The Future of Crypto: Stablecoins, AI Integration, and the Path to Mass Adoption (Jesse Walden, Founder & Managing Partner at Variant)

Speaker A: AI is a technology of abundance. You can create anything you can possibly imagine with AI, and the result is just an explosion of new information, new creativity in the world. And crypto, on the other hand, is the technology that is fundamentally about scarcity. Scarece digital assets. The ability to own digital property is built on top of this idea of scarcity. Speaker B: You're tweeting about what the next NFT marketplace should look like and asking for suggestions. Where are we now? What needs to happen for this to become more useful or more important than it is?

Speaker A: I think NFTs are still incredibly promising. The number of actual non-fungible tokens on blockchains is going to grow many, many orders of magnitude over the next 10 years. What we've seen is there's less interest in consumer speculative side of that, and hopefully there's going to be more interest going forward in developer opportunity. And the new opportunity is just build a product people want that utilizes ownership as a keystone of the user experience. Speaker B: Hey, I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist Podcast. As the saying goes, the future is already here.

It's just not evenly distributed yet. Each week I sit down with the founders, investors, and thinkers who are already living in that future to help you see what's coming next and understand it more clearly. Today I'm speaking with Jesse Walden, the founder and managing partner of Variant, an early-stage crypto-focused venture capital firm. In my opinion, Jesse is one of the industry's clearest and most differentiated thinkers, something he's exhibited across multiple cycles. In our conversation, we discuss where crypto is today, the biggest strides the industry has made since 2022, where Web3 still lags behind Web2, which teams are best positioned to win, and the intersection of crypto and AI.