Leonidas, welcome to the Block by Block show. How you doing? I'm good, how are you? It's an honor to be here. Now this is, you know, I've known you for, I don't know, six months maybe since, since dog, since dog was launched and have really looked up to the way you've built a pretty amazing community that's very ethos driven. And so for this podcast, I'd love to talk a lot about dog, about what you're up to, kind of what brought you into blockchain in general, and really your start in NFTs. I think you've built a name for yourself in the NFT space and then later Ordinals. And so maybe we can start there. Like what brought you, well, I guess what first drew you to the world of blockchain and then eventually NFTs and then Ordinals. Yeah, look, it's a great question. lot of people actually don't know this. So I so back in 2014, I was a freshman in college and I kind of saw just this kind of Bitcoin thing happening was almost exclusively attracted through just the number go up aspect. I thought it was like a fascinating investment. I had never seen a chart that looked as kind of gnarly is this is this run up Bitcoin had done in 2013, right? So I was like, how do I buy this thing? So, know, you go to Google type in how to buy Bitcoin Coinbase pops up. And, you know, I bought my first couple of bitcoins and, you know, it's a it's an interesting experience kind of being able to go back in time and think about like, what was it like when you were new to the space? And it kind of gives you a different perspective. We're veterans now. So it's very hard for us to like Maybe have empathy for like the new people hearing about crypto. But man, I knew nothing. I knew nothing for the first couple of years and very much just, you know, I was a coin collector. Now I'm this like digital coin collector with Bitcoin and I held my Bitcoin and then I'm a software developer by training. So when Ethereum came out, I got super interested in that ended up. working on some various software projects related to Ethereum. Never, there was no token released or anything like that. But yeah, I played CryptoKitties when they came out. I got to mess around with all the daps that came out. Just got deeply into Ethereum and ultimately got super into NFTs. So when 2021 rolled around and NFTs really had their moment, I was kind of already there. ready, understood what NFTs were. I'd been holding CryptoKitties for a long time. yeah, pretty much just like quit my job, went full into NFTs, like, you know, kind of like they tell you not to do. Don't go all in. I basically went all in and started collecting. you know, collected thousands of different NFTs on obviously Bitcoin, but also Ethereum. several other blockchains and yeah really was specifically focused on studying and researching the history of NFTs and that actually brought me to Bitcoin because at the time you know 2021 it's almost all Ethereum right like almost if you wanted to create an NFT of value it had to be done on Ethereum and obviously that's changed and we can talk about that but through all of my kind of research I did find that there was this early experiment on Bitcoin called counterparty. And you just have to give a lot of respect to those guys who are really pushing kind of art on chain, crypto art on Bitcoin. A lot of that actually started on Bitcoin, believe it or not, back in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and laid the foundation for what is the kind of modern NFT space. And then through all of that, through all of my collecting, This is now summer 2022. I met this guy, Casey Roddermore, right? He's pitching me this idea of numbering Satoshis and that people might want to collect old Satoshis because he knew that, you know, I'm interested in old NFT collecting, early NFT collecting. And just there's a small community, myself, a bunch of others. And he came to us and just got to know him through that. He was like just... thinking through what would it be like to collect old NFTs would anybody even care? It turned out we did care. So I got to interview him back in 2022. Of course, Ordinals comes out January 23. I'm like checking out the Ordinals.com site. There's only 20 inscriptions on it. Nobody really cares. And man, yeah, it's like probably about maybe like When there was a couple hundred inscriptions and I saw the four mega that Udi had done, I was like, wow, this is definitely actually going to be something. And it's not just the old sap collecting, but it's now these like on chain inscriptions. It's like a very powerful narrative. It's a full NFT standard on Bitcoin. And then I just, went all in. was like, you know, I have this love for Bitcoin. I've always had a love for Bitcoin. and to be able to fully on-chain NFTs on Bitcoin, you didn't have to really pitch me on it. It was just so intuitive and obvious. So basically kind of left the Ethereum NFT space, fully pivoted, started a company called org.io with my friend Zach. Right then, deployed a bunch of capital into buying a bunch of inscriptions. And yeah, I've just been here ever since. Met Trevor Yon started a, know, twice weekly Twitter space that we do. I've just, it's been a crazy ride, obviously leading up to now, you know, in 2024, very much a lot of my focus was on the free and fair movement, RuneStone, dog. And yeah, it's been a really wild journey, man. That's cool. Now I want to double click into something you said. I love coins. I was a physical coin collector when I was little too, when, I don't know, maybe sixth, seventh grade. Yeah. I would go to this, the coin shop in downtown where I lived and I would just spend hours just looking at all these coins, learning about the Buffalo Nickel and just all of it. It was so fun. Now you started out learning about the history of NFTs. In your study of the history of NFTs, what were some things you learned? And your pivot to ordinals and inscriptions, what's your general thoughts on? NFTs on Ethereum points to a database entry, whereas on ordinals, it's actually inscribed onto the blockchain, onto a Satoshi. I know on crypto Twitter, there's a lot of kind of moral grandstanding that inscriptions are, they're better, they're more pure. What are your views on that? Yeah, it's interesting. So my experience with historical NFTs and these old NFT collections was that, man, if you like go and look for these old projects, you can always find the tokens, right? The actual ownership tokens, they're always on chain, right? But you cannot find the actual art on a bunch of these old projects. And like this was a very unique experience that I had. Most people didn't care. 2021. They're buying the latest, you know, monkey 10 KPFP kind of thing, right? And I'm going back and like sifting through thousands of old, know, 2018, 2017 smart contracts, looking for anything that resembles an NFT collection. I've literally, you know, literally combed through like every, like a lot of these smart contracts, right? And I would actually go in and I would like, you know, interact with the smart contract, see if I could extract some NFT somehow. Literally every single one is different. wasn't super standardized at the time. And what I found was, yeah, a bunch of them would point out to this link that would be gone. Like I could use all my research skills and sometimes I'd be able to put together maybe with open sea combined with a way back machine or this sort of thing. I could put together what the art was like, but yeah, I was owning these collections. I would own this like collection of, you know, Crypto tulips and I knew I had this beautiful tulip, but I could never see it. And this was just purely a function of like time, right? Like people created these kind of early experiments is how to think about them. And then they basically moved on with their life, right? And stopped paying the hosting bills for IPFS or they just kind of gave up and stopped paying the bills for AWS or wherever these images were stored, right? Like they were not stored in a way that was able to stand the test of time just five years basically from when I, you know, was kind of looking at them four or five years later. And this is a huge wake up call to me. There were like these early NFT platforms that had gone out of business. Can't find the art for any of those. It was all just a disaster. Like the Providence Trail, like we're supposed to be spending tens of thousands of dollars. on these digital JPEGs, right? Because it's like forever, you own it forever. And I was seeing this like very glaring hole in that idea, which was that there's no way that people are gonna preserve the art for these for like 100 years from now. And I would tell people in 2021 before kind of meeting Casey, right? I was like, you guys do realize that for literally like 99 % of these NFT collections, people are just gonna forget about them and move on in 10 years and you're not gonna be able to find the art for And I think that actually went against what people thought they were collecting. think people kind of intuitively, there wasn't enough of a conversation about on-chain art going on. People thought they were collecting something that probably was on-chain or IPFS was forever or this kind of thing. And that was just not my experience. Like practically when you actually run that experiment for five years, that is not how you store things well. So I actually had already liked on-chain. NFT art from Ethereum. People did do that on Ethereum actually, like CryptoPunks had been put on chain. I collected some early on change generative art on chain monkeys, another great example, but it was still more of a niche thing. So this sort of just lays the foundation for when I do meet Casey and the guys like this fully gung ho on chain art now as well with Ornoles. I mean, it's like he was telling me everything I wanted to hear. Like I said, it was the pitch was Very, very simple for me. And I had already had that foundation. And then all of these things around, you know, I had these strong feelings about not liking royalties, not liking how in 2021 on OpenSea, there's this 10 % tax on all the traders, very inefficient market. All of this stuff I didn't like. And Casey was saying like, we don't like royalties. All of these things. Ordinals are awesome, man. I really cannot emphasize enough. how thoughtful Casey was when he created that protocol. It is truly what an NFT should be. And yeah, I think on Ethereum, they kind of experimented with ERC 721, ultimately, ultimately created something that just is not durable. It's just the reality. You gotta put the actual data for the JPEG on chain. You got to store it somehow and like the only way I've really ever seen it be done in a way that I'm satisfied with as someone spending tens of thousands of dollars on something is put it on chain specifically on Bitcoin. You're to be in really, really good shape. You know, there are a couple of thoughts on your answer there. First of all, what a shame that the links pointing to the actual image are, it's gone for a lot of these collections because some of the art is actually really beautiful and it'd be great to enjoy that. But over time, as you said, it's like, you know, people just stop paying the IPFS fees. and the JPEG goes away. Which leads to this idea of what if we put the actual, we inscribe the piece of art actually on a Satoshi, which is more technically superior. And there's also kind of, it's more in line with the ethos of blockchain, right, of crypto. And so I appreciate you sharing that journey, how you came to you came to that, how you arrived at that. How do you see the NFT space changing in the next, say, if some of the links pointing to the JPEG are gone in the last five years, five years ahead, or in five years, how do you see things changing then? Yeah, I kind of view it as like two buckets. You can have like your gaming NFTs where they're like low value and it doesn't quite frankly matter if the image is gone in 10 years, right? You're just kind of playing the game in the moment. It's not too expensive. But I do think that the market is like very clearly making a statement with Ordinals that, look, hey, if we're spending a ton of money on a piece of digital art, you should probably spend like a hundred dollars of that money that we're basically paying to put that and store that image on chain. So I think there's just going to be a trend of on-chain art and I think it already exists. Ethereum has already responded somewhat to this. think they're focused more on on-chain art than they were before Ordinals. So we're actually pushing the Ethereum NFT ecosystem in the right direction, which I actually really like to see. I want to see them thrive as well. And I think NFTs... Look, I think... We're still, really genuinely believe we're still in the early ending. Like it's just a basic primitive for a token that is unique on the blockchain. And there's fungible and non-fungible tokens. Obviously, I think everybody knows about our 10k PFPs, these sort of things. I think we'll find new metas and new versions of NFTs in the future. I don't think all of the kind of work there is done. Even, you know, with something like CryptoKitties, this breeding mechanism. I would almost argue there was more innovation at the early period of NFTs than there were in maybe modern day Ethereum NFTs where people are just copying the same 10k PFP template and just doing that over and over and over again. I'm looking forward to seeing like who there are people out there, right? Who are the ones really pushing the boundaries experimenting and moving NFTs forward and not just kind of repeating the same kind of thing that the market likes over and over and over and over. These are always the people that I just kind of deeply respect. No, I'll pick on Kevin Rose here. Like don't have that much interest in like a collection like Moonbirds where, you know, Kevin Rose is this famous guy. He's seen that 10k PFPs are worth billions of dollars. There's millions of like 10k PFP tokens out there now. And Kevin Rose like releases his Moonbirds project. That's like him. That's like his big innovation. It's like Not really. You just made another pixel art looking 10k pfp on Ethereum that really didn't innovate. I'm looking to find the guys that are like in the trenches and like 2016, like figuring out how they can use a blockchain to like store their art on chain. When you find those guys and then you see the experiments, I mean, that is the really like cool stuff that I love. And Ordinals brought that back for me. Like I had lost that with the modern Ethereum and FT space. It just. there wasn't enough of it. was people just trying to basically grab money as quickly as possible. And then you come over to Bitcoin and people were all of sudden trying this like crazy, you know, recursion stuff and inscribing on sats and like, this is the kind of stuff I'm into. I'm like, we're pushing the space forward. And I think we're still pushing the space forward in ordinals. And there's a lot of kind of innovation left here. And I'm interested to see, you know, what really comes out of this like 2025 bull run cohort. I think there's a lot of great OG collections. I think we'll have more collections meant out. And I'm interested to see where people can kind of take this technology and be creative with it. Yeah, you mentioned CryptoKitties. I was at ETH Waterloo when CryptoKitties was one of and Dieter Scherle and those guys were doing their kind of hackathon. Yeah, well, I remember during the readout, at the end of the hackathon, all the teams kind of do the presentation, right? And I remember when they did the CryptoKitties presentation, you know, there was kind of a weird like response from the crowd. Like some thought it was kind of silly. Others thought it was like just breathtaking, like breathtakingly, you know, new technology. I was just kind of in the middle. I just didn't know what to think of it. And so, and then you know, fast forward. I'm reminded of the quote that, you know, really new technology initially seems like a toy. And, then the use cases are kind of silly until they really find like a real use case that will like, you know, serve humanity. And so I'm reminded of that, that everything you see initially might seem like a silly toy, but turns out to be like a big deal. And so I just got reminded of that when you shared what you were, we were pretty epic. You were there living through what I would say is a really pivotal moment in FTC's history, Like that's the, like really obviously CryptoKitties, you know, cool project and all, but the big thing was to develop CryptoKitties, they also developed the ERC 721 standard. Like that was the first smart contracts on ERC 721 that they were showing off there at ETH Waterloo in that hackathon. And that was obviously the foundation that allowed a bunch of other people to come along. and not have to do what the Larva Labs guys and all the people before them had to do, which was, know, code a custom essentially ERC-20 contract into non-fungible tokens. They just used this template ERC-721 and then they're off to the races and you got to give credit to the Dapro Labs guys, Roham and the team for, you know, doing that. And you lived through a cool moment there. Yeah, yeah, no, that's cool. I mean, there's been several cool moments. I used to go to a lot of ETH hackathons. Another one was ETH New York. think it was 2018, 2019, something like that. But it was shortly after kind of the whole DeFi summer. And at ETH New York, the winner was the one inch team. And it was pretty wild because many of us had you know, dabbled in DeFi and then the one inch team, did their presentation. There were two guys there that I remember. They did their presentation on kind of aggregating. It was like a layer on top of a bunch of dexes. And then they would find like the best rates and the best, you know, routes. And I remember thinking, these guys are going to do these. They're going to go places. It turns out a couple of months later, they raised money for one inch. So it's pretty cool to attend these hackathons and participate because good things come out of them for sure. Let's switch topics to dog. For those that are listening that maybe aren't familiar, they're not familiar with the dog meme coin, can you tell us a little bit about that and maybe talk about the Runes Meta Protocol too? Yeah, so if somebody's like not familiar with dog, it also means that they might not be familiar with the fact that we have meme coins on Bitcoin. Like this is actually kind of like news to a lot of people, right? Like Bitcoin in a lot of people's heads is just this kind of older blockchain that has one currency, BTC on it. And I think most people have obviously heard of that, but they don't realize there's now this entire on-chain economy and ecosystem of tokens. And, you know, in that ecosystem is this protocol ruins. which is how we launch fungible tokens on Bitcoin meme coins. And yeah, Dog was one of these first runes that was launched and Dog is it's the number one meme coin on Bitcoin. actually, okay, I don't want to misquote here, but I believe we are higher market cap than Ordee. So we can say that we are the number two token on the Bitcoin network after. Okay, hang on. Ordee is $527 million market cap. What is Dog? 526? No! Okay, so... Alright, alright. We're $1 million short. We're technically the number three fungible token on Bitcoin right now. It goes... Oh, that's brutal. I shouldn't have checked. It currently goes VTC and then Ordi and then... Okay, we jumped to 529. While I was speaking, we flipped Ordi. So we're back to number two, But yeah, bottom line, Bitcoin has fungible tokens. DOG is a meme coin on Bitcoin. And it is the number one meme coin on Bitcoin. you know, every blockchain has a dog coin. You've got Ethereum has Shiba Inu, there's WIF and BOK over on Solana. And then on Bitcoin, obviously, we have to have a dog coin and we call that dog coin dog. So, yeah, that's super high level. Believe it or not, have to, Peter, I have to kind of explain to people this because a lot of people are truly very surprised here. that have meme coins on Bitcoin. yeah, Dog is the number one meme coin on Bitcoin. And obviously there's a lot more to it than that. But yeah, at a super high level, it's a Bitcoin meme coin that was airdropped for free to the kind of OG Ordinals community earlier in 2024. And since has been a been a really fun, really fun journey that we've been on. Yeah, and I've been super grateful to be part of it. And it's been so fun the last, I don't know what, six plus months where, you know, the community has really come together to, you know, support this movement of free and fair. Tell us about, so you launched Rune Stones, which was an Ordinals collection that was airdropped. So each, those airdropped to the original Ordinals participators, right? Something like that. And then you later launched DOG, which is a fungible token on Bitcoin, on the Runes Meta Protocol. And was a certain number of DOG tokens were airdropped to Runestone holders, 860,000, I think, something like that. Now, tell us about this free and fair movement and what were you, I guess, what statement were you trying to make? and what problems in our industry, in the blockchain industry, you were trying to, I guess, fight against. Yeah, so pretty much runestone was an NFT collection that was airdropped and we called it a pre-run project, meaning that it was a necessity because runes had actually not launched yet. So by owning a runestone, 112,383 runestones were airdropped, one to each wallet of all these OG Bitcoin Ordinals collectors kind of early pioneers users of the Ordnance Protocol. And each of them got 800, 890, 806 dog air dropped to their wallet. So totally completely free and the kind of initial inspiration and idea. It was purely about, I wasn't planning on launching or being involved with any sort of like meme coin or FD token release or anything like this. I had always just been a collector. But ultimately decided to look. What if we just ran this like super crazy experiment? If it fails, that's okay. We're just going to stick to our guns on this. Let's run a crazy experiment and see how far on the end of the spectrum and how extremely can go with doing things the way that like Satoshi Nakamoto would have done them and just saying as true as possible to the retail investor to the ethos of Bitcoin. And ultimately what that manifested itself, like that general idea manifested itself physically into rune stones and into dog. this ultimately meant, look, like these are not like rocket science things to figure out. It's like, go talk to literally anybody in crypto and ask them like, do you like when somebody launches a token and the team owns 50 % of it and then they rug you, right? Like the answer is nobody likes that. So it's like, Okay, obviously, we're going to do the exact opposite. Whatever the opposite of that is, that's what we're going to do. So ultimately, full decentralization, full transparency, trying to literally be as fair as possible with this distribution. I believe it's very important in crypto. A lot of projects go off the rails before they even like way before they've even launched. They've already screwed up the entire future of the project because they have this like super rigged distribution and I can break down. basically many different projects and explain, you know, kind of what's going on behind the scenes and basically how retailers ultimately buying the bags of it's usually VCs, insiders, KOLs, influencers, whales who got access early, this sort of thing. This is very much how the ecosystem on Solana runs. You are rarely ever the first person hearing about it if you're just the average retail investor. Dog flips that equation upside down. you know, instantly airdrops hundreds of millions of dollars of value evenly across, you know, over a hundred thousand wallets. And that's like a super special thing. So specifically, I very much do not like this idea of having teams for non fungible, sorry, for non utility projects. It's like it is a literal by definition non utility project when you're a meme coin, right? Like there should be nothing other than a ticker and a meme coin. not a fan of this whole thing of adding a team and then trying to build a bunch of utility. I have literally never seen this work for meme coins. It's very silly. I do not like long-term kind of the implications of having this non-utility token where there's this sort of team that's viewed as being in control of it because inevitably they end up screwing things up. They end up, sell the token and then everybody, know, fudge it or they rug or they do something the holders don't like. I want my tokens like Bitcoin. I don't want there to be a team. I just want it to be Bitcoin. I want to feel like I own Bitcoin. I want to feel like it is everybody's token and very much very, very important that there's no team. So dog, know, RuneStone, there is no team. It's a fully volunteer initiative. A bunch of people donated their time and capital to make that happen. And then there's this whole thing with Peter, you'll know this, right? The centralized exchange listing fees, you know, the top know, exchanges in the world are essentially imagine them as like guardians of liquidity, where they've sort of hoarded a lot of liquidity and you need liquidity as a token. It's very important. And they charge these exorbitant kind of listing fees and essentially Max extort value from projects. So I always like in my like, you know, earlier years would have been like, okay, well, if you're a centralized exchange, you love your customers. So your listing team's only job is to just curate the safest, best projects so that your users have access to buy great tokens and great projects that will go up in value. And man, like, is that not what's happening in the market, right? It's like so the opposite of that, that it's like extremely, it almost kind of makes you like disappointed and just like give up on crypto level. Like it's almost depressing to me to even think about this topic. Because the market and... The kind of situation with the listing fees is just like super, super demoralizing. You've got the largest, it doesn't matter how big the institution is, you've got the largest institutions basically extorting every founder, every project for many millions of dollars just to get a listing. And unfortunately, that in result is, is these decentralized projects, the ones like Satoshi created Bitcoin. It's very hard for them to get on centralized exchanges because they don't have a team. they're not willing to fork over a bunch of tokens to the centralized exchange, right? And yeah, like, you know, don't be naive. Like this is very much kind of a rigged game. And what centralized exchanges are doing with these listing fees is they're actually encouraging bad behavior in the market. So it's not just the fact that, okay, if you want your meme coin to go to a billion dollars, you're going to have to write a fact check to Binance at some point. But it's that the incentive to actually, you know, create a token a certain way is created there because then what happens is these sort of insider launches of meme coins, which in my opinion is ridiculous. It's a non-utility token. There's nothing to do. Nobody should get special access. should, know, meme coins should be an asset class controlled by retail. And these large centralized exchanges are basically making it so that, okay, you want your token to do well. You need to set aside, you know, 10, 20 % of the token for us. And from the start, you now have nothing that looks like Bitcoin. You have a rigged launch. And basically, it's not just centralized exchanges. There's market makers that want you to do that. There's KOL networks that make you do that. And pretty much people end up trading these meme coins and setting aside over half for these like insiders that all want to take their cut and they'll all kind of help you along the way and make the token go up in value. But ultimately, all you're really doing is creating this pump and dump mechanism because the real long-term value is only going to be created through a token having a large community of long-term believers in it. So I'm just very proud that DOG does not pay listing fees. I know this is obviously a somewhat controversial stance in the crypto space. A lot of people are more than happy to just bend the knee to these centralized exchanges, pay this fee, perpetuate that kind of dynamic in the market. But yeah, I just fundamentally believe it's very bad for these tokens. And if you don't like that these random Solana meme coins are going to hundreds of millions of dollars and then back to $10 million because the team rug. I don't even blame the creators. There's infinite scammy people out there that will create a token and do that. Blame the people who've set the system up this way. It's the centralized exchanges extorting listing fees from these projects that are at the top of it. And I'm just basically calling them out. And I think a lot of people resonate with that. And I think we need to move to a model where at least for non-utility tokens that if you're a centralized exchange and you have any shred of credibility and you have any interest in retail using your product, you should look after your users. You should curate the best set of tokens based on merit, based on community, based on the aspects that make a meme coin valuable long-term. Make your listing team curate those projects. Give access to your users to buy those projects. Do not make your users exit liquidity for a bunch of these scammers that are paying you the highest, you know, listing fee every month. That is an insane thing that's happening. And yeah, I'm simply calling it out. The dog army is calling it out. We're not going to pay these. Obviously, that hurts these conversations, but that is not something that I or the dog army is interested in really negotiating on because it's a deeply held belief that this is perverting the market and harming retail investors. And we are not going to participate in Here's the ironic thing, right? Like, you know, blockchain came about to kind of bypass intermediaries, but within blockchain, we've kind of created our own intermediaries with these centralized exchanges that are huge gatekeepers of value. And they decide the winners rather than letting the market decide. And it's a peculiar situation that I think we all find ourselves in. And I think it's really admirable that you've decided to go the free and fair movement and that dog is one of the, I think, shining examples of, let's see how this experiment goes. If a dog belongs to the people, it won't bow down to intermediaries. Let's see what happens. So in the last six or so months that you have, whether you like it or not, you've kind of become the face of dog. Though it dog belongs to the people you you've largely kind of held held that banner and and help I think the community along. How have you seen the community come together in the belief of the free and fair movement and. And I guess just tell us your experience there is is kind of a community builder community kind of organizer. Yeah, it's interesting. So I think if you are like creating a community, whether it's NFTs, meme coins, whatever, I think it's like super, super important that just like the actual holders are like the number one priority. Like you always have to make sure that the holders are put first and dog like through and through does that like to the most extreme degree, right? You have to You have to just take seriously that somebody probably worked months of their life to earn this money. They're just a normal person. And it's a very important responsibility that you're being entrusted with to a degree when you're the voice of something like that. Because their hard-earned money is at risk. This is... It's yes, it's super like it's fun and games like they are literally meme coins. It's a cute dog and all right. Like there's a silly aspect to it. But at the same time it is real money that people work for and you just need to have like an empathy for that. And I think just time and time and time again, I just do not see the creators of these tokens out there and these projects having that empathy. Like there's something about it where people just feel comfortable walking away or not caring that it just failed and they stopped tweeting about it or not caring that they sold their insider supply and then moved on. And to me, it's just like people aren't having empathy for their other humans, I guess, or something like this. It's like, I don't know, like, you know, of course, the holders deserve transparency into what happens. Right? Like, how crazy is it that you have like no transparency on all of these top meme coins? Yeah, I don't know. Like bottom line is, treat people right. Be honest, be transparent, be fair. And then they're going to probably support that project. And I think that's what we've seen. you know, dog is the number one ruin by far in a free market experiment. You know, people are choosing dog, right? Like people, you know, have made dog one of the top being coins in the world. It's, you know, over half a billion dollar market cap. That's because it's not because of the cute little dog, although, you know, dog, I think is quite cute with the little floppy ears and everything. Dog is very cute. But I think it's the story, it's the narrative, it's the idea of dog and free and fair that's actually the thing that's resonating with people. And I think people are tired of getting rogged. think people are tired of centralized exchange listing fees. People are just tired of a bunch of the BS that's going on in the space. And they're seeing a project stand up against that and stand up for the little guy, basically. And I think it's a fairly logical decision. been treated like crap, essentially, by a bunch of project founders in the past who, let's be honest, like, looking back, did they actually give a shit about you? The answer was probably not very much. They were focused on, you know, securing their own bag at your expense. And dog is not that. It's ultimately a group of people who believe in this idea of free and fair and are basically standing up for a set of values that I think Satoshi Nakamoto held in a lot of cases. I just think it resonates with people, Do right by people, they'll do right by you. It's really not even that complicated. It's like, do the right thing by people. Yeah, I agree with you. see the hero's journey is kind of happening right in front of our eyes. know, centralized exchanges and insiders are kind of the villain in the story. And then those that are affected are kind of at the end, their exit liquidity, Phil take advantage of, right? And then Dog comes in almost like it's a very redemptive arc that, hey, it doesn't have to be that way, guys. Like Dog was launched free and fair, airdrop to Rune Stone holders, and we don't bow down to the powers that be. And so we're seeing the hero's journey happening in real time. And it's exciting because there's power in story. And this story that's literally happening right in front of our eyes, we don't know the end of it yet. So it's like, there's quite a bit of drama and it's exciting. And if you really believe, know, dog will win out in the end and the free and fair movement. It's not just like the dog army, right? It's like the movement behind it, which is, and we think it's going to win. Quite exciting. Yeah, super exciting. Like I like to say dog was born out of necessity, right? It was not. It was not that we all just wanted to have a fun little meme coin dog like was our hand was forced like retail had to do something like the market had become so deeply corrupted by insiders and institutions that retail had to stand up. And I think if we want to have this meme coin super cycle as a lot of people want to call it. We cannot let these insiders and institutions just lay waste to the market. There will never, promise you, there will never be a meme coin super cycle until retail reclaims this asset class. Dog is the reckoning day for these guys who have basically been, yeah, preying on retail for way too long. And, you know, moving into the meme coin asset class, it's like, how, like, this is a bridge way too far for me. And dog is the antidote to this. Like if we send dog to the moon, right? We're going to make a very, very loud and clear statement and we're going to change the market dynamics and change this industry and set precedence for you want to create a valuable meme coin. It's got to look like this. That is what I want to have happen here. Long term. I want to put these centralized exchanges out of business to be completely honest with you, but That's going to take a long time to move everything on chain in the short term in the next five, 10 years, they're still going to be relevant. And we need to, we need to do something. Dog is that thing that was done out of desperation and necessity to change what is deeply broken in our industry. I agree. Let's talk about something really quick that I think has been happening in the public domain that's been quite interesting for me. So AIXBT is an AI agent and AIXBT seems to have a love affair with dog. What's going on there you think? Yeah, look, it's you know, I so I haven't done like the behind the scenes kind of, you know, picking apart the tech stack and like how AI XBT is actually functioning. But I would imagine it's basically just slurping up a massive amount of tweets every day in on crypto Twitter. And I would imagine it slurps up a lot. mean, we tweet a lot. If you need to know one thing about the dog army, it's that we go to X every day and we post a lot. And I think it literally has just been trained on millions of tweets of like, you know, dog propaganda that we've put out over the past year. And I think that, that's kind of turned bullish. It's like, you know, people will ask it about some meme coin, but it's like, it might, it may have only seen like a few hundred tweets about it. Probably in its model, we have like successfully, cyot brainwashed this thing into liking dog, you know. That's it's probably just that it's like it sees that so many people are bullish and the sentiment is so strong and it's seeing us, you know, roasting people in these debates that happen about it. I think it reads all of that. And it's just like, yeah, of course these guys are right. Of course, rugging is bad. Of course there should be transparency. Like it sees all of that. And it's, know, I don't, you know, it's hard to know like what's going on inside an LLM when it spits the stuff out, when it spits the text back at you. But whatever it is. I mean, it's clearly seeing that there's a group of people here that are onto something and it probably sees our virality in some regard. And it's kind of a no brainer for it to support that. And yeah, I mean, look, it's, it's gotten a ton of engagement itself from dog. It itself has benefited from what we call, what we call the dog effect, which is when you put dollar sign dog in a tweet, you get like 10 X the engagement, right? So that's very much held true with AIXBT as well. And I'm just, yeah, I think it's kind of bullish for AIs that, you know, they're almost like this kind of great equalizer in that if they're coded fairly, to be honest, right? I mean, they're seeming to be pretty good at just calling out bullshit, right? It's like the AI reads a bunch of tweets and then it'll, it'll like, you you ask it about some like random scammy Bitcoin L2 and it fuzz it. You you ask it about like listing fees, it fuzz the centralized exchange, right? Like these things are actually like pretty smart and I think they're kind of like a collective. I think that I think they're good. I think they're going to be a force for good in the market. Like from what I've seen, you know, you can obviously engineer them and code them to like, you know, prop up some scammy project. There's no question, but these kind of large language models that are like learning from crypto Twitter, they seem to be on the side of retail, which is like pretty awesome to see. Yeah, my favorite is someone asked AIXBT what the dog market cap target is. And I think it said something like 100 billion is just the start. I mean. had these conversations with AIXBT, like explaining the dog thesis, kind of asking it thoughts and it's totally on board. And it's funny because I'll read people will talk with AIXBT and they'll talk about their coin, you know, going to, you know, billions of dollars or whatever. And it just like does not buy the thesis. They're like, probably not. And it totally it's like totally buys that like, yeah, it kind of stands to reason Bitcoin. as a blockchain is like by far the largest blockchain, literally trillions of dollars of value stored on this network. And the top token is only worth half a billion dollars today. That should probably be worth like tens, hundreds of billions of dollars. It totally buys the thesis. It loves the kind of fair launch that dog had and it's kind of bought in. Yeah, it seems to be a huge dog army member. I love it. I love it. I love watching the tweets and this love affair that AIXBT has with Dog. I want to see it continue. Let's switch to ord.io. You're a co-founder of ord.io. Can you tell us a little bit about what's going on there and what you're hoping to build? Yeah. So roll the clock back. It's wow. It's almost been two years here. you know, my, my friend Zach and I had this idea, let's launch an ordinals explore. There was kind of ordinals.com and we were like, let's launch a version of ordinals.com, but let's, know, add more searching, you know, better filtering a bunch of these kinds of deeper queries that like I was in just already wanting to do myself. It was almost built just for myself and Zach, right? And we also had this idea to upload inscriptions where people can sort of, we can sort of crowdsource, you know, you'd scroll through ordinals.com in the early days and you would just have to like scroll through tons of garbage to find like, you know, something really cool. And I've found myself spending hours and hours a day scrolling through ordinals.com mesmerized by all this like really interesting stuff that people are inscribing, right? Inherently, it's going to be decently interesting because there's actually a cost to doing it. It's not just free. So Ultimately, we created, we built that, we launched it in March of 2023. And yeah, man, it's like, you know, it's this top ordinals explorer that people go to to explore, you know, ordinals. We were the first explorer to kind of mark these sats that an inscription is on as being rare. So we introduced this feature shortly after launching called Satributes. It's been a huge hit. We since helped. know, Magic Eden, many others in the ecosystem adopt this attribute standard. And, you know, you can see, for example, for the first time on org.io, like, Hey, my, my inscription is on a sat from block nine or my inscription is on a pizza sat. Like these were, kind of very novel things at the time, even if now they seem like kind of more normal. And that was like a really, really, you know, awesome thing to get to be able to contribute to in the ecosystem. And then. You know, fast forward a little bit here. We've been adding more social features. can reply to inscriptions, but also, you know, runes come out and we're like, look, I'm a massive Casey Roddum or fan. Like, let's just be honest. I'm a fan boy and what he creates, the way he creates it. I mean, it's very much how I want protocols to be created. He kind of embodies a lot of the values that I, you know, very much uphold. And, you know, when he, when he announced he's launching runes and then launches runes, I'm like, as a company, we got to get behind this. Like we got to support this. I believe in fungible tokens on Bitcoin. I believe in this standard. Let's support it. yeah, pretty much we build out exploring for runes. We built out the ability to mint these tokens. So if people don't know runes, the way they are created is you put them on chain and then you actually kind of mint them from the Bitcoin miners, right? So that you're not sending money to the creator. And then Yeah, we've had this really successful platform of like people going, you can explore the top tokens, you can see in real time in a feature we call it Block Vision, where you can see exactly what's going on in a Bitcoin block. In upcoming Bitcoin blocks and recently mined Bitcoin blocks, you just go to org.io slash runes, anybody can check this out right now and see what's going on. And like it's very much a tool to discover and explore the runes that are popular and minting out. Not much runes mincing right now. So it's maybe kind of BlockVision's boring right now if you looked at it. But when runes are mincing and super popular, man, it's like, it's really fun to just go to or.io and kind of watch all the action going down. And then we introduce Degen chat. So every rune, every Bitcoin meme coin has a token gated chat for the holders, know, embedded into the site that you can go chat. So like dog army. Has a has a chat or you know all hanging out with people you can go and talk to the dog army there if you're listening to this go say hi and the in the dog go to the moon chat on or dot IO and yeah You can met you can meet these tokens So I discover meant them we give you all the information in real time so that you can make a very informed decision when you meant and we actually just the other week released kind of an update on our pricing where if anything is 0.01 BTC or less, so the order to mint runes is 0.001 BTC or less. So basically a hundred bucks or less, you don't have to pay any platform fees. So it's actually the vast majority of people are doing runes mint orders of a hundred dollars or less. So we are like the very best place. You should definitely mint runes through ord.io because it's going to be the cheapest place to do that. And then... We've actually, so that's all kind of going on in the background, right? And then over the past couple of months, we've been actually building something in stealth that I'm not quite ready to talk about yet, but will be soon. And I'm just super, super excited about this. And it's going to be really, really, really big for the ecosystem. And man, I cannot wait to reveal that to people. And that's coming around the corner like super quickly here. The engineers have been super hard at work at that. And it's something special that I don't think people will be quite expecting. So yeah, stay tuned is what I'll say. We've been cooking something pretty neat. That's awesome. We'll definitely stay tuned. Now, you mentioned you built org.io really to serve. You needed an explorer, and the current explorers weren't meeting your needs. And so you and Zach built this thing for yourselves, but it turned out to be a product that others also wanted. Does that summarize kind of what you said? Yeah, I mean, literally, that's exactly what happened. was like, man, like I need a better Ordinalist Explorer. I need to efficiently search for these inscriptions, filter, do these kind of more deep pro user type experience searches for inscriptions. And we build a product to power that. And like, yeah, it turns out that like, you know, a lot of people want to be able to do things like sort by the largest, you know, image files, for example, and see, you know, there's literally like kind of this dick-slinging contest on Bitcoin. who has the biggest inscription, right? And people have been pushing the limits on this. yeah, you know, org.io is the best place to like just go do a basic filter like that. It actually like, you know, you couldn't do that at the time. So there's all sorts of deep filtering and sorting and searching that you can do that. That's really cool. Now, did you do some user research or customer development as you kind of figured out, you know, what kinds of features should this Ordinance Explorer have? Did you talk to users to identify what those were? Yeah, it's interesting, right? So I think like when you start a company, when you start a kind of MVP product for, you know, some idea you have in software, you know, the number one thing you're supposed to do that a lot of people get wrong is like, they actually they don't talk to users, right? They kind of don't, they're not in touch with their users. And, you know, I think Twitter can be a waste of time. But if you are a founder of a startup, specifically a consumer startup, I mean, Twitter is like X is the best way to actually talk to those users. So like literally, what am I doing all day on Twitter? Yes, you could just say I'm you know, scrolling through and interacting with like people and you know, yes, I'll you know, be silly. And yes, I'll do some crazy full posts about dog. But I'm also, you know, really interacting and engaging with the Ordinals and Runes ecosystem, and kind of having this more deeper understanding of the know, individual who is here, the problems that they have, the challenges that they have. And you know, that is like very important. I think every founder of every kind of crypto startup should spend, you don't have to spend an insane amount of time like I do, but spend like 15 or 20 minutes a day on X just engaging with your users, talking to the community. I see a lot of founders make this mistake where they just kind of like end up building the wrong thing because they're not in touch with the kind of changing winds and trends and needs of people in our space. And like they end up, you know, not kind of reading the writing on the wall. And I think being on X, you're going to have your finger on the pulse for what your users care about and where the industry's headed. That's awesome. I loved or.io. I mean, it's actually like really fun to just kind of just poke around and see what's out there. And kudos to you and Zach for building such a useful utility for collectors. Yeah, man. Well, thank you. I'm honored to hear that you use it as an Ordinals Explorer and you like it. And, you know, I'm hoping you'll continue to use us and that you'll like what we're cooking and coming out with soon. Yeah, when do you, well, I don't want to ask that, but I am curious when you are planning on making that announcement soon. Okay. Awesome. Well, Leonidas, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us. This has been just very, very interesting. And again, you know, I just want to tell you thank you for Dog and for championing the free and fair movement. been life-changing for a lot of people and it's been so fun to be part of the dog army. So thank you. Well, look, I got to throw it right back at you, Like, you know, I'm not sure how much people totally realize this, but like, you know, there's there's people that, you know, behind the scenes are like helping God. Right. Like this is this really is not like just the United States meme coin. I like truly view this and believe that this is a token that is owned collectively by the community. And, you know, you're one of those community members where like you could just be a passive holder of dog. You know, you hold your token. You kind of move on with your life, but you you stepped up and you are a very important member of this community that like really like, yeah, I don't think you'll maybe fully appreciate behind the scenes, kind of, kind of what you're doing there. But look, man, you, you very much have helped this community and like have just been a loyal community member, man. And it's like a super honored to just be in a community with people like yourself that are willing to. volunteer your time, right? Like nobody's asking you to do this. Like you don't have to do anything, right? Like I'm not paying you any money or anything like this, right? So just, yeah, man, it's an honor to be in a community with people like yourself. And, know, as long as this community has people like you who step up and kind of support dog, especially from behind the scenes, I think we're going to be in really good shape here. I agree. Dog go to the moon, Thanks, Leonidas.