Why everything will be tokenised, with Mark Yusko of Morgan Creek
Mark Yusko joins Pirates Parley to walk through three decades of investing in innovation, why he went all in on Solana, and why every asset on earth will eventually live on-chain.Mark started in the Notre Dame endowment world, allocated to the venture fund that put 500K into Google and turned it into a couple of hundred million, and now runs Morgan Creek Digital. His framework is the ABCDs of the digital age -- AI, blockchain, chips and data. 80% in equity of businesses building the future, 20% in the liquid protocols themselves.He and Steve first met in 2022, when Solana was getting dunked on for "vaporised transactions" and Mark was one of the few people on the outside trying to understand instead of name-calling. Steve set him up with a phantom wallet and sent him $10 of SOL live on stream. Mark lost the seed phrase. The $10 is still on-chain.They cover:- The five internet protocols and why the wealth all went to the application layer in Web 1 and Web 2- Why about 85% of Web3 wealth has gone to the protocol layer this time- AI is artificial, not intelligent -- it fails all four definitions of intelligence- Why prompts you type into the context window get rewritten before they ever reach the model- Tokenisation as digital property rights, not squishing assets into coins- Eric Voorhees on permissionless systems- One-of-one always has value -- Mickey Mantle's signed card, the Constitution DAO, Magic x Lord of the Rings- How Solana held up during the Trump coin launch- The Morgan Creek Solana journey -- pennies to $265, sold 75% near the top, sold most of the rest in the high hundreds- Five Web3 protocols, the bridges problem, and why Frame's pitch did not click- Mark has reviewed thousands of pitches, and not one was building on XRP or Cardano- Tim Draper, World of Warcraft mana, and the FBI Silk Road Bitcoin auction at $601- Fundraising for founders -- fast yes, fast no, slow yes, avoid the slow no- Builders are rare, promoters are plentiful- Sales is simply transferring your enthusiasm to another
Why everything will be tokenised, with Mark Yusko of Morgan Creek
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