Haseeb Qureshi: The Meteoric Rise of Perps (And The Next Massive Move)

Transcript

All right, guys. We're back with Hib in the tokenization tower. H just a normal day. NASDAQ down 4%. SP down two. Bitcoin is under 60K, sitting at 592. Um, >> so chill. >> Everyone's favorite tokens, Hyperlquid and Zcash are crushed and the relative shrink trade got hit by a truck. >> Yeah. >> And that always happens. That always happens. >> Yeah. I mean, look, uh, markets are hurting. Markets are hurting. But look, if you've been in crypto for a while, you've had your share of days like this. So, I'm uh I'm I'm chilling. I think uh the the Zcash one is the most idiosyncratic. Of course, it's about this bug, which I'm sure you guys have have probably talked about given that you had Mr. Mert on. Um but I was I was

just chatting with some people online and realizing like, man, people do not understand what happened. Yeah. Yeah. And so I wrote a post this morning trying to at least explain a little bit because people think there's some kind of uh like oh we're not we're never going to know the supply of Zcash ever again and maybe there'll be extra Zcash floating around. Um and that's that's just not what happened. That's not what the bug means. So I did a little bit of educating this morning which I think was um was helpful to people. But the reality is that macro right now is primarily driving this downturn. Um because you know with with the jobs report being as strong as it is, it's just like okay hire for longer.

>> Yeah. And it looks like now markets are projecting that there may even be rate hikes coming this year. Yeah. And if there are rate hikes this year, >> every risk asset is going to get crushed. That's just how it works. So crypto is no exception to that. And Bitcoin is still a risk asset at the end of the day. So that's why we're seeing what we're seeing. But um you know I think it doesn't really change any fundamentals for anything. >> Yeah. You know that's a interesting point because it feels like the performance of equities and other kind of AI stocks have been dislocated from reality a little bit in terms of like the war or the rates or the liquidity environment. And uh you know Chris Berniski he tweeted this bitcoin is the most honest macro asset. I think it's

trying to tell us something you know I don't know this a couple weeks ago like what do you think about the the honesty of Bitcoin as a macro asset? How do you how do you think about like stocks and equities just being kind of like pumped up by Trump or by whatever it is whereas Bitcoin being a more telltale signal of of the reality of the situation? Do you agree? Do do you disagree? >> I totally disagree with this. I think this is horshit. Like I I mean it is not the case that the that the economy has deteriorated by 50% in the last 6 months. Like that's just not a correct reading of reality. Very clearly Bitcoin was drawing down well before the war in Iran began. So you can't really pin Bitcoin in the straight of Hormuse. most of the downturn happened well before

that. So, and you know when the Iran conflict started, Bitcoin was actually doing okay for a little bit and actually it kind of started to recover during the Iran conflict. Um, so that just cannot explain what's happening with Bitcoin. The extent to which Bitcoin is honest, it's like I mean, okay, yes, obviously Trump wants the stock market to go up, but we don't live in a centrally planned economy. Trump cannot make the market go up. If the market wants to go down, it's going to go down. Um, now if we're if you're talking about, you know, Treasury going out and buying bonds or, you know, quantitative easing or the Fed going in and doing something, um, that's a different story. None of those things have happened. There is no Trump price stabilizer except for his change in underlying policy.

>> So that's why I I don't really think this is true. It's pretty obvious what's happening, which is that retail is not here. >> Yeah. retail left and it's just us in the room and like it's you know we're kind of stabbing each other as we go and being like oh my coin better than your coin. Um and that's you know that's like the relative strength trade like >> I mean that's what's been happening. It's been it's been per or like the revenue trade like oh my my protocol makes money. We have buybacks so we're going to you know survive the bear or I'm a privacy protocol so like I'm important or you know something to do with AI and there's important things happening there. I know you're a big lighter bull. Um, and lighter was just, you know, doing quite well for the last

couple weeks and its buybacks significantly outpace hyperlquids. Uh, your partner Tom Schmidt dunked on me today on Twitter with a screenshot of the Hyperlid all-time high revenue day or sorry, all time in the last quarter. It was about four and a half million. And then he put us a chart of of buybacks and how Lighter is just significantly higher in terms of its buybacks per, you know, based on the total market cap. Where do you think that this this per trade goes? Do we think that hyperlquid and lighter and variational have the ability to kind of leverage their non-crypto trading volumes to diverge from the broader crypto markets? Like per has become clearly like the revenue category leader. Like how do we how do

we see if it's possible some of these assets be more resilient than the rest? Is it just solely an idea and a narrative? What what is your purp? >> Yeah, I mean, so look, it's pretty clear hyperlquid, lighter, anything else that's kind of up up on the high tier list of crypto per dexes, especially if they have RWAS. A lot of the smaller perplexes don't have any RWA exposure, in which case they're getting decimated alongside the rest of the market. The market is being buoied in part by Hyperlid and these other assets because they have diversification of revenue, right? They're not purely exposed to the underlying crypto market. If we're going through a deep crypto winter and there's less retail activity, that means there's less trading fees. That mean, you know, look at Coinbase, look at Robin Hood,

these stocks are telling the same story, which is that retail is not here. They're not paying the fees, which means we don't have the revenues, we don't have the profits. So, if you are diversifying your business away from that, >> Robin Hood still has a foundation, which is that there's a lot of people trading stocks and the stock market is at all-time highs. there's all this brilliance, you know, we got SpaceX about to go out presum presumably OpenAI and Enthropic later this year and that means that there's still a lot of energy in that market and what crypto can offer to allow people to access the universe of financial assets, not just crypto uh is still really compelling. It's still a really strong narrative and and a strong growth story. If you're purely exposed to I want to buy and sell Bitcoin and ETH and sell soul and blah blah blah

blah, that market is challenged right now. And it also means that your um your token is going to be very tied to crypto beta. Crypto beta is getting hammered. That means those tokens are getting hammered. Um the what you're seeing is relative outperformance coming from having some kind of break from crypto beta, right? Where it's like, okay, even if Bitcoin goes down, I'm not that exposed to the Bitcoin price. I'm not that exposed to how many people are trading crypto. That's what Hyperliquid is saying what it's saying look you know it it it got hit today but on a week- overweek basis it's something like flat I think on a weekly basis um which tells you like yeah Hyperlid is doing okay even in a world where Bitcoin is going through a really dark period Hyperlid's going to be okay lighter is going to be

okay they're they're they're going to have some impact on revenue but it's not catastrophic whereas you know you take something like unis swap or a >> they're completely exposed to the crypto market that's why I think you're seeing the divergence we're seeing >> so one of the uh interesting things in this category has been this regulatory question and Kyle Sanmani's came back from the you know ashes or whatever you want to call it and he's been dunking on Hyperlid saying that it's stuck between a rock and a hard place on the regulatory side given that it has no KYC and there is now this onshoring of per with Koshi having this green light to trade per bitcoin in the US and soon other assets hyperl is kind of in this tough spot where they're not going to really be able to navigate the regulatory waters Some people are like,

"No, it's a completely the wrong take. This is a very bullish allpurpose platform in general that the fact that the US is being open to this." Then you've got lighter. It's kind of like Darling, Delaware, CC Corp, US-based Vlad is on this SEC um or the CFTC kind of council or something. There's a specific group of crypto innovators there. >> Do do you think Lighter is just like strongly positioned regulatory wise compared to Hyperlid? I know you, you know, you guys have an investment there. And then on that, like, do you think this this regulatory action is net negative for Hyperlid? Maybe you could put those two together.

>> Yeah. So, firstly, we're we're invested in in both. We're actually invested in a number of crypexes beyond even those two. We invested probably like five. >> The old dragonfly spray and prey, baby. >> Well, I I would say we're invested in the good ones. We're invested in the good ones. Uh there's a lot of bad ones out there, but um I would say, look, this is obviously an enormous category, right? right? We're invested in multiple, you know, centralized exchanges as well. And um I I think it's very clear it's not a winner or take all market. So I don't think you could look at this and say, "Oh, well, clearly this means that A is going to win and B is not going to win." I think probably there's going to be some relatively open treatment. They're probably going to be treated mostly the same, right? Like,

yeah, it may be that lighters in the US and hyperlids in Singapore, but for the most part, I I don't think that's the the the bounding box that the CFTC is going to draw if and when they do. very likely it will be hey if you want to have a pers uh a regulated per product in the US you need to get a DCMCO registered with the CFTC you need to KYC everyone you need to have market surveillance and you allow us to be able to pull anyone's name if there's some funny activity going on that's what the CFTC does that's their job they are a regulator they are the policeman the cop on the beat okay so right now neither lighter nor hyperlquid are set up to do that they don't have the licenses they don't have the infrastructure it's a it's a different ball game than what

currently playing. Now they may decide to launch Hyperlquid US or Lighter US which is you know lighter is is not available to Americans same as Hyperliquid right. >> So you think they would like split their book up? >> It's possible. So one thing they can't do they can't just serve liquidity from the offshore exchange domestically. Yeah. >> You cannot do that. Can't do that. >> You can't do that because if I want to if I in the CFTC and I say hey this looks fishy. Who is this? I have to be able to unmask them and say, "Oh, aha, this is this is, you know, this person who's insider trading or this is North Korea or this is whatever some sanctions violator, right?" You can't do that on chain. So, you need some kind of cordoned off liquidity, which like you see this with Poly Market, right? Poly

Market has the offshore global onchain product and then it has the onshore fully KYC regulated product and they're different. They're not they don't share the same liquidity. So in that world, you basically have lighter or hyperl or whoever wants to do this domestically. If they do it, they have to spin up a totally different kind of business and they have to compete with Coinbase, Robin Hood, whoever else wants to do this domestically right now. Maybe they can. Maybe they're set up to do that. Maybe the brand is really strong. Maybe the reach is really strong. Um, but the other thing I think is is that I'm actually kind of bearish on PERBs domestically. This might be a little bit of a hot take, but um I think the idea that pers are going to somehow reinvigorate the market and like oh

because we have BTC pers in the US now suddenly people will buy Bitcoin again and people will start buying crypto. I think this is just the wrong mental model. >> Yeah. >> Um like at the end of the day pers are just one financial instrument. They're a convenient financial instrument. We really like them because they're simple for retail to get leverage. It's very easy to understand relative to trading on margin or or buying options or or dated futures. Um >> but the the main thing about pers like the reason why they were created in the first place was because crypto exchanges historically did not have the ability to claw back losses, >> right?

>> So if you're trading on margin, right, you can go negative. And so margin trading didn't really work in crypto history because if someone goes negative, you're never getting the money back because they live in a different country. They might be pseudonmous. You know, there used to be no KYC exchanges. You know, if you think about like Bitmax or the exchanges even before then, it was just random people with just in, you know, an email address that were coming and trading on your on your things. So, you needed a financial product that worked in a world where you had no recourse. You didn't know who these people were and you couldn't send them to collections. >> Yeah. >> Right. That's where the per was the perfect solution to that set of constraints.

>> Right. >> But domestic US regulated exchanges do not have that set of constraints. You actually can send someone to collections. You actually can't. Like a lot of these problems don't exist >> in the same way they do in the overseas perspects, right? Like >> exactly like being able to trade on margin and or you know trading on data futures solve a lot of the problems when you can do when you can collect from somebody who goes now per >> in that it's very simple for retail. It's very easy for them to understand what they're doing. Um but like where they have really outsized advantages is in overseas uh you know offshore unregulated exchanges. So I think what you will see is that my guess when per launch domestically it's going to be

kind of underwhelming >> but they're still going to remain dominant on the offshore platforms >> right >> that is where I expect we're going >> and so do do you then expect that the current kind of American user whether you know we can advocate for this or not throw the VPN on trade on the hyperlquid trade on the lighter that activity that activity effectively can't be stopped unless they do like a full like block of of these these websites like do you think that if there is further regulatory action that there will have to be a actual full geob blocking from these websites versus kind of what exists now which is like this like you're you can't use this but then like turn the VPN on that you pay like 20 bucks a month for and then you can use this like do you think

>> yeah so I mean not every site does the same thing some actually do VPN blocking as well um and so it it it really depends on what their risk thresholds are or also I mean some of them have agreements with the CFTC um so like for Polyarketer for example they had an agreement with the CFDC that said what they need to do in order to stay compliant and they do that they remain compliant. Um so it it is it is on some level the the the regulations that we have in the US is that um it you are not punished as a consumer for doing something that the state doesn't think is wise.

>> Right? Like we will not come after you for trading on a prediction market. It's just not how this not how our system of government works. Not our system of regulation works. We might go after the company if they are willfully soliciting >> people from, you know, who we believe are not supposed to be trading on these platforms, but we're not going to go after them. Yeah. >> And so I think the the place that we're likely going to land is that as an American, if you are sufficiently motivated to go trade on these platforms, you can't. Now, if you're insider trading or you're breaking the law in some other way, then okay, people will try to come after you. Um, but these, you know, they're not going to necessarily go after individuals for trading on these platforms. As long as those overseas platforms are not

soliciting and they're not encouraging Americans to trade, I think it's perceived as more or less fine, right? Obviously, if you're sufficiently motivated, you can find a way around just about any kind of geob block unless they're full on KYCing, which is not demanded of them. So I would say, you know, long long story short, PERPS are a great financial innovation, but there's a reason why it's been more than 10 years that we've had PERPS. They are not used for almost any other financial product. >> People know that per exist. They've learned about them. Crypto is a huge market, right? And yet almost everything else in the world does not trade on PEPS. Crypto is the thing that trades on purpose, particularly crypto on overseas exchanges. Um eventually I think we will see per domestically but there obviously

they're gonna be KYC and there's gonna be limitations on leverage. It's not going to be you can go on your domestic you know Coinbase Ps and go 50x levered long. >> Yeah. >> Right. There because you know just go play around with products in the US they don't allow you to take on that le kind of leverage because CFTC understands look there's no real social value in allowing people to go 50x lever long on a 90 asset. >> Yeah. >> Right. I mean, that's just pure gambling. So, that's why I think there will still be demand for these overseas products from people who really want to just go and yolo it.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we're thinking about this category, it feels like these are the most or some of the most investable assets in the market and you look at Ethereum's market cap and you you you know, you were uh coming out during David Hoffman's I sold all my ETH thing and being like, look, we hold a bunch a bunch of ETH. We're still very bullish. Um, but you look at the revenue numbers and Hyperlquid and Lighter are making more money than most L1s, if not like all of them. Yeah. And so we we had this conversation forever of like there's going to be this infra to apps shift, right, where like a lot of the investors will shift from investing the underlying into the applications. We're we're going to see some breakout apps generate a lot of revenue. Feels like

Hyperlid and Letter are kind of like firmly in that camp. Obviously, Poly Market's doing well, pump funds doing well, but really in the per category, let's just stay here. Like, when you're thinking about the the market cap, the valuations, the investability of Hypqui liquid at whatever it's at, lighter at a significantly less amount. >> Yeah. >> Like, are are these things top seven crypto assets, top 10 crypto assets? like hypoid's there I think 10 now but if these things are the most profitable uh with the largest potential TAM of a market potentially going to be the exchanges for finance going forward >> like are these not just like a full full port type of play why still hold ETH why hold Bitcoin why hold other L1s I was

talking to the Bitwise guys and I'm like guys when you're talking to your allocators is it not just like you're just stop shilling all your other L1 ETFs because you've got Hyperlid that generates a ton of money, has a very clear tokconomic flow, and has a very easy explanation to a a mega trend. Like, why would you even talk about anything else anymore? How do you think about like this consolidation of attention of capital from the allocator's perspective, from the investor's perspective? We're down a lot now. People are wondering what they want to do with their assets. Is it too late to buy hype, to buy lighter? Where do these things go? kind of what what's your take on the on how per's assets are kind of shifting the way that the average investor is thinking about what to buy? Look, this thing is generating

all this revenue. It's generating it, you know, it has very clear pre-commitments for buybacks. Why would I buy anything else? How do you think about this? >> So, well, first let me caveat, you know, I'm not in the business of giving investing advice. Sure. But I will kind of take my read of the situation which is like Hyperlid is not the first asset on chain that produces a ton of revenue. Actually the first by a long shot is BNB. >> BNB preceded Hyperlid makes way more money than Hyperlquid does. It is by far the largest business in crypto besides Tether. Um and um you know they make billions a year in profit. Um if you wanted to buy that you could. This is not new. You can always buy a revenue

generating business and and it's valued highly because it does that. It's it's a it's a very good business. People in the US don't like to talk about it, but it's way bigger than hyperlquid. It's it's been around for a very long time. >> If that's what you want, it's always been there. What Bitcoin and ETH represent is something fundamentally different. And and the thing is, look, um part of the reason why Hyperl is outperformed is not because it makes revenue. Like I said, BNB makes revenue. Um it makes it makes way more revenue than Hyperlid does. Um the reason why it's outperformed is because the story of one defi onchain trading has grown so much relative to CFI driven by hyperlquid and second the growth of RWAS specifically on trade XYZ. Those two are the are the reason why it's been growing

so much and why it's been so strong. Um otherwise like there's a bunch of exchange tokens that that buy and burn and do the same thing that that Hyperlid does, right? And at the end of the day like there's nothing that forces Hyperlid to make those sales. they are discretionary um from a from a protocol perspective they're doing the discretionary thing but you know one day they could they could decide to stop same way Binance could decide to stop um now all of that is to say um because they don't burn literally 100% right they burn like 98 or something or 99 um which tells you okay who decided the 1% or the 2% don't get burned um now >> the the last thing that I'll I'll I'll point out is that look um markets are forward-looking >> and it's very easy to just kind of gloss

over what that means, but like let's really understand what that means is that markets are forward-looking. They don't care about right now. They care about the future. What is Ethereum going to be worth in 20 years? What is Bitcoin going to be worth in 20 years? We don't talk about that very much in the industry, but I'm a VC. That's what I think about. I think about what happens in 10 years. In 20 years, in 20 years, I have no idea what's going to happen to perplexes. it's very hard to to draw the line out that far, which is why the multiples that you're given on these um these cash flows are not crazy high, right? They're not Google type multiples, right? And why not?

Because people believe that Google will be doing what it's doing for a very, very long time. Y >> Apple will be doing what it's doing for a very, very long time. Microsoft will be doing what it's doing for a very, very long time. For Perp Texas, we don't know. They literally just showed up and we know that the market structure can change because we just saw it change. So now that being said, Hyperlquid, Lighter, Variational, all these guys are crushing. They're incredible teams. They're performing incredibly well and they're making a lot of money and that's fantastic. But one thing that we know is that the underlying infrastructure does not seem to change. And all this stuff, the whole thesis is dependent on these things continuing to exist.

>> Yeah. >> So what is Ethereum going to be worth in 20 years? What else is going to be on Ethereum? How are we going to be thinking about blockspace? I don't know the answer to that, but my bet the bet that I'm making is that it's going to be larger than it is today. It's going to be a lot larger. And you know, I I bring up this point a lot, but I'll make it again, is that, you know, Bitcoin now is 18 years old. That means if you're going to college today, you don't remember a time before Bitcoin existed. >> Yeah. >> Now, Ethereum is 10 years old. All right. That means like you were eight years old. If you're entering college today, you were 8 years old when Ethereum was created, right? Which, you know, when I was 8 years old, I didn't

know anything about money or the economics or finance or any of that [ __ ] Um, and so give it another 10 years. Ethereum will be 20 years old. Bitcoin will be 28 years old. These things will become boring. And the people who are totally accustomed to this, you and I, but even the generation after us, they're going to look at all these assets as being obvious. >> Yeah. And as they step into the halls of power and as they start being the allocators of capital to them this stuff is going to be mundane. Like of course you're going to own some Bitcoin. Of course you're going to own some ETH, >> right?

>> The people today like I talk to allocators literally for half of what I do is go and talk to allocators, right? These are people who run the biggest endowments, the biggest institutions in the world. And >> there are always someone on their board, someone at the foundation, someone on the investment committee who's just like Bitcoin's a scam. I don't believe this stuff. This is not real. This is a bubble. This is going to go away. Yeah. Right. Um those people will die. >> They just actually will die. They will step out of power. And the generations for whom crypto is obvious and they've lived with it their whole lives will step into that power. That's why Bitcoin is worth what it's worth. That's why Ethereum is worth what it's worth. It's not look at the current cash flows and multiply them by some number.

>> Yeah. Yeah. you know, we've been having this conversation with the with Joe Shalom from Ethereum and from Sharplink from the Stellar CEO um from a couple other like L1 uh John Woo from Avalanche and the there seems to be a bit of a dichotomy in how we're thinking about this value conversation and this is pertains to what you're saying Ethan and Bitcoin are kind of in this Lindy class of their own and you know these other assets will get there in terms of time too >> but all of these L1 chains when when we Again, probably because of Trump and its administration over the last kind of year and a half being like, "All bets are off. All rules are off. Go take all your cash flows. Give it to your token.

We don't care." You know, all the SEC rules that that that kind of prohibited you guys from doing what you want to do on chain doesn't really exist anymore, at least not to this certain extent. And Hyperlid as well being like, "Hey, we're just going to do this. Good luck. Um, you know, catch us or just, you know, watch us win or whatever it is, right?" And so we ask these L1 teams and these investors what their what's the business model? What's the fees and blah blah blah and it's always well transactions on the chain make fees. Those fees go to some version of a buyback or burn and this is how we're going to be deflationary.

>> And then at the same time we in the conversation they're all talking to us about how they're trying to scale their chain. >> Yeah. and they're trying to lower the fees >> and they're trying to scale this thing as much as possible to have the best experience and lower their fees. And so Rob and I have been sitting here for like the last three weeks asking all these like founders, investors about their business model from from the L1 perspective and it's the same answer. And it just doesn't make sense to us. >> How do we how do we make sense of this? How do we make sense of we want to scale our L1, we want to scale our block space, make it better experience, and our business model is quite literally tied to the amount of fees that we generate.

>> Yeah. I mean I I don't think this is an economic mystery. Like you know what do you think happened to software? What do you think happened to computers? What do you think happened to operating systems? Like the answer was that you know buying Windows in 1995 was like hundreds of dollars to buy Windows. Now you can literally get it for like almost nothing. Um like shrink wrap software has basically gone away because prices went lower and lower and lower but we sold more of it. >> Right. >> I get the Like I get that it's the economies of scale. I don't mean to interrupt, >> right?

>> But it still doesn't make sense though. >> Why doesn't it make sense? I mean, look at what's happening with AI models. It's the exact same thing happening to us right now, which is that frontier level intelligence is now onetenth 100th the cost of what it cost a year ago and yet revenues are going up. >> Okay. So then isn't there going to be a part of the AI intelligence stack that's going to be just like very expensive and very Yes. >> costly and like high scale, right? >> Correct. Correct. So why >> that's like the mythos models, >> right? Right. And then you have a whole slew of like really good intelligence for like super cheap. So you kind of get like this like barbell.

>> That's not going to happen in the blockchain space because Ethereum is clearly like saying like look, we're trying to scale the L1 as much as possible. Ethereum kind of had this like where the manhatt, right? So like the most valuable block space is always going to command the highest fees even within a blockchain that the marginal transaction is relatively cheap. Okay. So what does that mean? It means um if you are trying to compete for like sniping the highest volume unis swap pair, >> you're going to have to pay a lot in the in the flashbox auction to win that piece of piece of uh of state, right?

>> Okay. Like that's going to be really expensive. But the, you know, if you just want to do a send, that's going to be super cheap because you're not fighting over over contested state. Yeah. So, it's sort of like, you know, uh um New York makes a lot of money through property taxes, right? Um it is not the case that all property in New York is expensive. If you go up to the Bronx, you go to Queens, you can get a place, you know, it's not cheap, but you know, it's not crazy. Um but if you want to live here, like in Manhattan, it's just horrifying what you're gonna have to pay, right? If you want to go to Williamsburg, it's like insane. So what what basically you're seeing is these chains will be uh price discriminating such that if you're fighting for really

really valuable state, you'll pay a lot. >> If you're just doing a simple sand, >> it's actually like, you know, pennies. >> Yeah. >> That's where we're going. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and so that's kind of like that that answers the question for the fee generation. >> Exactly. >> It's the it's the quality or the or the urgency of the transaction. And and this is this has existed for a while. >> Totally. >> But I'm telling you, nobody has said that. Well, I'm saying it. So, I'm here. I'm saying it. So, it's been said. So, you know, it's the same thing. Look, if you're if you're OpenAI, right? Vast majority, like 90% plus of OpenAI customers don't pay anything, >> right?

>> They literally pay nothing. They are purely expenditures. Now, OpenAI will eventually make that money back through advertising or whatever, right? So, they'll make something on them, but a small number of people are paying for almost everything, right? They're they have the enterprise contracts. They're doing the, you know, whatever. they've got the huge uh uh um you know outlays across their entire organization. They have the gigantic token bills. Um the same thing is true in crypto is that a relatively small number of people are paying and effectively subsidizing what everybody else is doing. I use AWS >> for almost nothing. I pay peanuts because and I get to, you know, spin up a a nice little server and go, you know, run my open claw on it or whatever. But if you're doing that um like Ethereum, it's the same story. You know, if you're

just doing simple sends or you're just putting some stuff into into a very cheap to do that, but if you want to go play the biggest games on Ethereum with the big money players, Yeah. it's going to cost you a lot in me. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh last thing for you, Hib. Um man, what what words do you have to say for the folks watching? There's quite a few live who are, you know, looking at the market today. They're wondering, they probably missed the AI trade. you know, they probably have been holding crypto for a while. They're watching stocks outperform. It's hard to be a believer right now.

>> Um, it's just hard to kind of be excited. >> How do you how do you think about >> just surviving here and kind of the point of maximum opportunity being ahead of us? >> Hard to see that. >> Yeah. >> But give us some words of wisdom here. >> Yeah. I mean, look, I've lived through a lot of days like this in crypto. Um, one of the things that gives me a special comfort at a time like this is that we didn't do anything. You know, like there are times when crypto goes down because, you know, FTX collapsed or BlockFi or, you know, some something that we did just totally [ __ ] up and ruined the whole shindig, right? But actually, right now, if you look at the fundamentals in crypto, >> they look great.

>> Yeah. >> Right. Like we're all the technology is working. We're continuing to scale underlying blockchains. Um, if you look at RWAS, you look at trading volume in DeFi, you look at DeFi relative to CFI, you look at um, you know, all the things that we're doing with respect to asset tokenization, stable coins, like the numbers are going up and to the right. Things are working. The regulatory regime is right around the corner. We're hitting alltime high in stable coin supply, right? The things that we said we were here to do, we are successfully doing now. Prices are not going up. That sucks. I feel that. I have a lot of this stuff, too. But like at the end of the day, prices are a leading indicator, not a sorry, they're a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator of where we are going. I believe that crypto is one of

these generational technologies and it also is going to have a massive impact on the world, on markets, on technology going forward. And AI is a part of that story. Um, crypto is not the only thing happening in the world. It's not supposed to be. If crypto is the only thing happening in the world, then we're [ __ ] Yeah. because there's nothing there's nothing of value to denominate. So, I'm not afraid of AI being valuable and running up. I think it it is going to mean that look, we're not the star of the show for a little while. I think it's okay. Look, it's a big world. But, um the question of whether or not crypto is fundamentally valuable or you're wasting your time here, I think the answer is unequivocally no.

>> Someone in the chat says, "Please don't say buy the dip. I will smash my phone." >> Not making any investment advice. No investment advice here. >> All right, Steve. Thank you so much, man. Cheers. Always good to be here, man.