Our next guest interview at Consensus Hong Kong 2026 was with Max Rebol, Co-Founder CEO and Managing Partner at Harbor Industrial Capital, a Polkadot-ecosystem focused venture fund. In the conversation with Hardik Katariya, the Founder and CEO of The Crypto Times, Max answered a series of questions, which were essentially in the mind of every Polkadot user. From the market price of DOT, the current and future state of Polkadot, Gavin Wood’s JAM project, and Harbor Industrial’s investments. In conversation: Hardik Katariya X Max Rebol Hardik : All right, so today we have Max Rebol. He’s a managing partner at Harbor Industrial Capital. Hello, Max. How are you doing today? Max : Always a pleasure to be on The Crypto Times. Hardik : So we had an interview with Max earlier, online. Now we’re going to ask some questions regarding his investment, his capital and Polkadot. First, I wanted to ask you is that Polkadot is down 97% from the all-time high. As someone who runs the funds exclusively invested in this ecosystem, how are you managing this personally and how are you explaining this to the LPs that are investing in your fund? Max : Well, unfortunately, the entire market is down, so most of the old coins have been suffering very heavy losses. This is obviously not a great position to be in. While we are a Polkadot focused fund, we’re by no means exclusively invested in the DOT token, but also in other projects that are building on top of Polkadot. Oftentimes they have their own token and some of them have been doing much better than DOT itself. Our fund has been massively outperforming DOT. Now when, as you say, DOT is down 97% from its all time high, that’s still like a relatively small relief. But I guess there are two things. One is that we obviously didn’t buy at the all time high, but much lower than that. And secondly, we are invested across the ecosystem and some of the tokens have actually been performing pretty well even in this bear market. Hardik : So I wanted to understand exactly that. Since, the main token is down with the entire ecosystem, it kind of reflects the protocols that are building on top of it. Yeah. So how has that been affecting you and have you considered hedging it maybe with a different investment? It may be in a different chain or maybe in a different sector to hedge out the risk? Max : The short answer, no. We are still very much committed to the Polkadot ecosystem. There are a number of reasons for that. The number one reason obviously is still a strong fundamental belief in the Polkadot technology and the pivot through which the Web3 Foundation and Parity, are currently going through. So it’s not that Polkadot is just sitting still while the token price is going down. Over the last half year, we saw a market decline. Polkadot has been implementing a lot of different changes, to hopefully change the narrative to get back on positive pages here. And of course bear markets are always good time for building and I can go into a lot of detail there, but there are a lot of things under the hood at Polkadot that were changed throughout this market, throughout this downwards trend that still gives us a degree of confidence that this is not the end but that there will be a U turn and that there will be a path to recovery. Hardik : And there is a growing narrative regarding Polkadot that Ethereum and Solana have already won the layer one, making Polkadot’s layer zero approach, kind of irrelevant in a way. How do you respond to that argument from the community? Max : Actually Vitalik came out and he was saying that the way L2s on Ethereum are currently structured, it does not really work. And in many ways what Vitalik is proposing now to do about Ethereum is very much what resembles the Polkadot model. So it’s actually interesting how these two ecosystems are learning off each other all the time. And I mean this whole idea of L2s was kind of pioneered by Polkadot in the first place. We didn’t call it L2S, but called parachains. But it’s kind of the same thing because they roll up onto the main chain where offloading certain types of computation to another layer but then rolling it back onto the main chain. That is kind of what Polkadot has been doing. Now the interesting development here for Polkadot is that we’re actually moving closer to Ethereum model, whereby, we’re focusing on Polkadot Hub, like codename Hub, which is an L1, not unsimilar to Ethereum. It’s an EVM environment fully running on Polkadot, but because of the structure it has and the way it is built, it is super scalable, very high throughput, very fast in confirmations, quick time to finality, very cheap transactions as well, but still having the full EVM environment and all the bridging capabilities to the other ecosystems. Hardik : Since you were elected as an head Ambassador, in 2024, I think Polkadot was trading like 3 to 4x higher at that time. And since then the price has been declining. So at this current stage, are you able to attract new capital into the Polkadot ecosystem and into your personal fund? Max : And since you mentioned the head ambassador thing. So that’s kind of a thing of the past. This was a program we ran for a period of time. This got discontinued for a number of reasons. I don’t want to go into that necessarily. We discontinued being the ambassador. This is the way it was structured. I guess this particular program just didn’t make so much sense anymore. But this is just more like a side, side point here to your question. I guess the bigger question is whether we managed to attract more capital into the ecosystem. And I would say the answer is getting more capital, in terms of investments, is not necessarily what we’re looking for right now. What’s more interesting, I guess in terms of capital, is TVL. Because we have some very good exchanges like DEXs. I guess the most obvious one that we should talk about is Hydration. They actually grew up TVL massively over the last half year or so. And a partial reason for that is because of an incentivization campaign that was paid by the Polkadot Treasury. So all the yield farmers will get rewards that are paid for by the Polkadot treasury, which I think is a good thing. I mean all the other ecosystems are doing it as well. It’s called the gigahydration campaign. That’s over now. But what is interesting is that the TVL is actually very sticky. So even after those incentives ended, we didn’t really see the massive rugpull out of investors. Hardik : And do you think Polkadot Treasury’s approach of spending heavily in marketing is right? Max : Yeah, I mean they’ve spent around $80 to $90 million dollars in marketing alone in the last year while the revenue wasn’t that great in 2024. And that’s the year where we, in my opinion, overspent on marketing and also on inefficient marketing. Like paying some KOLs and for some kind of low quality content. So this is a thing of the past. I think it was bad spending at first. This is my personal opinion. It’s bad spending. It was not smart to spend it there, but it stopped like two years ago. Hardik : Your investment thesis centers on deploying capital through parachain auctions, an early stage venture in polkadot ecosystems. And with the parachains transiting, to core time and the economic model fundamentally being changed right now, how are you evolving your strategy? Max : So this model already has changed over a year ago. So, we did parachain auctions a lot through our fund one and we were like the biggest supporters of parachain auctions during the year 2021, 2022, 2023. Now there are like a number of reasons why it has come to an end. One reason is that it was an inefficient model of resource allocation because a lot of these projects ended up getting a parachain slot and then the parachain was like producing a lot of empty blocks. And it’s not an efficient allocation of resources by putting a lot of capital in this parachain and then not really using it. That’s why Polkadot made a complete change about this and transition to Agile Coretime. And Agile Coretime is essentially a pay as you go model where if you’re a developer and you have a nice idea of an app that you want to build, you want to deploy, and you don’t have any users, you can just purchase a tiny amount of coretime that’s going to cost you 5 cents or something. There’s a marketplace for it And then you can deploy, you can test it out quickly If it works great. And if you want to scale it, you can purchase more. So it’s similar to the Ethereum gas fee model, but you can do sponsored transactions for example. You don’t necessarily have to own Ethereum. if you want to send USDC to another wallet, you need a tiny amount of eth that’s kind of annoying. And that’s why the sponsored transactions are great to have. Hardik : All right, so now I have a few questions regarding the halving that’s coming to Polkadot. The first one, I guess it’s just about a month away. Exactly. And the annual issuance will drop to roughly $57 million. That’s right. So do you expect this to have a Bitcoin-style price impact, or has the announcement already been priced into the current value? Max : Great question. Whether it’s been priced in or not is always hard to say. We will say it could well be priced in. Maybe a little bit of background for this halving. In the past, Polkadot had a purely inflationary model with a relatively high emissions rate. There was also a very high staking rewards rate, so staking rewards were very attractive. A lot of people in the Polkadot ecosystem were just staking. But then I think Gavin made a really good point that in a way we’re overpaying for security. It’s great to have security, but there’s also a point where you’re overpaying for it. We’re spending too much on validators. And so the decision was made to cut that down—to pay a reasonable amount to the validators that validate the transactions and keep the network secure, but without overpaying. So that’s kind of the idea. As part of this conversation, this new inflation schedule was introduced. And that’s the important part: it’s hard-coded into the system so that there can be no future changes. Polkadot is similar to Bitcoin in reducing the new issuance on a regular basis, always cutting it in half. So now it’s getting cut from 12% to 6%, and that continues. This is going to have a number of knock-on effects. One is that and I guess that was your initial question, it introduces an element of scarcity. So there will be fewer DOT available on the market. And this, in my opinion, is of course a good thing. I don’t think it’s been fully priced in yet. Because not everybody knows about it, not everybody has heard about it. So people still think there is this old emission schedule. But I think once we get to this Pi Day and it’s cut in half, I expect there will be a lot of coverage around it. People are going to say, “Oh wow, actually it’s much lower,” which would be good for the price. The price right now is very discounted. It’s anybody’s guess. I’m not really a market person. But purely from a fundamental perspective, if you have less supply, then by definition the price should go up. Hardik: But the one concern we have is that Polkadot’s core problem has been that 49% of DOT is staked for security, and around 3% is in liquid tokens. Now when the rewards are cut in half, and if any of that staked DOT gets unstaked for any reason, there’ll be more supply in the market. It could put more selling pressure on the market. So instead of improving scarcity, you might make it even more liquid, more tokens to be sold in the market. What’s your take on that? Max: Yeah, it’s a fair point. It’s possible, of course. But there are also a few precedents that counter this intuition. I can give you one interesting example: when we had the first parachain auctions, the DOTs were locked for exactly two years in the parachain leases. It was a significant amount, a very significant amount, of the total network that was locked in the first five parachain leases. And then they were all unlocked at the same time. A lot of people were speculating, “Oh my God, they’re becoming liquid. Everyone’s gonna dump and the token price is gonna be destroyed.” At the end of the day, the opposite was the case. I monitored this very closely myself. The day all these tokens became liquid, hundreds of millions of tokens became liquid on one day, actually marked the regional bottom. If you look back historically, afterwards the price started trending up again. So we could expect something similar to happen. It’s a slightly different scenario, I get your point. If stakers are getting fewer rewards, maybe some of them will unstake. It’s possible. But I think in the short term, some exit liquidity—where people who are not committed sell because they don’t believe in the future—is fine. Anyone is free to sell. But in the long term, a more scarce DOT token is generally speaking a good thing for the ecosystem. Hardik: That’s great. Now I want to talk about smart contracts. Polkadot recently launched smart contracts just in January, right? There were 19 contracts deployed, while Ethereum saw over a hundred thousand in the same period. So I do think Polkadot is very late to the smart contract game and others have already won. Max: It’s a fair question. In the past, as you say correctly, Polkadot itself did not have smart contracts. Everyone asks, “Why, what the hell?” But that was of course a deliberate choice. The relay chain only secured other chains, and those chains were handling all the smart contract work. That’s a more efficient tech stack in my opinion, not mixing these things together. In the past, for example, we had Moonbeam as the most prominent EVM-compatible L1 on Polkadot. They of course had smart contracts, but they also had their own token, which was to a certain extent standing in competition with Polkadot or with DOT. Whereas now what you’re referring to is the launch of Polkadot Hub, the Polkadot-branded L1 on Polkadot that only has DOT as its native token and that now also has full smart contract EVM functionality. Hardik: Great. The next question I have is that Gavin Wood returned as Parity CEO in August 2025 and signaled a major pivot towards product development. He has talked about building a native DOT-collateralized stablecoin and Polkadot-branded apps, shifting Parity from a parent platform company to a product company. So is this pivot born because of the reduced price in Polkadot, or is it some other strategic decision that he made? Max: Great question. There are a few aspects to your question, so I’ll address them one by one. First, you said Gavin came back as CEO last summer. That’s correct. But I also want to add that it’s not that he disappeared in the meantime. The time he stepped down as CEO before was mainly to focus on the development of JAM, which is a very complex, very academic project. He completed that while somebody else was CEO. The JAM Gray Paper is published and it’s very much on the Polkadot roadmap. We can talk more about JAM later. But then, as you say, in August or so he came back as CEO of Parity and started to enter a new strategic direction for Polkadot that is now crystallizing. I think you really hit the nail on the head when you said that now Parity is much more focused on product, not just protocol development. Before, the logic was always “build it and they will come,” a bit of a Silicon Valley saying. But this doesn’t really work so well in reality. We had great developer environments, but at the end of the day still not that many developers, especially not for the products we wanted to see. This strategic shift that Gavin is now introducing is that he says, “Well, at Parity we have some of the world’s best engineers. We’re really good at building stuff. Why don’t we actually go and build those things ourselves rather than waiting for somebody else to build them?” Hardik : That’s right. Now I have a question regarding JAM. JAM is described as Polkadot’s future, a decentralized supercomputer. But the mainnet is not really expected until later this year in 2026 or 2027 perhaps. And the earliest, I guess the JAM Gray Paper is still approaching version 1.0. So in a market that moves this fast, is this going to be damaging or harming Polkadot in a way? You’re going to deliver this later and by the time it gets delivered, there are no users left for it to utilize. Max : Great question. But to answer that, you kind of have to understand what JAM is. Because of course the market is very fast at launching another meme coin or launching another perp DEX after 20 other perp DEXes already exist. JAM is a very fundamental revolution of how we think about blockchains nowadays. It’s actually moving away from the traditional purely blockchain-based thinking and more towards thinking of Polkadot as the world’s first largest decentralized supercomputer. That’s kind of the best description of JAM. It’s a decentralized supercomputer. It’s not just about transactions, sending tokens from A to B, but it’s literally about computation of any code. One comparison that I quite like is: think of Bitcoin as a calculator. If I have one Bitcoin, you have one Bitcoin, I send one Bitcoin to you, then you have two, that’s like one plus one is two. Very basic. Bitcoin is doing a lot of other things amazingly well, everything around security, immutability, and so on. But in terms of functionality, it’s basically a calculator, just adding and subtracting values and nothing more. Ethereum is kind of like a computer, where you can do if-this-then-that. If X is larger than 3, then Y is whatever, some formula, some smart contracts as we call it. That’s like a computer. Now with Polkadot, I think the best analogy is a multi-core server, but in a decentralized way. And because on that you can not just run your very specific code, in the case of Ethereum that’s Solidity, but on Polkadot JAM you can literally run any arbitrary code, any binary, any executable machine-readable code you can run on JAM. Hardik : Is it going to be how retail is going to utilize that? I mean, the main users, if you develop something so complex that it can only be used by people with a certain level of knowledge, it’s not going to be a product fit for the market. Max : Of course not. Now it’s not a retail product at all. This is more like, one comparison that we often use is a bit like AWS, Amazon Web Services. A retail user doesn’t use AWS directly. But it’s being used by products or apps. Exactly. For example, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, they’re all running on AWS. And these products are partially that successful because AWS is such a powerful backend. Hardik : Can you give me an example where a product or an app can use JAM for their advantage and retail uses that app? Any app that you could give me as an example? Max : As you say, JAM is not live yet. It’s still in testnet. So we don’t really know exactly which apps will end up using JAM. But one interesting test case, and I always love talking about it, is that Gavin Wood ran Doom, the old ego-shooter game, on JAM. JAM was essentially acting as a decentralized computer here. And sometimes people go, “Oh well, it’s a 20-year-old game. What’s so special about it?” The point is where this binary, where this application is executed. It’s executed actually on a decentralized network. Which is something that nobody else, no Bitcoin or Ethereum, no Solana, is even close to achieving at this point. Hardik : So it’s safe to say that Polkadot may be late in delivery, but it is going to be unique. It’s not going to be just a copy, a 15th copy of something that already exists. Max : Yeah, I think that’s a good take. Hardik : And I wanted to talk about how Polkadot recently completed what may be the largest blockchain migration ever, moving like 1.6 billion DOTs across 1.53 million accounts. And that also happened in like eight hours with zero downtime on the chain. So why did the market completely ignore this huge achievement? Max : No, great question. And I guess the reason why many people have never heard about it is because it went well. I’m very glad that you asked the question because very few people know about that. The truth is, because it went extremely smooth. It went exactly according to plan. It was the biggest blockchain live migration that’s ever been seen. The few we have seen before took a long time and were very complicated, and people were always kind of scared about it. But this happened and nobody knew. That’s the achievement. No news is good news in that particular case. No hiccups, no issues, no emergency hard fork needed or something like that. It went exactly as planned. What really was this upgrade? It was all about moving data from the relay chain to Hub, formerly known as Asset Hub but now Hub. And this is exactly this new EVM-compatible environment that I was talking about, which for now gets a lot of attention within Polkadot. And I think a lot of people are still going to be surprised how powerful Hub is going to be. I think people don’t really understand DOT yet. And there is complexity here, complex development. That’s the reality. And I mean we are a VC fund at the end of the day. I guess our job really as a VC fund is to spot a mismatch between market price and realities on the ground, like the tech stack on the ground. And in our opinion there is a mismatch. Polkadot is very cheap at the moment. I’m the first one to admit that. I would like to see it higher as well, of course. But I believe there is a real mismatch between where we are in the market and what is actually getting built on the ground right now. Hardik : Several analysts describe Polkadot as having high developer activity, over 15,000 code commits in 2025 alone, but almost no consumer-facing traction. So the TVL remains a fraction of competitors. So where is the disconnect between the developer activity and the retail? Why is it disconnected? Max : Yeah, it’s a very fair question. I guess TVL and user adoption has a lot to do with marketing, community management, outreach. And then it also gets some sort of snowball effect. Polkadot has, I think you’re right, been focused very much on developers. As a result of which you have a lot of developers that are building stuff. But users that may come in, DeFi degens, traders, meme coins, NFTs, this was never really a focus of Polkadot. Now you can be critical of that. I think it’s fair to be critical and say we should have done more good marketing, smart marketing, and tried to get all these people into the ecosystem. Maybe that was a bit of a missed opportunity. Hardik : And do you think Gavin Wood can be responsible in a way for the marketing part? Because he has not been very outspoken about the tech he’s been building and the things that he has been doing, and his past reputation, he has been a core developer in Ethereum, then he kind of got bored with it when it got saturated and then moved to Polkadot and created something, then got into JAM. So do you take him in a way responsible for this disconnect? Max : I personally would not, because Gavin is clearly a tech person. He loves building stuff. He thinks about it from first principles. He’s definitely not a marketing guy. He’s definitely not a hype guy, like somebody who goes out on stage and says, “Pump it up, people. Pump it.” That’s not him. And I’m very glad about that. In general, all these things that have been gaining a lot of traction over the last cycle, especially on Solana, are indeed meme coins that oftentimes turned out to be pump-and-dumps. Somebody launches a meme coin, it gets a lot of eyeballs, a lot of attention, a lot of trading, a lot of TVL. But then at the end of the day, it’s a pretty worthless meme coin that in a few days drops to zero. So this has never been the Polkadot approach. We never tried to hype things up in a stupid way to go for super-fast growth. Polkadot has fundamentally a very different approach. We’re trying to build products that are actually useful, that have a much longer time horizon, and also products that are really Web3 native, that embody the values of individuality, self-sovereignty, and censorship resistance. It may not be as sexy as a meme coin with a frog on it that does a 1000X and then collapses completely. But it’s just a generally different approach. So we’re not really trying to compete directly against the Solanas of the world. But your criticism that it takes a bit longer is well received. And I think you’re right about that. Hardik : Okay, now I wanted to discuss a bit about the forward look of Polkadot and Harbor Industrial Capital. So can you give me a few specific milestones that, if achieved by the end of the year 2026, would make you say that Polkadot is definitely on the path of recovery and has a promising future? Max : So Hub, we already talked about that, so I’m not going to talk about that again. I think this is the year of Hub, so we want to see a big migration to Hub. The other thing that I’m very excited for this year is POP (Proof of Personhood) which is actually a very interesting project, a very important project. The idea here is that currently in Web3 you have two extremes. Either you have completely anonymous accounts, where you don’t know who owns it, it’s just an anonymous account, or you have fully KYC-ed accounts, where you upload your passport, your ID, and something sums up, does the KYC, and then an exchange or a DEX can link you to your real-world identity. And Polkadot always says there should be something in the middle, meaning something that shows that an account is owned by one individual and that’s it. So there are two things. One thing is that it’s owned by an individual and not by a bot. And that’s of course a very important thing nowadays, with AI and with bots and agents. You have a lot of accounts that are controlled by AI agents. And so we are introducing new proofs of being a human. And the other aspect is that there’s just one, that only that one account is controlled by a human who does not hold another account. This is called sybil resistance. There’s a term for sybil resistance, and it’s an incredibly important thing for so many other things. I think it has so many applications across Web3, across the Internet really. Because also social media is an obvious use case. If you go on X today, half of the accounts are probably bots. It’s really hard to say. Multiple accounts of the same individual. So with this kind of infrastructure we may very well be able to build a new social media platform where you actually know that you’re talking to somebody that’s actually a human, not a bot. And it’s just one individual. That’s pretty powerful help in the real world. Hardik : And the next question I have is about Harbor Industrial Capital. In our last conversation, you said that you are aiming to raise $100 million to be deployed in the Polkadot ecosystem. So first I want to know where, if you have already raised it or if you are in the process or how it’s going so far, and how exactly do you aim for Harbor Industrial Capital to be in this year or the next year? Max : So have we raised $100 million yet? No, we’re not there yet. However, what we have in the second fund is an investment from the Web3 Foundation, which is the foundation behind Polkadot. So they were the first ones to come in, and they have given us money that I’m very happy about. And we started deploying this capital already in projects that are building on Polkadot. Obviously, we also have some private LPs. We also have private LPs in Fund 1, which is going to distribute at the end of this year. And we are expecting some rollovers from Fund 1 to Fund 2. So that’s obviously going to be positive for this fund as well. We’re not at 100 million yet, but maybe especially in this bear market, it’s also good to work with a smaller amount. I don’t have an exact number where we’re going to end up now, but it’s going to be less than 100 million at the end of the day, and then really deploy that efficiently in the most promising projects in the ecosystem. Hardik : And you said that the Web3 Foundation, the firm behind Polkadot, is investing in your fund, and your fund is going to be invested back in the Polkadot ecosystem. Exactly. So in a way, doesn’t that make it kind of, what do we call it, biased? Because your own fund is investing in the system that is going to be launched in Polkadot. That gives some kind of leverage to you guys that you could, because you are the one in the ecosystem who make decisions: what gets to be launched, how it gets to be launched, how it gets to be promoted. So doesn’t that make you kind of an insider in terms of investing? Max : Of course we’re an insider. We’re very much inside the Polkadot ecosystem, but we’re also very transparent about that. We’re kind of an ecosystem fund. Look at all the other ecosystems. Look at Ripple, look at Solana. They all have their own ecosystem fund with which they’re investing in projects building on Ripple, on Solana. We’re doing something similar here. We’re not investing in DOT itself. Maybe that’s part of your question. It would be kind of pointless if the foundation gives us money and then we buy DOT. But that’s some protocol being voted for any reason for any activity on the ecosystem. Hardik : And then when the Web3 Foundation is involved in the investment itself, so that would have, they would have certain voting power and so that could, the decision making that happens, that’s supposed to be decentralized, gets intervened by some personal advantages in a way. Max : I’m not sure if I completely follow this question about decision making. But that’s kind of unrelated to us, unrelated to Harbor Industrial, is that the Web3 Foundation has over the last year, or let’s say half year, become more active in voting in open governance. So it did not do that in the past. They would abstain. But of course the foundation also holds a good amount of tokens. And in my opinion it’s good that they are using their voice and their tokens that they own to vote on the future of the Polkadot ecosystem. That is indeed like, and you and Web3 Foundation are being transparent about everything. I mean it’s all on-chain. You can go to all the blockchain explorers. There’s Subsquare, for example, it’s the governance tool, and PolkaAssembly is the other one where you can see all the proposals that are coming onchain. And then you can also see the Web3 Foundation’s voting track record. They have been very active in governance over the last half year, let’s say. But for me, I think it’s a very good thing. It’s a very positive thing because it kind of shows that there is new leadership, there is direction. Where are we headed? Before we had a million different people saying, “Oh, we should do this, we should do that.” Everyone has a few DOTs to vote with, but kind of no clear leader. That’s of course the perils of decentralization. Whereas now there are a few foundations that in many ways hold a significant stake. So they’re also able to influence the future of the network in a positive way. It makes sense to get input from the experts rather than from everyone. Hardik : And now I wanted to just ask you a question about being a managing partner in Harbor Industrial Capital, if someone invests, or let’s say someone gives you $10 million, I wanted to know exactly what you would be investing in and what would be your reasoning behind it. Max : Well, our investments are, I mean we don’t invest in one project but as the whole purpose of a fund is to invest in a portfolio of projects. So usually what most investment theory tells you is that after you invested in more than 30 projects, you have a relatively well risk-adjusted normal distribution. And we’re doing that in terms of returns. We have some projects that already delivered 50x for us and we have some projects that failed, that went to zero. But that’s kind of what you expect in any VC fund, as long as you have some big winners that make up for the ones that don’t make it. You can return a good ROI for your LPs and that’s what we’re trying to achieve. But if you give us $10 million, would we invest all of that in Polkadot for Fund 2? Yes, because we are a Polkadot ecosystem fund. Hardik : The DOT token? Max : No, not in the DOT token but in the projects that are building on Polkadot, building in the ecosystem. Hardik : Okay, that’s honest. Okay. Now I just wanted to discuss the upcoming approach that Polkadot would be having in this year and exactly I wanted you to explain this Hub that you said that launched and how are you going to bring more apps that people can use on it? I wanted to kind of know what exactly retail can expect from DOT, like any dApps. In a normal instance like why people use Solana, Ethereum and now they’re just using Hyperliquid that’s built on top of Ethereum. So are you going to have any promising project that retail can expect to use? Max : So I guess the big one is kind of codename Polkadot App. The name is “the app.” It’s the Polkadot app. So that’s being developed by Parity at the moment and it’s not out yet. But I think it’s gonna surprise a lot of people because it’s really rethinking how we interact with Web3 from first principles. In a way you can think of it a bit like a super app, like WeChat, where third-party developers can plug into this app and then use all the things such as payments, identity verification, on-ramps, off-ramps, using those shared resources from within the app. It’s also really rethinking from first principles how we as users of the Internet interact with services. So it is a very privacy-conscious and self-sovereignty, data-sovereignty conscious approach. If you think about how the Internet Web2 works at the moment, you have Facebook, you have Amazon, you have Google, you’re giving them a lot of your data. Those services give you free or close-to-free services, but they own your data. They can immediately deplatform you if they don’t like what you do. But they keep the data. You don’t own the data. You post something on Instagram, they own it. Web3 and Polkadot is kind of trying to flip this whole idea on its head. Through the Polkadot app you will be able to access apps that are where you do own your own data, where you do have self-sovereignty, where with your private key you can’t just send tokens back and forth, but you actually own your entire photo library, you own your contacts, you own whatever it is, some in-game items in some games, for example, NFTs or whatever we want to call it. So it kind of really changes the primitives of what Web3 was kind of supposed to be. And it’s really trying to go hard into this direction. And then this proof of individuality or proof of personhood that I just mentioned before comes in there as well. So again, imagine a social media platform where actually you’re guaranteed, not just because somebody tells you, but cryptographically guaranteed, that you’re talking to somebody that’s actually a human being and not a bot. Maybe there will be bots as well, but they will be very clearly marked. It will be transparent. You will know what. So this is kind of the future towards where we’re heading here. It’s a big roadmap and many things. Hardik : All right, so Max, on an ending note, what statement would you like to provide to our audience or any statement or any advice or any sort of knowledge you want to share with us? Max : You started with the market price. And you’re absolutely right that the token price, the DOT price, has been down. It’s not a pleasant environment to be in, this kind of bear market for a token. That’s true. But as somebody who is quite deep in the ecosystem or who sees all the things that are being built here on Polkadot, I can say that I believe there is a disconnect between realities on the ground and the market price. So for some people out there, that really might be an opportunity. Hardik : That’s wonderful. Thank you so much, Max, for joining us today and providing us with these useful insights and being transparent and honest about your fund and the Polkadot ecosystem. I really appreciate that and thank you so much. Max : Thank you. Hardik, always very good questions from you. I appreciate it.