Bankless
Is the Crypto-Native Era Coming to an End? - Lessons from 10 Years in Crypto with Joey Krug, Founders Fund Partner
22 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
every single person who interacts with any web service, it's almost always running Linux in the backend. Another lens on this, I guess, like if you look at like Polymarket, you basically have, you know, Robinhood, Coinbase, and then Polymarket's like three or four in terms of site traffic. Most people don't even know it uses crypto.
They're just browsing the site to see what the odds are because they're curious because it informs them in some way throughout their day. And that's like a crypto product that's, you know, touched millions of people.
Chapter 2: Is the crypto-native era coming to an end?
Most people don't even know it's a crypto product. Bankless Nation, Joey Krug is a partner in Founders Fund. This is Peter Thiel's legendary VC firm. I'm sure you've heard of it. He was previously the co-CIO at Pantera Capital. And before that, he was the co-founder of Augur. Safe to say, Joey is a crypto OG, also an Ethereum OG. It's been a while since we've talked to him.
Joey, welcome back to Bankless. Thanks for having me. All right.
Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Augur's journey?
So it was 2022, actually, when we last had you on. It was summer of that year and a lot of things going on that summer. But SBF was still running the exchange FTX at that time. So the full gravity of that bear market had not yet hit us.
Chapter 4: How did Polymarket achieve product-market fit in prediction markets?
Catch us up. Since 2022, it's summer. What have you been doing? Yeah, let's see. So since then, I ended up moving over to Founders Fund. I'm one of the partners here. I spend...
Chapter 5: What are the implications of upcoming prediction market regulations?
probably about two thirds, 70%, something like that of my time on crypto. And then the other third is just assorted kind of random interesting stuff that people loop me into. Some biotech stuff, some AI stuff, things like that. Is crypto still interesting to you, Joey? Like, what's interesting about it? Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I think the thing that interests me about crypto is if you look at kind of the most broken industries, you know, in the world, in my mind, they've always been, you know, basically three things, you know, the government itself, healthcare, and finance. And... You know, when I got into crypto, my logic was basically doing something in government seems really annoying and tough.
Healthcare is also a lot of bureaucracy and, you know, takes a long time to make any dent. And, you know, I saw crypto in smart contracts, basically applying sort of the idea of programmability to financial markets. I was like, that's an area where you can actually, you know, have some level of impact on the world.
And, you know, I think it's went both slower and faster than I thought getting into it. But yeah, I'm still excited about crypto.
Chapter 6: What risks did the Founders Fund take with Polymarket?
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Chapter 7: What is the Founders Fund's investment thesis in the current crypto landscape?
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token launches are making a comeback but things have changed since the 2017 ico era now we have eight years of research on how to fairly distribute tokens to the market all that progress culminates in the uniswap continuous clearing auction no sniping no timing games no whale advantages just fair transparent on-chain price discovery here's how it works
A project sets aside an allotment of tokens. The continuous clearing auction sells them continuously, block by block, over a customizable window, typically a few days. Supply is fixed across the auction, and as demand comes in, the clearing price adjusts. If new bids arrive, the price moves up. If they don't, it holds steady.
Since bids are filled gradually over the entire window, early participants often end up with a lower average price, while still giving everyone time to place orders. When the auction ends, the proceeds concede a Uniswap V4 pool, giving you day one liquidity without exchange fees or market maker contracts.
But while the Uniswap continuous clearing auction is perfect for launching new tokens, it's also an extremely flexible protocol and can be leveraged for price discovery, bootstrapping, and auctioning of existing low liquidity assets as well.
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Chapter 8: How does Joey Krug view the future of crypto and AI?
And yeah, there's more suits in the room now, but they're doing stuff that's more real than people were talking about six or seven years ago. So I think it's landed in a pretty good spot. Maybe I look back on like the 2018 to 2020 era with rosy colored glasses. Maybe it's not as, maybe there's not as much nostalgia to be had looking back on that era as I kind of think there is.
But one of the frequent themes of conversations is just, the values, the ideals, the cypherpunk ideals of the space and what can we take, what can we do to export cypherpunk ideals to finance on Wall Street.
And there would be endless debates like the Bitcoiners and the Ethereans are debating about node size and like small nuances like that where debates would be taken down to like the nth conclusion just because of the philosophy of it and the fun of the debate and like who's more cypherpunk than, which designs are more cypherpunk? Did all those conversations matter now that Wall Street's here?
Was that more just like a fun arena of conversation for those who elected to partake in it? Or did they actually produce at least some of the net effects that we wanted? Like now that we're all the way in 2025 and we have tokenization that's going to be legalized in Congress, did a lot of the blood, sweat, and tears that we spent debating some of these things, did all that matter?
I think with all things, it's like most of it didn't matter, but some of it did, and the part that did matter, you know, mattered a lot. And so, like, what I mean by that is, you know, if you look at some of those debates back in the day about stuff really being, you know, decentralized and trustless, and I remember having these debates, you guys as well, you know, not all of it stuck.
Like, for instance, I remember back in the day when we were building Augurt, and this is still completely impractical to do, for the most part, is like we have like a decentralized front end. And the tech just never really got good enough for, you know, most apps don't have decentralized front ends today.
But, you know, some of the more important stuff like smart contracts and the design of those, I mean, a lot of those early conversations around stuff like Maker and Compound and Aave, like that is still largely stage, you know, true to this day. Maybe there's some more centralization points that
People can kind of argue around the margins around, like, I still don't quite think the Oracle problem has been fully solved. But for the most part, I think a lot of these core primitives have sort of set the groundwork that's going to continue to remain even post, you know, further institutionalization of the asset class, like, you know, trading tokenized funds or tokenized securities.
I think people will use things like, you know, Uniswap and automated market makers to trade those. Can't really borrow too much against them on Aave right now, but I think eventually those things will be supported on Aave. And then if you look at, to more directly answer your question, you know, what did crypto bring to the traditional financial system? You know, I wasn't really trading.
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