Travis John (00:01.141)
Hello, hello. Welcome back. Another episode of the Real World Assets Show. Today we have a special guest with us, Avery Bartlett. He is the master of vibes for social media for Ava Labs, AKA Avalanche, and one of the leaders in RWA ecosystem, an L1 disguised as many different subnets of many different projects. We'll get into this, but welcome. Good to see you.

Avery Bartlett (00:26.03)
Thanks, man. Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited you reached out. You know, I love I got a podcast of my own. So I love being the guest, the guest on these, you know, then I get to talk more than I already do. So really appreciate the opportunity.

Travis John (00:36.949)
Yeah, we want to chat about that. We'll definitely plug the Answers To The Universe. So if anybody listening needs to jump in there and talk to Avery, he's had some great guests. So yeah, I guess, first off, let's chat a bit about, I know that you have an interesting background. I mean, I know quite a bit about it, but I know a lot of my viewers and listeners don't. So tell us a little bit about your journey into crypto. I know that it wasn't the typical one, as most of them are.

Avery Bartlett (00:42.798)
Oh yeah.

Avery Bartlett (00:48.59)
Appreciate that.

Avery Bartlett (01:04.43)
Yeah.

Travis John (01:06.901)
but it's interesting.

Avery Bartlett (01:07.374)
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like everyone kind of has a goofy story. Or maybe it's not. Maybe they just like saw something on social media and got into crypto. But for me, it came in a few parts. So the first time I ever bought Bitcoin was in 2015. I was a freshman in college and I was trying to sell fake IDs. All right. At the time, OK, so I was 18.

It's cool to sell fake IDs when you're 18, but then once you're 21, that is not cool, because then it's like you're doing terrorism. So yeah, I didn't, that was just a quick little chip. So the first time I ever, and that was back when it was like really, really clunky, right? So I did that. I had like, you know, maybe Bitcoin was at like 700, completely forgot about it. And then, you know, Bitcoin started hitting the news again. And I found the password to my Coinbase account.

Travis John (01:42.965)
Love that.

Avery Bartlett (02:03.79)
Coinbase has been around for a long time. And, you know, this was, I was still in college and I had like $500 in Bitcoin in there. And that, and like being a sophomore with $500, like you're a millionaire, you know, like you can, I'm, you can, you know, do anything you want with $500 if you're, you know, I guess, you know, in college at that time.

Travis John (02:17.173)
Heck yeah.

Avery Bartlett (02:28.814)
And so that, that just kind of starts forming, you know, the early understanding of what this technology is. I wouldn't say I was obsessed over it. Wouldn't say I was deep. Wouldn't say I was, I got super in the rabbit hole. It's still very surface level, you know, everyone kind of gets into this space with that crazy dopamine hit of seeing, you know, the number go up or whatever, uh, when you're super, super early. And then, and then, um, a little bit later, um, I was a software engineer at the home Depot and.

During that time, it was right after I went for college, it was my first job. I was a computer science major at Georgia Tech and did that. But I always felt like there was more to life. I felt like I had more potential and I was meant for something greater. And while I was really grateful for this job, I enjoyed it, great people, Home Depot is a great company to work for. I felt like there was something else out there.

And this is when I started getting really deep into crypto, right? This was around 2020, 2021, where it started becoming more the zeitgeist of society. And so I started seeing it more on my Instagram, seeing it more on the YouTube videos, seeing it mentioned a lot more. And...

through just a barrage of contacts with it, I just got that like, this is actually a really interesting moment. I said it's more than just, oh, it's like a new digital money, who cares? That's what people kind of first try and make the correlation when they first see crypto, but it's really not that. It's actually a terrible way to try and understand it, of this is just new money. That's not really the interesting part of it, and that's not really what it's trying to be.

What it is, is a new way to describe value. And value is a very broad term and I use it broad on purpose, right?

Avery Bartlett (04:28.334)
Value is in a bunch of different things. It's in ideas. It is in physical money. And that's usually what's transferred in between. But as the world's becoming more digital and I know is like, I grew up on the internet, a lot of people nowadays, a good portion of the population completely grew up on the internet. And we have a firm grasp of what value is outside of what you can see with your eyeballs. A lot of it's what you see behind a computer screen. And there is no really good effective way to describe that until now.

And so that was what really kind of interested me in crypto and how I saw that you can kind of create a new internet that moves in a different way. And so I was like, I want to do something in this. I didn't know what it was. And at the time I thought I wanted to be a software engineer, right? I had spent seven years. I mean, my first job as a software engineer was the summer, my freshman year. My dad shouted to him, I'm not going to take credit for this.

He found a small IT department in the government, the FDEP, Florida Department of Environmental Protection. And I worked in this basement just doing any coding work they could describe, really making it up. And so that was my first experience being a software engineer. And it was fun. I loved solving problems. And then I continued working part -time pretty much since then. So.

Honestly, although I was still young, I was like 24, I had had like a decently long career as a software engineer and that's what I thought I wanted to do. So I started doing hackathons. I started doing bounties, crypto bounties, and I started learning how to develop this crypto tech and that and all that stuff. But I learned that I wasn't very good at it. So I would never win these hackathons and I would never be the first place in these bounties. But I kept trying because that's just what I do. And I also really got into the Avalanche ecosystem.

Travis John (05:57.685)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (06:20.91)
I tried out a bunch of them. I tried out a bunch of protocols, but I noticed Avalanche attracts a lot of engineers just because the architecture just makes so much sense. And if you think about things in a long timeframe, it's very hard to imagine a lot of the existing systems can scale to four billion users in 10 years, but Avalanche was designed a way where that's actually possible. So that's kind of what attracted me to it. Still very early, 2021.

22 maybe so go to 2022 that was when this was and then one day I was on social media and I saw a post not from any engineering department at Avalanche but from the CMO the chief marketing officer Devin at the time great guy and He said hello if you have a friendly face if you are good on social media And if you like traveling we'd like on -site correspondent

Travis John (06:52.821)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (07:18.094)
to go to all events all across the world and just to make fun content. And listeners are probably confused of like, why would you care about that? You were trying to be an engineer. Well, the other part of the story that I haven't mentioned yet is in college, I was sorta TikTok famous, right? I was a track athlete. I was pretty good. Good enough to get a shoe sponsorship once I graduated to train for the Olympics. And to get more money from said shoe sponsorship,

I was like, let's see if I can get a lot of followers on social media, because then I'll just be more attractive to brands. And so I started posting my workouts on TikTok. I started posting us at meets, the travel days, just what it was like to be a D1 athlete on TikTok. And people ate it up. They loved it. I grew an account to about 100K followers, got tens of millions of views. It was a lot of fun. It was actually like probably one of the most fun I've ever had in my life. Just because being an influencer is cool.

especially if you're in college age, right? Like the older you get, the less cool being an influencer becomes. So you want to get in real early, you know, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to be like going crazy on, on, on TikTok, the older you get, content, content matures and I would do very mature content at an immature time and it was awesome. So with that combined with my technical experience of actually playing with the tech, I said, well, I actually understand the tech pretty well. And, you know, I have this base so.

Travis John (08:23.125)
100%. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (08:45.518)
He said to submit it, just film a one minute video of yourself pitching. And so I knew how to edit pretty good on my phone. So I recorded on my phone, spun it up really good, sent it to him. 30 minutes after I sent it to him, he responds, this is awesome. Let's talk. We met that Friday. And that Friday is when I put in my two weeks notice at Home Depot. Two weeks later, I did whatever the inverse of being a software engineer at the Home Depot is. That's my current job. There's absolutely nothing in common.

Travis John (09:14.101)
Right.

Avery Bartlett (09:15.662)
There's like zero overlap of what I used to do and what I do now. But I think marketing is really what I've meant to do. I'm interested in it. I think about it all the time. I absolutely love it. I love making content. I love strategizing. I love talking about what I do. I love talking about RWAs. I love talking about crypto tech. And so I've really, really found what at the moment is my purpose. And so that's kind of my long -winded story of how I got into crypto.

Travis John (09:27.349)
Yeah.

Travis John (09:45.653)
That's brilliant. I mean, I've followed a lot of your content and I didn't know all of that. So that's good. Those are some good nuggets. Yeah, I appreciate that. And no, it is, I think it's a brilliant hero journey of finding out kind of what, and I think, like you said, a lot of people go through very similar stories, but I think they're all interesting in different ways of how it hits. So, and I think what I resonated with too is just the fact that,

Avery Bartlett (09:51.502)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (10:05.454)
For sure.

Travis John (10:11.285)
I mean, I can tell from your enthusiasm and passion and just knowing your content. I mean, this definitely is the path that makes sense for you clearly. But you're obviously, yeah, but working, supporting Ava Labs and Avalanche, you're still getting kind of your cake and eating it too, so to speak, because you have one of the best engineered platforms.

Avery Bartlett (10:19.598)
a lot better at it than I was.

Travis John (10:33.941)
blockchains in the space. So clearly, you still benefit from that even though your day job doesn't necessarily involve the engineering side of it. So I think you still get to enjoy it and tell people about it, which is cool. So, yeah.

Avery Bartlett (10:45.294)
Yeah, 100%. Although I don't use any of my tech lingo in marketing, it is helpful that I understand this stuff to then make that conversion of how can I say this and as, you know, how can I describe this to a fifth grader, which is, you know, usually what you try to do when you try and reach big audiences. So.

Travis John (10:51.732)
Right.

Travis John (11:04.117)
Yeah, and I think why I see this such a, like what you're doing as so critical, and I think to your point, you hit on this, I think we're all realizing that the next wave of the future, so to speak, I mean, we're seeing it, we're living it, but what's being rewarded now was not what was being rewarded 20 years ago or even five years ago. Creativity, connections, community, all these things that are...

squishy, you know, it's not the really tangible things. It was like, you know, hey, this is what you need to do 20 years ago or 10 years ago. And like I said, even five years ago have moved very, you know, that needles move significantly and what really does, you know, move the needle, you know, in the sense of growth and, and momentum and transformations is, you know, is this creative side.

Avery Bartlett (11:33.166)
Yep.

Avery Bartlett (11:53.742)
Yeah.

Travis John (11:53.973)
which I can appreciate because I've spent a lot of my life kind of feeling odd, being a bit creative in a lot of ways. And I think it's embraced more than ever. And you see that with NFTs, you see that with meme coins. Meme coins are going completely crazy. And a lot of that's basically people allowing themselves to be creative. I mean, of course, some of it's gambling, but just in the sense of creativity, I mean, the amount of creativity that goes into meme coins is quite extraordinary. I mean, of course, some of them are terrible, but like,

Avery Bartlett (12:05.325)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (12:12.493)
100%.

Avery Bartlett (12:21.998)
It is.

Travis John (12:23.893)
There's just some of them that I'm just still blown away of just the creativity that goes into it and the, you know, whether it's the art or the enthusiasm and the teams and, you know, you bring people together from all over the world for these kinds of things. So, and I know I'm diverting from RWA talk, but this all connects because ultimately that's what this is all about is like, it's that's what RWA and the tokenization space is, is it's bringing that real world and, you know, having that digital twin of what's going on and living in the cloud. So.

Avery Bartlett (12:34.638)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (12:53.678)
100%. And kind of like one of the reasons that makes my job so hard, but also kind of so rewarding is because so if you were a marketer, let's say, let's say, keep the example 20 years ago, for you know, an upcoming technology company, let's say 20 years ago, it was phones or whatever, right, that I was trying to market phones, that would be a lot easier than I'm doing now, because you can see a phone.

Like you can see the buttons and it's pretty straightforward that you just click the buttons that it shows you. It's like something physical you can see and you can play around with, right? But what we're going towards now is that the technology isn't getting built in the physical world as much as it was in the past. Like, you know, if I was trying to sell a car, it's pretty straightforward. You just look at a car, you know what a car does and that's a cool innovation. But for this stuff, we've gotten to the point where we're not building on

like the physical reality and laws of physics, we're building on ideas, right? We're building on and like you keep saying, creativity and imagination and whatnot. And so the innovation is more so like what ideas can we come up with? And crypto really is just an idea. It's not the only bounds of physics that we are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are are holded by

pretty straightforward. And the other one is how fast can the internet communicate all the way across the world, which is about half a second. And that actually does limit how fast crypto speed can go just because the internet isn't fast enough yet for us to do what we want to do. And so just to your point, it's like the innovations are more coming or more cerebral. It's more like thoughts, like interesting thoughts, cool ideas. And RWAs...

the mix between the two because right now they're separate like the physical and digital world are separate the meme coins what I'm trading ideas and I'm trading cool thoughts I'm trading creativity is completely separate from RWAs and and there's no reason they should be they should be one thing that kind of Is just one system which makes sense which we're working for it and we're doing

Travis John (15:07.125)
Yeah, yeah, well said. I love that.

I think to that point, I think maybe some ideas, maybe even some examples, if you have any of things that you've been working on or even Avalanche have been working on as we kind of like maybe move into that segue. Cause obviously there's a lot we'll get into with what's going on in Avalanche. I know there's quite a few of your coworkers that obviously can speak to very specific projects, but from the sense of just overall, I know you have a good handle on what's going on. And particularly, like you said, social is bringing these components to

Avery Bartlett (15:20.366)
Yeah.

Travis John (15:39.735)
together because at the end of the day, RWAs are the reason why this narrative is so strong is because it's, it doesn't have to, it's, you know, narrative is, you know, it's kind of a term that doesn't even have to be used because at the end of the day, that's typically where everyone looks at like, what's the real application to something, you know, that's been one of the biggest.

pet peeves of maybe people that are kind of like friends or family we talked to about crypto or something and they're like, well, what can you, like, they don't get the value of ideas or the value of creativity yet. Like, that's not, they're not wired that way. Yeah, it's fair. But this is where the RWAs and tokenization and whether it's capital markets or real estate or collectibles, all of these things are going to, this conversation will start still on social and in many, many cases.

Avery Bartlett (16:00.654)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (16:10.638)
Which is fair. Yeah, yeah.

Avery Bartlett (16:24.622)
Yeah, so I think a good entry point of so we keep saying RWAs and I'm gonna go ahead and define that is like the term RWA stands for real world asset. It's not a perfect term, but it's what we're going with, right? It's like, it's a definition we're going with. And I'll basically describe that as something that has already existed and has a system behind it, but isn't on the blockchain. So let's...

Take for an example, the most simple ones, homes. And I think one thing that has in common of the biggest argument towards throwing these items on the blockchain is to make these items more efficient. And the biggest hurdle that makes buying a house very inefficient is there's a lot of middlemen and the middlemen exist because of trust.

It's like, how do two parties exchange an exorbitant amount of money? A hugely personal thing about where you live. It's not the most personal thing you can do.

Avery Bartlett (17:37.902)
without, I guess, having a lot of, I guess, safeguards that these two parties trust each other. And what blockchain does is it is just a decentralized system, which basically means nobody owns it, and that this is a battleground or somewhere that we can be that I can exchange an exorbitant amount of money with deeply personal things a lot more efficiently, because what we trust is we trust the blockchain.

I don't have to go through it trusting the bank, trusting my real estate agent, trusting your real estate agent, trusting the person who's signing the mortgage and all these different things. I could just trust the blockchain. And I don't think the current system is going to go away for a long time. Real estate doesn't move too fast. And as I said, it's a deeply personal thing and there's a lot of money in it. And so people are going to be very, very slow to change things. But one thing we've done with Homium, and this is kind of the first step.

is

tokenizing equity in a sense. So it's not like you can't buy a home on Homium quite yet, but it is a way that you can, that institutional investors who do invest in residential real estate, it is the largest asset class in the world. I forget the exact number, but it's gigantic. It's number one, number one asset class in the world. So there's a lot of interest behind it. You know, you probably have a few, a few buddies who as their side hustle invest in residential real estate. It's more like the most popular side hustles is renting out.

So it's a massive industry, but what they're starting to do is for institutional investors, tokenize the equity to make it a little bit more investable. And so that's pretty high level of something that we're doing on the home level, but it goes down a lot deeper. And one of the most interesting examples that not a lot of people talk about, which is the same, the boring thing that we've done for thousands of years. We've done residential real estate for thousands and thousands of years. Some people think that's boring.

Avery Bartlett (19:37.422)
The other thing that blockchain solves, which involves a ton of trust is insurance. Okay. And so why, why insurance? So the one use case is Lemonade. And what they're doing is they're insuring farms in Africa. That's, that's a crazy sentence, right? Um, but here's why blockchain makes this make sense here. Okay. So typically if you're to get insurance on your car, you're going to have, you know, an insurance agent.

let's just say, who's going to be in charge of your policy. They're going to make sure if anything happens, they'll do the paperwork, whatever, and get you your money. And it's pretty straightforward, right? It's just something bad. They're paying you based on risk and that hopefully that they make more than the chance that you get on a wreck or whatever. But if you're insuring farms in Africa, the premiums there of like the upside is like a couple bucks. It's just not scalable for a single person to look over these farms.

And so what they're doing is they're using blockchain tech. So let's say, I think there was an article of Eunice was a farmer in Kenya and she has her corn farms, right? And the reason you would ensure your corn farms is like, if there's a drought, if it gets flooded, a million different things, if there's bugs, just a million different things can happen to your farm. But it's not a massive farm and, you know, it's not a huge market. And so she would literally pay just 10 bucks.

to have this have her farm insured. And if anything happens, then she just gets the price of it. But it's just like, it's such a small market. So it can kind of only be tackled by trustless and scalable systems, which in this case is blockchain tech, right? The big key, the big pattern here is trust, right? Trust in a system that everyone can agree on, because that's just how these systems were designed. And the

Travis John (21:21.493)
Yeah.

Travis John (21:31.221)
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I've followed a few of these projects for sure. And I would do just to note to a couple of things you've already said is with going back to Homium, I think they're doing it exactly right. I think to your point, you know, I've spent a number of years in real estate and a founder and through multiple different aspects of running businesses, franchises. And I will say like, I don't see a lot of this like, you know, changing overnight, clearly.

But home equity on the blockchain just makes perfect sense because it doesn't require anyone to have that a lot of emotional ties to that. It just allows people to unlock some of their equity without adding to their, you know...

additional payments every month in most cases with Holmium and they're able to provide another vehicle for investors to have some upside in a market they already trust and already invest in. So I mean, it makes perfect sense. And to your point of lemonade, I think that what's cool about that, I mean, we know like even in African countries, the corruption is so great that they're paying the insurance fees a lot of times or the cost to move money.

all of these things that we take for granted in our Western world, particularly here in the US, that's not always a luxury there, unfortunately.

Avery Bartlett (22:44.174)
No, not at all. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And that's one of the things about emerging markets is I've noticed that a lot of crypto and there's a direct correlation between interest in crypto and where a society is in, I guess, maturing, let's just say. So for example, when we were in

Istanbul, a couple of months ago, I was rocking my Avalanche merch all the time, just drip down Avalanche all the time. I've never been recognized more just for wearing an outfit, just for having crypto on me. Sometimes here it's cringe, it's like, oh God, crypto, bro. But over there, they loved it. And the reason being is that their currency isn't rock solid right now. They're having some...

some economic trouble. And like literally the week I was there, their currency lost 5 % of its value compared to the US dollar. And that I say that and it sounds crazy, but like, that's devastating, right? And so a lot of people are turning to crypto rails. And it's not for, oh, hey, I'm going to use Bitcoin to buy coffee. A lot of it's actually the stable coin, a lot of it's actually the US dollar on crypto rails. And so people aren't

necessarily adopting crypto as a currency. That's why I don't like the word cryptocurrency, because it throws you off a bit. It makes you think that we're competing with the US dollar. But in fact, what you see in practice is with these developing countries, especially in South America, I'm sure there's a bunch of other countries, but in Istanbul, they were using it as a way to acquire the US dollar and send it pretty quick. And so that was kind of a unique use case that I feel like

Travis John (24:26.325)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (24:40.718)
most people don't kind of, they underestimate with crypto is stable one right there.

Travis John (24:45.685)
Absolutely. I think another, maybe I'm jumping ahead, but I know Coachella is an interesting recent development with AVAX. And I think that they just had, and it's very relevant because they just had a massive event that was one of the largest attended events. I mean, I saw like Sublime. I saw all kinds of viral videos going around. So maybe you can chat a bit about some of those hookups. So even Sports Illustrated, I think a couple of those are interesting.

Avery Bartlett (25:05.454)
Oh yeah.

Avery Bartlett (25:09.486)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (25:14.382)
Yeah, ticketing is a pretty interesting one, but to Coachella, this was just kind of just like an easy way to add value rails, I'll say that, to activations, right? So if you think about like the way humans behave, and I'm gonna zoom out really quick of how I'm gonna tie all this in, but.

Travis John (25:15.605)
Yeah.

Travis John (25:38.517)
Yeah. And maybe we should explain a little bit about what Coachella, I think we probably... Okay.

Avery Bartlett (25:45.294)
Yeah, so it's questing. Yeah, so the cool thing there is Coachella Canvas was with questing. And basically...

Basically, you download the app and they gave you different things to do. There were scavenger hunts within Coachella that you could go scan a QR code and you would pretty much just get, you would level up, you would get experience, right? Just like an RPG, right? Just like a video game. And there were different activations to just join their Discord, following their socials, retweeting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what they would get in return is, um,

collectibles, but also if you get enough of them, if you get enough experience, you could have like gigantic rewards such as like VIP access, as well as even like tickets to next year and bring a friend. So it's like, like actually like valuable stuff just for completing quests and doing things for engagement. And from a business perspective, the reason this is interesting is...

is because obviously, humans act on incentives, right? To get people to behave and engage, there needs to be an extrinsic motivation before there's an intrinsic motivation. When I say extrinsic motivation, basically something that comes from the outside world. There's a cool incentive of VIP access as an extrinsic motivation because I get that from somebody else. So that's where things start. The first time you used Uber,

you probably got like a free pass. It's like, oh, you can use it for free. The first time you use DoorDash, you probably got $20 free. That's an extrinsic motivation. So when you start doing these things, such as like joining the Discord or whatever, some of those people, I mean, everyone's going to start through extrinsic motivations, but the goal is of all businesses that then you then convert to intrinsic motivations, which is I am going to do this on my own Accord. And I think the Discord is probably one of the most interesting parts.

Avery Bartlett (27:45.486)
Because that's essentially just like spending time in the community, right? Talking about your different artists, whatever. And maybe you make a friend and whenever you make a friend, you're more likely to come back to the discord and you're probably going to tell about it. And then you kind of become sort of acting on the best interest of the festival. You know, you'll start if you're in that discord a lot and talk to people, learning about things, something interesting comes out. You're going to tell your in real life friends about it.

And that network effect, if you can hook somebody with an extrinsic motivation, such as questing, such as doing these core codes, such as joining the discord, and then convert them to actually enjoying and liking your community, they can kind of be an extension of your user acquisition funnel. So that was an interesting thing with Coachella. I know I went super businessy there, but that's just kind of how my mind works. I feel like it's more interesting. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Travis John (28:37.045)
No, that's perfect. I think that's kind of the MO of most of the listeners so far, at least if I had a persona. So I think that fits perfectly. And no, I agree. And that was trending on OpenSea for a few weeks, kind of leading up to their event and different things. So I mean, it really got some good press and we're seeing more brands...

Avery Bartlett (28:45.838)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (28:56.366)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (29:03.221)
go this way. We saw this in that 2021 era and into 2022. And then obviously think we all know what happened with a few years of bear market activity where there really wasn't any real activations. But we're seeing quite a few of those either reactivations or doubling down on their activations or brands that already had these ideas that are finally bringing them forward. And that another example, of course, is a Sports Illustrated where they moved.

Avery Bartlett (29:13.55)
Right.

Travis John (29:31.029)
over to Avalanche to basically refresh their NFT connection between their real -world applications and NFTs, which is cool. So, yeah.

Avery Bartlett (29:38.03)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (29:42.062)
It is very cool. And Sports Illustrated, you know, it's ticketing. They have a bunch of events, but we have a bunch of ticketing platforms on them. The interesting thing about that is...

I feel like in 2021, the pitch of ticketing was, oh, hey, you know, you go to a game, you have your ticket, and then if it's a cool game, maybe you could resell your ticket. I don't think that that ended up being like the most engaging part of NFT ticketing. So from being a software engineer, one of the tricky things about using databases and databases, you could think of just an Excel spreadsheet, just a grid, a column.

table, something that you have descriptors, and then you have stuff that's filled in with numbers. Databases are really bad for something like ticketing, for an example, because you would have, okay, this ticket, and then it would be who it belongs to, and then you would have to keep a record of, okay, if it's transferred, then you have to create a new database of where it's at and then have a pointer linking back to it.

And if it's transferred like five times, you need to add five more columns saying this is pointed, this is pointed, this is pointed to long story short, the blockchain actually makes this a lot more straightforward and actually makes it cheaper and more streamlined to just like, just have tickets, right? I don't know. I did my best to explain. I don't know if that made sense, but.

Travis John (31:12.629)
Yeah, that's, no, I agree. And I know, like you said, ticketing, the aesthetics of, or the pitch of how NFT ticketing is going to be, you know, this, this huge, uh, windfall of people wanting to buy these tickets, you know, now online because they're NFTs hasn't fully panned out, but I do, I do see, and I have talked to some projects, uh, not on the podcast yet, but some that I'm lining up, but that are in the collectible space.

Avery Bartlett (31:31.598)
No.

Avery Bartlett (31:36.974)
Uh huh.

Travis John (31:39.797)
And you made a video recently on social just talking and comparing this to Pokemon cards. So I do think collectibles, we're seeing where this does make sense in a lot of ways. I think certain things where it's a ticket, unless it's a really rare, very sought after event, it's probably not going to be something that has a resale value. Although it is a digital collectible that is a little easier to... Lines more up with...

Avery Bartlett (31:44.75)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (32:06.581)
what we would appreciate collecting these days. Like a lot of times you don't want to have it go collecting dust somewhere else. It's like, hey, I'd love to just have it in my wallet and show it off. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (32:13.71)
Yeah, unless it was right, right. Unless it was like a super rare legendary event, which I'm sure there's maybe some resale, but yeah, the primary use case, and maybe you can attach collectibles to it. Maybe there is a twist on it where you add some art or just some sort of extra value that kind of augments the ticket to make you want to collect it more. Maybe there's that, yeah.

Travis John (32:19.477)
Yeah.

Travis John (32:40.181)
Yeah, when I think where... I agree, but I think to your point earlier, and I think really where this is all going is it's not about like, as we know with most of these things, it's very easy at first to look at everything on the face value and say, okay, Bitcoin is money. And you know, it's more than that. And all these things are more than what they appear. And this is a perfect example with tickets because tickets are just step one into...

Avery Bartlett (33:01.902)
100%.

Travis John (33:08.533)
those breadcrumbs, those online breadcrumbs of what people are doing. It's by giving those external incentives that are aligning then with future internal incentives, but also can align with future rewards. And this is where I think whether people love it or hate it.

I've spent a lot of time trying to convince myself it's not going to work on the blockchain, but rewards and point systems are still going to be something. And in fact, they've been mostly a failure in Web 2. So I think there's a lot of reasons, projects that I've talked to have convinced me that rewards and point systems and aligned incentives actually are going to work much better in Web 3, where a lot of people have said, well, only 90 % of incentives aren't redeemed. And it's like they give you this step.

Avery Bartlett (33:29.87)
Yeah.

Travis John (33:54.071)
that you're like, wow, that's pretty crappy. But Web3 has so much more potential because of all the things that you can connect up to it.

Avery Bartlett (33:55.982)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (34:01.998)
And I would argue about the rewards as being actually, this isn't a prediction, more of a trend we're seeing now in the true crypto degenerate culture that will only get bigger. So almost every single app, basically every single app has a point system. All right. And people, I've never seen people go crazier over online points than I see in crypto.

just because usually these points will convert to, you know, you'll get a token. And as we know, tokens can go crazy. And I think the difference that reward points in web two aren't as good as reward points in web three, just because value, the value of this point has so many steps to get to, whereas valued web three, it's in the same wallet.

Travis John (34:40.021)
Yep.

Yep.

Avery Bartlett (35:02.126)
that you keep all of your stuff, right? It's one singular place to hold all your stuff. I can't hold, like, I can only hold the US dollar in my bank account. If I got a bunch of subway points or whatever and I wanted to convert, and if I didn't want to buy a sandwich, I want to convert that into money, too bad, right? But in crypto, let's say subway points were on crypto, and I would accumulate those, that's just like...

I know what that is. It's clear. It's not like, well, if I do five, then I get a free sandwich, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just like value that I have in my wallet, which is the same, the same, my subway points are in the same place that my gaming points are, which is in the same place that like my collectible items are, which is the same place that my tickets are. It's value all in one place. Whereas in Web2, value's all over the place. And sometimes you even forget about it. And well, most of the time you forget about it, because that's what statistics say. And so I think reward points, it's, it's...

Travis John (35:55.061)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (35:56.91)
It's not even a prediction, it's happening. And after this, I'm going to go farm on Stars Arena to get more points because I know that's going to be a good thing for me.

Travis John (36:02.741)
Hehehe

Yeah, that's it. I haven't listened to your most recent episode that you had Jason on there from Stars Arena and the founder, right? Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. And I think to your point, I think it's almost like the points reward system is comparing like a rotary phone to the iPhone. Like the rotary phone was one thing. Like, you know, the iPhone opened up the door to apps, to so many different levels of communication and banking and you name it, payment systems.

Avery Bartlett (36:12.078)
I'm excited about that one. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (36:23.406)
100%.

Travis John (36:34.805)
So it's really just these rails for incentives. And as you mentioned, I mean, there's sites like Whale Market and some of these ones where literally you could sell your points. And like you said, in some cases, in many cases these days, because of intrinsic incentives are part of the ramp up of this market right now, that it does turn into some kind of token airdrop potentially. So you really, you know, people treat incentives and points in a much different way than they do in Web2. So, yeah.

Avery Bartlett (36:57.262)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (37:02.798)
Yeah. And it's pretty interesting. And I guess kind of like the... I guess I don't want to segue for you, but I think this kind of goes right into gaming in a way.

Travis John (37:15.605)
Yeah, now it's a good time to go to that. Let's do it. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (37:20.814)
Okay, yeah. So this is actually where I think Avalanche is the strongest in gaming. And the reason is, is the big, big exciting thing, the differentiator of Avalanche for those who aren't listening is the concept of subnets, which basically means anybody can create their own blockchain that they manage using Avalanche technology and it's within our ecosystem. So a lot of times you think of a blockchain,

You think of just a single network. Like I can use Ethereum and I have all my stuff on Ethereum. I can use Solana and I have all my stuff on Solana. Avalanche has the C chain, which is a lot of the time what people do, it's like our central hub is where we hang out. But next to that, just in parallel are dozens and dozens and dozens of blockchains. A lot of those are gaming blockchains. So Shrapnel, for an example, owns

their own blockchain, the shrapnel subnet. And what powers this subnet is shrapnel's token. So a big reason why people use subnets or they own their own blockchain is for tokenomics reasons. So basically they can have a token that has actual value accrual based on usage and isn't just, you know, they don't do a bunch of mental hoops to try and create value for a token, which a lot of the times people do and fail at.

but they go to subnets and why do games care about subnets? Why do games want their own blockchains? Because although this is a super early industry and we really haven't, you know, we're still experimenting a lot. One of the things that is guaranteed to throttle a network and to override a singular blockchain has been gaming. So if a game, so let's just say, you know, you're trying to use Trader Joe at Dex, you're trying to just like swap.

USDC for Avalanche, but the same time that a game is super, super, super popular. The network's going to get clogged up and your fees are going to be, you know, the transaction is going to be slow and you might have to pay a lot of, a lot of gas just because there's so much demand for, for block space. You'll have to pay a lot, a lot of gas for that trade. Games have already proven to be able to throttle a blockchain time and time again, games can throttle a blockchain. So what do you do?

Avery Bartlett (39:41.102)
you go onto your own blockchain. And so we see dozens and dozens and dozens of games, you have their economy built on the blockchain and they have incentives, extrinsic incentives for people to create content for their game. So there's two interesting things about Web3 games, right? There's one, the tokenization of their in -game assets. So as we've been talking about in this podcast, if you have a good enough idea,

whether that be a cool Fortnite skin or a cool collectible, in this day and age, that has value. Imagination has value. So if you're, and it can't, it's not valuable because it's NFT, it's valuable because you're creative. So people mix that up. So if you have a good enough game and a good enough items, you can throw that on the blockchain and it's just a much more efficient way to have an ecosystem and have a transfer of value for a million, million reasons. A lot of games are doing that. The other things is,

Travis John (40:22.581)
Love ya.

Avery Bartlett (40:38.222)
this trend in macro gaming, like out of web three called games as a platform. What does that mean? That means something like Roblox or Fortnite where, so you have your game, you create some content, but the majority of the levels, the majority of the skins, the majority of the mini games are created by your player base. It's with the assumption that, you know,

one million ,015 15 year olds have a better chance of creating a super awesome level than like your game studio of 200 people. Right? So it's just like outsourcing fun ideas. And blockchain is a huge way to facilitate this and actually reward people. Because right now, if you're going to make a fun mini game on a

for the most part, let's just say on Gary's mod or something like that, you're not going to get paid anything at all. There's no way to monetize it. But if there's a way to monetize players creating content for your game, creating skins for your game and having really, really good ideas, it's possible that if you're a good enough game designer with no experience or whatever, just through the capitalism and the laws of supply and demand, you will get paid by this game for creating content. And crypto is great rails to facilitate users creating content.

Travis John (41:35.893)
Right.

Avery Bartlett (41:59.054)
It's one big thing Maplestory is doing, that's one big thing Shrapnel is doing. And I think it's a very, very awesome trend. So that's why I'm so excited about gaming.

Travis John (42:05.877)
Yeah. And you had a post that talked really, really well to this topic of with graphics. So make sure you follow Avery on Twitter, LinkedIn. I think I saw it on both platforms, but it talks about that network effect. And I think where subnets are different, and we can talk a little bit more about that too in capital markets as when we finish up gaming. But what's interesting, and you pointed this out, but I just want to reiterate.

Avery Bartlett (42:23.374)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (42:35.573)
for people listening about this, that aren't familiar with subnets on Avalanche is that these independent blockchains aren't exactly the same as an L2 on Ethereum because these are all going to be operating off their... If they wanted to, they could choose to use AVAX as the gas token. But for the most part, the reason why they want their own blockchain, as you mentioned, aside from the fact that it's game and it's going to be a heavy load on the ecosystem, they're able to have their entire own blockchain, but they're also able to use their tokenomics.

for the entire blockchain. So it is literally their own blockchain. They're not an L2 of Avalanche, even though they are, you know, there's a lot of synergies and obviously with Teleporter and some of the other things we can maybe, we don't have to get all too geeky on it, but some of the ways that subnets can communicate together back to the mothership, back to other subnets and even to other blockchains, like, you know, back to Ethereum over to other places. So...

But I think I don't want to jump too far ahead in gaming because there's so many different things there. I don't know if there's other things you wanted to point out. Obviously, there's Beam, which is a billion dollar market cap ecosystem that not everyone realizes that that's an Avalanche subnet.

Avery Bartlett (43:41.646)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (43:47.214)
Yeah, and I think that's, I think Beams a great example, because like, if you really put your ego aside, like the goal of Avalanche is just to get, make other people successful. So get, and I'm going to just be blunt here.

You want to get other people rich. You want to use your technology without your brand name that they're not relying on because cool comes and go. You won't be cool forever. You can't rely on just being in the hot narrative because everyone gets their time in the sun and everyone's going to be second place and forgotten about. That's going to happen. The value has to be real. You have to genuinely provide something that makes other businesses make more money than you. Because what happens when you do that, such as Beam, they're

enormous success, right? They're a blockchain that's doing, but I'm not saying they're doing better than the Avalanche ecosystem, but I'm saying that's our goal. Our goal is to make the subnets be as powerful as possible. Because if they're successful, A, we're going to do business with them forever. So they're going to be part of the ecosystem forever. They'll always stay with Avalanche if they're successful. And they're going to tell everybody else and they're going to set a stage of like, okay, that's the model we're going to go off of.

Travis John (44:58.805)
All right.

Avery Bartlett (45:05.646)
And so it's just a big network effect. And so the goal of subnets is very, very like we're trying to get other people to make the best blockchains as possible. We don't necessarily even need to be involved. We just want to provide as much value to other businesses as possible. And so that's why we're literally giving people their own block space and their own, you know, throughput and their own ownership and their own gas token. Um, cause if, if we only cared about Avalanche, we would make everyone use our gas token, but.

Beam is a fantastic example of someone who can really crush and be successful as a subnet.

Travis John (45:40.757)
I agree. And I think, you know, I don't know, it just came to me and there's plenty of good examples of to tie this in, but you know, it's like, you think about like Y Combinator. It's like Y Combinator. It's like Sam Altman taking credit for every company that came out of Y Combinator and saying like, you know, you need to partly name your company Y Combinator or always mention us in every, you know, and I think that's where Emin, you know, his vision and all of you guys on the team is it's very much the same way. I mean, you guys, the clear path has always been...

Avery Bartlett (46:05.806)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (46:10.197)
put builders first, we're gonna put the engineer, we're gonna put in place what builders want and where the puck is going. And we're not necessarily, of course, we're gonna take some accolades and we're gonna point, hey, we're involved in this. And naturally people are seeing that. I mean, there's a reason why the number one coin on CoinMarketCap for RWAs is Avalanche, just because...

Avery Bartlett (46:17.486)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (46:23.246)
Of course.

Travis John (46:35.317)
there's a multi -layer narrative. Like if you're looking to invest in, if the RWA niche is too confusing, and this conversation is a good example of not being confusing, but just of how dynamic it is and how many different layers and how much is going on, that Avalanche is probably one of the top players, if not the top in the sense of, and with people are voting with their dollars, I mean, based on the market cap and based on the RWA rankings,

Avery Bartlett (46:37.518)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (47:03.989)
Avalanche is where people are putting their money because they see that, you know, and it's natural. So clearly that's working, which is great. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (47:07.566)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (47:11.054)
Yeah, yeah. And you know, we're super proud of it. But you know, as you know, the reason we got here to begin with is because we were never satisfied. So, you know, we're trying to do as much as we can and, you know, hopefully, hopefully do the best in every single vertical. So, you know, we're excited.

Travis John (47:25.717)
Yeah. I think a lot of the listeners love the capital market stuff. I mean, BlackRock, Larry Fink, this is a hot topic these days of tokenization of capital markets, the traditional markets. I know Morgan on your team is the director of this and involved. And I think she's in Dubai maybe right now, or she's in... I think it... Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (47:40.717)
Yes.

Avery Bartlett (47:46.35)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (47:51.246)
She's in Dubai, flooded in her hotel, but yeah, she is. She's doing great stuff there. She's a beast. Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting things going on in the, I guess, institutional finance. One thing I will say is to no surprise, similar to real estate, this is one of the slower moving verticals. Like people who...

Travis John (47:55.637)
I bet.

Avery Bartlett (48:19.95)
have all this value, the financial giants, JP Morgan, Citibank. It took a long time to get them to open up to the idea of taking some of their different verticals or different parts of their business, which are essentially just having large, large funds and converting them into RWAs and the blockchain or

tokenizing some funds to use crypto tech to distribute value and do all sorts of stuff took a while. But right now, what JP Morgan, Citibank and T -Rowe Price, a lot of KKR, a ton of huge financial players is they're playing around with the idea of

Essentially, so they're not changing the asset itself. Like the asset itself is going to be saying their funds aren't going to change. But as you know, there's a lot of trust involved in moving these assets around from different players, organizing them in different ways. Blockchains are literally built to solve many, many problems that they have. Because a lot of the traditional systems that are on Wall Street that run our financial system, they were built decades ago. And they aren't written in the most up -to -date code. It's just mainframes that still work.

Travis John (49:40.597)
mean for a man.

Avery Bartlett (49:42.254)
which is fine because if it works, that's fine and they know where it is and it's been reliable. But what comes next? It's very straightforward. It's going to be the tokenization of assets and it's going to be a long journey to get the entire ginormous vertical of institutional finance to get fully on board, but making ginormous steps to

have them play around the tech, they have their blockchain, they're tokenizing some of their funds to make transfer between different players a lot easier. And a lot of that's facilitated with Avalanche Subnets because they can be private as well. I talk about, you can own your own subnet, you can also own your own subnet and it'd be private and you just have it within your own rails, which is usually what a lot of them are doing. And it's a pretty interesting application.

Travis John (50:33.589)
Right.

Avery Bartlett (50:38.222)
and it saves them a ton of money and it makes things a lot more efficient and it takes out a lot of middlemen just because the trust is already solved.

Travis John (50:45.653)
Yeah, I agree. And I've read some of the case studies and I like the on it, the JP Morgan Onyx program is a perfect example of that, that test where they did that with a private blockchain, they, they tokenized funds and they're able to even, uh, like we mentioned a little bit earlier, just the term teleporter where you're able to communicate privately back and forth to the main, the mothership. So even to like the web two mainframe systems or what, you know, their existing database systems or.

Avery Bartlett (50:51.406)
Mm -hmm.

Avery Bartlett (51:09.678)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (51:15.061)
even if they were settling, say for example, like they were going to settle on the BlackRock tokenized fund, for example, like, you know, that's not anything related to this case study, but Teleporter makes that possible now where you could literally have your tokenized funds. And then if you're looking to settle into USD or USDY or something, they could teleport that directly back over to another blockchain, which is crazy. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (51:39.758)
Yeah, yeah. I think that deal was done before Teleporter was out. So I think they're using layer zero. But I think to speak on that point of the vision. So Teleporter is basically, so I talked about all, you have all these separate blockchains that are just right next to each other in the Avalanche ecosystem. What is a secure way to have these blockchains be able to talk to each other or in the most basic form, be able to transfer assets from

Travis John (51:45.365)
Yeah, it was. Right.

Avery Bartlett (52:09.358)
one place to another. And so that is, teleporters been a huge task is historically for if people don't know, going, taking assets cross chain is, you know, from let's say Ethereum to Solana or Polygon to Avalanche is one of the scariest things you can do. It's not a perfect system. There's a lot of hacks. And so to make something that is both secure,

works and really, really fast is actually a big task. And we're super proud to be ahead of the curve on that. And Teleport, it's still early. There's people are still building on top of it. But it's really what's going to make all these separate blockchains feel like one. And so when I talk about that vision of you just have one wallet and you have all your stuff and you don't have to keep track of your subway points and keep track of your bank account and keep track of

Maybe you have a different thing for a credit card. You don't have to keep track of all these different stuffs. It'll just be kind of like your phone connects all these different apps. It'll be teleporter and Avalanche connects all your value. And I use value on purpose because it's a very, very broad term. It can mean anything. It can mean anything from the art you collect, the games you play, your reward points, to your net worth. So anything.

Travis John (53:24.373)
Right.

Travis John (53:32.181)
I love it. I love it. I think we hit on most of the things. What did I miss? Is there anything that we didn't capture? I know there's still a lot of projects. I know one thing I was going to mention from, there's a ton and I think I'll have them on the show too, but another one is to your point of insurance. It was just something on my timeline and something I had to check out today, but Re Insurance, R -E, they go by Re. They're also an Avalanche project and...

Avery Bartlett (53:43.822)
tons.

Avery Bartlett (53:55.694)
Mm -hmm.

Travis John (54:00.469)
It's similar to like a Lloyds of London, anyone that knows that story. I think it's a fascinating way they're building that project where they're essentially tokenizing or they're using the Avalanche decentralized system in the blockchain rails to create their own Lloyds of London marketplace essentially where decades and decades ago, that was just a bunch of rich men that got together that literally sat at a coffee shop and figure out how to...

insure the maritime ships that were going back and forth and if they were going to make it or not. And this is something that now has moved obviously in many decades forward to something like with insurance, which is almost a $2 trillion business, just one aspect of that reinsurance business. So some of these projects that are coming on chain now and bringing these real world applications. And to your point, they're able to talk back.

Avery Bartlett (54:42.222)
Yeah.

Travis John (54:52.725)
to some of these legacy systems or even other blockchains for a settlement layer or for even just transfer ownership in some cases. So I think there's some exciting things and I think we hit on a lot, but I like to always keep these close to an hour just because everybody can only take so much of us jabber -job, right? So...

Avery Bartlett (55:08.622)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (55:13.006)
Yeah, no, it was a great conversation. I think that was a great point on Rhee. I think I need to talk about them more. I feel like it's been a while since we posted about them, but yeah, that's a great one.

Travis John (55:22.965)
Yeah, I'm working on getting them on the show. I've connected up with a couple of team members, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (55:27.214)
Oh good, good. They're good dudes. Awesome team. Well hey man, thanks so much for having me on, this was a lot of fun.

Travis John (55:34.581)
It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. This has been awesome. I think this will be eye -opening for anyone that's not already geeking out on the Avalanche blockchain because there's a lot, especially in this market with things heating up, there's just so much to take in. And I think this hour session here is gold for understanding just what's going on in Avalanche and...

Avery Bartlett (55:48.462)
There is.

Travis John (55:57.653)
mirroring to what people are hearing about, oh, you know, Avalanche and RWAs, but not everyone really understands what's under the hood. Like we talked about, we keep bringing back to this, everyone's looking at the surface of what's happening. I think we just, we unpacked a lot of that, which is good. Thank you.

Avery Bartlett (56:03.726)
Yeah.

Avery Bartlett (56:12.014)
I hope so, yeah, and I did my best to explain things. I know it's some complicated stuff, but yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity. And for all the listeners, feel free to DM me on any platform, Avery Bartlett, I'll do my best to respond, answer any questions.

Travis John (56:23.733)
Yeah, definitely follow Avery, follow Avalanche, follow the Ava Labs teams. And definitely I'll have you back as we have more developments and new things to talk about.

Avery Bartlett (56:34.862)
Can't wait. Awesome. Thank you.

Travis John (56:36.117)
Awesome, appreciate it. Cheers.