Crypto's Magnificent 7 with Ryan Watkins

Transcript

If you have like some of these big entities that hold a large chunk supply on the balance sheets, what can they do with that? Where are they going to deploy that capital? Are they going to deploy it into lending markets? They can deploy it into purse markets, or they can deploy it into liquid staking providers. >> Ryan Watkins, give us the Athena bull and bear case. How do we get this thing to 50 bill? What is the max bull case? And what is the bare case for Athena? Close us out here, man. you know, now they're starting to go beyond perpetuals exchanges and start to build into more product lines that they're going to bring, you know, under the under this umbrella and it's all going to kind of flywheel through Hyperlid.

>> Welcome back to the Rowup. We are your hosts. I'm Andy. >> I'm Robbie. And this is your home to learn from the biggest guest, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation. >> Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. >> Welcome, Ryan. Good to have you. >> Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, apologies for some of the setup stuff. It's a it's a full technical operation here, man. >> All good. >> Yeah, good, man. Good. >> It's exciting times. USDH we've had feels like every single proposer uh to be the issuer of USDH I think besides two we haven't had Guy from Athena we haven't had native markets but we've heard from Agora heard from FRA we've

heard from essentially all the rest you're very involved in the hyperlquid ecosystem as well so just to just to open up you're not putting forward a proposal yourself at least not that I'm aware of but how how do you how do you view this landscape and what what are your your initial impressions and thoughts here >> I mean if want to give me all the interest revenue for a stable coin. I'm happy to do that. >> They're gonna they're gonna want it. 100% revenue shares, table stakes, Ryan, >> right? Yeah. No, it's uh I think it's incredible. I mean, it came out of nowhere. So, for a long time, one thing that I thought Hyperlid could do is uh create their own stable coin. It's kind of like low hanging fruit. there's all this USC in the platform and even like

at the end of December I think it was one of the first time tweeted this out they already had like a couple billion dollars there and it's just sitting there doing nothing considering no yield and it's actually quite easy I think to just like replace it but there was just no reason to do it like it wasn't really that big of a it wouldn't have been that big of a revenue boost at the time I think at the time would have maybe been an incremental like $50 million uh and Hyperl was already making you know well over like 200 $300 million just from the the perks exchange and that was like the most important thing to do But now that we're getting to uh a stage in I think the the growth of Hyperlid where uh you know can start to think about this more

and also where there's just way more stable goals in the platform I think now is the time to start considering what to do with this product and it's a very synergistic product to an exchange. So even if you just look at circles USC as an example, uh one of the biggest criticisms that I think many of like the natives had of circle going into IPO is that they're giving up so much of the interest income to to Coinbase. Now it's like a big criticism like oh the margins are compressing and this is going to be such a dud when it goes public and obviously it just behaved the opposite. But I don't think that substantively that that take was was wrong. And really what I'm getting at here is that exchanges are the biggest distributors of stable coins. And I think Hyperlid is no different. And I think now we're kind

of seeing Hyperlid really start to uh just kind of put it like strongest foot forward and demonstrate the power that it's now having in the ecosystem and and and just going going after this opportunity. So yeah, I think it's it's very exciting and uh I mean at this point like literally every single stable coin issue with the exception of Tether and USC have come to the table to uh to to win this and it's been a absolute show, >> man. And I I put a a a screenshot of CL 207's quote tweet of John Vanek saying, "Hey man, I I own 1.5 billion in our validator, whatever it is. could you uh please speak to me in a language I

understand like meow or something like that and then you got moon overlord in the comments saying oh I don't like his attitude thumbs down and it's just like it's just a complete flipping of of power truly I mean it's you've got some of the largest institutional players in the space basically coming in to lobby to essentially what is like hyper onchain defy giga whales now as a result of the airdrop and as a result of the success of hyperID liquid. Um, just taking a quick step back, Ryan, with your in involvement in Hyperlid. Curious kind of like what your personal and and synchronies capital involvement is in the Hyperlid ecosystem and kind of just generally your Hyperlid thesis as I know

that you've been involved uh quite a bit early on and then we can get into some of the nitty-gritty of some of these proposals and uh and that stuff. >> Yeah. So we've been uh it's like longtime support of Hyperlid. Uh Sunny or or D5 monk who's on our team uh had covered Hyperlquid for you know well before it even launched the hype token. Uh we at a fund level bought Hype on the first day and have been holders since and we haven't made any additional investments in the ecosystem. I think we're uh generally very patient and methodical about how we build exposure and I just don't think that there's been

opportunities to do that so far. But yeah, it's one of our largest holdings and uh and yeah, so that's that's like how we just think about Hyperlid uh and our exposure as as a whole. For me, this this proposal, we haven't officially endorsed any uh any other proposals. And part of it is just me waiting to see what all those would be. You know, Guy just came out today with his proposal for Athena. And I think that one kind of shook up the uh the landscape of proposals. So, we're taking our time. And I think over uh the course of the past couple days since we started to get trickle these in uh what I really started to laser in on is what is the most important thing that the

communities consider when evaluating these proposals. And you know for us it's really about alignment because there's so many teams that have come to the table. They're all proposing the same thing. We're going to be a genius compliance tablecoin. we're going to pass back all the revenue to token holders, right? That just doesn't make a difference at this point. And I think the number one thing is we want to make sure that whoever is building the stable coin, this is going to be their number one priority and that they're going to be here in the next few years as we look to scale this ecosystem.

So yeah, I'll pause there, but that's that's kind of like the most important thing that we've identified so far. >> Yeah. And I think you've you've outlined this, right? you you sort of articulated this like who is going to be the best steward for USDH and and so you know I think we've seen a couple of proposals sort of allude to how they could build USDH into a legitimate stable coin beyond Hyperliquid's ecosystem. The most compelling or one of the most compelling that I saw was uh the the Agora proposal and how they could leverage RAIN and the debit card issuer to sort of implement USDH into Visa and there could be some network effects there to to massage it into the rest of the ecosystem. Aside from that, how else do you think any of

these proposals, what would stick out to you as okay, yeah, that is a legitimate way of building some USDH adoption outside of Hyperlid? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I I actually don't think building adoption outside Hyperlid is the biggest priority. I think the the sequencing of how or I think it is like an end goal, but the sequencing of you get there matters. So I think phase one for lack of better words is uh just getting this new stable coin adopted within the hyperlquid ecosystem. So at the end of the day like what we're bidding for is just a ticker and once you get the ticker you have to go and get the stable coin adopted. There's no promise from the Hyperlid Lab team that

they're instantly going to add USDH pairs for the spot markets or it's going to be USDHs collateral on Hyper Core or any of that. Right? you need to actually go and get this stable coin to scale and then get it to a point where hyper the hyperlquid lab team would even consider wanting to put this in hyper core. So I think like the what I would do is I would be most focused on who is going to be supporting uh hit3 markets who's working with like the builder codes ecosystem who is tapped in with all the leading projects in hypervm to get stable coins onto that platform lending rates are still so bar rates are still way too high there uh and all these things I think would be like the number one priority as far as just and what would be the most immediately creative

to the ecosystem right so building financial products around the stable coins and actually working with all the people all the builders in the ecosystem to to get this adopted. >> Introducing extended exclusively on Stark, a nextgen ps trading platform live today with 50 plus trading pairs from crypto to tradi. You get the best experience on chain today. Deposit in the community vault for attractive returns compatible and engage in unified margin spot trading lending and per trading exclusively live at extended.app app on starknet today.

>> This is a this is a big part of the future of uh hyperlquid's growth trajectory right is the stablecoin part. I think I mean somebody put out a tweet saying that basically you know the best businesses in crypto are exchanges sltrading and stable coins currently and and maybe one other and it seems like Hyperl's kind of coming together to put these all into one. We had Vance Spencer of framework on uh to start the stream off today and he spoke about uh Hyperlid's potential path to you know $100, $200, even $500 and and kind of wrote that or you know kind of stated that this stable coin could be a big part of that path in addition to growing purpose volumes. When you're thinking about the the future of hype the asset as well as the protocol, how how

important do you think this stable coin is going to be to driving more flows into it? you know, do you agree with with Vance that this is a very strong part of its next leg of growth uh into a higher uh multiple? How do you kind of think about this stable coin uh part of the platform leading to its rise in you know 100 200 300 $400 etc. >> Yeah. So I agree with Vance and his bullishness. Uh I agree with I think it was someone from Dragonfly who originally put out that tweet about how the biggest businesses in crypto are exchanges, stable coins and and smart contract platforms and totally agree with that framing as well. Historically we've not seen these three businesses

bundled uh and I think that is what is like a big opportunity because uh if you can bundle all these businesses and you can align all these businesses economically with one single asset then you will could potentially if you get this to scale and it's competitive in all three of those categories and I think these categories are very synergistic as I said uh exchanges distributed stable coins uh blockchains are the settlement rails for stable coins and trading. If you can get these to scale, then you can have probably the largest buybacks of any protocol or platform in the ecosystem.

Majority today you see that Hyperlquid is doing more buybacks or generating more protocol revenue than any other smart contract platform in the world inclusive of Ethereum Salana and that is more or less just with the perpetual swaps volumes that is getting and the growing spot markets and nothing to do with stable coins yet and this is also prehip3 which I think will be expansionary because you're not only going to have just existing you know bitcoin ethereum soul markets that are driving a lot of with different collateral types, but you'll also have potentially US equities, preIPO startups, all these new asset classes that currently just don't have, I mean, even just outside the crypto economy, this perpetual swap

instrument to trade them. And I think that is like, you know, very exciting green field opportunity. It also helps Hyperco get to a stage of its growth where it's also not as tied to the crypto economy anymore because >> you know crypto can go down 50% to in the next month and then all of a sudden maybe we're cooked for six months and then all of a sudden volumes fall off a cliff and now revenues are down but I can be pretty confident that equity volumes will be more stable than crypto volumes right so I think it is important just to kind of diversify a revenue mix as well and that's why I think the HIP3 three stuff is is important. So when I think about the way that this stablecoin fits into this picture, it's like once

again once uh is another revenue stream for Hyperlid. Uh and then two uh it's like a it's like a huge driver of the the buybacks that like I said just already are at a scale that is outpacing everyone else. And I think this just supercharges it. And maybe the one bon last thing I'll say too and this is something I've been thinking a lot about recently uh because this wasn't in the original hyperlquid thesis we wrote is that uh hyperlquid is taking has a very unique point of view on how to build an ecosystem. So if you think about historically there's like two different ways to build an ecosystem and this is a little bit reductive but there's like the uh you know fully integrated uh there's like I don't know

there's maybe a Ethereum's vision where you just have the smart contract platform and then a bunch of thirdparty teams go out and build everything right and then there's this fully vertically integrated version of like an app chain I think of I mean although it wasn't successful like something like Kanto or think of maybe like a bar chain where like the core team actually builds these core primitives of stable coins and trading uh all under one roof. And hyperquit is kind of this interesting in between where it is intentional in the same way that a baritin or can be and that it's saying we only want to have one hyperquid stable coin and one hyperlquid exchange. These are enshrined into the protocol, but it's not the core team that is building out those features. These are

third party teams. And initially for a unit that was not a open process decide who's going to build the spot markets but now for the stable coin it is an open process. So you get to tap into the community and see what everyone can bring to the table and you do get competition but you get the uh also you get the benefit of this efficiency and this like intentionality of just having like a single product for the entire ecosystem to coordinate around. And that is a I think a really interesting way of methodically building an ecosystem from scratch because these are as we know like extremely important primitives.

These are extremely cash generative primitives and if you can intentionally build roll these out uh then I think you can build not just like an amazing ecosystem but you get a ton of buybacks for the token and I think that's like what hacker liquid is doing. So in your original >> so >> I I think you know what what you're talking about from the purpose-built app chain perspective and now they've been able to expand that especially as they've gotten network effects with the amount of liquidity and volume and adoption that they have. They've been able to now incentivize other teams to come in and build out other core primitives and functionality. And you know, now they're starting to go beyond

perpetuals exchanges and start to build into more product lines that they're going to bring, you know, under the under this umbrella. And it's all going to kind of flywheel through Hyperlid starting from the perpetuals piece because we were talking about this before. We're actually going back and through our through our our chat >> really >> the Hyperlid team back in 2023. you know, we we sort of faded the points program because we were like, look, like perpetuals exchanges have been done before, you know, Apex and like some of these other ones like >> why why do you think Hyperlid had a why was it a zero to one? Because at at at at the beginning it was just a perpetual exchange, but they were able to build

such a such a robust ecosystem around it. What do you think they did differently that other perpetual exchanges didn't? and and what made them so successful early on that it spurred this monumental growth. >> Yeah. So I think it's a I guess a handful of things. So for one, many of the early per exchange were constrained not only by technology like it was just hard to build a chain with that level of performance even if you were to have just a small number of validators but they're also constrained philosophically because I think many of the early builders in the space had this hard line on decentralization right there's a certain way you're supposed to

build a product if you look at all of the core printers we built in the past whether it be per exchanges or uh spot markets or stable coins like what was it? It was like decentralized stable coins. It was AMMs. It was like you know an L2 with some you know really complicated proving mechanism that is the PES exchange and that's great if you want to adhere to a certain set of principles but it's not great if you want to build the best product. And I think what it took is a shift in the culture of this industry that took place over the course of many years for someone to come along and even have the confidence that to build this and that

people would actually want to use it. So that was one. It's just shifting culture uh and then also like the technology getting to a point where you actually could build one of these one of these products. Um the second thing is just like the actual uh timing of it. It's no surprise that uh you know I think the Hyper Code Labs launched the Hype asset after Trump won the election. I don't think that this is I mean I think it would have been like a riskier proposition for this like offshore derivative exchange to launch a token with buybacks before that happened. So it's like hard to separate that from this. Uh and at the same time like I think having a more accommodative

regulatory environment in America gives it more cover to go out and grow and and kind of move with confidence, right? Because these businesses uh operated in a gray area for a very long time and not every founder operates in the gray area the same, right? Some people are more careful, some people are more bold. >> And I do think that that is like it's it's hard to separate the timing from from all this. >> And then the last thing is just, you know, they just nail the user experience flat out. And you know, that one's just like a little bit hard to communicate.

It's just something you got to experience for yourself, right? It's just really smooth. Uh it was like one of the few per exchanges out there where you just deposit once and then you have to pay any more fees to transact, whereas every single other blockchain you have to pay every single time you do a transaction. You have to prove something every single time you do a transaction. Uh I think it's just cheaper even just look at like the fee tiers versus Binance or any other exchanges just a lot cheaper. Uh and then yeah like when you actually like I said it had the performance the performance that was actually comparable to one of these centralized exchanges but you can still access it anywhere in the world so long as you have a VPN right so those are things that I think really stood out to

to me and then maybe one of the last things that I think just the team is just aggressive so like the first list assets they're really creative they like they'll list like a pump futures market before it goes live >> it'll be the first one to do it like the Trump futures like way before any other exchange did and sometimes being first is like the most important thing with these really hot assets where people want to trade. >> Yeah, man. I think you you you raised an incredible point about the US regulatory regime Trump as well and and we had we had Vance kind of speak about his view on the on the stablecoid side of things which obviously is skewed towards the sky ecosystem but but I'll kind of ask you the same which is he he framed it as that the and you know last thing here on

the on the US and I'd love to get into into some of your Athena stuff as well is he framed it as uh USDH doesn't really necessarily need to be a genius compliant uh US regulated stable coin. Like that's probably not exactly what the hyper community really needs. But on the other side, it probably doesn't need to be something like uh you know, you take it all the way out to like a die or a algorithmic stable coco or a very decentralized kind of like uh yield bearing, you know, very kind of uh let's just call like exotic type of of stable coin. you know he he he thought somewhere in the middle and obviously this lands on USDS for his perspective like what is what is your take on the type of architecture for uh USDH stable coin given a lot of the uh features that

you've mentioned of hyperlquid's success some of them being you know regulatory repar some of them being the team's aggressiveness and willingness to kind of ship uh let's call them exotic products when it comes to the actual design of of USDH and perhaps this this is, you know, going into Athena's proposal, but how do you think about the correct type of stable coin and, you know, I imagine that there's going to be multiple actually. Um, yeah. >> Yeah. Uh, so I I I I actually do think it needs to be genius compliant and I think it just needs to be no frills, uh, built in the safest way with the most institutional partners. And mind you, that doesn't mean that like the team

that's stewarding it needs to be this large institution. You know, for example, the native markets team, they're working with bridge acquired by Stripe and Bridge will be the issuer of the stable coin. So, you get the best of both worlds where you do have like the compliance and fiat rails of a bridge and Stripe, but you do have this native team that's stewarding the the protocol, right? So point being is I don't think you I I do think you need to have like a someone who's just not going to this up, right? And why is that important? It's not just important just from reducing the risk that there's a It's also important for increasing the confidence so that more people would want to deposit this asset and use it on

the platform because you know hyperlquid it's getting big right I mean this is like one of the largest exchanges for trading crypto in the world at this point and it's competitive with like the Binances of the world and it's also not a guarantee that you can even win over the existing USC that's on the platform right it's not like day one, you know, Jeff is going to snap his fingers and then everyone just converts all their USDC into USDH. It'll be a I think it'll be a process and I think that whoever team wins needs to have like a like an actual coherent plan for how to get those get those over. And I think like you know the Athena proposal was a great example where there's going to be

a combination of like incentives and you know all this stuff to kind of get all that stuff over to uh US USDH. Um so yeah all to say I I really do think that you this is opportunity to uh to build something that is institutional grade that has a lot of trust so that you can actually get more people comfortable with using this platform which you know while we all may like I just think about meeting one of my friends works at investment bank they hear about this decentralized exchange and you know all the servers are somewhere offshore in Tokyo and there's like wait hold up this is what what is going on here. I think you want something that's just going to be uh like a positive for the brand uh as

well. >> Understood. Understood. All right, guys. Shifting gears um into some of your Athena thesis and and the the thing that that I want really want to kind of pick on here is that we're going to get a rate cut next week or in about seven to 10 days Jerome Pal's going to come out. We're going to get a rate cut. Um this is very bullish for uh speculative behavior in crypto. Um you know kind of what I expect is to see stable coin yields uh increase as the as the uh desire to borrow stable coins increases.

uh the lending rates on a and morpho should go up for USDC USCT but no none other than USD is the larger you know beneficiary here of this of this design with their kind of uh funding rate basis trade mechanism. How do you think about Athena's growth into a rate cutting environment and kind of walk us through the the evolution of the thesis up until now? >> Yeah. Yeah. uh you know I think one of the f first times I I met guy in I want to say early 2024 uh and this was right before Athena

launch uh and he told me like exactly what he was going to do how he's going to get to 5 billion 10 billion and he specifically talked about this rate dynamic he's like listen at a certain point Fed is going to cut rates right crypto will rip funding will blow out and the spread between what you get from this USD stablecoin and what you'd get on T bills is going to be huge and this is going to be a huge shellin for us and I was like that makes a ton of sense right that makes a ton of sense and now we're kind of at that stage where there's a line of sight to that happening so I think he's totally right about it

uh and that's really all there's to say about that uh the Second thing on like the evolution of Athena thesis. I mean, I may have had one idea last week and then in the past week he announces that I mean uh another 500 plus million dollar pipe into the uh Athena DAT announces a integration with Binance which is I think probably the most important integration in its history that could uh add another you know couple maybe few billion maybe even tens of billions of dollars of mark of uh of supply to the US state of the coin.

uh he also announces the integration with Megath right where they're going to be the powering the native stable coin to me so that mega can offer you subsidize user transactions and then they put out this proposal for hyperl this is all within the past week right so I mean these people are just shipping and it's relentless I mean I can only think of maybe just like a a couple of founders inclusive of Jeff from Hyperlid that are actually shipping at this pace and this is just something that I think that people in the the crypto economy are not used to but that you would be more used to if you were uh in like the normal startup world or like normal world of uh finance and technology where there's just like a a higher level of professionalism and and more competition

in some of these areas. Uh so yeah, I mean much much to unpack there maybe any of those uh you know four proposals but yeah uh it's a it's a monster in the making. Do you think part of the reason that crypto is starting to embody more startup culture is because there's more at stake? There's like this competition is more fierce. You know, we're talking about bigger numbers now and that's why it's drawing in more talent and more competition. >> Yeah, I think that's right. I think yeah, definitely more at stake uh bigger bigger economic opportunity, which is one of the reasons why we're seeing this influx of talent. I think that there's

regulatory clarity now which gives builders more confidence to go and take bold risk and then uh another key factor here as well is that I actually think many use cases are starting to ascend the S-curve and >> now that these these products are real and we're not just competing in the the narrative wars all day for you know why is my shitcoin better than your shitcoin like how do you actually differentiate you got to go out and do something right and at the same time you know what is doing something in the context of these these core use cases we talk about whether it be stable coins or tokenization or trading uh yes it is speaking to you know all of the

cryptonatives but it's also interfacing with large institutions and both within and outside the crypto economy and that just takes a certain uh type of founder to go and execute that well because listen all the use cases I just listed this is finance. >> Yeah. >> Right. This is not this is not like you know social this is not you know some some weird this is this is finance. You have to go and talk to investment banks. You have to go and talk to asset managers, brokerage platforms like all these different people and and convince them to to use their products, right?

And I think that's what's also changing like the types of talent that are succeeding in this asset class. And also it's like a it's a it's kind of lighting a fire on everyone too. like there's this huge land grab that's happening out uh in in crypto and if you don't have an answer for how you'll be able to compete with some of the large incumbents that are now coming after these core products as well because once again it's not just like Athena is competing with uh or or Hyper is competing with like other decentral exchanges other decentralse big institutions that are coming in and like these people don't care the code is open source >> y >> right as far as they're concerned concern stable coins are 1% of US M1

money supply as far as they're concerned like >> these these exchanges and no one's using them on a grand scale. We're just trading coins back and forth like and then there's like what like maybe 20 to30 billion dollars of tokenized assets on blockchains. I mean this is actually like real like zeroth inning of this stuff going up the S-curve. So this is nothing to do with prices, right? This is everything to do with just like where we are in the the growth of this asset class. And I think that's the reason why like like I said, there's a fire under people because yeah, this you can't just win by winning the narrative wars anymore.

>> Uh and not only can you not win, but you probably just won't make any money doing that either because there was a point in time where like it didn't even matter if you're winning, you could still pump a token up to a billion dollars and cash out and go buy your house in. And that's just not what people can do anymore. >> Nope. Yeah, man. And I mean I think you put extremely well. I call it crypto entering its practical era which is extremely positive for a handful of projects and will contri it'll keep contributing to this market bifurcation in terms of performance and you know in light of regulatory clarity institutional appeal we're moving deeper into this revenue or value territory real value creation territory and moving away from Dows and governance for the sake of it fugazi decentralization overemphasis on you know idealism and

tribalism and into the real and perhaps albeit unsexy categories of just moving all of finance onchain. And it's just an extremely bullish development for the space as a whole and equally so for the projects that are contributing it. And so how do I how how do I take that eloquent uh response and turn it den? Well, I pull up Arthur Hayes's tweet and he says uh with Binance USD listing ENA fee switch is going to get turned on. That unlocks 500 million of buybacks. Let's go. Ryan Watkins, give us the Athena bull and bear case. How do we get this thing to 50 bill? What is the max bull case? And what is the bare case for Athena? Close us out here, man.

>> Yeah. Uh I I think that we're we're in the beginning stages of creating the next mag of the crypto economy right now. And you know, for all we talk about market topping, market bottoming, alt season, it's all noise, right? I think what's happening now is it's this assass is going to look like I think a lot like it has for the past three years to be honest where there's a select assets that are doing well and most assets are rationalizing down to zero which is where they belong and so this is not just about Athena uh or or Hyperlid there's there's a handful of projects that I think like we said all the things we talked about where the founders executing they're building real products they're growing really fast uh like that

is the opportunity I think from here on out so I think about state Um, Athena, you know, what is the thesis for me is that stable coins is this, it's one of the few, I think, TAMs that is provably hundreds of billions of dollars today and will be trillions tomorrow. They're the third largest issue right now. They're the fastest growing by far. They've added about five to six billion dollars in supply over the past couple of months. And that was really just from the a integration uh yields just increasing from all the price action on Ethereum. And you're starting to see I mean if they can put out all this stuff in this past week where they're talking about you know launching an exchange on Hyperlid and building these products

around Hyperlid and being the native stablecoin and running the stablecoin as a service platform for Mega and uh getting the integration with Binance. So you can already see the line of sight for them seal and that supply from 12 billion is today to another you know 10 2030 billion tomorrow right um once again this is just what like the current opportunity set within a crypto economy this is not talking about when you get uh you know more fintexs that are starting to enable you to click a button and start saving in stable coins and I think that Athena is like really well positioned to be almost like a savings protocol for many almost neo bankanks uh as as well. So yeah, and then maybe one of the last things too is

and this is maybe a hot take, but I'm I'm really excited for many of the uh DATs that correspond to many of these large products as well. I think people are really underestimating uh like I said there there's this there's a speculative incubation period that is they're all going through right now where they trade at a big premium ZNA, they sell equity, they buy more. All right, that's fun. that's not gonna last forever, right? By this point, you have a material percentage of the supply for many of these large assets and networks that is sitting in these publicly traded companies. What is going to happen from here? I think that they're going to be key players in governance moving forward. So, you think about Salana's SIMD 22A proposal, the inflation

proposal. Uh if there was a public company that held temper supply, they probably had a lot of influence in whether or not that proposal goes through, right? I think about the long-term economic implications of if you have like some of these big entities that hold a large chunk of supply on the balance sheets, what can they do with that? Where are they going to deploy that capital? Are they going to deploy it into lending markets? They can deploy it into purse markets. Are they going to deploy it into liquid staking providers? And then what can they do with access to US capital markets, banks and uh and funds like they can borrow money to go and put it on chain and that could be like a huge driver of growth. And I I really think that uh you know the the the there are a handful of

teams that I think really understand the opportunity here to get institutional capital into the asset class and yeah I think that uh and also full disclosure we are investors in the Athena Dat the one is is one of them. >> Ryan we wish you uh a lot of success in the next couple months. I think we're going to have a lot of fun in the crypto market. Um, and I think over the over the next couple years, uh, we'll be reminded that it's early. We get too caught up in the cycles and the thoughts and the this and the that, but when you zoom out, it's it's extremely bullish.

And I I kind of am closing out this two-day hyperlid special, thinking to myself that we just did all of this, but I think there's a strong chance native markets is just going to take the cake because that's what the community wants. Um, so we we will see, guys. Yeah, Ryan, thanks so much for coming on, man. Would uh would really appreciate you having back on and we can revisit some of the uh the thesis that you laid out here on Hyperlquid and Athena. >> Yeah, 100%. Appreciate the time, guys. >> All right, buddy. >> Cheers, man. We'll see you next time.