GRTiQ Podcast: 204 Felix Xu

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Felix Xu (00:18):

So, if we look at that timeline, it has always been around finance, trading, no matter if it’s in the exchange trading, like exchange trading products, or on-chain trading products

Nick (00:33):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Felix Xu, co-founder of ARPA Network and Bella Protocol. At ARPA Network, Felix is leading the development of cryptographic infrastructure, including verifiable random number generation and zero-knowledge machine learning solutions. As one of EigenLayer’s largest AVS providers, ARPA safeguards billions in digital assets. And through Bella Protocol, Felix focuses on creating AI power trading tools and DeFi solutions to help users better navigate the crypto markets. A graduate of NYU’s Stern School of Business, Felix combines deep expertise in both technology and finance.

(01:43):

His entrepreneurial journey began after roles in venture capital and equity research, where his early exposure to blockchain technology sparked a vision for bridging traditional finance with blockchain innovation. During our conversation, Felix shares insights into the evolution of the crypto markets, the impact of AI on trading, and his perspective on the history of market cycles going back to 2017. He discusses the future of DeFi, the rise of meme coins, and his team’s work on advanced AI models for crypto trading. I started the conversation with Felix by talking about his upbringing in Beijing, and his early interest in financial markets.

Felix Xu (02:22):

Hi, Nick. It’s my honor to be here. I was actually born and raised in Beijing, China. And 17 years old, I actually went to New York for college. And then worked a couple years after college in New York, moved back to Beijing 2016, and then after COVID moved out of Beijing because of some crypto regulation. I’ve been in crypto for six and a half years, a veteran here, and still a true believer of the industry. Right now I’m in Singapore most of the time, but travel to different places for conference and also for kitesurfing, which I love.

Nick (03:02):

Let’s talk just real quickly about China. Do you get the sense that because of changes in the US and some of the regulatory shifts we’ve seen for the industry recently, do you think that’ll impact China and their approach to cryptocurrency or how do you feel about that?

Felix Xu (03:17):

I would say in terms of the crypto regulation, I feel like there’s still a long way for the Chinese Government to go because of the capital control and other concerns that they have. So, it is quite different than the US, but I think maybe in five, 10 years things going to change, and they’ll definitely follow the steps of other countries, especially developed countries. So, we’ll see. I hope the regulation will be clear, and then it’s going to be much easier to do business or to travel.

Nick (03:51):

So, when you think back to your childhood and sort of those formative years, when did you become interested in technology and finance? Do you remember any aha moments or pivotal experiences that shaped your thoughts on this?

Felix Xu (04:02):

Of course. I have always been interested in tech and plus finance since I was a child, probably because my parents were entrepreneurs themselves and I kind of grew up under this influence. I always want to do something exciting, fast-developing, fast-growing. Actually in terms of finance, it’s funny, I had my stock accounts, like stock trading accounts, using my grandpa’s name back in middle school. So, when I was 14, 15 years old, I remember there was a bull market in the Chinese market in 2005 to 2006, and the index went up six times within one year. It was the biggest bull market in the Chinese stock market history. I was a kid and I was apeing into different stocks. I was encouraged by my parents. My parents were very liberal. I became, at that time, the richest kid in my school.

Nick (05:01):

That’s amazing.

Felix Xu (05:02):

Yeah, and I was dreaming about buying a car for my parents, for my mom at the time. However, 2007 and 2008, the financial crisis hit and the stock just went back to where it began and I lost most of the money. So, that was my lesson learned. I’ve been here and there trading since then, and in the US stock market, even FX, especially after college.

Nick (05:30):

So, when then did you become interested in crypto and what was sort of the unlock there for you to be interested in crypto?

Felix Xu (05:37):

I graduated from NYU, New York University, Stern School of Business with a double major in information systems and finance, so it’s kind of a crossroad between technology and finance. I remember back in 2012 my professor for information technology class, it’s kind of an info tech 101, the professor’s name was Panos Ipeirotis from NYU, and he actually gave everyone in the class some Bitcoin. I can’t find that wallet, but 2012, it was very early. Nobody knows what the heck it is. It was interesting because that was the first time I thought, “Oh, I really own this digital whatever, currency, or digital asset in my laptop.” Even though I cannot find my laptop today, but it kind of a seed about Bitcoin, about crypto to me.

(06:33):

And later on after college I worked at a equity research shop in a hedge fund. I was working on some really boring job to cover industrials and machinery companies based in the US, especially the Midwest of US. And then, because I studied information technology, so I actually spend more time researching on new technologies like VR, AR, and then I found Bitcoin by accident. I talked to my friends about Bitcoin back in 2015, but I didn’t ape in until 2017. I changed to another job working at a venture capital back in Beijing. Back then blockchain as a service, not crypto, already became quite a hot topic in China. So, I was looking into these technologies and also Bitcoin at the same time, and I was very hard to invest anything like early stage companies because they’re very risky. Blockchain technology is also kind of unknown, but this crypto thing, this Bitcoin thing and Ethereum seemed to be interesting, so I aped into Bitcoin and Ethereum back in 2017.

Nick (07:46):

Can you take us back in time and just sort of describe if there was a moment or maybe it was just a set of experiences that signaled to your mind that this was something more about technology and not necessarily about speculative assets. I’m presuming you’ve sort of evolved your thinking, but a lot of people who come on the podcast first become interested in Bitcoin because of the price speculation, and then something happens whether it’s Ethereum or something else where they realize, “This is something more. This is technology.” What was that experience for you?

Felix Xu (08:16):

Yeah, I kind of learned my lesson since I was in middle school and also college not to speculate too much, so lesson learned there. And even now I never take on leverage. So, I have a pretty heavy bag as of today, 80, 90% already allocated, but still I only take spot, never take leverage. I first look at technology at first, and I was interested in the technology, but the price action gave me the final kick for me to buy Bitcoin, buy Ethereum because I was looking at it and then it went up quite massively in 2017, so that’s kind of the final kick for me to really dive into it and own Bitcoin at that time. So, I would say it’s kind of a combined force.

Nick (09:08):

Well, as you mentioned earlier, you worked for some VC and did some equity research out of college, and then eventually went on to co-found some startup and entrepreneurial type of things. The first one was ARPA Network and then you worked on Bella Protocol. What can you tell us about that journey of becoming an entrepreneur and what those early ventures were for?

Felix Xu (09:27):

So, the end of 2017, I got my bag in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, so I started to look really deep into the technologies and started to talk to some friends, some people about the future of this industry. Back then I was still working at the venture capital firm in Beijing. And then people were talking about FinTech, people were talking about open banking, open data, and I was like, “There’s definitely some use case for blockchain in that backdrop to enable some open banking or open data framework.” That’s why I looked into the technology. And I was like, “Maybe I can improve upon it.” Back in early 2018, that was the hype of probably two bull markets ago, people were talking about using blockchain for everything. I would say it’s much more imaginative compared to today, of all these meme coins and then all these DeFi. Back then people were talking about flying cars with crypto, with blockchain.

(10:31):

So, it was kind of a bold, but also interesting moment in history. And I was like, “Maybe I can do something to improve the industry, to solve some problems.” That’s how I founded ARPA Network. And for ARPA Network we’ve been working on cryptographies like multiparty computation and right now for zero-knowledge proof machine learning. At first we want to solve the privacy problem because there’s no private data on blockchain, but later on we found there are some more efficient use case of multiparty computation, specifically threshold signature schemes, which is like a cryptographic algorithms, to generate partial signatures. And then the use case will be generating some verifiable random numbers. If you think about the games and also a lot of use cases that utilize randomness, sometime you want to select the winner, sometime in the game you want to loot, they are all random numbers.

(11:42):

We build random numbers with cryptographic algorithms that can be verified on blockchain. So, since 2018 we have been working on that part until now. We are also venturing out from multiparty computation into other algorithms, like deep neural networks using zero-knowledge groups and some other interesting use cases. That is kind of the journey for ARPA. I can also talk a bit more about Bella.

Nick (12:10):

Please.

Felix Xu (12:11):

Sure. I have been always interested in the new things happening in crypto, and I think each cycle there are a lot of new narratives coming out. So, 2018 it was everything plus crypto or anything using crypto. And then, well, we had the bear market in 2019, but then there are visionary people working on DeFi. I was kind of the early user for Uniswap V1, I was early user for ETHland, later on they became Aave, also Compound and some other DeFi protocols, and especially Synthetix back in 2019 and MakerDAO back in 2019. And I was amazed by how automated they are. So using smart contract, it’s permission-less and also it’s automated. That was kind of the biggest problem when I was working at a bank, doing active research job because there are so many manual work.

(13:10):

If there are people who are in control that can say if the loan is going through or not, there is definitely inefficiencies and it definitely cannot be fully automated. The first time I was using DeFi, I was amazed by the fact of it is fully automated and it’s permission-less. I was thinking, “This DeFi thing can really scale in no time because it’s all like permission-less and it’s all automated.” So, once there’s a flywheel, then the market can grow maybe from $10 million into a $100 billion just within a couple of years. And that’s why we internally incubated a DeFi project in January, 2020. And that was better protocol. And it’s also been many years, so it’s been nearly five years or four years. And then we have been working on different DeFi products over these past four years, including yield aggregators, multi-chain yield strategies. Right now we are top three on a cross bridge relayer, so providing liquidity to facilitate cross-chain transactions. And also we have this really interesting powerful AI signal bot to help traders to make trading decisions with assistance from AI.

Nick (14:40):

Let’s talk a little bit about AI. And I have a bunch of follow-up questions about ARPA and Bella protocol, but to talk about AI for a moment here, it’s been amazing to see how much traction and market adoption AI has achieved in such a short period of time. In the context of trading, what can you tell us about the impact AI is having? You’re clearly building it into your tools at Bella Protocol, but from a general perspective, what are you seeing out there?

Felix Xu (15:09):

Yeah, AI has become a hot topic since I would say since the release of ChatGPT. It has been researched upon since 1970s, so it’s been around for a very long time. In terms of trading, I would say AI has been used in trading on Wall Street, I would say, maybe since 15, 20 years ago. People try to make algorithms smarter. And back then a lot of people are using like multifactor quantum trading strategies, and then they try to optimize it using some simple AI models, optimize these factors or weights. If we talk about AI in trading, I would say it’s been going on for quite some time. And for us, we try to build AI models to make trading decisions, and then we open up these signals to normal users. It’s actually free to use.

(16:06):

We built five different AI models essentially to track different structure of the market, if it’s trending up, if it’s momentum or if it’s like range-bounding. So, with different market structures, we will recommend different AI models to make trading decisions. I would say another hot topic these days is the AI agent. AI agent can basically be helpful in a lot of fronts, in terms of research, in terms of finishing some activities. And you can also use a group of AI agents to work together. So, some AI agents are specialized in, let’s say, graphic design, some AI agents is specialized in doing some automation work.

(16:54):

You can basically have a group of agents to work together. It’s called an AI swan. Trading is a very specific vertical, and now you have this more general vertical that can help each one of us, so just make our life easier and then to finish a lot of jobs that’s kind of repetitive, or even not repetitive, or even creative. It’s very exciting to see AI is infiltrating into different aspect of life. And in terms of crypto, we have crypto trading, we have basically an arbitrage or MEV using some AI detections. Also we have automation work and intent-based. So, I would say AI agent can be helpful in a lot of different fronts in crypto.

Nick (17:44):

What’s your perspective on where we are in this present cycle? You and I are recording in December of 2024, so this release date is a little bit after that, but what’s your sense of this market, and what does the AI sort of say about the cycle we’re in?

Felix Xu (18:00):

Our AI models are more short-term oriented. So, if you check out like Bella Signal Bot, we have five AI models and they are basically designed for day traders. So, we don’t have this very long outlook into the market, but if we look at prior cycles, I feel like now might be the time for altcoins to shine. If we compare now to the end of 2020, the ETH-BTC ratio actually went up, got doubled in the next five months. In this cycle we have seen a huge bull run for Bitcoin, and mostly very subdued price actions for most of the altcoins. And I think maybe the next two, three months is going to be the best period to trade altcoins.

(18:51):

And maybe next year, I would say I’m a little bit concerned about next year because the liquidity will not be as good as this year, the global liquidity. And also after Trump, there are a lot of things… So, there’s very high hope, a lot of anticipation in the market. People are optimistic, but maybe next year it is going to be a sell the news event, buy the rumor event now and then sell the news event after Trump. I would say maybe we go higher for the next three to five months, but the second half of next year, I’m not sure.

Nick (19:29):

Would you be willing to speculate on Bitcoin in terms of there’s a lot of people out there, and I’m putting a little pressure on you here, but there’s people on Wall Street and a lot of different industry analysts that speculate about the price of Bitcoin and what it might do this cycle. And I’ve heard a lot of different things, and so have you I’m sure of, 180,000 and beyond, but what’s your sentiment on that? Is there still room for Bitcoin this cycle or do you think it’s peaked out?

Felix Xu (19:57):

I would say probably there’s still 50% upside to Bitcoin in terms of the next couple months. For the long term, I would never sell my Bitcoin. I would never sell not even 50% of my Bitcoin. I’ll just hold it in my co-wallet. If the US finally uses Bitcoin as in reserve, other countries are all going to follow or even front run that action. It’s very easy to see maybe 50% of the market cap of gold, which is at least double or triple the price of the Bitcoin price now. So, I would say there’s another super cycle upon us, but I’m not sure if it’s this cycle or the next cycle. Back in 2018, a lot of people were speculating that the institutions’ money are coming in, but actually they just came in this year, so it’s going to be like five-year or six-year lag of the market speculation, the real action.

(20:58):

But I think the moment will come, maybe not next year, but it will definitely come. At that time, I would say Bitcoin will become the most valuable asset in the world. And it will probably out-compete gold, which is kind of the last generation product store value. I would say maybe next year at some point around 130k to 150k, I will sell maybe 50% of my Bitcoin, but I will just keep the rest to… I don’t know how long.

Nick (21:35):

What about your opinions on high frequency trading? So, clearly in traditional markets that’s had an impact, and a lot of people follow that. Is AI and what you’re seeing in the crypto world as it relates to trading impacted at all by high frequency trading and what are you seeing?

Felix Xu (21:51):

I would say there are three factors for a successful high frequency trading strategy. So, the strategy itself: how to build smart strategies to arbitrage or to take advantage of other players, so that is how smart it is. And then AI model can definitely help to create and also to improve these models, and that is probably the most important part. But you also have the infrastructure, so you have to be using… Let’s say in TradFi, you have to do co-location with slide the exchange. So, you have your server is basically just put in the same data center with the exchange. You try to be a little bit faster than anyone else. And third one is the capital cost. So, if you use stable coins, if you use even Bitcoin, there’s cost to it. For some institutions like the cost is lower than others, so in that front you can also out-compete if you have cheaper capital.

(23:02):

So, the combine of three, I would say, is how to build a successful high frequency trading strategy. And in terms of on-chain high frequency trading, it’s basically MEV. So on Solana, there’s Jito, on Ethereum, there’s SplashBot. And there are some other… these kind of unions on other blockchains. So, essentially you have to bribe Jito in order to not being front run. And Jito is making a lot of money, like Jito is making $6 million of revenue each day. It’s higher than Ethereum or Solana gas feed because there is so much retail flow on Solana, and then they all try to protect themselves from MEV, so they pay a small fee to Jito. We are building some strategies to capture the MEV. We are searching ourselves. This MEV searcher is very similar to high frequency trading in TradFi.

Nick (24:00):

What about the evolution of trading and the industry entirely since you first got involved in 2017? Has it evolved? Has it surprised you? Anything surprised you about the evolution and growth of the industry?

Felix Xu (24:16):

Yes and no. We have definitely came a long way since 2017. Think about all these assets are being launched on-chain, on Pump.fun. There are 10,000 tokens to be launched on Pump.fun each day since March. It’s a crazy number. If we compare to 2017 or even 2020, it’s 100x growth or 1000x growth. There’s definitely product market fit there. And I believe in the future, like 99.9% of the token will be launched, and the major liquidity venue will be on-chain instead of in centralized exchange. And I think that’s kind of a mega trend going forward. And then if we look at each cycle, there are interesting things happening for each cycle. 2017 it was the ICO which fueled the bull market. And 2018 it was the exchange, Binance. In late 2017 and early 2018, spot trading mostly. And for 2019, it was FTX.

(25:27):

FTX kind of popularized leveraged tokens and also futures like USDT futures. That was 2019. And also the platform tokens, so FTT launched and went up a lot. And for 2020 ,it was a DeFi, DeFi Summer. 2021, it was the NFT and Metaverse. And 2022, Three Arrows, FTX collapse. There was a lot of deleveraging… a huge deleveraging process. And for 2023 it was kind of the ETF, institution money. And for 2024 it was to me, Pump.fun especially. So, if we look at that timeline, it has always been around finance, trading, no matter if it’s in the exchange trading, exchange trading products or on-chain trading products. So, the industry really found the PMF in trading, in finance. And I don’t think it’s going to change a lot in the future. There’s one thing that I observed since 2017.

(26:38):

So, back then there was a lot of professors issuing tokens, trying to do these groundbreaking technologies. What about now? Now it’s all engineer-driven. Now it’s all about product-driven. So, people are becoming more and more practical to build products that people like to use, but not necessarily these very products, but actually those are the product that can make people money, that can help people to speculate to trade. So, essentially we are still a financial market, it’s just a different financial market that can permission-lessly issuing assets, issuing tokens. And that is something amazing about blockchain, and I think that’s kind of the bread and butter of our industry. But on the other side, so back in 2017, 2018, people were dreaming about something cooler. People trying to do anything with crypto, anything with blockchain, tried to reinvent the wheels of a lot of other industries with crypto.

(27:47):

And I don’t think that worked because not a lot of use case that really need to be trustless. Not a lot of use cases that really depends on decentralized technologies, only money needs. And I feel like going forward, even though the liquidity will be on-chain, there are a lot of the user experience that will be abstracted. Still going to be centralized exchanges or centralized user experience, however, just liquidity is on-chain. But that’s what we have been seeing in a lot of trading bots and Moonshot, this ad. Essentially people use it as a centralized exchange, but it sends transaction to on-chain and buy these meme coins on Solana. I feel like that will become more and more popular going forward because there are less hardcore tech lovers, and there are more normies that we can go after.

Nick (28:48):

When you think about this industry, and I’m kind of talking about web3 here, what we commonly hear people refer to as web3, do you see it as just like a DeFi, something that runs in parallel to TradFi, this whole thing about blockchain and crypto is ultimately just sort of about a new financial environment, or do you see it more broadly, like gaming and all the other things that sort of get governance, other things, NFTs, to get bolted onto this?

Felix Xu (29:17):

I actually don’t like the term web3 to be honest. I prefer to say crypto. The term web3 is vague. It’s very hard to define. People like to say, “You can own. You can read, you can write, and you can own.” However, in most of these use cases, you actually don’t need to own or you don’t care to own. People own it because, what, because they can resell it. They can resell it as a higher value or they can keep it, they can keep it to themselves to make sure that they own it. However, a lot of the things that is not considered universally valuable. Money is universally valuable because you can exchange to other things, but what about your data, what about your game items? Those are valuable to some people, and those are not valuable to some people, so it’s very hard to assign an universal value to these things.

(30:11):

That’s why decentralized social network and a lot of similar concept, I think they are sexy, but they only cater to a very small fraction of users, the really hardcore users. Let’s say if we use a social network or if we use an IM app, do you really need to safeguard your private key, let’s say? It’s very hard for, I would say, 99% of the people to safeguard their private key. I feel like the blockchain is fast enough. It’s not like we are lack of block space. We can use LDAs like Celestia is very cheap to use, but the thing is probably there’s not much value to be captured if we convert anything into web3.

Nick (31:03):

What’s your long-term vision for ARPA Network and what do you want to accomplish with that?

Felix Xu (31:08):

For ARPA Network, we have accomplished a lot in the past six years. Right now we are the third-largest Eigenlayer AVS. So, we have, I don’t know, maybe $5 billion worth of ETH and other tokens to safeguard our network. We provide verifiable random number generators on most of the Ethereum, like the EVM chains. And we are supporting two dozens of application that utilize our service. Going forward, I would say we are doing some really interesting research into zero-knowledge machine learning. I am very interested in AI. My team is very interested in AI, but we try to do it in a more verifiable way. So, we try to explore if we can build AI models with some cryptographic algorithms to combine them into something verifiable. That is what we try to accomplish at ARPA Network.

Nick (32:09):

And what about Bella Protocol then? So, what’s sort of your vision there, and what are some exciting milestones you’re looking forward to?

Felix Xu (32:16):

At Bella Protocol, we try to make money for the users. It’s that simple. And no matter if we do DeFi yield aggregation strategies or if we do cross-chain liquidity provision strategies or if we do AI-assisted signal bot, signal Telegram bot, everything we do is try to make money for our users and try to help with smarter decisions by our users. So, we will continue to make effort in that front. Essentially we’re going to improve our AI models, and then we try to run backtests in more tokens. Right now we have 14 tokens that we support using our AI models. People can sign up for their signals. And we launched this Bella Signal Bot about a month and a half, six weeks ago. We didn’t do much marketing, we didn’t do any paid campaign, and right now we have more than 2,000 users.

(33:16):

It’s just organic flow. People love our product because people can just look at Bitcoin, see our signals. We backtested with great track record. We will definitely improve, and then to add more features on our Signal Bot. Next month we are actually going to release a second AI product, it’s called the Research Bot, the Bella Research Bot. You can find informations about different projects or some general information about crypto, about wallets. You can look at the KOL wallets, et cetera, so it’s going to be a very powerful tool for our users to find intelligence.

Nick (33:56):

I want to ask you about entrepreneurship. And clearly you graduate from university, you went to work at some large sort of VC, private equity financial type organizations. Then you ventured off and did your own thing. You’ve been very successful at it, as you’ve been talking today. What do you know about the nature of entrepreneurship? What are the one or two characteristics that every entrepreneur needs to possess?

Felix Xu (34:22):

Right, okay, so I can think about some words. The first one will be curiosity. Especially if you try to build a business in a fast-developing industry like crypto, you have to be very sensitive to the things happening. Back in 2019 when I was using DeFi, I didn’t have to use it, but then I was interested. I was curious about how this smart contract application can work. And then the next year, DeFi Summer, when COMP Token was launched, a Compound Token was launched, I aped into it instantly. I tried to yield farm. And it was crazy time. DeFi Summer was actually a crazy time. And then for now, meme coins, I’ve been trading meme coins since March, since before the launch of Pump.fun. All these things, they are not necessarily to make you money, but it actually sharpen your judgment of the industry. And you have to be curious to learn these because it’s all very time consuming. That’s kind of the first word I can think of.

(35:33):

And the second word is charismatic because you always try to influence the people around you. No matter if it’s your team, your clients, your investors, you have to basically sell the vision to them and also the users eventually. It takes a big heart to always talk about the things that you believe. Sometime you make yourself believe and sometime you influence others to believe the same vision. And I think that is very important. And the third one might be collaborative. So, nobody is a Superman, nobody can do all the work. There is definitely a team effort behind anything. So, you got to bring in co-founders with different expertise, team members that are… sometime they are more talented than you, as the founder, in some angles. Everyone has to work together, and then as a team. So, I think that three words are probably the most important.

Nick (36:35):

Felix, what about something you’ve talked about a couple of times already, which is these different cycles had different narratives. And for whatever reason, DeFi Summer, ICOs, NFTs, all of these things sort of got attached to these different cycles. As you look ahead to this cycle, what do you think the top line narratives are going to be this time around?

Felix Xu (36:57):

Yeah, the narrative for this cycle is definitely about meme coin, about memes, and also maybe about RWA. I feel like those are the… And also AI. I think those are the three strongest narrative of this cycle. For meme coin, it’s more about product market fits. We really have Pump.fun that can launch like 10,000 tokens a day. All the retail flows are there. And for RWA, we have the ETF, we have BlackRock doing their [inaudible 00:37:32] fund. We definitely see a lot of crossroad for TradFi and for DeFi, even integrating blockchain system into the existing banking or cross-chain… like cross-border payment system. So, I think there’s also product market fit there in RWA. And for AI, it’s more about narrative, but it’s interesting, crypto AI is kind of like a niche vertical compared to the whole general AI. But it’s interesting because it kind of explore into the financialization of these AI models. We have Goat, we Cerebro, we have all these automated accounts that they build a token by accident or on purpose. So, it is very interesting to look at that and then to see how the industry evolves.

Nick (38:28):

What’s your opinion on something like Goat? When I first saw that, it blew my mind. It felt dystopian to me a little bit of what I was seeing, but then of course it became more and more interesting. And it became a big topic on social media. What’s your opinion on something like Goat?

Felix Xu (38:45):

That is exactly the right approach to build a cult. I feel like single AI agents, I’m not too sure if there’s another token coming out in terms of the popularity, in terms of the cult of Goat. It’s definitely the OG AI meme out there. But there are also a lot of these launch platforms and also there are some frameworks, for example, like AI [inaudible 00:39:13], ELIZA, Wife, Top Hat, Virtuals. So, those platforms are, I would say, more the converge of financialization and the AI agents. So, recently I’ve been looking at these projects.

Nick (39:32):

Well, Felix, now we’ve reached a point where I’m going to ask you the GRTiQ Ten. Longtime listeners of the podcast know that I ask these questions every week, gives us a chance to learn a little bit more about you on the personal side, but it also might give listeners an idea of trying something new, learning something different or achieving more in their own life. So, are you ready for the GRTiQ 10?

Felix Xu (39:51):

Sure. Let’s go.

Nick (40:05):

What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Felix Xu (40:09):

I would say two. So, the first one will be The Three-Body Problem. It’s a Chinese sci-fi book. Very popular. I read it a long time ago, and it had a lot of impact on me in terms of… Because it has similar concept of blockchain in that book I was reading, so I love that book. And there’s another series that I like is The Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. I love these unspeakable horror, cosmic horror. Yeah, I just enjoy reading it. So, basically I listen to audiobooks when I do late night driving. I love to drive after work. I drive to airports, I drive on the highway, and I listen to audiobooks about Cthulhu. The Mountain of Madness, for example, I read many times. I love it.

Nick (41:01):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you would recommend everybody should watch?

Felix Xu (41:05):

Not fancy one, but Alien. I love that series.

Nick (41:10):

How about this one, Felix: if you could listen to only one music album for the rest of your life, which one would you choose?

Felix Xu (41:15):

Something from Green Day. Yeah, I listened to Green Day since I was a child. Yeah, I stopped listening to them for a while, but if I can only do one album, then I’ll probably do theirs.

Nick (41:28):

What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Felix Xu (41:31):

My dad, I guess. He has always been my role model, and he taught me a lot about the business, how to collaborate with other people, how to keep integrity, so to make some money, to not make some money. So, I learned a lot from him.

Nick (41:46):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Felix Xu (41:51):

I feel enlightened when I learned that all the joy and all the hardship, all the sorrow is all part of my precious life. No matter if it’s good or not, it’s just part of my life and has shaped who I am.

Nick (42:06):

What’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Felix Xu (42:10):

Life hack? Okay, so back in 2022, I tried to lose weight, kind of overworked, so I got overweight. I was trying to lose weight. I love eating fries and ketchup especially. I just love sour food, like ketchup for example. I know that if I substitute ketchup with something else healthier, that would be great. So, I was trying to eat different things to substitute ketchup, and I found Tabasco is actually the most healthy condiment that you can substitute ketchup. It has no calorie. It tastes kind of the same.

Nick (42:49):

Amazing. I love that insight there. How about this one: Felix, based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

Felix Xu (43:03):

I’m trying to learn a lot of new things and trying to be curious about this world. What’s going on in our industry, I guess that is the one.

Nick (43:13):

And then the final three questions are complete-the-sentence type questions. So, the first one is: the thing that most excites me about the future of DeFi is?

Felix Xu (43:24):

To bring in some real world assets, and then to kind of merge the blockchain technology into TradFi and to incorporate crypto.

Nick (43:35):

And how about this one: if you’re on X or Twitter, whatever people decide to call it, you should be following?

Felix Xu (43:40):

I follow this guy called Crypto Amsterdam who gives really good charts and analysis about crypto price.

Nick (43:50):

Amazing. And then the final question is: I’m happiest when?

Felix Xu (43:55):

Would I feel like doing something useful. When I just trying to build something.

Nick (44:07):

Felix, thank you so much for joining the GRTiQ Podcast. It was a lot of fun to get to know you and to get your perspective on this intersection of AI and trading, as well as the amazing things you’re working on at ARPA Network and Bella Protocol. I’ll put links in the show notes for anybody that wants to learn more and get involved in those projects. For listeners that want to stay in touch with you, follow the things you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Felix Xu (44:30):

Follow our Twitter, it says ARPA Official and Bella Protocol, and also my personal Twitter, Felix NXU.