Playing the Frontier Meta-Game, w/ Fiskantes | Layer Zero

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code that's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. The Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down, and always has been.

Today on Layer Zero, we're talking to Fiskantes or Fiske, who is an An-on-Crypto Twitter participant, but also part of Z Prime Capital. And Fiske has been known for just very good and sensible and strong takes in the crypto Twitter sphere, as well as being somebody who is just a well-seasoned investor in the crypto space. And we talk about the frontier versus the center of crypto and how the frontier always expands and it attracts the individuals, the explorers. And as the individuals of the crypto frontier who are playing the frontier metagame find something new, something cool, like NFTs. We found NFTs and all of a sudden it changed the Overton window of the meta of crypto. But then it became a little bit more institutionalized. It became a little bit more expertise. And so the frontier shifts. And so as Bitcoin has been completely subsumed by people that also trade stocks, the institutions of the world, it has become institutionalized and the frontier has been expanding beyond Bitcoin and it has been expanding beyond Bitcoin ever since. And so it got to Ethereum, but then Ethereum became institutionalized. It got to DeFi, but then it DeFi is becoming institutionalized. And the frontier is always where the individuals lie because that's where the professionals aren't. That's where the institutions aren't. And so this is the way the crypto industry explores. And Fiske talks about why he enjoys being on the frontier so much. We start with his background with poker and connect that to many other themes throughout the podcast. So I'm sure you're going to love this thought provoking episode with Fiskantes on Layer Zero, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Hey Fiske, how's it going?

Hey, fine. Yeah, just in a hotel room in Spain. Thanks for having me in this uh weird hour of day.

Oh, of course, of course. Thanks for making the time out of wherever you are making your trips for to do this. I appreciate it.

Thanks.

Yeah, I think it's better to be on this podcast than uh just partying somewhere else. So happy to be here.

Very, very true to crypto is like rather be in the crypto world when out and about. Um, I want to start this conversation with poker because you are one of those crypto people that came into crypto with a poker background. And poker seems to be one of many ways that people ultimately fall in love with crypto. People that loved poker seem to be able to translate those skills into crypto pretty well. So I'd like to start this conversation there. How have you like noticed or paid attention to just like poker skills and how it relates to crypto skills?

So I would say that poker in itself is very similar, let's say, to trading, more than like to let's say crypto investing or getting uh deep into the tech side of things, which I started to do a bit more, but still there are many lessons that I took from poker that I couldn't or wouldn't learn elsewhere how to apply like basic statistics to make like

Decisions under pressure regarding to finance, right?

And one other thing, I don't think I mentioned this one before because I was talking a lot about my poker background. One important thing that I realized only recently is that during my poker career I had to play many tables at the same time because I was playing online.

Yeah.

And you need to basically make a lot of decisions pretty fast. Like most of these decisions are pretty trivial, but you still need to like consciously make the decision and click the button and move on

to another table. And now I realize that when I'm like, let's say researching RDU flow for Z Prime, I'm getting a lot of inbound through my DMs.

I'm actually pretty fast at like spotting what kind of things are interesting and what I want to disregard. Like some of my associates, they go much deeper, they start to like research see the deck, they go to the

Some other data sources and they do a deep research. But at that time, I already know

if I want to fold or continue to pursue the opportunity. And I think that's something that maybe not many poker players would tell you that this is important because most of them were

playing live where you only can play one table and you can focus on your one hand and one opponent. But with online poker, with multi-tabling, this was very important to be able to kind of

decide very fast and intuitively. And this intuition just I mean, of course, it doesn't just come out of nowhere. You need to see a lot of action, you need to play a lot of hands to be able to internalize like.

the decision-making process in a way that I don't sometimes I can't even explain why I don't want to do some investment, but I just know I don't.

And I need to spend a lot of time thinking to f you know, formulate my decision-making process because it's so intuitive at this point. I saw so many deals and it's similar to poker. I saw so many poker situations that

It just comes naturally. So I would say that this is like one big advantage that's like less obvious than just saying, oh, I know what expected value means and how to play with odds, how to have a correct bankroll management, for example.

Interesting. Okay. So yeah, I think to put the right image into listeners' heads, we shouldn't be like looking at Fiskey sitting at one poker table playing one game in deep thought about one move, but instead like an array of poker tables going and paying attention to all of these things, all these poker tables all at once simultaneously. I have another friend that has the same background that has also done very, very well in the DeFi space. And he talked about how he had this script that would play in the background and it would just tell him the right move to make for like 99% of moves, like most of the moves, because like most of the moves, like, okay, we are obviously playing this, we are obviously calling, or we are obviously folding. And so then it would just call his attention into this one particular scenario where he would actually have to do the computation in his head. But it was like a chip in the brain, right? He was like this AI-enabled thing able to master, like he's had between 30 and 60 tables all at once. And he was farming this whole like online poker thing, and this script was playing to help him just like judge. But he said that at some point when it came time for like the human element, it was all about pattern recognition and like intuition and just like seeing and quickly interpreting data and being able to come to a split decision like very, very quickly. If you're telling me that these skills have translated into the DeFi space, when there's absolutely like no precedent with

good products and or at least a sort of short precedent of good products in this space, like that pattern recognition skill I think is must be the thing that's really coming alive here. Is all of that tracking?

Yeah, it is. I mean, I haven't played so many tables. I played like up to

12, maybe 14. I didn't have any particular script. So it was all like me doing the like quick math or whatever, quick decisions. But it's very similar. And yeah, you are definitely correct that in crypto, the landscape moves so fast and changes so fast. It's very different than poker. Like in poker, you still have like

Fixed amount of cards you play with. You know, there are a fixed amount of situations that can happen. They are all kind of constrained within

very simple set of rules.

Right.

In crypto, you have all these like

I don't want to call them games because sometimes they are like legit products building something interesting, but they are sort of gamified in a way that you need to understand, specifically in DeFi, you need to understand the rules very quickly. You need to maybe be able to review the code if it's like.

Fork of synthetics contract, or if it's something new, and then you need to decide very fast if you want to kind of farm or if you want to

just do something else, or if you want to accumulate a token.

And yeah, so I think like

at the beginning, when the meta, so to speak, changes, you need to be

more qualitative, you need to go deeper into everything, and only over time, as you start to understand how these new set of projects or products operate, then you can like switch to more like autopilot mode. But at the time, usually you know it already starts to vein. So we are already looking where the ball will be next.

What will be the next interesting thing?

And yeah, I mean, one more thing that's interesting with crypto and poker is that

many of these, like even DeFi projects or even crypto games, they actually face similar issues that online poker rooms faced early on,

Right.

in the early days of online poker.

They were rewarding

professional poker players that played a lot of table or gave them a lot of volume, which is now the same as, let's say, DeFi project that rewards TVL.

Big whales that do a lot of lending or liquidity providing.

And this is something that actually was not sustainable, especially in poker, where you need to

have both sides of the table. You need to have professional poker players that are inspiring and

attracting all the fish at the table. They are playing a lot of volume, but then you also need these guys that come in and want to play and have fun.

Not just to win the money, they actually need to be

happy to spend money to be losing over time and still keep playing, right? Otherwise, the poker game is dead. So

In many crypto games, or even some DeFi projects that are more,

let's say, zero-sum oriented or like short-lived, this is the case. And if you want to play these types of games more actively, you need to understand this equation. That being said, I'm much more enthusiastic about things that I can just bet on long term and

just help the founders build something really big. But yeah, I mean,

I don't deny I play a lot of these short term games as well, especially early on in DeFi summer.

But I wasn't still so well off as I am now with my investments.

Right. Yeah. I actually want to go into that because I think that's a great metaphor. And we love metaphors here on Bankless, of course. Can you talk about how these online poker rooms would incentivize the volume, incentivize the whales? And the gist I'm getting here is that like you need to incentivize the whales because they're the liquidity providers of these poker tables. It makes the poker rooms full. It makes the poker website like easy to find a table, but also you can't incentivize the experts too much because then they'll just milk all of the newbies for all their money and the newbies won't come back. Can you unpack this dynamic a little bit more?

Yeah, I mean it was kind of simple. The basic reward mechanism was rake back. So when you play poker, you pay rake or fee. Let's call it uh fee.

And when you play a lot of tables, there were some uh you know some levels you could achieve if you played a lot of tables or like turned over a lot of money, where you would get, so to speak, rake back or like rebate from the fee you paid. And some poker players were actually just playing.

For the maximum amount of rank back they could get. And with fees, they would be even losing money. Playing so many tables, they weren't even winning anymore because they couldn't focus on the game itself.

But when they got their regback back, they would actually be up quite a lot. So that was like

were subsidized

their performance was