Casey Craig from Euphoria Finance. Welcome to the show. Hey Peter, thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here. So I want to read the tagline on the website and then maybe use that as a point of departure into what Euphoria is. So the site says, one tap trading in the palm of your hand. It's fun, fast, and frictionless. Don't just believe in something. Feel something. So that's so, uh first of all, it's written beautifully. And it's so mysterious and intriguing. Maybe help us learn about what Euphoria Finance is and how this tagline kind of helps the story. Yeah, certainly. So when we came out of stealth, you know, we put out this landing page and um the point was to draw kind of an air of mystique around the project a bit. It was to explain it, but also to just kind of get people intrigued about, we're thinking about trading differently. um So what is Euphoria? Euphoria is it's a mobile first derivatives trading app and it's a new way to trade that the market hasn't seen yet. You simply just tap on the price chart where you think that the price will go. and that's how you're trading. So we call it tap trading. the point of this, yeah, it's fun, it's fast, it's frictionless. And uh we're not only building for an existing audience in crypto, but we think that this is a consumer app that can really break outside of this bubble where people don't need to have some kind of prerequisite knowledge and they can understand what's going on extraordinarily simply. So we wanted to speak to everybody and say, look. you know, there's this messaging out there like stop trading and believe in something, right? Murad really popularized that saying. And so we were like, okay, but don't just believe in something like feel something like we want you to have fun and like, you know, interact with the markets in an engaging fashion. And so that's our mission here is to make it fun, to make it frictionless, accessible. I love it. um On this pod, we talk a lot about uh branding and kind of like sharing around branding around emotion, because in crypto, you don't really see a lot of that. There's a lot of kind of like factual positioning and messaging, like we're faster, we're more accurate. It's very kind of bland. And so what I really, what really intrigued me about Euphoria, not only like the form factor is really, really intriguing, but the way you guys are positioning it and the language you're using. uh If we could turn to the manifesto really quick and I just want to read this because it's it but it's so well written and I think it just I think it draws the it draws the reader in really So our mission is to make you feel something euphoria isn't just our brand it's our ethos. It's uplifting disruptive unapologetically fun. We reject the notion that complexity equals sophistication and stress equals legitimacy The complexity doesn't lie in the fundamental concepts of trading, it's in the artificial barriers that have been built around them. We're here to tear these walls down and bring exhilarating experiences that both amplify the potential of crypto and harness its momentum to elevate normal people rather than alienating or gatekeeping. Could you maybe expand on that? Yeah, totally. So I think that a lot of that stems from most trading terminals in crypto. They've stemmed from what we've come to know and love or hate in TradFi. So if you look at TradFi trading platforms and crypto trading platforms, they all look quite similar. They're quite sterile. I think that there's a lot of great UX in crypto that is very familiar. um So for example, say like Hyperliquid, fantastic UX if you are a trader. But that's my caveat is it's if you are a trader. So if you put it into the hands of a random person, they still wouldn't be able to just intuitively pick it up and understand what's going on. And so I think that, you know, when you take the approach of making things, know, quote, like breaking down walls and making things more approachable to people. you have to think from more of a Web2 lens about these things. Like what are the consumer products that people are interacting with in Web2 on a day-to-day basis, not Web3? Because we have a lot of products that are really great uh for people who interact with finance and trading and crypto, but they're not going to reach kind of that marginal user, and that's what we're really looking for. I love that. first, when I first joined crypto, I don't know if you remember Ether Delta, but it was like the worst experience. And I knew so many people that lost money. I lost money. I like, you know, fat fingered everything. And it was one of those things where it's like, just like the caveat you said, it's like, if you're a trader, but with Ether Delta, it's like, if you are like, know anything about crypto, just be really careful or else you'll make a mistake. There's so many caveats to it. And even like the smartest people I know, like just had, you would make easy mistakes because it actually encouraged mistakes and that's kind of how it is. um think for me too, lot of my passion for this stuff comes from, I had a crypto education company for a long time before this. And so, you know, it's like years and years of seeing the mistakes that people are making and the pain points that they're experiencing and the friction that they have and things that are just, they're so second nature to us as crypto native people that you just, you kind of have to take a step back and think like, this is not common. This is not normal. No, I totally agree. So when I first started my career, not in crypto, but like in my career career, I worked at Toyota. And in the Toyota production system, there's this concept of pokeyoki, which is a Japanese for error proof. And so like in physical devices, the idea is like you create the device so that it's impossible to make a mistake. And so it only goes in one way. And then later, like a couple of years later, I, that idea like got introduced into like lean startup. And so now lean startup started using, you know, ideas from the Toyota production system in addition to UX. And so there's like lean UX. And I love that because, and I think we need more of that. You know, it's not just like beautiful design, but like design that actually is helpful to the human and prevents the human from making mistakes. And I think we definitely need more of that. Excuse me. Tell us about the mechanics of tap trading. Maybe walk us through what it actually is. Yeah, so on the surface, uh what you're seeing is you see a grid and then it's the price chart overlaid on that grid. And you tap the squares on the grid where you think the price will go. But what's actually happening under the hood is that you're trading effectively options. So you're trading options exposure. um And so, you what's cool is we can take these primitives like options, like perps, and we can create alternative UX and we can create these fun experiences and ways to express our beliefs about the market and have exponential upside that we're looking for when we're trading all of these things, but just in a fun way. so that's something that we're really excited about is all of these alternative experiences. Tap trading is our flagship product that we're going to market with. um And yeah, it's a really sophisticated product under the hood. It's a new type of order book and matching engine that makes it all work underneath the hood. you won't see us talking about the technical guts of the protocol a whole lot. Because that's not like our core selling point. That's not our key value prop here. The value prop is like, hey, here's a really fun and really simple way to trade and to do the things that you already wanted to do. So yeah, like you said before, a lot of people talk about their tech, like how fast their product is or their chain is or whatever that might be, which is really great, but... You know, in a world of abundantly fast chains and abundantly great technology that we have, it's like, what can we actually do to put this stuff into the hands of people? And that's something we really care about. So that's what we talk about, right? Because, you know, as I mentioned before, our goal is ultimately to get this not only to crypto Twitter, but outside of crypto Twitter and outside of the bubble that we all exist in. And so you can't talk about, you know, latency. You can't talk about, uh you know, matching engine. you can't talk about these things with those types of people. yeah, that's kind of one of my favorite things about it. It is a really sophisticated product, but just wrapped in a beautiful, very simple design. When you think of go-to-market, uh are you thinking of your various audiences, like your crypto Twitter people, your current hyperliquid perps traders, and then Web2? Or I guess how are you thinking about the archetypes, uh the consumers that will be using Euphoria? Yeah, so there's a handful of people, right? So you have obviously crypto Twitter. Like crypto Twitter is, as much as I talk about, we're looking for outside of crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter is extremely important to us. know, I mean, these are the fundamental, hardcore, ride or die users that make projects uh get off the ground, bootstrap a user base and become successful early on. And so that's a massive part of initial strategy. And then from there, it's things like TikTok and Facebook ads and, you know, the people who don't exist in this world. world here. um And then a big part of it is fun things, right, like streaming. um So there's, you know, a handful of streamers that will be streaming tap trading on Euphoria. And when I think about streaming, I think about It's almost this like fun cathartic experience, right? Like you go watch somebody stream on roll bit and you feel like an emotional connection to this person. You're either invested in them winning or losing, like whether you love or hate the person, like you want to see them win. You just, and you're on the edge of your seat and you're watching it. And so I just think that there's, there's so much more that we can tap into. That's not just crypto Twitter. And so yeah, for go to market, it's a, you know, it's kind of like a, there's a cadence that will happen of different platforms. Um, but Yeah, there's users everywhere and they all kind of they appeal to different reasons why they would like the platform. Casey, like euphoria is going to be so big. Like I'm just like imagining in my mind, you know, watching someone stream, they click a little box and then everyone's like just on the edge of their seats. Like where is the price going to go? And then it almost hits that box, but then it quite doesn't. And then they lose like that is so exciting. Yeah. eh we want to be the Mario Party of derivatives. You're either watching people or you'll be able to play with your friends too. So you and I could join into a session-based trading competition and we could either trade with or against one another. If you are a killer trader on Euphoria and I'm like, want to follow Peter. I could kind of copy trade you and do what you're doing, or you and I are just friends and we want to have a little competition. We could join in and we can see each other's taps on our screen and so we could trade against each other, uh or with each other as well. So yeah, this is how we're thinking about these things, is in just a fun way, a social way. uh Yeah, the design space is so new. You could do so much. It's really exciting. Now, I trade on hyperliquid every day. And you could go very discrete to the three or four decimals. How does that work with tap trading? Because you select a zone. And so you can't go quite at the three or four decimal level, right? So it depends on the asset, right? So, you know, I mean, obviously, like different price assets are going to have, there's different ranges for, you're going to, you will have a different range for something like Bitcoin, which is priced at, you uh know, $116,000 versus something, say XRP, and it's priced only at a couple bucks. So the decimal range will be different for each asset. But yeah, when you get down to these really short timeframes, right? So for us, we're optimizing for super low timeframes. uh You... the ranges will be you'll be looking at pretty small ranges in price fluctuations because you're trading down on you know only a couple second time frames. Got it. Now, for Euphoria to work, it needs to be on a chain that's super, super fast. And so I'd love to hear the thought process that you and Nathan and team had on which chains that you evaluated and how you guys arrived at choosing MegaETH. Yeah, so there were a handful of chains up for consideration. Like I said, we have an abundance of fast and cheap chains and basically all of the popular ones, And so whether launched or unlaunched, things like Monad, things like... uh There's some projects that are up and coming that aren't super public yet. Those were gonna be a little bit too far off. There were kind of some philosophical reasons as to why we chose L2 versus L1. When you look at a chain like Mega, there's a line that they often use that it's uh unapologetically performant is what they say about this chain. Where when you remove the consensus overhead, when you do things like that, you can make a technically superior chain that can scale and become extremely fast, extraordinarily cheap, and uh create this abundant architecture for not only the gas that contracts consume, but it just kind of opens up possibilities to what you can do in the future. as well as enabling that hyper fast experience that we were looking for, right? Because whenever you have um every single one of those little squares is an order book. So the price update frequency is ridiculously high, as well as like the orders that need to go in and out of the order book, right? So I guess like from a technical perspective, why did we choose it? Because we see that this is where the, we think that this is where the future is going to um this style of architecture. Like I would say, um Personally, I'm bullish on the Monad team. I'm bullish on a lot of the projects there, but I personally don't have an appetite for an L1 right now. And so I'm less confident on that thesis than I am on building uh on an EVM chain. That's, all of the reasons I aforementioned. um So yeah, mean, there were some reasons like that, as well as I think that Mega ETH is the best distribution partner. So they have been incredible supporters of us. They have been our biggest champions and they have uh you know, just been extremely useful from day one. And there's something that Nathan talks about a lot, which is working with warm people, right? And so when we talk to all of these other teams, I just, don't think that there was ah anywhere that we were going to get the same level of support. And I will say I joined Nathan actually after he had a lot of these conversations with people. this is, I'm kind of echoing some of Nathan's sentiment here, but yeah, like the warm people thesis has proven to work out pretty well because uh I think that when you're, when you're a new app, you need support from your chain, you need support from your ecosystem. And uh where I think that MegaEth is going is there will be users there. We have the distribution from the chain. We have distribution from our own means, our own business development. But yeah, just think like warm people, great tech, uh fantastic distribution partner. And so those would be some of my reasons. I think like the core ethos of Mega too is just like... People are thinking differently. People are thinking outside of the box. They want to bring new ideas to the space. They want to see this thing break out of Twitter, not just us, but everybody that's building on Mega. um It's not all copy paste projects. It's not just another chain with the same five core apps over and over and over again. I'm continually inspired by my fellow builders on Mega as well. We hang out a lot. uh yeah, it's a great environment to be a part of. ah I spoke with Kevin from World Capital Markets this morning and um my comment to him was, what is really cool about MegaETH is that it is going to enable a lot of consumer first applications in crypto that we've never seen before because it's so fast and so performant, no gas fees. That enables so much potential um and also just creativity. And so I love the you know, the projects that are building on MegaETH. It's really exciting. um The speed, maybe we can talk like a little bit about like the technical aspects of you mentioned that the speed update on the order book is like, is ridiculously fast. so MegaETH is able to support that. On the price feeds, from what I understand, you guys are using RedStone oracles. how is that, how has that been helpful to I guess the product. Yeah, I think for us, know, you want to we want to operate on super low timeframes. uh You want your prices to be updating in a fashion that is as low as you can possibly get, right? It's like we're trying to take this to its logical conclusion of where it's still fun and fast, right? So when you look at something like your Oracle provider, if you don't have an Oracle that can update on that kind of time horizon, which is, you know, milliseconds, not seconds, is you have a jumpy price line and you have, you know, like just not a smooth and fun experience. It doesn't make it what we kind of set out for it to be. So there were also a few Oracle providers that we had chatted with and RedStone, whenever RedStone set up Bolt for Mega and we started working with the RedStone team, was like, okay, this is, and again, kind of warm people thesis. Like RedStone team has been fantastic and they've been super helpful. uh So yeah, RedStone was ultimately, they were going to provide us a fantastic product and yeah, give us, know, help us to enable the best trading experience for our users. I love that. I mean, as you know, I joined RedStone just a few weeks ago and the warm people thesis, I mean, is totally spot on. These guys are great. It's a good team. what I love, and this is not something that is like publicly known necessarily, but their approach to like client service is so high. Like they really take this idea of like white glove support very seriously. And having come from like the web to space, like that's a big deal. You know, when you talk about like the customer journey and the customer experience, like they are really serious about that, which is such a refreshing thing. Cause you don't see that in crypto a lot. I, at least I haven't. I've seen kind of a lot of a, you know, PVP, PVE, very kind of like self kind of a, I don't know, more kind of greedy kind of approaches, but they instead are like very client focused and I really appreciate that. So that's, that's amazing to hear. Yeah, there's a handful of teams that I would say I'd recommend wholeheartedly to a lot of people. Like they have just kind of gone above and beyond and have been there when we've needed them. And I would say like, uh you know, RedStone has been fantastic. Another team that I cannot get over how fantastic their customer service is, is Privy. We use them as a partner of ours and the Privy team, I cannot say enough good things about them. um You know, they're constantly useful. uh so yeah, like we want to partner with people that are, you know, they're not only executing on a high level from a product perspective, but they care and they want to implement your feedback. Like with RedStone, you know, it's a new product, right? The Bolt Oracle. And so We're working together with RedStone and Mega. My CTO is constantly in communication with RedStone and everybody's kind of working out some things together. And they're doing things according to our needs, which is super useful. It's not like a, here's what we have. You guys figure out how you can work within these parameters. It's like, what do you need? And is it technically feasible for us to make this happen? And if so, here's how we're going to do it and when. It's wonderful. Yeah, the concept of growing together is pretty powerful and I definitely see that in play. In a recent AMA, you said that there's like 300,000 people on the wait list, something like that. Either you or Nathan said that, I believe. I'm curious to see what patterns are you seeing in the people wanting to tap on euphoria finance. So there's a couple of different types of people. course, you kind of get memed when you talk about these massive numbers of people that are on your wait list. It's actually over, it's like a million people now on the wait list, which is, it's kind of funny because we all know that there's probably not a million people who are banging down the door to try euphoria. I I like to think that there are, but we have bot protections on these wait lists and things, and we have systems that filter, this stuff will all be filtered out and everything. So it's not a big deal, but. TLDR, we can tell who's real and who's not. uh But when it comes to the real versus the fake people, we can also see like where they're coming from, right? So uh there's a platform that actually legitimate people use. called airdrops.io. And so when new projects do like fundraising announcements and things like this, they often get listed on these platforms. And so one of our top referrers on our waitlist is airdrops.io. It's those guys. uh So like, it's a real thing. It's just people that are coming to farm an airdrop. And so, you know, some of them turn into real users and some of them don't. But uh ultimately, my messaging for a lot of this, especially as it pertains to the waitlist and our community, we have a weekly community call and I just had this chat with somebody today. uh They said, I joined your waitlist when AirDrop. Mm. And I'm like, look, you know, at the end of the day, we're building a trading app. And you you join the waitlist to sign up for a trading app. You didn't join the waitlist to sign up for me to hand you some tokens. And so, you know, I had kind of a little conversation around like when airdrops are useful and when they're not, and you know what that's all for. But yeah, lot of people on the waitlist. But different types, right? So there are farmers, and then there are just people like you who are excited about something that's new in the market, something that hasn't been done. think that people kind of have an appetite right now for something fresh. And I think the consumer first approach is really interesting because, you know, hyperliquid, imagine probably, I don't know the percentage, the ratio really, but I imagine that there's going to be like probably a bunch of hedge funds and like institutions that are playing on hyperliquid in addition to like, you know, consumers like retail. With euphoria, I mean, I don't, at least I don't see like institutions using euphoria necessarily, but it's like very consumer first. So it's very unique that way. um where was I going with this? I wasn't really going anywhere with this, but I'm just thinking of like as a user of hyperliquid and like the other users of hyperliquid, know like market makers using hyperliquid and et cetera, but with tap trading, euphoria, it's like, these are like consumers, like TikTokers. These are like everyday normal people. Anyway, I just can't get over how cool that is. It really is pretty amazing. And I'm so curious to see, as you guys roll this out to the public, what it will look like for TikTokers and then people on Instagram. I really see you four going crazy. Yeah, likewise. That's the goal. I think that ultimately there will be a path for both consumer and more institutional, more sophisticated actors on Euphoria as well. It's another thing, again, we kind of don't talk about this a ton because it's a little bit more technical. So we want to talk about the fun aspects of things and... ah We're speaking to consumers right now, but on the backside of things, a lot of the conversations that we're having are, um I mean, this is a legitimate exchange that's under the hood. So there are market makers. There will be a vault that's similar to like the HLP vault, right? users can contribute capital for the in-house market making operation as well. there's like different, you know, there's people that will interact with the front end as far as just tap trading. There's people that might just want to passively speculate and provide capital to the market making vault. You know, make, make money on idle cash that way. And then uh in the future, you'll be able to plug into the API and do market making and trade on the backend as well, where you're not actually interacting with the front end. But again, this is kind of a new style of order book and uh a new expression of derivatives. Okay, that's really interesting because the go-to-market right now is definitely targeting normal retail consumers. But it sounds like there's a B2B play maybe happening in the background, which is more like a business development aspect, right? Yeah, for sure. You know, to price these, you need uh strong market making. And so that's a key component of uh what we spent time on over the past year. I would say over the past year, it's not necessarily been spent on the front end, it's been spent on the back end and making all of the core elements work together. Okay. I think that's really cool. And I'm glad to hear that because I think the messaging and the positioning is just really great. But there's also a segment of the market that probably should know that it's a serious exchange underneath. And I'm curious about how do you blend the of the fun, the feel something approach versus Okay, here's like the really serious like technical stuff happening in the, you under the hood. I think that until you're live and until I think it comes down to conversations really until you're live. I think it comes down to building relationships, being present within the space, being present within your your ecosystem, your network of people, your ecosystem of people. um And I would say better known beats best. So I think that we have one of the best trading experiences that will come out this year, but better known beats best. If somebody else is way more liquid than we are, if somebody else offers way better execution than we do, that's a problem for us. And so uh I think that it comes down to pre-product. It's in relationship building. And then post product, it's discovery, right? It's making sure that everybody knows you, everybody can see you, that you're discoverable on every analytics platform and that people can see like this is a serious operation. But again, up to that point until people can actually see the smart contracts and see like what's happening on the backend or see the product, it's more, you have to tell people. uh What stage is Euphoria in right now? There's a wait list. Does that mean it's an invite only private alpha or? Okay. a closed beta that people are trying out and we will go live. We'll start to roll out access in batches over the next couple of weeks and then we'll be live on MegaETH, Baynet. That's awesome. I can't wait. Likewise, likewise, I'm so excited. You know, today's a perfect example. There's something I tweeted about today, which is like, you know, you're watching the FOMC meeting and you're not sure how the market's gonna react to the news. So rather than getting caught off sides in a per position because you thought that the market was gonna react one way, you could sit there with Euphoria open and you can tap trades and you can bag it in either direction. You could be right, you know, 12 times before you would have had your limits filled in. This isn't to knock like a perpdex per se. This is just to say like, I think it's a really fun way to interact with the market. It's alive and it's like you're participating, not just like reacting. It's funny you said that because that's exactly what I did. I opened a limit short at a really high price for an asset. It never hit it. So I went the other way. I went long at a really low price and never hit that. So I'm totally sidelined. And so now what do I do? And now I'm just out of the market. And so that's a really common experience. And I think with tap trading, It's going to be, that could be a problem that tap trading will help fix. Yeah, I like to think so. I'm a trader myself too. I trade perps constantly and I think of what are the frustrations that I have during specific things and how can we make solutions to those. And this is a fun one, right? In moments of uh extreme volatility and you're just not sure what to do, like, okay, go have fun with it and be, it's a reflexive platform. You can just do it whatever direction you think. mean, you're down on the... you know, the 10 second chart at times. And you can just tap wherever it's going and not have to care about am I directionally right or wrong over the next 10 minutes. I think too, like the other bull case that I have, like I've got plenty of bull cases for my own project, but. ah Something that I think is really fun, which is messaging that I think I'll kind of lean more into when the market cools down is I joked recently when the market dropped that euphoria is the only legal way to feel euphoria in a bear market. uh But when you have these times of just like crab markets or bear markets that are kind of boring and choppy, It's still fun, right? Because all we're doing is just taking the volatility to the max. so like, you know, even if Bitcoin's not moving, it's moving on a 10 second, like on a one second timeframe chart, it's moving, you know, so it's still fun. I love that. I know I'm pretty active in the the Infinex community. believe Kane Warwick is one of the investors. Is that correct? Okay. I would love for Euphoria to be in like one of the apps in Infinex. And so I'm going to like push him like, dude, you got to talk to, know, Casey and Nathan and get do something here. Like we need to feel something in Infinex. So just a heads up. Absolutely, yeah, there's a few things that I think that there's a lot of synergies between us and we've talked about them. I'd say Mega and Infinex have a pretty close relationship. Nice. Well, Casey, this has been so fun. I'm like so excited. I'm very bullish on Euphoria and I can't wait to give it a shot. I think this thing will take off. I really do. so anyway, congrats on having that key insight. And it's such a like on its face, it seems like a simple like form factor change, but it's really like a huge change in psychology that that seems so simple on its face, but is really, really pretty novel. So anyway, thank you. And anything like last words you want to share? No, I just want to say thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. This was a fun chat. uh Yeah, we've got Testnet coming out in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned on our Twitter and come hang out in our Discord if you have questions. We host a weekly community call on Wednesdays. So I'm always there to answer questions and anything that anybody needs, there for and providing updates to our community regularly. We give them sneak peeks of the alpha experiences that we don't put out in public quite yet. um Yeah, I guess thank you for having me today and appreciate the chat. Awesome, thank you.