At Consensus Hong Kong 2026, the conversation has clearly shifted from an era of speculation to automated execution, AI agents, and on-chain intelligence that place trades rather than just informing them.
In this exclusive interview, Hardik Katariya, CEO & Founder of Top Coin Daily, sits down with Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, to dive into the company’s evolution from a neutral blockchain analytics platform into an AI-powered execution layer. Svanevik explains why he believes the future of trading is agentic, why individual investors stand to benefit most from AI, and how Nansen is climbing the “trust ladder” towards autonomous finance.
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From Solana dominance to the NX8 index to his controversial Cardano “ghost chain” comments to ETFs and to exposing the uncomfortable truth about founder incentives and “slow rugs,” this Q&A offers a raw look at the 2026 crypto landscape through the eyes of its leading data scientist.
In conversation: Hardik Katariya X Alex Svanevik
Hardik: This is Hardik from Crypto Times and today we have Alex Svanevik and he’s the CEO of Nansen. Today, he joins us to explain why Nansen is betting its future on something he calls Vibe Trading and why he thinks that the greater beneficiary of AI would not be Goldman Sachs or any other big player, but rather individuals.
Welcome to Top Coin Daily, Alex.
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How are you feeling here at the Consensus event?
Alex: It’s been great. I did a keynote at Solana Consumer Day yesterday, and I had a panel this morning, so meeting up with great folks like yourself.
Hardik: That’s great! So, starting off, you called the trading launch the most significant product in Nansen’s history, but Nansen has built its reputation as a neutral intelligence layer of crypto. So once you’re executing trades, aren’t you competing with your own customers, the funds, and the traders who pay for the data?
Alex: So, what we do now is we just allow people to execute the trades on chain through our interface. And so that means under the hood, we actually aggregate multiple other DEX aggregators, LiFi, Jupiter, OKX, and probably more. So we’re actually just making it easier for them to trade in the same places where they do their research and discovery.
Hardik: Does Nansen have any intervention in what they trade or in terms of the fees they pay to any exchange?
Alex: No; basically, the way it works is that the user comes in, they talk to an agent—you can go and download the mobile app for the people who tried it—so you can start talking to it.
The background here is basically that we think trading in 2030 is going to look very different from trading up to now. Right. And instead of going into complex user interfaces, order books, different models, that frankly probably overwhelm a lot of people, you can just talk to an agent to express what you want to do. And so you can start at the top of the funnel to ask it, “What tokens are smart money buying right now in the last hour, 24 hours?”, for example.
Hardik: And you can just ask the AI to buy it for you.
Alex: Exactly. So you can go through that flow of discovery, due diligence, and at the end of the day, it’s up to you what you want to execute on. And so we’ve just made it really easy for you to both do your research, your due diligence, and your execution in one integrated product.
Hardik: All right. You’ve claimed Nansen AI has hit 85% quality scores in the expert mode versus like 20% of the GPT, the other GPT models that we have. Can you walk me through what benchmark this actually measures?
Alex: Yeah. I would actually love to be more transparent on how we do benchmarking and Evals. But the way to think about it is there are two main dimensions we look at. Quality of the output of the agent and latency—how quickly you can do it.
And there are two modes. There’s the Expert mode and the Fast mode. For Expert mode, you might be familiar with deep research and so on in other AI products. It’s very similar in the sense that if you have the patience to wait maybe 40, 50 seconds, you’ll get a really great response where our agent has basically looked at a bunch of different on-chain data points and using the tools that we have available.
So when you compare Nansen’s agent to GPT-5, Opus 4.5, I think 4.6 that we have in the benchmark. But under the hood, we don’t actually run these models, but we enhance them. And so that means if you ask it “What token smart money is buying?” or you ask, “Who are the top buyers of Pengu?”, ChatGPT, or Anthropix models will not know.
Hardik: Because they don’t have the infrastructure.
Alex: Exactly. So I think the way to think about it is we’re giving the best models eyes on-chain and we also allow them to explore what’s happening on-chain agentically. So they’re not necessarily competing as such, it’s more like you’re enhancing these models with Nansen’s capabilities.
Hardik: Right, so you’re just integrating your infrastructure on top of these models.
Alex: And so when Opus 4.6 dropped within 24 hours, we had evaluated it with Nansen’s own tools.
Hardik: And you had integrated it?
Alex: Well, we concluded not to integrate it because it turned out specifically for on-chain, it was not actually better. It was a little bit slower, but it was not actually better than 4.5.
Hardik: So which AI would you call the main base AI for Nansen?
Alex: For Expert, it’s Opus 4.5 still. That’s still the best one. And for the Fast mode, we use Sonnet.
I was actually hoping for Sonnet 5, which some people were expecting to see launched, and instead they launched Opus 4.6. So our entire team is basically obsessed with these new model launches. When Kimi K2.5 dropped, the same thing happened. We evaluated Kimi right away.
We found that it was a little bit better on a few things, but it was worse at tool usage, which is really important for our use case. And so again, we decided to stick with Opus 4.5 because it’s frankly a very good model.
Hardik: So, about joint venture protocols (JVPs), you’re now co-creating and co-funding on-chain protocols with partners, right? Critics say that this concept dilutes focus concretely because it’s a JVP. So how does Nansen avoid conflict of interest when promoting such protocols in which you have a financial stake while being a neutral analytical platform that people trust?
Alex: So first of all, we actually created JVPs partially because we don’t want to dilute our focus on the core product, right? If we had built these protocols in-house, I think it would have diluted our focus. But by working with partners, those core teams can actually deliver on these protocols.
Hardik: So you don’t have anything to do with the operations, particularly how they operate?
Alex: Not in the operations. We just co-create, we co-fund, and in some cases, we help with distribution. So if we talk about the NX8 index product that we have worked on together with OpenDelta, it is the issuer of this product, but of course, we’ve worked with them on the concept, figuring out which Layer 1s do we want to include in the index, what should the methodology be, and making sure that Nansen points holders have ownership in the protocol that’s going to underlie NX8. We think this is a good way, actually, to make sure that our users become stakeholders in these protocols.
And as such, I think it’s actually a great opportunity to be a Nansen points holder because you’re going to have ownership in these protocols that we co-create.
By the way, can I talk a bit about NX8? Like what it is? Because it might not be clear.
Hardik: Yeah, sure. You can explain it in your own way.
Alex: So NX8, the basic problem we’re solving here is that if you have friends and family, right, who ask you, “Hey, I want to buy some crypto, should I buy Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, I’ve heard of SUI, like, what should I buy?” We basically looked at what are the top eight Layer-1s that have genuine on-chain traction. They generate revenues, they have active addresses, they have transaction volumes that are meaningful, they might have stablecoin issuance, they might have TVL and DeFi. So we looked at all of these different metrics, and we concluded that there are basically eight chains that are leading.
Of course, some are doing even better than others. And these eight chains, we created an index product together with OpenDelta, and we made it really easy for people to just buy this index on Solana at first. And basically, people can buy NX8 on DEXs, right? They can go on Jupiter, they can even buy it through the Nansen mobile app or on the web. And you can lend it, you can stake it through Kamino and other DeFi integrations.
The idea here was really to make a product that abstracts a lot of the complexity of which Layer 1 should you bet on and give you a broad basket that you can deploy funds into. And that’s kind of the concept. It’s actually solving this need for not having to always monitor which Layer 1 is doing slightly better than the other. With this, you get broad exposure to eight layer ones.
Hardik: So when a user asks Nansen AI, “What should I invest in?”, is it going to promote NX8 in the chat?
Alex: No, it doesn’t promote it. It treats it equally as any other. If you ask about NX8, it’s going to give you information about it. It’s going to tell you who’s buying it and so on.But there’s no favors given to NX8. It’s a good question. There’s no favors created for NX 8.
Hardik: That’s great. All right. And now there’s a lot of talk about the death of narrative trading. So based on the on-chain data, what capital actually is rotating and what do you have to say to this particular thing, death of, you know, narrative trading? You know, earlier we had a narrative and people would invest in the narrative, but right now it’s different.
Alex: I mean, I think 2025 was a pretty strange market because you have all of these like institutional underlying positive trends.
When you think of the regulatory advances, when you think of institutions getting involved. At the same time, retail investors had like the worst sentiment I’ve seen, maybe ever in crypto, despite all of this. So we kind of ended up in a very strange point where crypto markets did not do as well as at least I expected, given all the positive things that were happening under the hood.
So I think there’s a little bit of fatigue going on with maybe narratives. People, obviously, NFTs were many years ago, meme coins; and I think now people are kind of looking for fundamentals. They want strong, long-term investments they can make. At the same time, I do think that people find, you know, crypto and on-chain investing entertaining when they find the right narratives to look at. And so maybe one thing where you have some fundamentals as well as a strong narrative is betting on agentic trading.
And so there was a little bit of this with bags.fm happening. I don’t know if you were following that, but you could essentially bet on vibe coders. And so people would essentially have a creator coin, and the creators were often vibe coders. The creator of Ralph Wiggum had his own RALPH token, which sadly ended up selling and dumping on the holders; which tends to happen in crypto.
Hardik: Every time.
Alex: Unfortunately. There’s another one behind Leon, which is a personal AI assistant. This guy’s been working on it for years. It’s an open source project. And so I think that’s an interesting sector. But at the same time, you have a lot of bad incentives in crypto, and there is this tendency where a lot of creators and teams just end up dumping on the holders, and there’s a lot of speculation, which is not great.
Hardik: It’s very expected.
Alex: In some ways, I think we’re still in like the toy world era of crypto, where there’s all these crazy tokens being launched. But at the end of the day, there’s going to be a real-world era where we use this infrastructure and these products to invest in stuff that is more durable and sustainable. And so I’m super bullish on things like prediction markets. That’s growing super fast. Tokenized equity, both public equities that are becoming more popular through xDocs, Ondo Finance, and so on. But also, I think with private equity getting an avenue to get more liquidity, I think that’s going to happen. And then there’s other real-world assets. Probably over time, you’ll have music rights, you might have, you know, real estate. It’s never really taken off yet.
But I think ultimately the vision here is that every asset is going to be tokenized. And so our bet is that if we just create the best tools to allow investors to explore on-chain and to execute the trades on-chain, it doesn’t really matter what the asset is. They can find anything as long as it’s tokenized and as long as we can support it on the different blockchains.
Hardik: So, for example, let’s say that somebody says that, “I want to buy the hottest meme coin there is right now.” And then while Nansen recommends any coin to the user, does it do any sort of fundamental research on the coin, or it just blindly promotes it if it’s trending?
Alex: Firstly, it doesn’t really recommend coins just to be clear, but it will highlight coin space when you ask it, right? So, for meme coins, I think the reality is there are no fundamentals by definition.
Hardik: Yeah, there are none.
Alex: Right. So then it will look at who else is buying, you know, and maybe what are people talking, what are people saying on X, for example. So we’ve integrated X into Nansen.
It also has web search, so it can do fundamentals. I was asking it about Lido V3, which is an ETH staking protocol that people might be familiar with. And I was curious about what’s different with V3, what are going to be some of the implications.
And I could actually have a pretty meaningful conversation with Nansen AI on the topic of Lido V3. And obviously, to do that, you need to look at more things than just on-chain, right? You need to look at what is different about V3, what are the implications, and is this going to have an impact on validators in Lido’s ecosystem for V2 and V1. And so, yeah, I found that it’s actually surprisingly good at looking at things beyond on-chain.
Hardik: Since we’re talking about the structure of the market, I have a question for you. You have been in the industry a long time, you have survived FTX, you have survived bear markets. And I think Nansen actually helped expose the FTX situation in a certain way.
Alex: That’s right.
Hardik: So after all that, what do you think the crypto industry has actually fixed its trust problem? Or are we just in a better market that’s masking the same structural risks? I mean, the ETFs, of course.
Alex: Yeah, I mean, FTX fundamentally was a problem that was a problem with a centralized entity, right? And so I think the main metric to look at is how much activity is happening on-chain versus in some database that Sam Bankman-Fried or someone else controls.
I would say the biggest health factor is how much activity is happening on-chain versus off-chain. If you look at the last few years, on-chain activity has been going up, right? Hyperliquid is a good example.
Hardik: Yes, it is.
Alex: And on Solana, there’s tons of trading happening on spot trading. So I think overall, the world is going to be on-chain. And the more we can push on to blockchains instead of databases that individuals can control, the better it is.
Hardik: But, the institutions are into ETFs and they’re holding crypto and not really having an on-chain activity. Like, there would be thousands of people or maybe 100,000 of people who invested in an ETF while it’s entirely being controlled by a single entity. So how does that change what it was before?
Alex: I think ETFs, DATs, these are all like temporary constructs as we get to on-chain, you know, because they’re kind of just distribution channels into legacy finance, right? If you want to buy a crypto or you want to buy a basket of cryptos, you can do it through an ETF or through a DAT, because that’s the distribution channel you’re used to as a TradFi investor. But if you could just connect directly to the blockchain, it would be much easier for everyone.
Hardik: You’re saying this is like an on-ramp for people?
Alex: That’s what it is. Like, it is literally just a distribution channel into legacy finance, TradFi. I think in the long term, like I said before, every asset is going to be on-chain. And so I think these ETFs and DATs, it’s great that you get them because it brings more capital into people, into the space. But I don’t think they’re going to exist in like 2040, 2050. Like I think people are just going to be trading on-chain.
They’re just temporary kind of intermediaries.And I welcome them because it means we get more capital and more people into the space. But I don’t think it’s the end game for trading and investing, for sure.
Hardik: And since you have integrated Sonnet and Opus into your platform, I have a question that recently Anthropic has demonstrated that their AI can exploit half of the smart contracts. So while you’re using this AI that is by them, you’re shipping an AI agent to autonomous agents to retail. So what do you think about the systematic risk of AI hallucinating or AI agents operating in a DeFi at a scale while you’re there at a point?
Alex: Yeah, this is a great question. My mental model for this is like a trust ladder. So you don’t want to go straight to autonomous. That would be like sitting into a Tesla for the first time ever and just going in the back seat and letting it drive, which I think most people, if you’ve never seen it, would be uncomfortable.
Hardik: Yeah, I wouldn’t do that.
Alex: Most people feel like they want to have a hand on the wheel or they want to sit in the driver’s seat or whatever. And so similarly in trading, we have to take the approach of climbing a trust ladder. And it starts with having the human in the loop on tapping approve on the trades.
So like, hey, I want to buy a hundred dollars of Pengu, it finds that and it shows here’s the trade you’re about to make, execute: yes or no? That’s the most basic level. Then maybe the next level is smart trades.
The agent finds trades for you and it says, “Hey, maybe you want to look at this trade.” Again, you execute it manually. And then you can climb upwards towards autonomous trading.
But I think it’s a really bad idea to go straight to autonomous trading, straight to autopilot for a bunch of different reasons. There are security issues with that. There are regulatory issues with that. People are probably going to lose a lot of money because the agents frankly are not good enough yet.
Hardik: I think Singapore doesn’t allow these trades that you’re offering. So how are you handling that? Because crypto trading is very highly regulated there.
Alex: Yes. So to be clear, you cannot use our trading features from Singapore. So it’s just geo-fenced.
Hardik: You cannot use it in Singapore, but you can use it anywhere else.
Alex: Yeah. That’s just a legal assessment. And, you know, I’d have to bring in our lawyers to explain.
Hardik: But you’re operating from Singapore, but you’re not going to allow anyone to trade.
Alex: The trading itself is not allowed in Singapore.
Hardik: Okay, I just wanted to clear that. All right. So I have another question. You have an MSc in AI, right?
Alex: I was in AI before it was cool.
Hardik: You were doing machine learning before the current wave. So the question I have is, what do most crypto founders get wrong about AI? And what does the broader AI industry get wrong about crypto in general?
Alex: Oh, interesting.
I think on the first part right now, what I see a lot is people have blind spots in their own areas of expertise. They don’t realize that AI can be used for the thing that you are really good at, which is ironic. People tend to see that, “Hey, I’m not a designer, so I’ll use AI for design.”
But if I’m like a product manager, maybe the AI is going to write a better PRD than I will. But you have a blind spot because it’s your own area of expertise. And if you’re a finance person, you might not realize how much you can do with an AI agent within the area of finance.
So people have blind spots in their own area of expertise. If I’m a CEO, maybe I underestimate how much an AI can help me figure out how the company should be organized, what the strategy of the company should be, and how we can improve our communications around culture.
We tend to have blind spots in our own areas of expertise, and I think that’s probably the main thing right now. And I would say most people underestimate AI.
Of course, some people overestimate it, and they think they can do everything and 100% like it.
Hardik: But I totally agree with your part. For example, if somebody is a journalist, they would think that he knows better, but maybe AI could have better prospects.
Alex: Exactly. And this is true for any job. It’s not unique to journalists, it’s not unique to CEOs, it’s not unique to engineers. It’s how we are used to thinking. We have blind spots.
And I think maybe the number one tip I’d give to people is to reflect on your own blind spots and think, “Hey, maybe I could use AI for this thing, which is the core thing I normally spend time on.” And then it frees you up to think higher order, or do higher order work, and think more about orchestration of work with agents and quality assuring the work.
And then so on crypto, I think maybe the other thing is a lot of people don’t realize that I think crypto is fundamentally inevitable. If you look at the inheritance that’s going to come in the next 20 years, from boomers to millennials and Gen Z, it’s close to $100 trillion worth of assets. And if you think about the investment preferences of millennials or Gen Z versus boomers, we really like crypto compared to that.
So there’s basically this wave of assets that are going to be inherited by people. To some extent, I do think it’s inevitable and it’s something that you can’t stop. And so when people are skeptical about it, I tend to think that they don’t realize this is in large part inevitable.
You can’t fight it. Even if you don’t like it, you might as well get on board with it and understand it. And in some ways, that’s how I think about AI as well. You might dislike it. You might be afraid of it.
Hardik: You have to adopt it.
Alex: But if you’re on a collision course with it, you’re going to lose. And it’s the same with crypto.
Hardik: That’s great. So now I wanted to ask you that with platforms like Arkham and you; they are making high fidelity data and they’re free in a way, increasingly free, and community sourced, basically. So how does Nansen defend its subscription, premium subscription model in 2026? Is the value moving from accessing data to getting it via AI easily?
Alex: The primary thing is quality. And I think Dune is a great project because it allows people to create things from the bottom up, which means you get a lot of variety, but you don’t necessarily get quality assurance of it.
I think we are much more a complement to Dune and we’ve co-existed with Dune. Actually, the CTO of Dune used to be in my team before we started working in crypto. So we know each other real well and it’s a great project that I overall think, you know, is a positive force in the space.
Arkham doesn’t have very high quality.
Hardik: I mean, it’s community sourced.
Alex: It has a bunch of errors. I don’t think anyone is quality assuring what they’re doing if I’m being totally candid. And so what is better, to pay $49 to get accurate data or to get wrong data for free so you’ll lose money when you invest in it? I think that’s the thing people have to think about with Arkham.
Hardik: That’s thought provoking. Okay.
Now, you know, I have some questions regarding the data itself. I wanted to know, like during crashes and liquidations, cascades, whenever that happens, what are the most common misreads people make using on-chain data and they’re not getting it?
Alex: That’s interesting. Yeah.
There’s a lot of things that people get wrong with on-chain data. I think one thing that people need to keep in mind is that on-chain can only give you part of the picture, right? If you’re looking at one wallet, there might be multiple wallets. And so sometimes you can have hedged positions, right? You might be short on Hyperliquid, but you’re long on a centralized purpose exchange.
So I think jumping to conclusions on the directions is not always the best idea. I think you should use on-chain more as a source of discovery to figure out what the smart money is doing, which tokens they are actually engaging with, and what they’re trading. But I don’t think you should necessarily blindly copy what an address is doing.
When it comes to liquidations, I think generally you always have amplified movements because of liquidations, which means that the market tends to overcorrect if there’s a sell-off, because you need to just dump all of these collateralized assets in the market to stay solvent. So what you see very often is you get this kind of Dalai Lama shape in the price chart, where it tanks, but then it recovers again relatively quickly.
So I think generally not panicking is often a good idea.
Hardik: I have another question regarding the company itself. In the past, Nansen has fired a lot of people, in 2023 as far as my research. So at this point of time, I wanted to know how exactly, and you have raised funds to run the company, profitable Nansen is? And would you be needing to raise the money again?
Alex: I mean, so first of all, we laid off people, we were 150 people. Frankly, I made the mistake that many founders do, which is to overhire, and we had to scale back to 80 people, which we are now.
That was 2023. And we have $50 million in the bank, so we don’t need to raise capital. We were profitable last year. We’re now in the first quarter of this year. Let’s see how it works out. Hopefully, it’ll go well. So yeah, we are in a good position.
Hardik: So do market conditions affect the revenue? Let’s say that we added a two-year bear market, how is it going to be for Nansen?
Alex: I mean, the good thing is, so a lot of people try to think, how can you come up with counter-cyclical revenue lines? I’m a little bit more of a fan of the kind of ride-or-die approach, where you just need to make sure that you survive.
Hardik: That’s in the blood of anyone who’s in crypto, I guess.
Alex: I think so. And so what you need to make sure is that you don’t go out of business, obviously. And so there’s no secret that our business is very correlated with markets.
And so when you look at DEX volume, the good thing is that last year, we benchmarked our own user metrics against DEX volume. DEX volume is kind of the baseline. If DEX volume goes up, we should also see user traction go up, which we see.
Last year, we actually outperformed DEX volumes. In other words, we had more user activity and growth in user activity than we saw growth in DEX volume. And so, yeah, my view is if we have a two-year bear market, we’ll get a lot of time to build a f***g amazing product in that time. And when the bull market comes back, we’ll be crushing it.
Hardik: So you valued your company at, I guess, around $750 million.
Alex: We didn’t value it. Investors valued it.
Hardik: It was valued at $750 million before, I guess, this was when Nansen AI was launched. So what do expect in terms of how much it’s going to be valued in the future?
Alex: We’re not actively fundraising.
Hardik: You want to give a number?
Alex: No. Investors have to give a number. Whatever they want to invest in, we’ll look at it.
But we’re not a publicly traded company, right? So we don’t have to worry too much about that. We just focus on making sure we have the best product in the market, that our users actually grow their portfolio using our product, and that they don’t lose money. And by the way, just to comment on the subscription price, we actually recently made Nansen totally free on the web on Solana.
So for people exclusive to Solana, if you are active on Solana, you can go on Nansen and you can use it on the web. And you get all the features that we used to charge $999 a month. Now you get everything for free on Solana.
And of course, with our trading features, we hope that people also will trade on the product. And you can also stake SOL with Nansen. We’re one of the top 50 I think validators in the ecosystem. So you can also stake with Nansen. And if you look broadly across multiple chains, I think we’re the second or third largest staking provider in Asia right now, and we’re I think top 15 globally. So it seems that users also like to stake their funds with us.
Hardik: Do you have more users for analytics on Solana than Ethereum?
Alex: Yes, yes we do. Solana is generally the chain that people use the most. It fluctuates a little bit and it’s very correlated with DEX volume. So if you look at DEX volume, Solana tends to be number one. BNB Chain has also done really great on DEX volume Base also. So these are probably the top three that tend to compete for the top spot.
But Solana generally has been number one on Nansen usage. And you know we offer SOL staking, we offer our trading features on-chain with Solana. So we’ve generally just gone deeper and deeper on the Solana ecosystem.
And the strategy this year is actually to double down on the winning chains which also aligns with the index product NX8 because these are the chains where we see the most on chain activity and we want to make sure we have great support for all of the chains that are in that category.
Hardik: I have a question that is a little bit personal. You sold your entire Lido positions last year.
Alex: I still own a bunch of Lido tokens. People can see that on Nansen.
Hardik: Yeah, you did sell in a large number. And you were one of the original DAO members of the protocol. So is this a kind of statement of you being apart from the Protocol?
Alex: Not at all. Actually Nansen is launching with Lido V3. We just announced that recently. So I’m still we actually are. We’re delegates in the DAO. That means I’ve delegated my token so that Nansen votes in governance on my behalf.
It’s still one of the biggest positions I have in terms of tokens. Although anyone can look at the price chart and be a little bit sad if they own Lido. I don’t want to make any comments on the token price other than to say that it is one of the most successful DeFi products ever created.
However, I think the pricing of the token has not really reflected that. That’s just an objective statement where you can look at the price chart and you can look at the traction of the product.
Hardik: About the price. You know, you, you made a statement earlier, that, you know, Cardano is a ghost chain.
Alex: It doesn’t have much activity on-chain. Yeah. So again, people can look that up. We haven’t added support for it because we haven’t seen on-chain activity. But the few places where I can find active addresses and so on, I don’t see. And I also don’t know anyone who uses it. Do you know anyone who uses it or do you?
Hardik: No, I don’t.
Alex: So there you go.
Hardik: I’ve never used it personally anyway. But do you have any, anything to say to any other chains that were huge at a time, like Polkadot for example? What are your comments on that?
Alex: I mean, I think if chains are a little bit like operating systems and it seems maybe unlikely that we’ll have thousands of chains. Depends a bit how you think about it. What’s the right analogy? Is it like certain servers or is it like operating systems?
My view is I don’t think we’re gonna have one chain that just dominates everything. I think at a minimum there will be a handful of chains that optimize for different things. Bitcoin does not have smart contracts and programmability. It does not have privacy built in.
And so it makes sense that you have different chains that optimize for different things. Whether it’s to be the most decentralized smart contract platform, it is to be the fastest, it is to be the most private and you can optimize for different things. So it makes sense. You have multiple chains in my view.
And then the way innovation works is that people build things and not everything works out. And that’s totally normal. I don’t have that much context on Polkadot. But there are many chains that had grand ambitions and I think, you know, overall I respect their attempts and you know, who knows, they might come back strongly.
But it is also true that there are a lot of these dinosaur ghost chains, right? So we should just be honest about that. Look at the on chain activity. Use Nansen, or other products to look at their activity.
Hardik: Any new chain you’re looking up to?
Alex: I mean LayerZero just announced Zero, which is their own chain, which looks incredibly exciting if I’m being honest.
I’m also a seed investor in Monad, which I think is a chain that has a lot of potential, you know, to give a more monolithic approach to EVM chains. I’m obviously a big fan of all the chains that are in NX8. Obviously Bitcoin is always going to be, always going to be around. I think unless quantum computing takes it down, which I hope it won’t.
Hardik: Then the industry is dead, if Bitcoin goes down.
Alex: Well, different layer ones have different post quantum strategies and I think they should all be prepared for that future.
Hardik: You’re looking for it like you’re expecting in a time where it happens.
Alex: I mean I think if you don’t have a strategy for it, you’re taking a really big risk and you should at least have a strategy for it and a plan for it. Most of the major chains have that. Solana, Ethereum and so on.
And so the Bitcoin ecosystem should, should equally take it seriously and not just dismiss it as FUD.
Hardik: Yeah, that makes sense. So ending it with the last question. I wanted you to tell our audience the most uncomfortable truth about crypto markets that you get to learn from the on chain data.
Alex: Oh man. I think probably the most uncomfortable truth is that the incentives are often quite perverse in the sense that it’s often better for builders to launch a token and slow rug, make a lot of money and not actually contribute much value.
That, to me, is the most uncomfortable truth with crypto. Most founders in the space do that if we’re being honest.
Hardik: Yeah, I mean they do that. They are being selfish.
Alex: And you can often see it on-chain. So I think that’s the main problem that we have to solve. I think fundamentally blockchains are the right technology to make sure that we have a more inclusive financial system that’s transparent, that’s disintermediated, all of those things.
But I think we have a real incentive problem that we have to take seriously. I don’t know exactly what the solution is. I do think transparency helps.
Hardik: I mean we can’t really say about the general solution, but I wanted to know if you can assure that the user base the Nansen has and the reputation and the recognition it has all over the globe, it’s not going to be misused by launching a token in the name of Nansen and then lead to people buying it off for any reason.
Alex: We’ve been around for six years. If we wanted to launch some shitcoin that has no value just to get rich, like, we could have done that a long time ago. But, I do fundamentally believe in tokens. That’s the interesting dilemma.
Tokens are very powerful and they’re actually a really interesting instrument to make sure that your user base can align and incentives and be stakeholders in what you’re building. And so I think a better model is what we’re doing with JVPs, with joint venture protocols, and we have a lot of exciting news coming out in the next weeks and months around it. NX8, the index product is the first step in that direction.
But overall what we’ve said with JVPs is that Nansen points holders are going to be stakeholders in these projects and that’s. We’re going to stick by that.
Hardik: But it’s not going to be launched as a token, right.?
Alex: JVPs are protocols. If they’re protocols, they need to have tokens. They need to have some kind of governance around them. How do you determine, for example, what the conceptions should be in an index product? Or how do you run the infrastructure for issuing such tokenized projects in a way that minimizes trust? I think you do need to have a token for that. But that is a separate protocol that they’re co creating.
Hardik: We totally get it. But you’re not planning a token right?
Alex: JVP is what we’re planning. JVP is different. That’s what we’re planning.
