The ChainStories Podcast

"I Hosted the Event where Vitalik Introduced Ethereum" 💥 - interview with Moe Levin

BEN BEN

Send us a text

Explore the evolution of crypto events with Moe Levin, the mastermind behind Miami’s rise as a global blockchain hub.


🎉 Exclusive Offer for the BEN Community!

As a valued member of the Blockchain Education Network (BEN), you’re invited to attend WAGMI Miami, happening January 22-24, 2025, with free tickets for students and a 30% discount for general attendees.

This is your chance to connect with industry leaders, gain cutting-edge insights, and represent the BEN community at one of the most impactful blockchain events in the world.

🎟️ Free Student Tickets: https://wagmi.miami/ben-tickets
🎟️ General Attendees (30% off with code BENSAVE30): https://wagmi.miami/ben


🐦 Twitter/X: https://x.com/BlockchainEdu
👤 Moe Levin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moelevin/
🎙️ Host on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/cryptoniooo


The ChainStories Podcast - powered by Dropout Capital and the Blockchain Education Network! 🎙️

We bring you conversations with top founders and key figures in the crypto world, sharing the latest news and insights.

Support the show

-----------------------

What is BEN?

The Blockchain Education Network (BEN) is the largest and longest-running network of blockchain students, professors, and alumni around the world! We are on a journey to spur blockchain adoption by empowering our leaders to bring blockchain to their communities!

https://learn.blockchainedu.org/

-----------------------

Thank you for listening!

Want To Start Your Own Podcast? We Use BuzzSprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/

Welcome to the Chain Stories podcast, the podcast that celebrates disruptors who defy convention. Here we dive into the bold stories of trailblazers who turned audacious ideas into billion dollar ventures.

Audio Only - All Participants:

Moe, it's a pleasure to have you on our podcast. We've been in touch for many years. You're one of the persons that actually did something very early on that really impacted my life as a student at University of Florida. One of your creations, which we're going to touch upon, but first of all, I would like you to introduce yourself. What have you been up to? What are you doing? And how you started in this space? Sure, man. Happy to talk to you. I know we've been in touch for many years. Yeah, it's been fun. It's funny to think back on how it all started. I was producing events about supply chain management in Austria while I was studying there. And that was like 2012, 2013. people started talking about at these supply chain procurement conferences, you have the CEO, CFO of Caterpillar, Pepsi, McDonald's, whatever, it was quite an important event. And they were talking about the supply chain. So the CFO for McDonald's was talking like to procure the plastic liner for the cups. You need to go through a big supply chain all over the world to get that plastic, to produce the plastic in factories, each person needs to get paid along the line. And it was, I think early 2012, they said, there's nothing really you can do about paying people on the supply chain. There's not really an alternative. You could have local banking partners, and then there was this thing called Bitcoin, which could be used to pay people faster, but it's really not used. It's used by criminals. I heard this at an event and I said, I don't know about that. That doesn't seems like such a bad idea. You're talking 2012. it's funny how quickly people forget about how money was used even 10 years ago, 10 years ago, you have a pocket full of metal coins and paper money. And you pay everybody with paper, and you get some paper back, and you get some metal back, even thinking about it like 10 years ago, nowadays, in Europe, almost everywhere, you tap to pay. That's really the only way to pay with things. If you don't have your phone, you're out of luck. Most people don't carry a wallet anymore with 20 different cards. Apple revolutionized the Google Pay revolution. Back then, there wasn't much in terms of fast payments. There wasn't like Revolut is a big player. TransferWise is a big player. Stripe is a big player. Back then these companies didn't exist. They were talking about Bitcoin at this event. I said, oh, this is interesting. It doesn't sound like a bad idea. So I posted on the Bitcoin talk forum there was only Bitcoin. There was no other any coins there were some not really, Bitcoin was the only thing posted on Bitcoin talk forum. I said listen guys I know how to make an event. There hasn't really been any sort of global event happening in the Bitcoin space yet. If anybody wants to help me, that would be great, because I think we should do something. And the response was good. I got a couple friends. One was, Matthew Wright, who was the creator of Bitcoin Magazine. And another guy named Rasa. They said, yeah, we'll help you produce the event and connect you with some people. They were already well known in the industry. In early 2013, we produced the first event in Amsterdam, in a comedy club for about 150 people. At that event, it was the CEOs of every major exchange Jesse Powell from Kraken, Eric Voorhees was there. Tony Gallippi from BitPay. Vitalik was there as a writer for Bitcoin Magazine. So many people, just in that comedy club, we had the exhibitor booths inside the speaker hall. It was messy and raw, but it was cool to see. And on stage Vitalik, who I was friends with at the time, was talking about, how you could buy Bitcoin magazine with Bitcoin. We have a payment gateway on our website. You can buy Bitcoin magazine with Bitcoin. He got on a tangent about quantum computing and a guy, Mihai Alisai was also working with him at Bitcoin magazine. Anyways, that's kicked off. A chain of events which a few months later in Miami in January Vitalik was on stage launching Ethereum. We helped him showcase what Ethereum could do. There's more to Bitcoin than just Bitcoin and Ethereum was launched many other companies were launched and at that event the price of Bitcoin had gone up from fifty dollars to a thousand dollars and there was hype and it was Mt. Gox hype and wild times and then we did it at the Miami Beach Convention Center. It was like, that was the big event in Miami, launching Ethereum, launching people. And then we had about a thousand people at that event. And over the years, since then, so much has come across the stage. So many people, like every one of the top hundred cryptocurrencies, anything has, we've seen it on stage. We've seen the booms and the busts and the price rise. And then we went on producing events all over the world, Dubai, London, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. it's been great to have connected so many people. And what stuck with me in the first event, when I was launching the first event in Amsterdam in 2013, the feedback I heard from people was, Oh, it's so good to hear, to put a face to the username. And I thought wow, there's no replacement for people meeting other people. Especially in this industry that have met people only online or in telegram groups or in Discord meeting them in person is a huge move because they get to speak to each other. The data transfer rate when you speak to somebody is so much greater than talking to somebody online. You meet somebody in person you see who they are you see how they are the amount of people that I've met because of my events, and I've gone on to create the coolest companies in the world, to create funds, to change the industry, it's cool. Every event, and other events too, they accelerate the speed in which Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general are adopted globally. People meet, people work together, people do hackathons, and the industry evolves. There is a direct result from events to the industry getting better. Fascinating work. And I don't think a lot of people today know that was actually at one of your first events where Vitalik introduced Ethereum. And let's dive a little bit more into this story. My first question was you're in Austria. Why did you pick Miami as the capital for your events to bring everyone together from around the world? Yeah, so I had moved to Amsterdam from Austria. I met my wife and was living in Amsterdam. So the first event was in Amsterdam. And then I was planning on doing it in January, like six months after the first event. I said, where's warm? A place that has a good airport, good hotels, good infrastructure. Miami sounds great. It's warm. People can let their hair down. It's fun and Bitcoin was fun and we want to make some, a fun experience. Miami was the place. Same reason why we chose Dubai. Dubai has always been ahead of the curve. a place where innovators and businesses can start and set up. And also just warm places that you want to be in. That makes a lot of sense. Miami is definitely vibrant and unique. Even later on, I think your events had a great impact on this. Was becoming the crypto capital of the U.S. 100 percent 100 percent making Miami choosing Miami as the place to be. Now so many companies are based in Miami. The mayor's named the Miami blockchain week and has been instrumental in helping businesses come over. It's become a crypto capital of the world because when somebody is coming to Miami or Dubai, they see, wow. It's warm in Miami. It's beautiful. The people are friendly. The business environment is good I could see myself creating a company here. I can see myself having a family here. There's good schools, good infrastructure, good housing, if they're based in the middle of America or somewhere cold or north, it's a better place. Now you're seeing Austin, Texas become very popular among crypto people. But I think the move has been over the last five years where the developers will go to Texas and the finance pros from New York will come to Miami. And I know that now you're doing a new event. So you have the elections coming up this January. Going to be great. You decided again to pick the city of Miami when there's so many events even outside of the US because we're at these exiters due to the regulation. Yeah. Was it because of the election results? Was it because you really love Miami and as this place where you started one of your first events? There's certainly a part of my heart that's in Miami. It's been very welcoming to me and the company. It's also one of the best places in the world to make an event, because I did it for 10 years in Miami, it's still on a lot of people's calendars, Miami, January, we go for an event. It's worked out well. The cherry on top is being the election results were positive for the crypto industry. It seems like more people are not as worried about creating crypto companies in the United States. It's a bull market. Other cities and other countries have become very saturated with events and a different quality of event. New York is now just a finance event place, small events for funds and hedge fund managers. And that's not really what we do. Dubai has been overrun. There's events all over the world. Back then there was one event a year. When I would make an event, that would be the first event that city has ever seen. When we made it in Dubai, that was basically the first event. A few months prior to my event in Dubai was Bruce Fenton making an event, which was instrumental in the country realizing blockchain is something they want to be involved in. But Dubai was not like that. And now, Dubai this year has Token 2049, Bitcoin Mina, Transcon has an event every other week there. There's a Future Blockchain Summit, the big technology, Jitex, has a big blockchain component to it. A lot of tech conferences will have blockchain fintech components to it now. It gets overwhelming. Cities are overwhelmed, and people are overwhelmed with events. There's only so many events you can go to, and it takes a lot out of you to go to an event. It becomes tiring. And even myself noticing on the event rodeo throughout the world that some are very high value, others are not as much. There's so much supply of these events that became such an industry that everyone now just wants to try them. And what do you think makes your event unique? Is it for me as a founder to find funding, investors, partnerships or collaborations? Where do you see your niche, your competitive advantage? Probably the main thing is we are dedicated from day one. Give people a return on their investment. Somebody's paying a few hundred dollars to buy a ticket, a hotel room, and a flight, and prioritizing the event over other things. You've got to give them value. So what value is that? We try to for investors or people raising money for sure. We bring a ton of funds. We bring a ton of Investors opinion leaders to the event that you should meet and you can meet if you're new we have a ton of stuff for you to learn one on one courses, classes from experts in the industry, professors to learn from, if you have a company, make business, sign contracts with people, bring in your clients to meet so we try to make it for as many industries as possible segregate them in places where this is the place for exchanges to meet their clients and potential new listings or legal and this is the place for funds this is the fun lounge If you want to meet people in the funds go meet them, this is the area for that if you're a newcomer, this is where you go. So many events have a hard time segregating these things. I was at Token2049. It was a huge event, impossible to navigate and find where you would fit into these things. You have a meme coin next to an exchange next to a Web3 developer course very difficult to find your way. And so you lose people like that. From the speakers we dedicated. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to find out what's going on in the industry. Know what the trends and big themes are. That's super important to people. We're just high value we turned down a ton of sponsors and speakers. You can't imagine the inbox I have of just that we need to go through. Everybody wants to speak at an event. You've got to say, what have you spoken about before? What do you do? And then you've got to put them on the waiting list because either they're not high quality enough, it's a big decision. You're going to give somebody 15 minutes to speak in front of 5,000 people. You better pray they're going to be good. You have 5,000 people's attention for 15 minutes. That's a big responsibility we don't want to waste anybody's time by listening to either somebody who has a weak project, isn't going to deliver value, or is just going to promote theirs. In a lot of other events is, it's an advertisement. Every speech is an advertisement or a promotion of their company or selling something. And we tell speakers, we don't sell anything on stage, it's not like a teleshopping channel. Give people value, tell people something interesting. So if you're talking about the Blockchain Education Network or BEN Ventures even, tell me your story. Tell me what's going on with how you got here. What's been important. What's been the struggle and how you resolved it. That's giving value to attendees. If you start going, listen to how much we raised, and this is how great we are, and this is all the success we have. It's interesting, if it's part of a story, and people can take something away from there. Do you see a pattern with people coming in, wanting to have those 15 minutes as a sponsor, and then they just go on full pitch modes, and trying to sell snake oil? We have backstage about 10 people working and, a three person jury who's like watching out and also happy to cut the mic. Seriously, like when we've done it before, we've just cut the mic and help them off stage because it's not fair to people. It's not fair to come to an event and listen to snake oil and scams people are investing money into this thing. When you talk about dealing with people's money, you got to be careful. We have a responsibility. You can't share scams with people. Over the years, we've had to deal with that, a few times quite famously. It's difficult. On the one hand, we always think, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Sunlight, giving people the stage will expose them, but you never know. I understand it can be quite intense and there's a due diligence process in the projects and people that you want to have on stage. I did not know you had someone ready to cut the mic. That's a very good filtering process. We also have huge smoke machines with compressed air that'll just overwhelm anybody fascinating. I still wanted to dive into this early story of Vitalik introducing Ethereum in your conference, expand a bit more on that, was 2014 when Vitalik was fundraising back in the day and he came into Miami, how was the sentiment there towards Ethereum? Was Vitalik looking to connect with investors or just presenting to the community for the first time at your event? It was, firstly, it was super casual. There was about 15 people that came to something like an Ethereum house and it was in Miami and they were all meeting together with Charles Hoskinson and Anthony Di Iorio, Gavin Wood. All of which have gone on to create their own things. Steve Dack, other people were involved in this thing. They were trying to create something special. Vitalik was young, maybe 19 years old at the time. He wanted to get into the after party of one event, and I had to talk to security to let him in, because he was underage, so he had to have his special wristband. It was casual, and there was some hype beforehand. People were expecting something really big from Vitalik. He got on stage in front of a packed, standing room only crowd. And gave a speech that changed crypto and changed the world forever. His plan was for Ethereum. And there was also a lot of, hesitation because the only thing was Bitcoin, hearing somebody talking about virtual machines and something faster than Bitcoin, and it didn't launch, it wasn't created yet. It was, we were raising money. We're going to have a token sale for the next 90 days. 25 cents a token. We're trying to raise as much as possible. People thought, okay, this is vaporware, this is nothing, this is just a scam, but then afterwards he was, ambushed by 50 or 100 people wanting to know more, how to get involved, this sounds like the future, and it really was. It changed blockchain technology forever and that must have been quite an amazing process. You have been with him in Amsterdam at this event, he was just writing for Bitcoin Magazine. And within a short time frame it comes in with a project with this massive vision he was so humble and modest even during the event. He was just selling Bitcoin Magazine for five dollars at a booth I have some funny pictures of just Vitalik sitting around selling. He has a little bag full of money and he's selling each to people, buy a Bitcoin Magazine for 5 dollars. Later that day he went on stage and changed the world. It's pretty cool. Not sure if you have any videos from that moment, but it would be amazing to rewatch There's videos online about, something I noticed. I really enjoyed that part because even for me as a student not knowing anything about crypto, I was able to go and talk with the big edge fund manager or a big tier one VC. And I'm like, you do this? Does this really exist? And he's like, it's cool. It's casual. To me, it was an expansion in my mind that I could never get in a traditional education or in college. We make sure to tell the speakers be prepared for something afterwards and be friendly and warm. There's no space at my event to be arrogant. Not a lot of people are new in the industry and again the amount of cool things that happen from it you were at an event for the first time, meeting amazing people, it changed your life as well. That story should be for as many people as possible. That's great for the industry to give people an opportunity to grow their network, to have their voice heard, to build something and you're at the right place to meet the right people too. Absolutely. And for students generally, since day one, students have come to the event for free. Always. There's no question. If you're a student, come to the event for free, learn. And the amount of students that have come through the events and have gone on to build amazing things has been tremendous. It's amazing and the industry is 10 years old now. So people have come to the event in 2015 and then, 2018 built a company, joined a company, lots and lots of stuff. It's really cool. Yeah. You mentioned students and I actually remember prepping everything beginning of the semester, in spring to go down to Miami. I was going to take the car. Do you guys go to Airbnb hotel? Everything is figured out and everyone like getting ready for this field trip. That was the Bitcoin rails. Yeah. It's so fun, and it's a legendary experience in college. If you're ready and willing to build something and join a community, you're welcome at our event. You can help out if you want to volunteer. If you want to just meet people, we'll help you with that. That's what it's all about. Yeah, absolutely. And that's something definitely in particular that you've honoured throughout the years and I can attest that. You always let students in for free because it can be hard to afford attending these events or going to a different city when you're in a budget in college. And I think your events were also, always very aware of these parts and the accessibility to the public. Yeah. Oh, 100%. We're not looking to squeeze every dollar out of everybody to come to an event. We don't have investors. We don't have a board of directors that are making sure that every dollar is accounted for. We're looking to make impact. And the way you make impact is getting good people there. Students are really hard working. And when they're coming through BEN, you guys are already telling them, this is what you should do, this is how you can extract value from the event, this is how you can make an impact and learn, and it can change everybody's life, for people to come to their first conference, imagine an 18 year old for the first time coming to a blockchain conference, reading and hearing about it, many of them don't have any idea, and it really opens up a world for people. That's great. And I know aside from you doing this event, you're also an active investor in the space and you had the chance to invest in quite a few projects. I was wondering throughout the years, you have seen so many people, so many personality types, so many projects. Have you seen a pattern over time that repeats this person ends up becoming successful? Is there a secret sauce? 100 percent there is a secret sauce. Efficiency. If people are efficient and have efficient companies and people are responding quickly and making decisions quickly, that is the biggest indicator that there'll be a success. When you're investing in a company, you have to do due diligence. You have to go through the company, understand who's doing what and the companies that have things ready and clean, and also have a graphic designer, copywriter, things that are looking good and they're working quickly, that's one of the greatest indicators success in a company. No wasted time, pass it on to somebody who can do it quickly, or do it yourself. That's what I tell my team all the time. When somebody is requesting to speak or requesting a sponsor, you get that out of your inbox immediately. You respond immediately and we have everything can messages. No matter who you are, we have something ready. We have documents, everything. Efficiency is important. Because then you can focus on building the product. The less admin you have to do, the more you can focus on what you're doing. People that are very administratively focused generally perform worse. Great observation. Have you seen over time any particular personality type demonstrating certain key to success? We deal with a lot of personality types in this space. Humble, being humble. Everybody that's been arrogant has just been good people like Sam Bengman Freed, like meeting him a bunch of times. Every time I met him, he was dismissive other people that have famously been dismissive or arrogant, I've come up to say hello and welcome them to the event and they haven't had the time to even say hello. I'd be like, something's going on here. I'm not sure what it is. And you have to trust your gut a lot. You say, you got to watch out for some people, being humble, being kind is the most, like everybody says, go to a restaurant and see how they treat the waiter is a good indicator of how they are as a person. That's always a good indicator of just people being kind and watching out for other people how they treat everybody. At our events. We know everybody from the janitor to the director we are all friends with everybody and that's the right way to do it. That's actually the business in 2016 I experienced that at your event the ability to be able to go up to Roger Ver talk to him and other players that I was a nobody and just going up being able to talk and people are open and learning. And at the time, crypto was not this known by the masses and we're such a small circle of people at the end. And we could connect and share thoughts. Oh, you're building this, you're building that. And to me it was quite fascinating. And being open to that. let me share my thoughts. Let me give you some feedback. That's great. Not you know call my assistant and we'll talk about that and we'll set up an appointment to do something and give you some feedback. No, we'll welcome you. Whatever you need will help. We'll be there for you I mean people are still like if you're just new to the industry send them some stuff from youtube send them some learning stuff. It's really helpful for people. Yeah, 100%. And now I know you've been very busy preparing the next upcoming event. Can you tell us a little bit more about this event? I know it's no longer called the North American Bitcoin Conference. There's been a change. Let's dive into that. We probably held on to the name the North American Bitcoin Conference for too long. Because it wasn't about Bitcoin. It was about Bitcoin the first time we made it because we didn't have anything else. And now the industry is tremendous, right? There's Ethereum, Solana, Sui, Binance has become a beast, the industry has grown so much. And what else has grown in the industry is besides for this election, the feeling and the vibe is more exciting and more happening. And we're in a bull market. So things feel a little bit hyped, but it's less, trying to convince people that crypto is real and it's more the optimism in the face of everything. The name of our event is called WAGMI which is this term. We're all going to make it. That is the current thinking of me and my team is we're going to make it this event and the industry no matter what it's a positive thing that encapsulates blockchain and Web3 technology in general. This is the future and it's happening whether you like it or not anybody in it is going to make it. And it's true. The same thing is true that it's been for 10 years. No matter what industry you're in, no matter what your background, you could apply blockchain technology to it and be successful. The industry is still young. If you're good at whatever traditional, bring it into Web3, come to the event and you'll change your business. And you'll, you still have this, like yesterday, this Japanese company is we, we're going to take some of our profits and invest it into Bitcoin. The thing goes up 200%. When companies say they're going to invest in blockchain technology, pay attention. When Microsoft said they're going to create an entire division for blockchain technologies. Pay attention. They have done that. And invested in a lot. IBM made a blockchain division. Now every company has a blockchain strategy necessarily. Why do you think there's still so much opportunity and room for growth in this industry? And why, let's say someone that's working in traditional corporate America or anywhere else change? This industry is still young the market capitalization of crypto in general is very low compared to money and industry in general. The whole industry of blockchain technology, if you add up all the market capitalizations of all the coins, it's like 3. Bitcoin is worth over 2.5 trillion and the rest would be 3 trillion in total that's an all time high right now. Market capitalization of Tesla and Apple or Tesla and NVIDIA is about the same, together. Those two companies have the same market capitalization of an industry with a millionish active people in the industry working and building. The industry can go 10x easily because, in terms of value creation in a business, like the output is not 3 trillion, that's the market capitalization, but the industry is booming. There is so much in the world that can be made more efficient with blockchain technology that hasn't been touched yet. AI and blockchain is probably going to be the next major wave of technology. That's going to change the world, but we're still so young. if you're in traditional finance, join the industry. If you're in traditional, anything, take what, from the other industry, bring it in, or just come to an event and talk to somebody. What do you think? Hey, my only experience is, I worked, on the Bloomberg terminal. Do that for crypto. My only experience has been in trading crypto. I built a business with supply chain stuff overseas, and I don't really know how to get involved in blockchain. Come to an event, we'll teach you how to make the supply chain with a blockchain. I think you touched upon something very interesting, which was the comparison with very large companies like Tesla or Microsoft. Their market caps to the market cap of an entire digital assets industry, which as of now we have over 2.5 million assets listed on CoinMarketCap. Do you think there's a particular reason why crypto does not have a larger market cap than gold or some of these companies? Was it because of regulation? Was it because it's just the normal course of things? Did you see anything specifically? Over the years, there's been a couple of really high profile bad actors. Mt.Gox, FTX and others, Bitcoinica in the early days, but some really big things that have these black swan events that have destroyed the crypto price and has now been rebuilt. So you have some bad actors would make people lose trust in it. You have like really aggressive regulation in Europe and the United States that has handicapped the growth. If you want to make a company, if you want to make any company crypto or otherwise, you want to make that company and open that company. In a good environment where it you don't need to worry about it being closed down getting arrested. You don't need to worry about not even being able to provide for your family. You need to make it in the best environment possible. Crypto companies have tended to go to places like Miami and New York everybody left going to Texas now is very open going to Dubai and London. Anyways, people want to make a company in a good environment. And if it's not a good environment, they don't build it. A by product of bad regulation. And so that's happened in the past, and the market cap was affected by it. The second thing is that, and we're seeing a change now is easy to onboard somebody into the industry has gotten better and cleaner and better UI better UX. In 2012 2013 you bought Bitcoin using Paypal and using spreadsheets and there was no real exchanges. And now you can download some app Kraken looks good and Coinbase is cool and the graphics look good and you could just say hey listen I want to buy 100 euro put it in there. It's very quick and that's happening quicker. To be able to do big transfers you need quite a bit more KYC or, for businesses, KYB, it's more difficult. Those on ramps still need to be developed better and made better. that's been reducing the velocity of growth for the crypto industry a lot. I still see it. Somebody wants to play with a meme coin. They have 50 bucks, they want to play roulette with meme coins. Good luck. How the hell are you going to do that? How are you going to teach somebody to take 50 dollars. They have a banknote of 50 dollars. How do you get that to buy your favorite meme token, cutest thing. It was the same problem with NFTS. You have 50. I want to buy a picture of monkey. How do you change that 50 into that? Basically put that 50 in the bank, make a bank transfer to an exchange, figure out how that works if they don't have Solana listed, you buy Tether. Then you do a bridge swap on some Changelly or some other account. And now you've swapped to Solana and you may have to make a new wallet with Phantom or Metamask. So now you have, a wallet on coinbase you have wallet on Metamask or Phantom you if you want to make one on Metamask, you don't have the Solana network. So now you have to transfer it back to Phantom. So now you have phantom wallet and you're about to buy your first Monkey coin you go on the NFT exchange now you have to learn how to trade? You don't know. There's no trading system. You go on Radium you go on Jupiter try to figure out how to buy fifty dollars worth of the thing as an NFT Opensea now you have a gas fee. You didn't buy enough to pay for the gas fee. You can't actually. Buddy, this is restrictive. And now you get a phone call from the bank because you transferred 50 to Coinbase and they closed your account because you were involved in crypto. This is worst case scenario, but parts of that are still common. It's bizarre to have to go through so many hoops to spend your 50 dollars. But that's what it is now. Still a lot of friction and a lot to be built to onboard the masses and general adoption. So if I want to get more involved and be a WAGMI, what are the next steps? How do you suggest me to either apply as a speaker or as a student or just general? You come by, speak, it's all open for you. If you're new to the industry, get a ticket, go to wagmi. miami, wagmi.miami, look at the speakers, the best in the world, buy a ticket, be involved. You're a student, get a free ticket, you could either go through the Blockchain Education Network or we have a button to contact us if you're a student and we'll give you a ticket. If you want to sponsor, partner with us, send us an email. We've got a contact on the website to help you with that. If you want to volunteer at the event, come by. We're always open and welcome to anybody. Amazing. And what are the dates and the exact location of the event? The dates of the official event are 22nd to 24th in January 2025. What's good for the industry, is another 20,000 people come to Miami, make events the entire week. We have events after the event, we have events before the event, it's blockchain week. In Miami, it's everything in lights. It's amazing. I would hope you should probably come 18th, 17th to Miami, get over the jet lag, get over the travel and then start going to events. All those events are going to be published on our website. Where is the location of your events? Downtown Miami. Cool. And if our the listeners would like to follow or learn more where they can? WAGMI.miami. We got socials. We got videos. We got whatever you need. Awesome. Moe was a pleasure to have you on. It was amazing to listen to all these stories and how you started so early on and brought probably over more than a million people together. Yeah. And we keep going. Accelerate the growth in this industry at a tremendous space. My man. Thank you for all your work. Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to the Chain Stories podcast, where disruptors become trailblazers. Don't forget to subscribe to hear more inspiring stories from those who are pushing boundaries in digital assets. Brought to you by Dropout Capital, where bold vision transforms into reality. Check out our social media links down below and visit us online at dropout. capital. And remember, the future belongs to those who dare to challenge the norm.