 20 part series on an audio, yeah, I'll I'll I'll do that over the next few weeks. Yeah. Sure. And so the I think the game is less about how it's packaged. It's more on what narrative or what story are you telling. And, again, that kinda takes me back to, like, the and this goes back to my broader view of AI. Yeah. I can make a video into a blog, a newsletter, a podcast, a social clip instantaneously.

But if the message and what I'm talking about isn't interesting or isn't insightful, no one's gonna care. Mhmm. So the the emphasis of media moving forward needs to be, what do you stand for? What are you trying to say, and why should anyone care what you have to say? Like, what is your evidence of being able to talk about it? And that's where the idea of taste and credibility becomes so important because, you know, anyone can skew their thoughts everywhere now.

So the emphasis is really gonna come back to, do you have something interesting to say?

Man, that's such a good point, and that's even relevant to my own life right now. I'm I'm going through a a course in in my church, and we have to, like, write papers. And there's been this tension on, like, where does AI fit in? And I'm like, well, I sit there and I spew, like, a rough outline of my paper for five minutes to, you know, Claude and Mhmm. Cleans up the grammar and restructures it. Like, again, the key here is what are your thoughts? What are your input?

And there's definitely a misunderstanding of that, at least in in some of the the generation there. And and I think even just in the broader context of, like, how do we use I AI? And it it gets glanced over really easily that, like, hey. If the input is you, is your unique thoughts, it's it's your outlook on the world, then it's going to give an output that AI wouldn't have been able to just think of by itself. Yeah. What what do you think is the best like, is this is this is this just interviews?

Are we just hop hopping on and having conversations? Like, what what is the best mode to bring this? Or is this another area where we say, hey. It's it's the intangible. It's how are we gonna see a resurgence of how well people can interview, how well people can structure conversations and ask questions?

Yeah. Yeah. I think I mean, there's definitely a science between behind inner good interviews and how to elicit great conversation. Is that the biggest, you know, friction point? Probably not. I think step one is just, like, you know, again, you can go into AI, ChatGPT, whatever you use, Claude, and say, write me a LinkedIn post on this topic. But if you're not if you're not providing what you see differently or interesting or having a perspective about it, a, it's just gonna be super generic.

B, the next side of this is most people don't even really know what they stand for or what they feel strongly about. And I think that's a more introspective kind of, you know, journey that people need to go on on their own. But the nice thing about, you know, building a company is your company does usually stand for something, and it's a little bit easier to identify what that is.

So as far as, like, proper use of AI, yes, it all matters about what that input is, but that input has to be high quality for you to get something high quality out. And, you know, I talk about this a lot. I help people, you know, build personal brands and and whatnot. And we spend, like, the whole onboarding, like, trying to identify, like, what you actually believe. I I boil everything down to, like, what are your core beliefs? Like, how do we figure out what those are?

Because then we can just create content, and you can tell that core belief in in different ways, and that's where you get your variety. But you really need to understand what that core belief is going into, you know, whatever you're producing. And, yes, that can come up in an interview. It can come up based off of what's happening in current news. If you know what you stand for, you know what you believe, then the input becomes substantially higher. I

know that most of this conversation has not been inherently stable coin focused, but I think they're very intertwined, especially if you're anybody building in the space. Yeah. You made made a comment on earlier on the types of reports. You know, we've we've seen kind of these different iterations of the state of stablecoin report. I think everybody's done a great job. What type of reports do you think aren't being written that need to be written?

To your question.

And I yeah. Go for it. No. I was gonna say I said my my first guess in this kinda going on, like, the state of Canton report, you know, we we've always you've you've heard the term, like, riches are in the niches. Mhmm. Even us, you know, really niching down into this content. Do you do you think research reports are gonna kinda follow a similar trend? Because we've seen them pretty broad broad stroke to this point, state stablecoins stablecoins in emerging markets.

Like, yeah, I guess, kinda on that, would you agree, disagree, and then maybe what you what you were gonna say?

Yeah. I I agree. I mean, I think anytime you can niche down more on a topic, it makes it way more impactful for a smaller group of people, but by proxy, actually makes it more impactful for a larger group of people. And that's kind of the always been the the inverse paradigm of niching down. Right? Like, you would think that you're alienating people, but, actually, it just makes it more impactful for it's the same thing as, like, your first a thousand customers. Right.

And, like, stablecoins is niche as it is, but we can keep getting more niche. From a business standpoint, my advice is niche down to subjects that your buyer cares about. What is impactful for them? And by proxy, that creates more valuable information for the industry as a whole. To your point, like, status stablecoins is interesting, but it's who who does that apply to? Does that is it status stablecoins as a independent researcher? Is it status stablecoins for the fidelities of the world?

Is it state of stablecoins for a crypto degen who, you know, still holds their crypto punks? Like, who who is this actually meant for and right for them? And that's, you know, definitely that kind of business lens. The second component of this is and I think research what I've seen is a lot of it sits in the quantitative.

And I think back to, you know, kind of the theme of this conversation has been the qualitative, the so what, how does this impact me, is always the most compelling in my opinion because we can publish and and I think it makes it more obvious with, like, on chain data because, technically, everyone has access to all of it. But the part that makes data or insights interesting is being able to connect the dots between what we're seeing and how that impacts me as an individual.

And so when you are putting these reports together, have an idea of who you're writing this report for and try to connect the dots a little bit of, like, we're seeing this, and this is what the implication of that means for this type of individual. And that to me is the way that you bring a report from being very generic and just kind of stating facts to something that becomes, you know, more insightful or more impactful for, you know, individuals in the space.

Do you think there's tension when you're talking to, like, go to market teams or founders, like, just on that notion of, like, if you're speaking to everybody, you're speaking to nobody. Like, don't be afraid to get granular because I I I've felt in the past, like, tension between, like even with when we're thinking about, like, our own content. Like Yeah. Do I want to have a clip that reaches a 100,000 people, or would I rather have a clip that reaches, like, 10,000 of the right people?

And it's like, which one is more valuable? Because I think in society, we're generally pushed, like, in this culture of, like, more and more and more that, like, more is always better, and you can't you can't convince me otherwise. You know? Like, especially, I think even when, you know, I I've I've just I've heard that that notion over and over again, whether it's with founders working with agencies. I'm sure you've experienced it with content writing.

Like, how how do you balance that, and and how what would you tell somebody that is very much in that mindset of, like, more always equals better?

I mean, the the unsexy, obnoxious answer is there's, like, not one way to do it, and I think that's why it is it is a debate. Right? Because there's, Yeah. We can get to the same goal a few different ways. But the whole concept of niching down into a topic is you build credibility as you expand out of that.

So if you can be the only person that talks about one specific topic, like, again, stablecoins for companies in The US that have 10 employees that, you know, are building in their under these regulatory constrictions. Right? Like, the more specific you get about the individual you're talking to, you will inherently become that one person that they will go to. And then you can as you build more reputation and more credibility, you kind of expand back out of that.

So instead of, you know, talking and talking about crypto or blockchain or finance as a whole, which is hard to talk about because there's a lot of people competing for that narrative, go down more specifically. And at that stage, you're really just worried or you're really only concerned about reaching the right people who care about that topic. And we trust the algorithm or whatever platform, our ability to distribute to reach those individuals. If it's relevant to them, they should be interested.

Now as far, like, more, I would say volume is always a good thing. I think volume is fantastic. But stay focused on that one individual. Right? If that if that niche that you own and you're constantly putting out, you know, a 100 pieces of content a week, you're gonna reach everyone in that. And then as you build more credibility, you kinda step your way out. So it's volume, but being specific about who you're talking to.

And then as you kind of grow out of that, niche, you kind of gradually step up into larger and larger categories.

Awesome. Sorry. We're we're coming up on actually, I think we actually went over our time, which is always a good problem to have. I guess last last question. What do we have to look forward to when it comes to, you know, to the research and and contributor program in the next coming months?

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we've already worked with so many incredible companies to date with contribution. It's really you know, if you have something you wanna talk about, and we're giving you a platform to speak about it. We're doing on application basis, and so we wanna get as many people on as possible where we can really help you capture, you know, your narrative, your insights, and, you know, like I said, give you a platform to to tell that story.

As for research, you know, we we wanna help capture again, like, what the trends are happening in this space and be that presenter of media in a way that's unique and meets people with how they wanna consume their media. So working with, you know, teams like defense and others on being able to kind of uncover a thesis together and deliver those insights to the rest of the community and and the rest of the people, you know, tuning into our content. So a lot to look forward to.

If you guys are interested in in doing either research or contributing, feel free to reach out to one of us. And, yeah, a lot of good content to come.

Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Will. Yeah. See Tom. Of you in the future. Obviously, at next research report that we publish, we'll decide to dive into it. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Talk to later. Sounds good. Alright. See you later. Alright. We made it. Made it through the show solo. Hopefully, only have to do that every now and then. I'm just getting was fun. It's a great guest. Like I said, the we're doing the show for the community. We're doing this show for people that we wanna have on on a recurring basis.

And so, you know, as Will said, it's it's the conversations it's the conversations that AI can't replace, and I've really I think that resonates with with our mission, and what we wanna build StableDash to be. So one last departing departing gift here. I wanna talk about StableDash. I've said I mentioned it earlier. If you're in the Bay Area, if you're around the Bay Area, if you're gonna be at a stay very stable, a very stable conference, so many stables, on Thursday. See us this morning. Get in get in to run.

If you need this link, like I if you're subscribed to our newsletter, I've sent it there, or reach out to me on LinkedIn or on X. Happy to send it over for you to register. Like I said, big detail here. Some prizes for the winners. CAS gold card at 10,000 value. Also, be giving away a CAS founders card as well as a CAS Bitcoin black card. These cards have some sweet cashback, some great perks. And if you don't have a CAS card, they're even just so high quality. I have one. It's just, you know, it's thick.

It's metal. I think I even get looks because sometimes I think it's an Amex black card. So like I said, definitely register this for this event. We'd love to see you. If you're going to be in San Francisco on Thursday, say hi. We'll be doing content all day at a very stable conference. And like I said, be good to see you all in real life. So till next time. We'll be back Thursday with the stream, and we'll see you next week as well. Stay stable.