Evgeny, CEO of Zerion, welcome to the show. Thank you, Peter. Glad to be here. I want to do a quick intro. You're a person that probably doesn't need intro since you've been around for a while. Zerion has a ton of users. But today we're on the show uh with uh Evgeny, co-founder and CEO of Zerion. One of the most earliest and enduring projects in crypto, been through multiple cycles. It's one of the most widely used smart wallets and they've evolved quite a bit since they began their journey. We'll talk about how Zerion adopted through multiple market cycles and what they have planned right now and where they're going. So, Evgeny, maybe take us through the journey of Zerion, like when you guys started, how you guys started, and how did we end up here um with the current kind of product characteristics that Zerion um finds itself in. Definitely. So the story of Zerion is actually quite the unique one, I think, in crypto. We've seen so many different waves of crypto adoption and how we've seen the rise of retail in the beginning of DeFi, summer, and then the whole collapse. And it happened multiple times over the last many years. So Zerion started in 2019 as a formal entity. we first went to market with this simple idea that uh actually should be very straightforward for you to understand how much money you have. And back in the day, people were just using spreadsheets and like their notes. I don't know what maybe block folio I think was the main product for tracking how much money, how much like Bitcoin and ETH and tokens you've invested in. So this was like state of art situation on the market. But at the same time, the number of tokens was growing, the complexity of on-chain things was exploding. DeFi summer was happening, it was 2019, early DeFi protocols were appearing. So we thought it's a very simple idea that you can just plug in your wallet address and you should be able to see all of the money. And this defined the foundation for Zerion in the beginning. So we started with that and we've built the system to... really indexed all of this information and provided it in a glance, in a split of a second to any wallet address available on-chain. And uh this is how we started. And obviously, as we started integrating more more DeFi capabilities inside Zerion, like swaps, were the first Uniswap integration ever, like external from Uniswap. uh same with like Compound V2. maker as well with work external interfaces to all this recent defy protocols We realized that we cannot really progress further in terms of simplifying user experience Beyond where we were if we are not moving towards becoming a wallet. So in In 2025, sorry in 2022. We really became full full-fledged both released first on mobile and then later we released the extension And since then, we really think of Zerion as the bullet first product. currently, most of our users, uh overwhelming majority of our users, they use Zerion primarily as their main wallet and only second as uh a portfolio tracker. But recently, in the last few years, we've released more products as well to the market. So the two I want to mention uh is obviously the Zerion network that we released last year. And the product that is, I guess, not many people on the retail side are familiar with, but Zerion has been around with our API product, which has been wildly successful, especially in beginning of this year. It will start exploding in adoption, mainly because the institutions and other companies are moving towards on-chain. So they're moving because of the changes in regulation and just broader sentiment towards... crypto adoption, I think there's more more demand for uh indexing and allowing uh building better experiences for the end consumers without all of the hustle of building uh on-chain uh infrastructure. we are helping users, helping other businesses with that through our API product. So yeah, that's full range. Yeah, a lot of things. Happy to untie. I love it. uh I want to tell you a quick story. I was very, very early in 2016 or so. And I remember I was in a Telegram group, or I think maybe back then it was like a Slack group where we would share kind of like tools that we were using. And then a couple of years after that, Something like that. then a couple of years after that, um so Blockfolio became big and we're all using Blockfolio. And then someone in the group said, hey, they got acquired by, I think it was CoinMarketCap acquired them. um And then one of the people in the group said, well, we have to stop using it now, but there's this other thing coming up. then everyone in the group started using Zerion. Nice. oh crazy because it was such a, it was almost like a really natural thing and almost like a protest against, well, Blockfolio was cool, but now they're part of them, so we're gonna go over here. And I love that transition, and also the adoption cycle. No, no, no. You guys are such a big business now. I love the adoption cycle of going from initially a tracker, which gets a lot of users. And then over time, became a more sophisticated tracker than a full-fledged wallet, adding services. And now you guys have an API business where now other businesses can use Zerion as a platform. And that's really exciting. And I'd like to get into that also. Tell us about, I guess, in the transition, during this adoption cycle, as you went from, uh beautifully went from a tracker to a wallet to adding swaps, like from a product perspective and user perspective, what were the, I'd love to have been in those discussions where, hey, maybe, you know, we've, we've, we have all, you know, a bajillion people using the tracker now, maybe we should do something else. Like, what were those conversations like as you move from? you progress from one kind of main product feature to another. uh That's a good question. I think, honestly, I don't know how other companies approach that. think at times, Zerion is different in that capacity because we've been always uh more, I would say, thoughtful looking at the market. And sometimes it can be a blessing and a curse. At times, we would be um slower to react to some things because we're like, okay, we're not... too compelled by what is happening. It doesn't feel right for us to completely throw everything out and go there. at other times, it helped us a lot because we were able to anticipate a lot of this market shifts and transitions and where we need to um be like, what's the next phase of Zerion? Because the market, obviously, you've been in crypto for a while, the market is volatile and very volatile to an extent of Many companies die in these different phases. So oh we have to be very much thoughtful about this transition. So the discussions, the way we usually do that is we bring in uh different people from the company and we have like this, now it's much more institutionalized, let's say. So we have this like quarterly strategic sessions. Before it was more like ad hoc, uh but similar cadence. And we would just raise the most relevant hard questions. Like, do we believe that being, for example, just a tracker is enough for us to move forward? Like, what are some signs, for example, or market trends and shifts or demands from the user side that we can address that are kind of in close proximity of where we exist? And from these discussions, we give like... different product directions we are creating and we're deciding to focus on something new to continue evolving. um Yeah, this has been the process so far and I wouldn't say it was perfect. Sometimes when it comes to some of the features that we've built, they were a little bit too early. And for example, this whole uh Zerion network, I think was a little bit too early. in a sense of like we've been been, we now see the stable and tempo going into the direction. no transfers, no fees for making stable coin transfers, like making stable coin chains that are specifically designed for this kind of use cases. with Zero Network, we've been a little bit one step there, but it wasn't fully clear how exactly that's supposed to look like. So I think that's on one side we were early. with our, I would say, NFT feature, we were pretty late. to the game and not particularly compelled. And maybe for the better because NFTs were a big disappointment in the last couple of years, but recently making a comeback. So I'm more excited about NFTs uh in other formats like RWA type of context or more uh utility focused NFTs. um yeah, that's been our process, I guess. Pretty natural for us. Yeah, the adoption cycle for Zerion sounds very natural. I'd love to hear more about how you involve users because, well, in crypto, there's a lot of like, info projects, but not a ton of applications that are very kind of user-focused, user-centric. And I'm really intrigued by those types of applications and to the extent that they involve actual users. and do user research, that type of thing, because it just doesn't happen a lot in crypto. In crypto, most of it's like you kind of build something and then you hope people will come and start using it. But you guys actually can know like, okay, here's kind of like some habits and behaviors people are doing, and we need to kind of adjust to meet that. Yeah, I think we've, and especially recently, we became really good at this. Obviously, there's no ceiling, but I'm pretty proud of what the team was able to do with regards to our decision-making process on the product side. We've been, I mean, first we've been pretty early on obsessed about analytics and We didn't want analytics to compromise the privacy, so we've built so much to really segregate the user information, user data from the analytics insights that we gained from that data. So it's like a whole other topic that I don't want to go into yet. But speaking of the analytics, data is gained when making these decisions. So looking at retention of different user groups, can... derive insights about the patterns of usage and who's growing, like what kind of user behavior is there and which behaviors are not like kind of ceasing to exist. And encrypted is particularly, I think, hard because a lot of people are just chasing yield or chasing tokens or chasing alpha. So it feels like you're onto something and uh the next moment alpha is not there and no one actually is interested in. let's say Web3 gaming whatsoever. And just a few months ago, was like the hottest thing and everybody was gaming uh and doing this and that. I think it's just, it's obviously you need to be looking at data and be also very in the trenches to understand what is actually going on. And I guess on the other side, like on the user interview side, we've... I think for Zerion, we have always run this roadmap.zir.io uh thing since like early, early days where people vote for different features or different token integrations and chains. We've been using that as our guide. But more recently, we started doing again, because of the market shift, I would say that started this year, we've started doing like another rounds and rounds of new user interviews to get to a better understanding of the new user to come. I think previously the market was, I mean, if we're putting it in this like buckets, it was mainly innovators and early adopters versus now we're shifting to actually like the early majority type of audience and their demands and the way they want to be using this technology is different. So that's why we thought we need to readapt to that as well. So speaking of like the upcoming transitions. I love it. And you guys were also very early to mobile, which is a whole probably a whole different user type. um I know looking at might be, yeah, which is really incredible. Because I think you guys went to mobile when almost everything else was on desktop. so it was like, people go left and you guys went right. And that turned out to be like the right direction. um What's the most surprising? So looking at all the user behavior, uh can you share maybe like one or two like really surprising things that you thought was, that just like surprised you in the product team? Something you guys didn't expect? I can share a few recent ones. The one that really got me was that a lot of people were so happy to see the desktop view uh in the DApp browser on mobile. And the reason being that a lot of people are using our DApp browser from their mobile phones because they're uh claiming some airdrops, they're going to test nets and testing a bunch of different DApps that are being released. And for them, It's important, like they don't have really a desktop and they want to do a lot of things on mobile and all of these websites are really not meant for being used from mobile. So that was like one of the praised features that I had no idea that was necessary for so many people. And I guess like another one that I was surprised with is really how much like test net usage we're getting. Obviously it's like fluctuating and But people are obviously hunting for new gems all the time. And the usage of different air drops, sorry, of different networks, test nets, connected to the upcoming air drops, obviously it spikes kind of, it's not, you know, so impressive, but I didn't know how much of an activity would be happening on test nets. Yeah, that's like a particular user group though. I think if we looked at the root cause of that, I bet it's a lot of the test nets recently, they've come up with this kind of a really interesting mechanic where they have these tap games where, and you're on a timer where you could harvest something for, I don't know, if you harvest something and then you let it grow and you have... come back like the next, like within eight hours or after eight hours to harvest it again, to get more gems or points. And I saw like, at least in the last probably six to 12 months, multiple testnet, um kind of incentivize testnets that did that kind of thing. And it was really interesting and it actually worked. But the other problem is that now it's like, uh from a geographic perspective, it created lots of uh uh farmers that later will not become users. And so that kind of created a whole different problem for these networks. um Which brings me to an interesting question around, um Monad recently um did their uh airdrop claim yesterday and there was a lot of controversy with not including specific countries. um And so from a you see all this data on the backend. I'd be really curious to see kind of um where your users are from, if that's something that you're able to share. And does it give you a sense of crypto adoption? I've always heard that, like the Philippines, for example, is like the MetaMask usage there is really huge. I've always what, yeah, yeah, exactly. During the Axie Infinity craze. um But I wonder like what, What if it would does it actually tell us anything about crypto adoption? It's a good question. We had some like, was a beef on Twitter. I forgot the name of the person, but it was really about like, so he put up a tweet saying that they're banning all of the users from Nigeria and some other country that they were seeing because it's like the KYC cost is pretty significant. And I understand that. we're lucky in that sense that we don't have the KYC costs associated with the usage. for us, it's pretty much the same if these are like regardless of where they're coming from. So we can serve all the users and we're blessed because of that. So I'm happy. really the conversation was there like how much of a real user is like other people. And I think you put it right that for some of these games or maybe incentivized test nets not every user is going to convert into an actual retail user who's going to stick to the product. But from the wallet perspective and the point being coming back to Metamask, they did retain all these users who onboarded through Axie Infinity. So Axie Infinity was really the entry point for them to get into crypto, but they moved on to something else and they continued to use Metamask. So really for Metamask, it's actually a great thing. all of these users are actually uh real users. to the degree that they have some assets now, they have the wallet, they can use it, they can start like exchanging, swapping, finding new airdrops. So I'm much more open uh from that perspective. I think we all start somewhere, like in some sense, like every person in crypto is a farmer because you found something early. and you're like alpha seeking behavior is just on a different scale. Some people start with just one dollar, some people start with tens of thousands of dollars to find some alpha and to make it big. So we don't discriminate. We try to serve as many countries as possible legally. And speaking of the geography, our user base, we've been still heavily dominated by the Western world. world. on the mobile app side of things. So the US and Europe combined is still the number one and two. And then on extension, think the top country is becoming Nigeria or is already Nigeria. uh And that's quite interesting. we still see the US and other Western countries, but it's pretty global. if we look at the whole distribution. yeah, for me, just tells that crypto adoption happens pretty much universally. And we had this discussion internally, like, should we go into a very specific niche market and start like really, you know, becoming a country-specific wallet? uh And the decision was that it just goes against what we believe in, what we want to create. uh That's why we kept to the original ethos and stick to the plan of being the global product from day one. Yeah, and I think that makes sense and I think going the geo approach is probably really hard also I once worked for a Excuse me a large a large a company in the genealogy space And genealogy, the product itself is such where you actually need a location in each of these countries in which you uh provide research uh information. so for example, I helped launch the Italy website, the Germany website, and these websites provided like, if you wanted to find your ancestry in Germany, then you would go there and you would see all the records and all of that. But launching to specific localities, you know, it's like, it's a lot of work. And you actually need like boots on the ground there, and people and a team. And anyway, that's like a long way to say that's like the geo approach is really hard. I would say that the global approach is also hard. Everything is hard in a way. You can end up being everywhere but not anywhere in particular. So it's always the decision, the business decision, right? And business is hard. I want to talk a little bit about the mobile approach. For the same company that I worked at, when we had a mobile product also, and the way we launched it, and I don't know if you guys have done this with Zerion, but we actually could launch it in very specific zip codes of the US first. And then we would kind of go out from there. And we had a very really tight experiment that helped us to... be able to tweak the go-to-market and the product at the zip code level. I'm curious if you guys have, for the mobile approach, if you guys have done something like that or, I mean, that would just be really curious, especially for like a crypto project to be that sophisticated. Yeah. So we haven't done anything like that. So we've been rolling out pretty much straight to all countries. We didn't think about that in the early days. We just felt that, you know, the good mobile products are missing and we got to fill the gap. We do run a lot of A-B tests now. They're not, I mean, some of the experiments we run are geo-focused, but it's mainly because of like, we cannot run the experiment other way, for example. So uh we've done that recently over the summer. for example, with fees, we're experimenting with fees and seeing like, what's the response like, and we're doing that for a country. But most of the time we're doing just product iterations and we're testing that on the whole user base. But it's a nice approach, like when you're rolling something new to segregate that by. Yeah, I guess one interesting thing that we've done was when we were launching our loyalty campaign and the network. We've done a bit of separation and segregation of users by their previous on-chain experience and their on-chain behaviors. So we would put them in different levels based on what they've been able to do with Zerion and externally. So kind of like calculating their scores and their level based on their past activity, which was a... Quite an interesting exercise that we've done. That's cool. In that same company, just so you know, if you ever want to do any experiments in the US and you want to focus on like high school, yeah, at zip code level, there's a zip code in Georgia where it's actually the first school that, um it's the first school district that opens in the year. And doing tests in that zip code is very interesting because it gives you a peek into If it does well in the zip code when the school, high school starts, how well could it do in other high schools as the zip codes kind of open up? um Anyway, that was just uh kind of an aside, but I wish we could do more of those types of experiments in crypto. I think we'll get there. um Why do you think... not like the crypto marketing was not on the same level. think crypto marketing was like, it still is in many companies from what we see, like it's still limited and many people because of the nature of the industry and the kinds of people that attracted and I think this anti like ads ethos created the different marketing uh structure for these teams. It's very different from like a traditional, say you're launching an app, a consumer app. You obviously need to know really well how your performance marketing is doing versus in crypto, there was no performance marketing up until recently because everything was banned. So if you don't have performance marketing, everybody needs to survive somehow. And you go and like really start reinventing a bunch of these things from scratch. yeah, it's not fun, but also fun if you're like into pain. Yeah, you mentioned performance marketing opened up recently. I didn't know about that. I thought it was still, you still couldn't run ads. Can you share a little bit more? It's opening up. I wouldn't say it's like fully open. It's still problematic. It's not like a green light on everything, but there are platforms where you can start doing things in certain capacity. I mean, there's always like app store ads and stuff like that. And Google is also working uh more with uh crypto companies. So yeah, it's opening up. I wouldn't say it's very effective yet, but it's there. Going back to the the geo uh kind of topic, why do you think Nigeria is growing so fast? I spoke with another founder who actually lived in Nigeria. She's Chinese. um She's the founder of a very big project that is going to have a TGE at some point this month or next month. But she she actually lived in Nigeria for two years. And we had a really good conversation about that. She just kind of travels all over the world and lives wherever. But she actually didn't go to Nigeria for any reason. But I'm hearing more and more that it's like the crypto is just growing so fast there. Yeah, it is. I recently had a conversation with our ambassador actually, and his Twitter handle is derator. And he was just giving me feedback about our ambassador program and the growth of Zirin in Nigeria. So it was actually a very interesting conversation. It's a different market. first of all, obviously, there's a lot of people in Nigeria. It's like, think, coming up to 300 million people, think 280 or something, if I remember correctly. So it's a really big country with a lot of people who are interested in obviously English speaking. And that means pretty much immediate access to a bunch of the crypto information. Because obviously crypto is not as, it seems global, but it's still English primarily. And it becomes harder if you don't speak English too. really find this opportunity. I think that's really like the main drivers uh to Nigerian crypto adoption. And obviously like the local payment rails are not satisfactory for many people. So crypto is like a way to make it big. That's true for many other countries as well, but I Nigeria just because of its size, it started to grow. And I don't know if this is like a Zerion specific phenomenon, but uh Yeah, for us it's a good growing market. Yeah, I hear it's a really young population too. There's just the demographics, there's a lot of young people. m I'm learning a lot about Korea recently and our kind of an expansion, know, projects want to expand into Korea because it's such a big crypto hub, right? But it's a really hard market to really expand into. um I'm curious to the extent that you're able to share, like what is... em I guess what's Xerions experiencing in Korea and what do we know about the users there? uh I would need to go back to like to give you very specific insights, but what I remember, we've done this research maybe four months ago or so when we looked at Korea was in a target list actually of countries where we want to expand and continue pushing because uh honestly, it was just the revenue per user was higher than average for some reason. So I think like people there were trading more. uh And yeah, I think that's the reason why many people want to go and many companies want to be in Korea because retail users are just making more bets and buying more tokens and are excited about crypto. I think their use cases are ready to buy the right thing and to invest in crypto rather than say like... Even in Nigeria, Like the average revenue per user is smaller because a lot of them are trying to find like opportunities to uh win some kind of airdrop and that's fine. That's just a different way of making it. But that doesn't always create the same like uh a revenue for the projects going there. So I think like uh South Korea from that perspective is a lucrative market. Yeah. Maybe I can share with you a couple of things that I've learned about the South Korean market. uh It turns out that the average, like the demographic in terms of age, they're actually much older than probably your typical crypto user. And so like we're looking at like 35 plus are people that are very, very active and also have uh capital to use. uh which is really interesting because I think for the price, at least in the United States, I'm guessing the demographic is a lot younger than 35. 35 to like 50 plus are the folks that based on kind of my research. um then the next question is like, why is that? It turns out that in South Korea, there's kind of a couple of like really large families that are well off, but then everyone else are... um Don't have those opportunities and so they're almost using crypto as like a lottery ticket like and in a lot of the older folks in the 35 plus range Like they're very very active. That's why it's like the you know, the the kimchi premium on up bit It's like it's like why is that it's because it's like that age group is like they are Just gambling like crazy Yeah Yeah, I have a personal anecdote because I lived in Korea in Seoul for about four months and that was during the 2019 era. So just like early, early days of Zirin in some sense. And I remember that I wasn't on the bus uh and it was just a guy sitting there casually trading like thousands of dollars of Bitcoin at BitComp. Just like sitting next to me pretty much. uh And I haven't seen that anywhere else pretty much in any other country that I've been to or uh in. No one on the bus is trading Bitcoin from mobile. It was just a browser. So uh Bithub app opened, not even an app, like a website opened in the browser and swapping things. So yeah, that was pretty cool to see. That's cool. uh Let's talk about the, you mentioned the API product. I would love to hear more about like what is the name and um how you guys are rolling it out and like who's using it, that type of thing. And, you know, give us a sense into that product launch. Definitely. It's interesting that the name is actually Zerion API. So if you have a better name for that one, we've decided to stick to the Zerion API because this already became a pretty known thing. We didn't want to move away from Zerion because a lot of people come to us because they... The most common request is that, I've been using Zerion and I want this in my product. How do I get that? And this is where the Zerion API really comes in. And uh we started with that product about at this point, I think two years ago, or maybe even more than that, when we actually productized it, as in started putting it to the public and before it was used by other, some customers without even being a publicly available thing. And the moment we launched it, it was just getting more and more traction. And as I mentioned already in 2025, it's just started becoming like a bigger thing. think mainly it's connected to the rise of the number of layer 2s and just the complexities growing even on the infrastructure side. if previously you had Ethereum and that was the only thing where people were building, then we suddenly started having all the layer 2s and complexity around DeFi continued to increase, the number of tokens is crazy. Then we had Solana entering the consumer market. So if you are trying to build a wallet, like a non-custodial wallet, using all of these blockchains, you need to have support for all of these layer 2s. Otherwise, the user is going to complain. If they don't see their assets on a particular chain, if they cannot use a certain app, if your wallet doesn't support that chain, it's problematic. And users always want like, what's the new and hot new thing that is coming up? Say like, Mona, is a... around the door and people want to trade things on Monad, they need to have the support. And if your wallet is not there, what are you going to do? You're going to start losing users. So for many companies, it became obvious that building this infrastructure in-house is going to take first a very long time, but also maintaining that infrastructure is expensive. we, like Xeer and API, just came in as a convenient product to help on that front because building like integrating the custody of the keys you have preview for example or maybe you do that locally somehow there are different ways of solving that but actually fetching the data from the blockchain is is like in some sense unsolved problem the RPCs are very low level infrastructure so you still need to build a lot of things on top so yeah that's that's how the Zerion product and the Zerion API came about And in terms of the main customers, have quite a few of them mentioned on the website. So the main ones are uh companies like Rainbow, our big friends, and UnionSwapBall, for example. uh quite a few, so we have like over 380 different uh teams using the API for various reasons. That's been growing quite well recently. em So there's kind of like a sense of co-opetition almost because Rainbow on one sense uh is a competitor yet they're using one of the Xeron products. How do you deal with that? That's a good question. We thought about that in the beginning, how hard it's going to be to be on both sides of the equation. uh we think that first the wallet market is not one winner takes all. And if we were not there to provide this information, they would need to go somewhere else to find it. And there's going to be competition there anyways. And we've built all of that data in-house. So it's really that like Why are we, uh yeah, we just believe we're not um taking away from the main product, we're expanding the market with this API thing. Because a lot of these wallets that are launching, they are bringing their own user basis already. So um yeah, they would bring these users to their products regardless of what is powering. So we see that as an expansionary move on our end. like think of kind of if we extend our thinking beyond just the current crypto market, we can look at companies like um say TikTok, right? They would at some point want to launch a version of some kind of tokenized products inside. maybe like tokenizing some of the rewards, maybe loyalty, maybe different tokens that you tip with to the streamers and things like that. And they would want to, it's very likely that they wouldn't want to control over that. they wouldn't want to turn into a bank and have all the licenses in every country. So instead they would go the simpler route, which is becoming a non-custodial wallet. And from that perspective, we would be the right partner to them to support their growth and non-custodial wallet side uh rather than them building the whole infrastructure themselves. So yeah, that's how we think about it. And I don't think it really competes with um the user base. that is looking specifically for a bullet-like Zerion product. I love that uh philosophy because I think in crypto we have too much PVP and not enough like uh the grow the pie together kind of thinking. And I agree with you. I the wallet market is, the TAM I'm sure is massive. I don't know what it is but um I'm sure there's gonna be lots and lots of winners in the wallet space. um one winner in the infrastructure side. Yeah, think when I think of Zerion, I think of the the mote is initially I thought, okay, the the mote are users because they have a lot of users and we don't know how many but I'm assuming there's a lot because you guys are are kind of one of the one of the first in the category. And um but another mote is like the amount of information and data that you know about the without knowing any self-identifying information, but you know a lot about the user and user behavior, geography, and how they use crypto. That kind of information is so valuable that I think Zerion on API just makes so much sense. And if I were a business, I would definitely want to tap into that so that I could help grow my business with some intelligence using the Zerion API. um Do you guys think about data like that? I mean, now it's like monetizable. um But did you think that this would eventually become a moat for you? Can you see my video by the way? think it disconnected for a second. Is it all good? Oh, sorry. Yeah, you're good. Okay. Yeah, that's a great question. So we always thought about data as a moat. um I think the main reason is that the whole crypto is public, right? Like the on-chain information is all public, uh but only portion of that matters in some sense. So only the portion of that is uh retail user base that is actively making this taker order flow rather than the maker order flow or like a bot order flow. uh So it is definitely a valuable information, think, on the API side. We haven't um yet done any of the work that would benefit from this aggregated view that we have, but we're planning to release more of that. So the idea is pretty simple here is that as we see more of this information coming from the API partners, we can start exposing some of these endpoints, like for example, the most popular tokens that people are trading. to these customers themselves so they can increase, for example, their trading revenues or have better insights into the market by tapping into the aggregated view of the Zerion usage. So it's one of the next steps for us, I would say, but we haven't done that um right now. I think that would be huge. mean, super valuable. And I can see there's... Sorry. you remind me that we were yet to start our trading division at some point. uh We haven't done that yet, but probably the most profitable thing we could do is just launch our trading arm. um Which reminds me, I've met with multiple perps dexes, founders of perps dexes recently. um what I'm finding really, really interesting is that a lot of these projects, they start out as a perps dex, which has a really large addressable market. But then they're kind of verticalizing where you see some perps dexes and they're adding a spot feature. And then some of them are also adding borrow and lend uh kind of integration where you can borrow and then use what you borrow to trade and then pay it back. kind of like the verticalizing approach is really interesting. I haven't seen that a lot in crypto, but I see a similar thing within the kind of the smart wallet category. And it makes sense, right? Because If you to provide a really good user experience, you need to be able to control um these features for the user so that you can manage it and provide them features that kind of meet their needs. What do you think about the verticalizing approach and how does that kind of jive or m I guess reconcile with this idea of decentralization and like, um is there a conflict there? um Yes, I think there's definitely a conflict between uh verticalization and uh the protocol nature of crypto. uh So that's why I'm more of the believer in the barbell model for crypto specifically. I think when we're speaking about the internet, it's all turning into the distribution controls at all to the degree that like you can start messing around with the underlying protocols. for your benefit in some sense. So we see that the internet does not really look like it used to look like. So even though we still rely on the HTTP and IP kinds of protocols, I think they are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the context of modern internet reality versus in crypto. I would expect this to be a barbell in a sense again, that on one side, we'll still have this. very, very deeply integrated into everything, protocols like Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera. And on the other hand, we'll have a bunch of companies relying on their distribution and the leveraging this technology, but they wouldn't be able to move fully away from the native underlying protocols because otherwise they would lose completely the trust and access of some kind. So that's my theory. Obviously, it's like time will tell how this is going to evolve. I'm optimistic that this is possible to maintain and we're not going to fall into the same thing that happened with the internet. But speaking, coming back to this idea of verticalization, I think it's happening. And then crypto specifically, it's everywhere. We look at, I think, you know, the ones who making money, right? Like the exchanges primarily. We see them verticalizing a lot. So they launch their launchpads, launch their wallets, they launch their per products, they have everything. And we see even like looking at Uniswap as an example, being the most popular DEX, they starting to verticalize across the board. So they would launch it, they have a chain, they have their own wallet. So it's all about serving the user from different perspectives. Yeah, I think this is as a as trend will just continue increasing and the price of building on this infrastructure goes down. So if previously you needed like way more things to start your layer two or build your DeFi protocol, it's just an amount of investment and knowledge that you need to have was really high versus right now if you want to launch your own stable coin, if you want to launch your layer two If you want to launch your wallet, thanks for example to Zirin API, all of this costs are going down. And that means that companies like Stripe or don't know, TikTok as an example can build all of that stack in the matter of less than a year, or maybe if they're really serious about it in like months. So yeah, I think that's just going to be the case moving forward. Looking forward in the next, you know, three, six, nine, 12 months or so, what are some things that you'd like to share about Zirion and uh any work that you guys are doing that you want to, I guess, promote and bring more attention to? Definitely. We're doing exciting things on multiple fronts. I would start with the Zerion wallet itself. It's obviously the world of choice for many people. uh We continue to innovate on the wallet. The cool things that are happening right now is the feed, is currently in test flight. uh And for many, it's going to be the experience that you're going to have is that you'll see all of the people that are making different transactions and trades on chain. You'll be able to see that very early and copy trade what they've been doing. So I think that's pretty exciting. Also, you'll be able to find the most profitable traders and early surface the opportunities to you. So that's on the wallet side. we have Some cool stuff as well, but that's kind of similar to what many of the wallets are working on. having all the perps and integrations with prediction markets and stuff like that. And we're excited to start bringing many of these things into native wallet experience. And speaking of the API, we are putting a lot of effort there. coming up with, you New customers are joining. A lot of new teams are starting to use our Solana endpoints. We recently released that on the API level. We see the big gap in the Solana market in terms of data pricing for assets. It's just very complex in terms of scale. So we're happy to be one of the data providers of choice for many and uh excited to see how the Solana market is going to grow because of that. Yeah, and we're releasing more endpoints as well. So web hooks uh PNL is being reworked and improved on and Yeah, our DeFi handlers, etc, etc. yeah good things happening on the API So if you're building in for the blockchain, it's it's a great thing to start with a lot of things going on. I want to get personal a little bit. You've been in the space for a while and I'm curious to know how you have evolved as a founder, you know, since you founded Zerion. uh Great question. Yeah, I've been in crypto for like now over 10 years, which is quite crazy. I think the industry is changing a lot towards financial, financialization, I would say of the industry. And I think myself, uh I would mention first thing that changed about me is I've started, I became more pragmatic, I think. And this is, there are still things that I believe in and that I want to, that I don't want to compromise on, but I think there were things where I was just blind and had very little understanding about how people function or what people want. And you're coming as an early stage founder, you're coming in with a lot of ideas that... this needs to work this way. sometimes you're right and that helps you break the first, you know, doors and get into the first successes. But over time, you start building more of a skill uh to understand what people actually want instead of just relying on what you think is right. Yeah, I think this is one big thing. uh yeah, speaking coming back to the whole audience and this shift from innovators and early adopters of the technology. think this shift is pretty dramatic for crypto and we are only seeing it now. think previously I was saying that all of the attempts by big companies, it was really spending the R &D money. And I think right now it's really the shift that is happening. I think we need to adapt from being the, I guess, just a crypto bro type of person in team or anywhere on the street. Like you need to adjust to actually, and your product needs to adjust, it needs to really drastically simplify, it needs to compete with Revolute. So that means for us as founders in the crypto space, we need to be more agile, more smart about how we go about things. We need to be ruthless as well and like build out, you know, proper marketing, not just some... let's just throw tokens around and everything's going to be fine. Well, Evgeny, thank you so much for this was a really great conversation. think Zerion is one of the kind of the staples in crypto, if I can call it that, where it's really it's been there since the beginning and has really helped to shape how crypto users kind of interact and use crypto. And that's quite historical. I don't mean to be dramatic there, but really, like as long as I've been in crypto, I can like Xeron is just one of the key things that I've kind of thought about. um I will be sure to share, yeah, and I'll be sure to share, all of the URLs and in the show notes and uh other things. Is there anything else that we, that you want to talk about that we haven't yet? I think we've covered a lot of important points, so we can start wrapping up here. But thanks a lot for a lot of the questions and going deeper on some of them and going a bit personal. I like that. Awesome. Well, if you any thank you so much. uh Zerion is awesome and I'm a big fan and I'm sure most of the listeners are users and so I think they'll enjoy listening to this episode. So thank you. Thank you so much. Have a good one.