Matt Huang
speaker
205 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Matt Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I don't fully know, but my hypothesis would be possibly my mom or parents. That makes it sound like I have some bad relationship with them or something, but I think I intuited early on that in really small stakes, like not in a way that matters, but the trade-off between agency and authority. Now I see it on the other side as a parent.
But yeah, and really small stakes, just the notion of navigating individual agency. And I'm sure every child, every parent ends up in some situation where the child feels like it's unfair. And maybe it probably is unfair from some objective point, but it's the parent's call. I think that can make one skeptical of any system that allows one party to coerce another.
I think I developed very early aesthetic and intuitive skepticism of authority and the ability to coerce. And I have a very strong one should be able to choose one's own path mindset.
I think everyone will have different motivations, but I do think there's a shared underlying vector in this direction. I think a lot of us are working on it also just out of raw curiosity. It's just interesting. And I think you have to be really in it to fully experience this, because from afar, definitely the speculative noise is much louder.
But it is just breaking down ways that humans coordinate into its most atomic constituent parts and figuring out how to enable better and better versions of that and different unique combinations. I think it's just a fascinating frontier.
I think a lot of crypto is this new kind of security technology where it can secure different types of human coordination. And one interesting thing to look at is when people think about security, they think about preventing something bad. But security is also a huge enabler of things that are good. Countries with strong property rights do a lot better than countries with weak property rights.
And if you look at the micro scale, And just think about something like physical retail. We have these big box stores today like Walmart that probably wouldn't have been possible without many different kinds of security innovation. For example, the idea of a cash register that tracks all of the payments and locks the drawer so that you can trust the cashier not to steal your money.
And in a mom and pop store, that's actually a problem. And for a long time, the only people who could operate the cash register were people people in the family that ran the store, because those are the people you could trust. Or think about security cameras that watch parts of the store, allows it to be much bigger than what the cashier could look at themselves.
Or tags and security balusters that automatically detect when you've taken something out of the store without paying for it. These are all security technology that's preventing something bad. And you could say, well, you could just make shoplifting illegal. And you can do that, but the cost of enforcement is just too high.
So one thing that security technologies do is reduce the cost of enforcement of these things that you don't want to happen, thus enabling more GDP, more economic activity. I think of a lot of crypto as by removing the intermediary, by creating security around contract rules that you put on chain, lower the cost of enforcing these transactions that you want to be able to facilitate.
One thing that comes to mind is there's clearly the emerging markets use case. And I think a lot has been said about that access to a great currency, whether it's USD or some other cryptocurrency, rather than your local hyperinflating. But I think it's underrated how stable coins could be useful to U.S. consumers.
If you go on the Chase website and you look at the interest rate paid to Chase savings accounts, I think it's zero point something percent. Yeah, it's crazy. And this is with treasury rates at four or five percent. So I think the incentive for retail banks to pass along that yield somehow is broken. It's a very easy proposition to say, this is a stable coin.
When we get stable coin regulation, there'll be much stronger controls on the asset base that can back them. It'll be very safe. It's not a fractional system. And you'll get basically the full yield. And that's, I think, a strong value proposition for everyone in America who has savings rather than letting someone else earn all the spread.
So I think that's one where I'm excited about solving existing inefficiency. I'm probably most excited about exploring what might be newly possible. One abstract framework is this idea that permissionless platforms enable organic bottoms-up innovation. and kind of an explore function that doesn't currently exist.
And I think YouTube is a very useful analogy where it used to be that cable companies controlled content programming and you had 50, 100 channels and some sort of editor would figure out what people want. And with YouTube, we basically explored every possible permutation.
of human entertainment and discovered all these new verticals whether it's unboxing or watching other people eat on and on and we're probably not done we're probably still going to find new ones in the future especially as the culture changes and that same thing has not happened in the financial space There's such high fixed cost to financial exploration.
Either you've got to start a company to list a new futures contract, you have some startup costs around it. When crypto rails are more mature, I think we will see this breadth-first search of all kinds of different financial use cases that weren't possible before.
I would say the last five years of working crypto in the US has been fairly radicalizing on the competence of our bureaucratic institutions. And I think many different people come to this insight, I think, from different paths. I think COVID and the CDC was one example for people.
But seeing the behavior up close is very illuminating because the Aaron Sorkin West Wing vision of government is super competent, smart, funny people with the best of intentions. And that has not been our experience thus far. And I think some of this is going to become public in hearings around the debanking and other things that have happened.
I am very excited about the shift in sentiment on these political dimensions. I think we're likely to enter an era where regulators view this as the enabling and innovative technology that it is rather than anyone who touches it is probably a criminal.
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