# S01E15 · Transcript — Kurt Ivey Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 15, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Kurt Ivey, crypto storyteller and founder of Signal, a gamified Solana trading platform. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/kurt-ivey-signal). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, and connection hiccups have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Kurt's. ## Philosophy, wrestling, and an alien view of the world **Gokul** I want to start with your philosophy degree — not a lot of people go into philosophy. What got you into it? **Kurt** I got into philosophy as a junior in high school. I started reading Sigmund Freud, quickly found out he's not really the go-to guy anymore, but I still enjoyed it. I've always been interested in life looked at from a third-person perspective — a bird's-eye view, objective, impartial. I got into Camus and Kierkegaard in college — the absurdity of life. It's hard to explain why you get into philosophy. I just like metaphysics, I like people watching, I like looking at the world from kind of an alien perspective and asking: how do you look at this objectively? **Gokul** From there you became a college wrestler, then a personal trainer, then ran a coffee company, then went into crypto. For most people that's a wild path. What's the actual thread connecting it all? **Kurt** I started wrestling in high school — it was an outlet. Family life was tumultuous, moving around a lot, and wrestling was something I could pour my whole heart into and also be competitive at. It really helped me grow — locked in the work ethic, the discipline, the mindset. Reading and philosophy were an escape too, in a different way — thinking about what could be rather than what is. That mindset seeps into everything you do. When it comes to building, yes, pushing my potential is the starting point, but there's always something in the world I want to change, some sense of how things could be different. ## From a coffee company to ShopX **Gokul** How did you actually end up in crypto? **Kurt** I was pushing my coffee company and went to a biohacking event some investors invited me to. I met Cyrus there — this was 2020 — and we talked for hours about the economy. I'd already written an article called "The Problem with Money" describing how I'd fix things, and years later I realized the picture I'd chosen for that article was Bitcoin and Ethereum — I had no idea what crypto even was at the time, but what I was describing was basically decentralized-crypto logic without the vocabulary for it. Cyrus told me I should get into crypto, and it immediately clicked. ShopX was meant to be a decentralized marketplace, and that made total sense to me — it became my fulcrum into Web3 and e-commerce. **Gokul** You've been the storyteller behind a lot of projects — ShopX, Alter, ACES, Crypto PR Labs. How did you become the person who makes people believe in the thing, and then the person who builds it? **Kurt** I'm a writer at heart — I was writing long before crypto. I wrote two and a half novels, never published. Before crypto I also built a game, an iPhone runner, in Unreal Engine — that took about six months to learn the engine and ship it to the App Store. So I'd already been building, just from a more artistic angle. Storytelling got me into marketing almost by accident — I was good at managing things behind a computer, coordinating a team, clients, contacts, journalists, PR, events. That's more of a builder's mindset than a marketing one. Understanding the tech side and having the storytelling background together is what helped me move up — on calls, a founder would explain their project in all these technical terms and struggle to land it, and I'd give it back in one or two lines and it would just click for the room. ## ACES, and what actually killed it **Gokul** Walk me through ACES — the pitch, the bet, where the idea came from. **Kurt** ShopX was a broad decentralized marketplace; ACES was a more focused collectibles marketplace. We'd tokenize high-value hype collectibles — Pokémon cards, watches, sneakers — and create a derivative market for them. When the collectible sold on the platform, token holders got a cut of the sale, because by buying the token and evangelizing the item, they were helping sell it. You'd see the ticker on Telegram and Twitter, people would notice the item, and maybe someone with money would buy it. **Gokul** I heard from Eric that ACES ran into a wall. What was your read on what went wrong, living it from the inside? **Kurt** Being hacked was not fun — that was kind of the death blow. But we were also banking on Base taking a more social approach, and they did a complete one-eighty: dropped the social initiatives and went all-in on tokenizing instead. We had a couple of early influencers who didn't quite deliver the momentum we needed, and that early push dipped. But really, the hack was the nail in the coffin — we were planning to keep going otherwise. **Gokul** Being close to a lot of projects that made it and a lot that didn't — what's your honest read on the sexy and the ugly sides of this industry? **Kurt** There are two problems: how do you enforce anything in a decentralized system, and how do you stop decentralized networks from quietly re-centralizing? We haven't nailed either one, and when centralized entities step in to bring order, they just centralize it. So it ends up kind of wild-west — too easy to scam, too little enforcement. I don't think the ideas were ever the problem. One of the first projects I worked on was solar-powered Bitcoin mining — great idea — and the guy just ran off with the money; I was never paid. Another gaming platform I worked on for about a year on the social side — the founder didn't rug anyone, he really stuck with it, it just petered out. It's really been about execution and people not coming through on their promises the whole time. These gaming companies raise a billion dollars and do almost nothing with it. ## Building Signal **Gokul** Tell me about Signal, in your own words. **Kurt** I started building Signal in December. I set out to make an automated trading tool, but vibe coding something like this is a lot harder than it sounds — it took way longer than I expected, with a breakthrough almost every month. Signal ended up being a trading game on Solana — really just trading wrapped in a game experience. My token-detection system finds a trade and places it; the idea is you just sell. While building it, I realized I'd more or less solved entering a token at the right time, but exiting well was still a huge open problem. So I had the idea to put that exit decision in the hands of the user — and that's when Signal, as a game, was born. **Gokul** Why put a game inside the blockchain at all? **Kurt** For the user, you want that perfect trade — getting in at the best time. By the time I send a call to my Telegram group and someone loads up the chart, the token's often already up 50% or 2x — you can't get in at the perfect moment without the algorithm searching the entire Pump.fun trade set in real time. Nobody can watch everything at once. Getting in is hard, and I built the algorithm to catch that entry point right before a token blows up. Getting out is a different story — once you're in, a human eye reading a chart still beats an algorithm that doesn't quite understand charts the way people do. Once people start playing, I'm hoping to flip the "ninety percent of traders lose money" statistic on its head. **Gokul** If more people make money, isn't trading supposed to be zero-sum? **Kurt** There's a real problem with cabals — insiders, KOLs, people with better information or tools, who are the ones actually winning right now because they're engineering the entry timing. We're probably not going to get ninety percent of people winning, but we shouldn't be stuck at only one percent either. If you've got a good algorithm on your side, you can get in at the right time. My Telegram group's calls track around a 40% hit rate — meaning the token doubled from the price at the time of the call. The theoretical returns on paper are enormous, obviously nobody captures the perfect sale every time, but the upside I'm putting into that group is real, and people are making money. ## How the game actually works **Gokul** Walk me through the mechanics — what does a session actually look like? **Kurt** You start a session, and you've got a chart in front of you, your character, your hearts, your items. You're watching the chart — you're already in, that's your entry — and when you see it move, you click sell, or hit spacebar. You can add or remove twenty percent of your position at a time, up to three moves, so you're not forced to sell everything at once. If you lose three times in a session, it ends — sessions only last thirty minutes. There's also a paper-trading mode where you can practice for free. Once the whole system is fully live, paper trading will actually earn you money, because you're trading real, live tokens on paper. Every time a paper trader hits sell, that's a signal the automated algorithm factors in — if five, ten, twenty traders sell at nearly the same moment, the algorithm's own confidence in selling goes up too. So paper traders are contributing to training that automated system in real time, and get small kickbacks for it. It also depends on how good a paper trader you are — the better your track record, the more your decisions weigh on the algorithm. **Gokul** What do the items do? **Kurt** One item is a pair of shoes that lets you add or remove more steps than the base limit — more flexibility to size a position up or down. A hat gives you more hearts, from three up to six, so you can lose more times before your session ends. A jacket lowers the confidence level the machine-learning system needs before it'll flag a token, which gives you more opportunities but more risk. The base game is designed to give the average player their best shot at winning — you don't strictly need the items. They're for people who want more flexibility and are willing to take on more risk for it. ## The case against middlemen **Gokul** It sounds like part of the appeal of decentralization for you is that it lets a builder like you get paid directly, instead of going through a publisher or a gatekeeper. **Kurt** Yes. Fundamentally it comes down to middlemen — insurance companies, Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb, credit card companies. Any middleman is kind of a leech on society, no offense to what got us here as a society. Take Amazon: if we built a decentralized marketplace instead, we wouldn't have all that money coagulating into one person's pockets, all that ownership centralizing around a couple of people who end up controlling both sides of the transaction and raising prices on everyone. Amazon figured out how to run a marketplace — congrats to them, I think we can take it from here. There's just too many middlemen everywhere you look, too many brokers. We need to stop letting being a middleman be a job. **Gokul** What would tokenizing a regular business actually look like? **Kurt** A lot of Web3 projects already start with a token, and for them that essentially is the business — the community buying in, similar to a stock, except most stocks don't pay dividends either. You buy it because it has attention and you think the price goes up; the deployer earns from trading fees or from selling their own token. That's already happening in crypto — I think we scale that up and apply it to regular businesses too. Institutions are already looking at doing exactly that on their own blockchains, because tokens offer more liquidity and, I'd argue, more decentralization than traditional stock. ## Crypto's stigma, politics, and building instead of preaching **Gokul** You campaigned for Bernie Sanders — what got you into politics? **Kurt** It started when the government shut down and my financial aid got hung up — I realized this stuff actually affects me. I drove to Arizona and New Mexico, took people in my car, slept in random houses, went door to door — this was around 2012, 2013. I got disillusioned after he lost, and started asking: how do I, as an individual, or we, as small groups without institutional power, actually change anything? You can try to get into people's hearts and minds, and I hope that works, but really the world comes down to systems. It's a huge boulder rolling down a hill. We need systems that everyone just starts using because they work — like Uber or DoorDash — but with the ownership and the money directed the right way instead of concentrating in one CEO's hands. **Gokul** Last question — when you eventually retire, what do you want to be known for? **Kurt** Honestly, nothing. If I'm as successful as I could possibly be, I disappear — just watching over things, helping if I'm still needed. The whole point of decentralization is an environment where no single person holds all the power. I want to live in a cool world that lasts, and I want to live a long time — literally a thousand years, I'm not joking. There's a short-term layer to that: making a living, being comfortable, having a good life with my girlfriend. There's a second layer: a sense of justice, hating that so many people who did real harm die comfortable in their sleep while good people suffer and never get their shot. And at the highest level, there's something more selfish — wanting to live in a genuinely interesting, forward-thinking world, and wanting to build things. Even something as small as Signal is part of that: distributing opportunity to traders who normally wouldn't have the tools or the information. **Gokul** People sometimes say building with AI isn't really "making" anything, since you're just prompting. **Kurt** Try to make any of the things I've made — my token management platform, my Telegram bot, Signal — and you'll see how hard it actually is. AI can't think of new things; it can only do what you tell it. Sometimes I'm like a cheerleader for the model — I know you don't know this, if you knew it everyone would be doing it, we have to iterate, it's possible, we're here, and here is possible, let's go. There's real architecture and research behind stitching all those tools together — I'm also building a real-time AI video companion right now, and my agent Claudia is the brain behind it. The pieces involved have turned into a genuine headache, in a good way. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/kurt-ivey-signal) · [[podcast|All episodes]]