Delphi Office Hours Call (April 20th, 2022)

Below is the full recording and transcript of the Office Hours call our team did on Wednesday, April 20th, 2022.

• Pollen (01:29)
• Markets (04:41)
• ETH Merge (09:24)
• SOL Staking (11:22)
• Aku Update (15:58)
• Ve-Tokens (18:23)
• Flash Debate (22:10)
• Q&A (28:50)

Transcript

00:38 •  Nick
Thanks for joining today’s Delphi Pro Office Hours. The date is April 20th, 2022, and we’ve got quite the agenda planned for you. We’re going to first start talking about a recent investment in Pollen. We’ll shift gears to markets in general and what’s happening in Bitcoin land. We’ll talk a bit about the Ethereum Merge and continue our research there. We’ll touch on SOL liquid staking, the most recent update from Akudreams, and we’ll finish with a little teaser on our most recent posts around veTokenomics. As always, we’ll finish with Q&A. Please send your questions in the chat. We’ll try our best to answer them on the fly. Without further ado, I’d like to turn things over to Tom to talk about Pollen. 

01:31 •  Tom
Thanks so much, Nick. Delphi Ventures recently made an investment into Pollen, and as many who’ve followed our research for a long time, we’ve spent a lot of time analyzing and opining on decentralized 5G wireless plays. Our earliest posts on this go back three or four years on Helium. We followed that very closely and their vision to create first a decentralized IOT network and then a decentralized 5G network. We recently came across Pollen, and we’ve been blown away by the team and their approach. We think that they are the leading candidate for a decentralized 5G wireless company built on Solana. The team is technically extremely strong and well thought out, and they’re currently deploying nodes as we speak. So, it’s early days right now. As you can see, from what Nick sharing, there’s several types of nodes that they’ve started to deploy. 

02:25 • Tom
This. Isn’t an inclusive list, but they have smaller nodes such as camillas and dandelions. I have one behind me. They have larger nodes known as buttercups. What people are doing is they’re purchasing these pieces of hardware from the Pollen company. They’re getting them in the mail. They’re plugging them in and providing coverage and capacity to the Pollen Network. On the flip side, users are installing an eSIM, so there’s no more physical SIM cards, but they use a software version of that. They’re installing that to get access to the Pollen Network as a secondary carrier when they’re able to use it. For Pollen, it’s a race on two sides. It’s a real estate race in that they want to have the window space and the terrace space and the roof space in people’s homes and businesses to deploy the network. On the user side, it’s a real estate race to own that alternative one eSIM spot on people’s phones as well. 

03:19 • Tom
We think that Pollen is extremely competitive versus Helium and other players because they’re not focused on any other wireless standard right now. As people are aware, Helium spent a good chunk of its token supply (50 or 60%) to incentivize IOT nodes, and traction to date has been less than what we’ve expected. On the other hand, Pollen is strictly focused on building out a 5G network in the U.S. and hopefully abroad. As you can see from the new slide, they’ve started to deploy nodes. There are several hundred around the U.S. in key cities like San Francisco, Miami, and New York City, and soon Puerto Rico. They just had a recent node drop where they released 10X the number of nodes they did previously. Fast forward a couple of months, and their goal is to have tens of thousands of nodes around the U.S. providing 5G coverage while people install eSIMs on their phones to gain traction. 

04:13 • Tom
I think they’re doing a lot of exciting things to incentivize node deployments with bonus boxes and eSIM deployments with some gamification angles that they’ll be rolling out shortly. We’re excited for the team to roll this out. Happy to answer any questions here, but we co-led this deal and it was released yesterday. 

04:34 • Nick
Wonderful. Thanks, Tom. Yes, we’d love to get more questions on that and try to answer those at the end. Shifting gears a bit to the markets, what’s the latest in Bitcoin land, Jason? 

04:46 •  Jason
Thanks. This week I want to switch gears and talk about liquidity. We started talking about it last week, but since it’s a pertinent topic, it makes sense to stay on it. What exactly is liquidity? We touched on this in our last Market Insights Report. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, please do. We mentioned the textbook definition is: the ability to convert an asset or something into cash quickly with minimal costs; costs being transaction costs, time costs, opportunity costs, things like that. In reality, when you look at a market or a functioning exchange, liquidity is just a demand function, right? Demand is the ability and willingness, most importantly, of market participants to engage in market activities, so uying and selling of assets and things like that. 

05:45 •  Jason
I want to talk about how I view liquidity within markets and how I use it within my analysis, because different people interpret different things a bit differently, so I think it’s important to see the context of which I view things here. In the case of Bitcoin and a Bitcoin price chart, volume and demand are interchangeable (in my opinion).  I use them interchangeably. For the las