Joy Pathak, CIO at 100X Capital and founder of Weekly Wizdom, believes stablecoins—not Bitcoin—will drive mass crypto adoption. From USDC payments in restaurants to Shopify integration, stablecoins are becoming mainstream. AI, meanwhile, is accelerating entrepreneurship and decentralization, reshaping how we build, work, and invest.
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Welcome to perceived reality.
There's so much going on right now in the markets.
It's crazy.
It's wild stablecoins.
There's a lot of things happening, so we wanted to bring someone in that can discuss this, also talking about building business over time, and we have Joy Paik, the founder of Weekly Wisdom and chief investment officer of 100X Capital.
So Joy.
Bitcoin hits 112,000.
Circle goes public.
I mean, so much is happening in this space.
How do you see people transacting in the future when it comes to stablecoins and Bitcoin?
Yeah, you know, it's it's pretty amazing to see Bitcoin hit an all-time high yesterday and today, and it just keeps going up.
Seeing other coins go up too. stablecoins are definitely going to be a big part of onboarding the masses.
I think we're going to see bigger onboarding from stablecoins than we have from just Bitcoin and obviously Bitcoin is the king.
Uh, Bitcoin is going to be there.
It's more digital gold, but using the decentralization, the blockchain technology is going to be more on the back of stablecoin.
So I think the days of, you know, using cash to transact is going to slowly go away and you're going to see more people transacting on chain and using stablecoins.
That's one of the reasons Circle is doing so well, you know, especially.
As a company that's you know supposed to be more like a money market fund, it's trading more like a tech stock and that's because it's, you know, on the back, it's going to be one of the first on-boarders and at least that's what the market's thinking it's going to be an on-boarder of technology.
And so I think that's going to be the main reason we see stablecoins going up like stablecoins expanding, more companies launching stablecoins, more regulation around it, which makes it easier for companies to issue.
So we're going to see more and more of that and that's going to be the way.
The masses get onboarded to the blockchain.
So I just read that Shopify is now going to allow people to transact in USDC.
So from a business owner's perspective, what benefits are you seeing when it comes to obviously e-commerce?
What you know, other platforms could also be adding this in?
How do you see business owners taking this and running?
Yeah, no, for sure, you know, I think we'll see more and more businesses do that because it makes you're seeing this big shift.
I mean, we had people went from cash to credit cards.
I think we're going.
See that next big shift where people go from credit cards to just, you know, you're only seeing that with Apple Pay.
People just using their phone to pay for everything, but we're going to start seeing USDC as one of the methods on possibly Apple Pay.
You're going to start seeing restaurants, you know, one of the restaurants that I'm a partner in in New York City, we're going to start using Kay Shubi in Soho, and we're in the Hamptons as well.
We're going to start using potentially USDC to transact with clients.
You can buy tables, you can pay for your dinners all through USDC.
And the reason is because it's being, you know, There's more comfort around it now, especially because the government's regulating it.
There's more people who are able to understand that this is not just some random coin.
This is 1 to 1 backed by the US dollar.
There's full safety behind it, and it's similar to cash, and I think we'll see more and more of that.
Shopify is doing it.
You see PayPal already is big on it, and you'll see more businesses.
Just the future is going to be where you go to 7-Eleven and you buy a pack of gum and you can use USDC, and I see that future soon.
It's always amazing how when The advances we think I'm never going to do that.
Like a couple of years ago Chat GBT came out, I thought I would never replace my Google search with ChatGBT, and now I'm doing all my searches with ChatGBT.
It's pretty amazing.
So when you, when you think about business though and challenges that you've gone through, we were talking earlier about hiring and staffing and such.
What have you learned?
Yeah, I think is a great example.
We'll see more and more of people going from the web too, which would be.
Like core data companies like you know things like Facebook, Google, and so on, and we'll go to more decentralized companies like what you're seeing right now, more blockchain based, you know, think like Ripple, think, you know, any like Ethereum, things like that.
People are going to build more applications on the chain rather than you see on just general internet, which is what you saw, you know, post.com bubble.
So we'll see more and more of that.
We'll see more where the power comes back to the people rather than just a bunch of, you know, VCs.
Equities hedge funds that get access to it early, we'll see more democratization of uh you know, like the next Facebook is not going to be that's just backed by, you know, a couple big funds.
It's going to be something that's backed by the people, you know, from the ground up where the people have the upside and not just a couple of hedge funds and I think that's the future around it.
So when you look at AI, I feel like AI is democratizing the ability for people to create a business.
Like before you had you had to raise a ton of money, you had to.
Spend a ton of money to get things done.
Now AI can do so much of that work.
It can take, you can have one person maybe create a billion dollar company in the future.
Who knows?
How do you see AI being able to democratize the ability for entrepreneurship?
Yeah, so you know, AI great example.
So we're seeing, we're going to see more and more, you know, seamlessness streamlining. we'll see more companies use AI to basically, you know.
Reduce overhead obviously, but also like something that would have taken like, you know, a month, whether it's coding, whether it's hiring the right people, that's going to be done instantly.
So you'll see technology just moving at an exponential rate because now you have AI that can help you get further where before you had to wait for the right people, say you want to hire somebody that's, you know, working somewhere else, go through like, you know, non-compete, go through the gardenly now you're going to use, you know, AI or the next generation like more AGI where like, you know, you'll have.
I mean, you know, full of robotics, everything backed by AI models, and you can see and you'll see that in crypto as well.
You've seen that on the blockchain.
I think that's going to be the next big thing is that seeing AI and crypto merge and you kind of saw that a lot happening in 2024 but we'll see the next version of that happening where it's not just going to be a fully controlled AI by a couple of companies, but it'll be like a decentralized AI, a more democratized AI where people can get exposure to it as just a layperson.
You don't have to be in a, you know, owning a hedge fund or something like that to get access to it.
So we'll see the AI crypto narrative build more, but yeah, AI is definitely going to, you know, I think the biggest thing it's going to do is AI is going to make everything fast.
It's going to just push technology that would have taken a year to happen will happen in days now and we're seeing that already.
Yeah, so Microsoft laid off thousands of people and told those people that they should learn more AI skills, and I found that very fascinating.
You just, you had talked earlier about AGI.
How do you see this with AGI coming?
Obviously companies are going to reduce staff because it can be replaced, but also then people can learn something and maybe they can start their own thing.
But how do you see when AGI comes in?
I mean, I'm not even sure if there'll be any jobs.
I'm hoping there's no jobs in the future, to be honest, like I want to just hang out on the beach and and sit margaritas like I don't want to have to work.
What do you think when AGI comes into place, how is that going to change life?
I think, you know, it's.
There is the, you know, people have the doomsday scenario and then you have, you know what I think is really going to happen it's just going to make life easier.
You'll see pushback.
You're already seeing companies like coins like Worldcoin, for example, or humanity protocols.
What they're basically doing is they are, you know, they'll, it's going to be very tough to differentiate people from AI, especially in the internet world, right, because you're not seeing people face to face all the time.
I mean.
My team is all across the world, like, you know, we can wisdom team, we have 16+ people across the world.
It could be that one of them is just AI like, you know, writing everything from like who knows, right?
And so you'll see, I think that's going to be a big thing down the line where you know that's why you're seeing Worldcoin and Humanity Protocol do so well.
Humanity Protocol, you know, it's they use like fingerprints to figure out who's AI and who's not, and I believe WorldCoin use like a retina scan.
So I think that's going to end up being a very useful thing.
I think it's not on a lot of people's radar right now, but I think You know, I don't think the doomsday scenario, the, you know, the Terminator movie scenario is really going to, you know, materialize.
I mean, who knows anything's possible, but I think you'll just see more life just becoming easier, task is becoming easier.
I think you're going to see of course there's going to be a full restructuring of education, things like, you know, where.
You were out there like coders, I think are going to be refocusing on a different type of coding, you know, when people went from like Fortran or basic programming, you know, as the world grew, they went to C+, C++, and that's you'll see changes like that.
So you'll just see the world changing, education is going to change to fit a new narrative, but It's not that, you know, yes, some jobs will become obsolete, but that just means there'll be other jobs that come out, and we don't know what the future holds, but I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be great, and I think you'll just see a shift in if this is right now the way the world fits in, you'll just see that shifted that way.
Maybe it tightens up, maybe people have to put in, you know, get more skills of a different kind.
I think you'll see more of that easier life, like you said, you know, be sitting on the beach in market my hope.
I mean, the future, I guess the future is bright then, Joy, thank you so much for the knowledge today and thank you for joining us on Perceived Reality.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.