TLDR

In this episode, Jason Kam interviews Brandon, co-founder of Layer3, about building a crypto-native two-sided marketplace. Brandon shares how Layer3 serves gig workers, traders, and emerging market users, generating strong revenue with plans to double to $30M. He introduces a bold IAC-inspired multi-brand strategy, explores asset issuance and trading, and stresses the importance of mobile UX, smart capital allocation, and transparent investor relations to fuel sustainable growth.

Chapters / Timeline

• 00:58 Introduction to Layer 3 and Its Growth  

• 03:50 Understanding Layer 3's Consumer Base  

• 07:07 The Business Model and Revenue Streams  

• 10:00 Market Dynamics and Customer Acquisition  

• 13:03 Profitability and Financial Strategy  

• 15:54 Future Growth and Market Trends  

• 24:33 Revenue Growth and Sales Strategy  

• 25:39 Innovative Multi-Enterprise Subsidiary Model  

• 28:58 Exploring Trading and Asset Issuance  

• 34:20 Focus on Product Development and Market Entry  

• 36:00 Inorganic Growth and Market Optimization  

• 39:55 Capital Allocation and Future Strategies

Transcript

<Jason Kam (00:59)> 

All right, we're live. Welcome to another episode of BitCast. I'm your host, Jason Kam, aka Maple Leaf Cap. Today is May 14th, 2025, 8 p.m. Hong Kong time. BitCast is being live streamed to BitClub members. Questions are from the members and my own. Today I'm speaking with Brandon, the co-founder of Layer 3. Brandon, welcome.

<Brandon (00:22)> 

Yeah, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

<Jason Kam (01:22)> 

Yeah, I remember us talking like, I don't know, three or four years ago when you sourced me from Twitter. then it was just kind of like, I don't know, you were an investor back then and you're now a founder and I'm sort of an investor running a fund. Really glad to be interviewing you and talking about L3DA Token and the company. We're going to jump right into it. guess here's a thorny question for you. I don't think your mind share on Twitter is all that big for L3D project. So how do you have 300k to 500k MAU today and where do they come from?

<Brandon (01:59)> 

Yeah, it's a great it is a great question. I would say mind share wise we probably could do a better job The business itself has a pretty natural flywheel to it that took I think a year or two years to build But it's no different than any traditional aggregator and the flywheel Essentially is that we're a two-sided marketplace for those in the audience who maybe are a little bit less familiar on one side you have Protocols so large layer one and layer two ecosystems as well as hundreds of apps and the other side you have consumers that come to layer three for discovery

And so when we first started, it was very hard to get that flywheel spinning because you couldn't go to protocols and say, we'll help them acquire users if you didn't have consumers and consumers didn't come to your platform because there was nothing to discover. Like there was no marketplace that'd be akin to Airbnb not having inventory. so we just sold to anyone who would listen to us primarily at the app level. And I basically just would pass these people and say, hey, like you should distribute your token through layer three. We'll help you reach users and so forth.

Ultimately, we got that flywheel spinning through just a lot of hustle. And now when a new ecosystem comes to layer three, if it's a new layer one or layer two, with that comes a whole new cohort of users. So as a for instance, if we do something with Bearer Chain, there's a whole cohort of consumers who want to explore the Bearer Chain ecosystem that then come to layer three to discover and explore Bearer Chain on our platform. Now,

I would say roughly 45 % of those consumers will then stick around to go and do other things in the layer three ecosystem. So each time we have that, that sort of incremental ad on the B2B side of our marketplace, we're able to acquire new consumers and that flywheel happens pretty organically. So while the core layer three footprint on social perhaps is not as significant as you're pointing out. What you have is each of these brands promoting their activations on layer three. And then that helps us acquire a natural consumer footprint. And that flywheel is just constantly spinning in the background.

So that's really how we think about it. And then I'll also note just before I pause is when we define our monthly active users, we're defining users as those that are transacting on the platform. So revenue generating users. So it is, think, an intellectually honest definition of the word. Cause I think a lot of people are just, you know, site visits or things like that.

<Jason Kam (03:11)>
Yeah, monthly active paying. I guess my question is more so towards like, who are they? Because they are definitely not loud on Twitter. It's almost a completely different segment of the market versus your typical, you know, US-based or China-based 25-year-old aping, you know, DJing coins. Are they like Indians, Pakistani, Argentinians who just like no job and they just click and just make money? Who are they?

<Brandon (03:34)>
Yeah. So I often say there's three types of consumers in this industry. The first is the consumer who has a profit motive through effort. So that's your play-to-earn gaming, airdrop farming nowadays, Kaito, things like that, where they're spending their time and their effort to express their profit motive. They more or less view themselves as gig workers on-chain. Like instead of driving for Uber, they're just spending time clicking around on-chain.
This cohort, unfortunately, by I think the intellectual class, has a bad rep—like they're lower quality users and so forth. But by and large, most chains are built on the back of their work. Most ecosystems are built on the back of their work. So that is one cohort.

The second cohort is profit through capital. These are your traders. They're speculators. These are people spending time on Pump.fun, on Hyperliquid. They're trading spot, they're trading perps. They tend to be higher LTV in so far as they're higher wallet balance and you can generate higher fees from them. That has, I think, greater mindshare on crypto Twitter just because it's a higher-value cohort and more people are competing for that share.

And then your third is basically your consumer in the emerging market that doesn't care about crypto, but benefits from access to basic financial rails. Our product serves right now the first. We have a number of bets aimed at serving the second, but that just gets less mindshare on crypto Twitter.

They are viewed to be a lower caste or class in the hierarchy of status within this industry. But that doesn't mean that you can't build a really powerful business around them. And it also doesn't mean that they're not valuable consumers. These people spend most of their days on-chain.

Again, they do view themselves as gig workers. So there's kind of an argument to be made for the fact that we know the marginal rate of on-chain labor because we serve all these ecosystems in a really interesting way. No chain, I think, would be able to come to market without appealing to this segment. Very few apps would as well. And that's how I'd classify them.

As far as geos—yeah, I think you're looking at more emerging markets, places where that time is really valuable and the earnings that they can get from spending their time on-chain is valuable to the family's bottom line at the end of the month.

<Jason Kam (05:33)>
And their loyalty is more to you, I'm guessing, because this is viewed as a place to earn. They don’t really give a shit about what protocols there are. They kind of just—money, like, let me do these quests.

<Brandon (06:31)>
Yeah, exactly. I think it’s someone who maybe makes a living by driving for Uber and also across Uber Eats and so forth. They have a tremendous amount of loyalty to Layer 3.
I do think that sometimes they discover things that they’re super interested in—like Eclipse is an instance. Right now, I think a lot of consumers have discovered the Eclipse ecosystem through us and are spending more time there. So that organically happens.

The other thing you have to bear in mind is we try to take a really unopinionated view. So long as a protocol or ecosystem is audited and it’s a usable product, we will try to serve them. But a lot of times those ecosystems or those apps, maybe they don’t really have good utility or the 10th DEX isn’t that much better than a Uniswap.
So in those cases, the consumers might be a little more mercenary. They’re coming to get paid to spend time on that DEX. But the teams don’t mind it either. Because, as you know—and I think many people on the call know—different teams are playing different games.
Some are trying to get a listing, so they want their metrics to look good. Or they’re trying to get a raise done, so they want their metrics to look good. When I say that, I think sometimes people have allergic reactions, but that also exists everywhere else in software too.

If a team raised a seed round and they’re trying to get a Series A done, and they have $500,000 in the bank, they know that if they don’t get that Series A done, they’re probably going out of business. So they’re going to spend a lot of that through Facebook or Google ads to get their metrics higher so they can fundraise. And I think the same dynamic exists here.

<Jason Kam (08:09)>
Yeah, it was extremely relevant, I guess, before this year, where your means of exit is to low float high FTV exit through active market makers on Binance, let's say.
I would imagine for protocols who needed on-chain transact, especially layer one and layer two—like on-chain transaction, active users, active paying users—the dirty little secret is they sort of paid. Like, they got those numbers they wanted through you and a few other actors.

<Brandon (08:39)>
Yeah. I mean, pricing power in this industry is downstream of whoever can help you achieve your goals, right? So there are two goals teams have. One is generating a great business, and the other is generating a good token.
And a token is downstream of good listings and so forth. You know, hopefully in the fullness of time, the good business is the first prerequisite to a good token. But right now there are different games in the market being played.

But anyway, you have pricing power if you can help them accomplish the “good business” part. And that’s where we sit, which is—they come to us and say, “I don’t have users. Help us get users.” We can help them do so.
But as I mentioned, the tooling and the infrastructure that we’ve built is intentionally unopinionated. So they come to us and say, “We want to generate revenue.” We have the mechanic to target users who have higher wallet balances or fee spending—we can get them to a positive ROI on their spend or positive ROAS.

If they come to us and say, “We just want as much transaction activity as possible,” we can also do that. Where we draw the line is we don’t help with social or Discord engagement or anything like that. That’s just a really murky business, because if you try and help them get a bunch of bots on Twitter, what you're going to end up doing is diluting the Layer 3 user base to a point where it’s pretty much unapproachable for anyone who wants to reach high-quality users.
So we intentionally, for business reasons, don’t serve that need.

<Jason Kam (10:01)>
And I guess for any protocols who need this kind of on-chain transactional throughput, are you pound for pound the cheapest solution out there?

<Brandon (10:10)>
I don’t think we’re the cheapest, no. We do price on a premium basis relative to others. So I would say we’re not the cheapest, but we’re the most effective.

<Jason Kam (10:19)>
You are the most effective because the transactions that came from you do not look like bots, and they are the highest fidelity data that they can present to exchanges.

<Brandon (10:29)>
Yeah, I mean, if I had to point out, there are probably two or three market misconceptions about our business. One of them is that they’re bots.
It comes back to the classifications I had mentioned earlier: these people are spending time with the profit motive. Like, no one wakes up and is like, “I'm passionate about swapping on the 10th DEX on Avalanche.” That’s just not a consumer that exists, no matter how much the founder wants to believe it.
But there are real people with real wallet balances, and they have the propensity to stick around.

So we ran this analysis—it’s a crude analysis—but basically we took an aggregate score on the quality of the project based on how much funding they had, how many audits they had, and so forth.
We were trying to isolate: if the project is high quality, will our consumer base retain organically within their base?

For the top 25% of projects by that score—which again, it was somewhat subjective, but based on how much they had raised, how long they had been around, etc.—60% of the consumers we brought to them retained organically.
So if the project is high quality, the consumers we bring will retain.

But there’s also a long tail of low-quality projects where we can’t promise that our consumer base will retain, because again, no one wants to spend time on that DEX.

<Jason Kam (11:41)>
That's cool. And then you made 20 million dollars of ARR last year?

<Brandon (11:46)>
Roughly. I mean, last year public numbers were 16 million. We closed the year on a run rate basis of 20, but all in we booked 16. Profitable since Q1 of last year.

<Jason Kam (11:57)>
Can you break that down? How many accounts contributed to that 16 to 20? And then how does that—that's the cash flow—how does that flow down to your actual profit number?

<Brandon (12:09)>
Yeah, so we make money in three ways, but I’ll simplify it and just say there’s B2B revenue and B2C revenue.
So B2B revenue: protocols pay Layer 3 in some form to distribute their token or reach users through our business. There’s a huge range in the way that we price those because some teams are pre-token, some are post-token, some are going through TGE.
So sometimes we’re getting a percentage of total allocation, sometimes they’re paying more of a SaaS fee—things like that. That’s part of our business.

Over history, probably 50% of our revenue comes from B2B.
Then there’s B2C. So in B2C, you have trading fees. We have a bridge and swap natively built on top of Socket and LiFi where we take a fee. It naturally fits into our product because consumers are spending time across 40 chains and 500 apps, so they want to move assets around.
Then we have what’s known as a credential fee. Users spend 25 cents every time they complete an activation. They spend that fee because of the downstream earning potential they get from it.
It’s basically just like their ticket to earn on Layer 3. That also, on the B2C side, is about 50% of our revenue.

As for the protocols that we serve: we have about 40 chains that we’re live on. Not all of those chains are paying customers, but we serve them.
Then above that you have probably 500 to 600 different apps—most of which are paying.

The contract sizes really range. Basically, we segment this no different than how you’d segment enterprise software.
You have your large enterprise, which are the chains—you’re typically looking at high six to low seven figure contracts.
You’ve got your medium-sized enterprise, which are the larger blue-chip apps—your Compounds, your Aave's—there you’re looking at higher six figures.
Then you’ve got your long tail of like Seed to Series A audited apps—there you’re looking at closer to five figure contracts.

As for how that flows through to our bottom line: look, we are a 17-person team, so it doesn’t take a lot to run this business.
We’re not operating a chain, so our infra costs are relatively low. We do maintain a pretty healthy margin.

How we think about that profit: we had put on an experimental buyback for the past two quarters, which we plan to pause.
I think our thesis is no different than traditional capital allocation. We feel we’re still early enough and growing fast enough that we want to continue to reinvest into organic growth. But at some point, we would explore buybacks.

<Jason Kam (14:35)>
Yeah, and ARR is basically pure profits—like it’s on a net basis. You don’t—you kind of don’t pay it up. Okay. And 17 bodies—it’s like less than five million a year I’m guessing. So you are like deeply, deeply profitable.

<Brandon (14:48)>
Correct.

<Jason Kam (14:49)>
Okay, that’s great. Therefore, you don’t need to ever sell your token to fund yourself, I’m guessing?

<Brandon (14:55)>
Yeah, correct. We don’t need to do any type of fundraise for cash needs.
We do find value in having investors. A lot of our business comes from referrals. And so if there’s an investor that we think brings geographic presence or has an interesting portfolio that we can cross-sell into, we’ll obviously find a way to work with them.

<Jason Kam (15:14)>
Got it. Then the profit now rolls into a treasury. And does it accrue to equity? Do you dividend it out? Or you’re retaining it for growth and in the future it will accrue to the token? How do you think about that split?

<Brandon (15:24)>
The latter. It’s a value that accrues to the token in all cases. For regulatory purposes, there’s an equity entity, but there’s no value that’s accruing to it.
The basic premise is: we had experimented with buybacks, but I think we’re three and a half years into our journey.
And if you asked a marketplace that was three and a half years old whether or not they wanted to do buybacks or reinvest in growth, they would say reinvest in growth. Marketplaces are businesses of network effects.

<Brandon (15:54)>
And I think our point of view is that if we can continue to maintain a healthy financial profile, why not reinvest that into growth in a way that’s organic?
We have explored inorganic, but to be honest, I think we’re not at the scale yet where we can do acquisitions that are accretive. So it would be something we’d explore downstream.

<Jason Kam (16:14)>
I mean, you should have a pretty sizable treasury at this point—is it like 10, 20, 30 million dollars type of treasury that you have?

<Brandon (16:22)>
Between 20 and 30.

<Jason Kam (16:43)>
And the projects who need a higher valuation—for whatever reason, for fundraising, for exits, whatever—and then your business is a ticker on that.
Given what we’re seeing in the changes in the private market and how these companies trade, do you feel good about this year’s ARR continuously growing? Or do you feel like it’ll be a tough comp this year versus last year?

<Brandon (17:05)>
So the heuristic in private venture markets over the past 20 years—and this is hard to substantiate—is that 40 cents on every dollar raised went to Facebook or Google ads. That’s the number that’s often thrown around.

Our worldview is you probably want to handicap that a little bit. But call it 20 to 30 cents of the treasury of most projects will go towards growth in some capacity.
And growth in the history of the internet always goes to the most efficient distribution channel.
So if we can prove to be efficient, then why would we not be able to capture that? So I think we’re going to continue to see spend there.

As for expansion—look, for better or for worse, the industry has created a pretty interesting incentive that you know well and is talked about on Twitter, around the funding of new chains. And in order to launch a new chain, you do need a lot of capital.
So as long as that continues to exist, I think we’re going to continue to see expansion on the B2B side. These chains are increasingly competitive with one another. They need mindshare, they need users, they need transaction activity.
And we’re one of the more efficient places for them to spend that money. That trade, in and of itself, as a macro trend, is great for business.

For any aggregator, the strength of your product is how many consumers you have.  Aggregation theory is a term Ben Thompson from Stratechery had popularized. And I think most on the call are familiar with it. The basic premise is that you’re aggregating the supply side of a given market—so Amazon aggregating e-commerce, Netflix aggregating content. You own a distribution channel or at least lease one, but you have a direct relationship with the consumer and you can achieve economies of scale and capture a lot of value in doing so.

But all of those businesses—the strength of their business is downstream of how many consumers they actually own.

And so the way we think about our North Star for business expansion is: owning more types of consumers.

I had mentioned those three cohorts—we kind of own the “profit for effort.”
If we can continuously own the “profit for capital,” that’s great for us, because then we can go and serve a lot of these products that want to reach those consumers.
And we can get them users who have wallet balances maybe close to a million or two million in size.

So figuring out creative ways to serve that cohort, as well as the first cohort, is how we think about expansion. Because it just gives us more pricing power.

You’re seeing this today, right? Binance, or all the exchanges like that—I’d argue they have probably the best pricing power in the industry.Because teams will pay upwards of $10 million to get that distribution.

So that’s hopefully how we can go about growing.

<Jason Kam (18:30)>
I guess a part of your business growth would come from just signing on new customers who need metrics.
And most of them are layer 1s and layer 2s. Does the propensity to spend from a customer increase or decrease after the TGE?

<Brandon (18:53)>
On a number basis of customers, I would say it decreases. On a dollar basis, it increases.

So you see increased spend from Optimism, Arbitrum, Base—right? We’ve served those ecosystems now for many years.
And we’ve been able to acquire more revenue per period from those teams.
So higher quality ones—they’re growing, they have healthy treasury management.
You’re also selling into a really sophisticated buyer. A lot of these teams hire people who understand how to measure ROAS and things like that.

But then you’ve got this long tail—where I’m selling into a founder, the founder raised, call it, $20 million for some new chain from a group of investors that maybe many on this call probably don’t really respect.
And that’s a less sophisticated buyer. They’re just trying to juice their numbers.
And then they don’t do anything. Their chain doesn’t really exist. They don’t really build it. They’re just playing this trade that’s existing in the market.

So they’re a little bit harder to retain on a number basis, but the dollar basis continues to expand because the higher quality ones spend more—if that makes sense.

<Jason Kam (20:54)>
Yes. So those scam projects turn off, but they pay you a lot of money and they’re kind of dumb.
And the good customers—you have a higher tick rate over time, wallet share expands, because this is not one you maintain.

<Brandon (21:04)>
Yeah. That’s where our business is similar to Binance. And I’m not comparing the two profiles—I don’t want to come across as ignorant. Binance is in a world of their own.
But at the same time, what happens is you have certain projects that come to these exchanges and you have such significant pricing power because they’re insensitive to the cost. They just want to get through this period.
And there, you can capture a lot of revenue. And you’re always going to have a supply of those projects because of the way venture funding works.

But then there are ones that are lifetime customers.

If you were to look at Facebook’s customer base over time, I imagine you’d have something very similar.
There are a lot of venture-backed companies that have spent on Facebook or Google ads that ultimately went out of business—but contributed to Facebook’s top line.
But then the ones that retain over time—the Nikes, the Coca-Colas—those are large, large parts of their advertising revenue.

<Jason Kam (21:54)>
So the revenue from scam projects, from new L1, L2 launches, and the existing customers kind of taking up their wallet share—do you feel like that's a significant source of growth for this year?
Or would you sort of prefer a higher growth trajectory from, let's say, the second bucket of users, which is accessing the higher value group that is CT?

<Brandon (22:15)>
The latter. I mean, hopefully the efficiency of markets is that we get just a higher quality customer base that sustains over time.
They continue to grow their spend over time. We attract larger and higher quality consumers, different types of consumers.
That would be the direction I want our business to go—I think it's healthier.

You’re selling into a more mature buyer set, a higher quality buyer set.

If all of a sudden macro changes—let's say rates go to zero, capital goes out on the risk curve, LPs fund venture firms, venture firms start plowing money into these types of businesses—we’re still net beneficial.
But that adds some cyclicality. You're going to see a spike and then you're going to see a trough.
Whereas I'd prefer that we grow our marketplace with customers that can grow with us.

<Jason Kam (23:03)>
And then of the user base who are more pronounced in CT and do have more capital—what’s the effort to kind of grab them, which hasn’t been in focus in the past?

<Brandon (23:17)>
Are you talking on the consumer side or the B2B side?

<Jason Kam (23:21)>
Consumer side—the folks who are actually clicking and doing things on site.

<Brandon (23:46)>
We haven’t spoken too much about this yet, but when it comes to crypto, consumers really resonate with specific brands.
And oftentimes brands are relatively baked. If I were to go to most people in the industry and ask them what they think about Layer 3, I think they'd have a predefined opinion on it—and many consumers as well.

Our worldview is that if we want to reach some of these consumers, we might need new brands to do so.
And we might need new surfaces—be it on mobile, or more of a trading-style interface.
A user who has a wallet balance of one to two million is going to interact with a different UX and a different brand than a wallet balance of 10,000.

So that’s how we're going to go about reaching them.

That’s the current strategy—to build new brands under the broader Layer 3 umbrella.

The analogy would be: this exists on the internet, right? There’s a certain consumer for Instagram, a certain consumer for the blue app on Facebook.
If you look at a business like IAC, which owns Expedia or Match, there are all these different types of brands that resonate with different consumers, but they accrue to the same parent equity—or parent token in our case.
And that’s how we would think about it.

<Jason Kam (24:33)>
Yes. Hold that thought because we’ll get right into it.
But before that effort takes place, do you have a target for what your ARR looks like—excluding that effort—for this year or next year?

<Brandon (24:45)>
I’d like to double. I mean, I think we could expand our revenue base in our current business to double. So that would put us around the $30 million mark.
We’ve got some work to do on that, just based on the year so far.

But one of the things is—we’ve gotten the marketplace to a point where we can expand.
If we add a new salesperson, that person can get to kind of a 3X on their costs—which is the rough rule of thumb for enterprise software—pretty quickly.
So in probably 60 days, a salesperson on the Layer 3 team can basically pay themselves three times over.
And that is where I think we’re going to reinvest—just adding more bodies to serve more ecosystems, to hopefully get the flywheel spinning.

<Jason Kam (25:27)>
Very helpful. Tell me about this ICI multi-enterprise subsidiary effort, and what's the most exciting thing right now on that front?

<Brandon (25:39)>
Yeah, I think we’re still trying to keep some of this close to the chest. But if anyone in the audience is familiar with what Barry Diller built at IAC, I think it’s an interesting model.

The way the model worked was you’ve got a parent company that creates new brands—Expedia, Match.com, etc.
Those new brands reach new audiences, get to a point of maturity, and then they spin.
And when they spin—in the case of IAC—the IAC shareholders get a claim on the stock that spun out.
So it ends up being extremely accretive for stockholders.

I think no one has tried to do this in crypto for a few reasons.
First, a lot of time, capital, and attention has gone to infra—so there hasn’t been that much human capital thrown at consumer in an interesting way.

Second, there’s less sophistication in crypto capital markets and being able to tell the story to capital markets.
A lot of people immediately think “grift” when they hear of multiple tokens.
But you could do it in a way that’s unified and in the true spirit of how equity markets work.

Third, people understand that consumers resonate with different brands, but they haven’t tried to do it with one unified distribution footprint—which is how we’re trying to do it.
One shared infrastructure, one shared data layer—because we have a tremendous amount of data on all consumers in this industry.

So that’s how we’re thinking about it.
Time will tell whether the strategy proves successful. IAC obviously did it at much greater scale—thousands of employees, much more mature business, greater balance sheet, etc.

But if we do it the way we aspire to, we can pull it off in a really accretive way.
That accretive way would be valuable to token holders. If you’re a token holder, you get a claim on any spin.
If the asset’s not spun and there’s no new token issuance, then the cash flow automatically accrues anyway.

<Jason Kam (27:27)>
It’s obviously early days, but when you do it, would it be similar to equities—where you just get the airdrop and nothing is retained?

<Brandon (27:40)>
Correct.

<Brandon (27:45)>
Nothing is retained by the company. But in theory, you have all investors and team members as token holders, so they benefit too.
You’d also have retail.

There are some nuances you’d want to solve for. Equity markets are a little more mature—you have a more entrenched shareholder base and less churn than in token holder bases.

So to solve for that, you could have some kind of claim period.
Athena has done this really well where you get your vested Athena.
And I think it’d be something similar—where you kind of get a vest, and if you sell your parent token, then you forfeit that vest in some capacity.

But we’d need to think through the true structure.
We’re many years away from there being a spin on a token, but the concept would be: divide to compound.
It’s an interesting model and has worked really well for something like IAC or Liberty Media.

<Jason Kam (28:44)>
For sure. Can you share anything about what you’re trying to build—or at least what lanes you want to pick?

<Brandon (28:58)>
There are two lanes: trading and asset issuance.
Those are the two largest markets to reach new consumers in.

Asset issuance has a wide range in this industry.
How we’d approach it would be something net-new and interesting from a consumer point of view.

On trading—we believe there’s a gap in the market, despite many teams attempting it—for a truly unique mobile experience.
One that combines the primitives we’ve seen over the past few years: spot, perp, prediction markets.
Things that appeal to crypto consumers and also to consumers outside of crypto who like the intersection of equity markets and sports betting.

There’s a gap to serve that market.
And if you can do it, you can capture an extremely high LTV base.

<Jason Kam (29:50)>
Is it going to be entertaining—like livestream Robinhood—or more serious?

<Brandon (30:17)>
The former. Look, Gen Z is entering the workforce.
There’s a massive wealth transfer from Boomers and Millennials to Gen Z.
They like internet-native experiences. Sports betting participation is increasing. Flying to Vegas is decreasing.
This is all coming online.

There are many interesting primitives—trading on Hyperliquid, prediction markets.
People are more familiar with parlays and betting UX. So there is absolutely a viral consumer product to be built on mobile that combines these primitives in the next five years—it just hasn’t been built yet.

We feel we have the right ingredients to bring something like that to market in a differentiated way.

But the challenge is not the product—it’s the distribution.
You either need the distribution channel or an insanely viral growth loop.

<Jason Kam (31:59)>
How much money do you plan to spend on this?

<Brandon (32:03)>
If we follow the IAC model, we could create subsidiaries and source capital via financing.
Balance sheet is strong, so we can invest ourselves too.

From an R&D perspective, probably $2–3 million per bet as a cap, but likely less before you know whether it’s working.

<Jason Kam (32:57)>
I’m guessing that’s just for the product. Marketing will cost a lot more?

<Brandon (33:08)>
Yes. But if the product is revenue-generating, we could finance the ad spend through a claim on cashflow—like in traditional software.

It wouldn’t cost too much to build—six months with a good team.
But the bulk of spend is definitely in advertising.

<Jason Kam (33:53)>
So how far along are you? Should we expect this by Thanksgiving or Christmas?

<Brandon (34:00)>
Yes, that’s the timeline.

<Brandon (34:06)>
We’ve been thinking about it for maybe five months.

<Jason Kam (34:10)>
Thinking, but not building?

<Brandon (34:14)>
We’ve laid some groundwork—but we want to keep most of this close to the chest.

<Jason Kam (34:20)>
Got it. So that’s trading. And asset issuance is more preliminary?

<Brandon (34:30)>
Correct. It’s a big market. We’ve done some mapping of what’s worked and not.
Asset issuance could mean Pump or Tether/Circle. We’re mapping it out and think there might be something compelling.

<Jason Kam (35:00)>
So it’s one bet at a time. Trading is first.

<Brandon (35:04)>
Exactly. Focus is key.
We’re four years into our business with 17 people—we’re not going to say we’ll be the next IAC just yet.
But we want to thoughtfully explore adjacent lanes without distracting from our core.

<Jason Kam (35:34)>
So just to be clear, you’re incubating these—not just investing in them?

<Brandon (35:43)>
Exactly.

<Jason Kam (35:47)>
Got it. So we talked about two things. I think these are cool. I think the IAC-style spin model makes a lot of sense. It's interesting.
Anything else that’s on your mind that gets you juiced? Are you buying other things? What else are you thinking about?

<Brandon (36:00)>
We would be interested in inorganic growth if something compelling came along.
One thing we looked at was a whole new cohort of Stake-style competitors.

This is something crypto Twitter doesn’t like to talk about, partly because many of these aren’t venture-backed.
But a lot of these crypto-enabled casinos throw off a lot of cash—not Stake-level cash, but still meaningful.
We’ve looked at some of them.

I was in Dubai two weeks ago and spent a full day with one such team.
Nothing has really clicked yet from an alignment perspective. You’ve got to manage your house balance sheet, your risk.
But if you get those parameters right, then it just becomes a game of growth—how do you acquire more users via ads?

That’s a game we could potentially play.
But again, one thing at a time.

Inorganic growth would be interesting because you're acquiring a consumer base and a profitable engine.
And a lot of the people building these types of businesses might not want to run them long-term.

The second thing is within our core business—there’s still a lot of work we can do to optimize distribution.
If you’re a protocol and you show up to Layer 3, you get access to this no-code builder—like Facebook Ads Manager.

You predefine criteria, load your budget, etc.
That can always be optimized: how to reach the right consumer at the right time, what’s the best reward profile to get the behavior you want.

That engine is already humming in the background, but we can still do more.
We want to continue expanding B2B revenue in our core.

<Jason Kam (37:58)>
I see. So just to summarize: as long as the space sees L1 growth and VC funding, hopefully you’ll double that business this year—maybe hit $30 million.
Then with optimization, more customers, increased tick rate, and wallet share…
Then off your treasury, you’re probably going to spend on one bet this year and maybe two next year.
These could result in a token airdrop spin fashion to token holders. And those could be worth a lot—depending on success. Am I missing anything?

<Brandon (38:44)>
The inorganic piece. But again, that’s…

<Jason Kam (38:46)>
…but it doesn’t seem like you’re too seriously looking into it?

<Brandon (38:50)>
Yeah, I think that’s a lower probability. There’s enough focus on optimizing our current business.
If we can take our current cost structure and maintain profitability—there’s still plenty of room to expand.
That takes a lot of time, effort, and focus.

If we can pull that off and also explore one adjacent area—that would be a successful next 18 months.

<Jason Kam (39:25)>
Last question before I open it up: after Trump, how does your view on the value accrual model for your token change?
Say you run out of growth options, already funded your bets, and still have a huge cash pile.
What’s the best use of that capital?

<Brandon (39:55)>
Before and after Trump, our worldview was always that capital allocation is a studied practice.
There’s decades of research on how to do it well. There’s a great book—I imagine you’ve read it—called The Outsiders, about capital allocation by eight of the greatest CEOs.

There are a few things you can do with a balance sheet:

• Invest in organic growth (more product, team, etc.)

• Inorganic growth (M&A)

• Return value to token holders via buybacks or dividends

• Retire debt (though we have none now)

Dividends make less sense in crypto due to tax inefficiency—it’s like staking or yield.
So it would be some kind of buyback.

<Jason Kam (40:48)>
And you’re comfortable with that?

<Brandon (40:51)>
Yeah. We’ve gotten to a point where there’s enough precedent for teams with our structure to do a disclosed buyback.
There are disclosures you need to make.

That’s something we should talk about—disclosures. I have thoughts on that.

But yes, we’re open to buybacks once we reach maturity.
Problem is, the token holder base is still relatively unsophisticated—less so than even retail equity.
So you get “when buyback? when burn?”—and that’s not healthy.

If you’re 3 years in and growing, why would you do buybacks?

<Jason Kam (40:56)>
And when you say disclosures…?

<Brandon (41:58)>
I think many problems in the market today are due to inadequate disclosures.
And I don’t think the SEC will fix that. The U.S. equity markets matured with a period of no disclosures—and then came the SEC.

But the SEC worked because disclosures led to access to the most liquid capital markets.

Crypto doesn’t work that way—you have deep, liquid capital globally.
So if you have to go through the SEC, you’re just handicapping yourself and not gaining access to deeper liquidity.

Disclosures should come downstream of liquidity venues—primarily the exchanges.

We should see disclosures like:

• Team unlocks

• OTC sales

• Investor holdings (similar to 13Ds)

That would massively improve the market and attract institutional buyers.

<Jason Kam (43:20)>
Sure, but the kicker is—they have to be rewarded for disclosures: better funding, higher valuation.
That might take a while.

<Brandon (43:28)>
Exactly. It’s a Silicon Valley meme: when businesses have no economic incentive to do the right thing, they won’t.
If the incentive isn’t to produce revenue, then more teams won’t try.

The question is: can we get liquid crypto markets to a place where the incentives align with disclosure?

<Jason Kam (44:00)>
Would you guys have an investor relations portal?

<Brandon (44:07)>
We have a data room I make available to anyone who asks.
We’re a 17-person team, but I’d like to do quarterly investor calls and be super transparent. That’s something we’re working on.

<Jason Kam (44:22)>
Cool. I don’t have any more questions. Anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

<Brandon (44:33)>
No, this was a great conversation. Our journey started four years ago—before you started what you’re doing now at Folius.
It’s been interesting to watch the markets evolve.

Despite cynicism on crypto Twitter, we are moving toward maturity in liquid markets.
And what you’re doing—even this series—is a step in the right direction.
Thanks for having me. Great chat.

<Jason Kam (45:02)>
Yeah, thanks for your time.

<Brandon (45:04)>
Cool.