🚨LIVE: CLARITY Vote This Week?! Saylor Sold BTC! Big Crypto Move Coming?! Squid, VanEck & Dinari In

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Feels good to be back. >> I think the Rollup is one of the most premier media brands [music] in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. [music] >> I mean it's in our library as we speak. >> Potentially multi-chain deployments. >> We are at Devconnect. [music] >> Hey everyone, here I'm Francesco from Space. >> [music] [music] [music]

[music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> JP Morgan, BlackRock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions.

It's just It's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish. >> He said it. He finally said it. >> I'm so bullish. >> And he's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. >> [music] [music] [music]

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top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> Rollup is my favorite. >> From all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry, come together for the Rollup. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]

>> Survive through math. Institutions aren't coming, they're simply here. Take control of major crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. >> [music] >> Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. >> Guys, welcome to the bull market. Welcome back to the Rollup August 4th, 2026. We are here live from South Florida, fresh off a trip to Vegas. Incredible times ahead. I don't know about you guys, but it feels like everything's about to come crumbling down or go absolutely ballistic to the upside.

Uh this is the state of the world on chain and uh it feels like it's everything is happening season. The US is intervening in Japan's national currency. Saylor sold $100 million worth of Bitcoin. Kings Clips is here in the chat with us. Ethereum is decreasing or proposing to reduce the inflation to Ethereum along with multiple other L1s. Uh yes, Kings Clips Saylor is selling. Ethereum is reducing inflation. Solana is reducing inflation. Near is making a proposal to pay validators with treasury yield so that they don't have to inflate their token in order to pay for the validator security. Uh so incredible things are happening on the timeline.

Tokenized equities are here in the US. Big shout out to Denari. Uh they're partnering with Circle. Uh we've got more things at play here. Uh tons tons happening. Clarity is on the precipice. It's do or die for Clarity. Uh these are the things that are happening right in front of our eyes as we draw towards the end of the bear market. We appreciate you guys being here with us. Kings Clips is in the chat. We've got a big shout out to Ploom.

At the tokenization tower, we've got big big old bulk of our team that is in person there. I'm in South Florida and uh we are experimenting with some new content format this afternoon. Guys, stay tuned. Very very excited for the launch of Aton on the streets. You guys know Aton. You know him. You love him. And uh he's going to be on the streets very very soon in a city near you. Getting to know all of you. Asking questions. Getting answers. Finding out more on the streets with Aton. And today's topics.

Tremendous show. Welcome to the roll up. Squid had their token generation event. Squid's TGE, they were a leader in the interrupt space. They're going to be joining us and discussing TGE in the current market conditions. Got to say, feels like the most opportune time to launch a token right now. Feels like we are at the precipice of a massive rally. That is when you want to launch your token. That's when new token listings uh can paint a very beautiful chart. Uh then we've got VanEck. Uh title on VanEck. Uh we know Van Eck very, very well. We've got Matthew Siegel that is going to be joining the show for us today. Uh the PM over there at Van Eck. And then we've got Spire

Labs, very Ethereum focused. I'm glad that we have this proposal from Justin Drake and company to reduce Ethereum inflation the same day that we have Spire's team joining the show. They've got an exciting announcement. And then Denari's co-founder uh we've got founder spelled wrong on today's topics. Let's make sure we clean it up, guys. Come on, come on, come on. Behind the scenes, I hope we're paying attention. Denari's co-founder is going to call in. Denari had a Fortune article today that went live announcing that they are coming to the US market and they're bringing tokenized equities with them. Today's topics, as always, powered by Trezor. Uh exciting or destabili- destabilizing times in the self-custody world. Uh the

cold card uh exploit is [snorts] uh raining havoc. Uh but Trezor can keep you guys safe. John, hi. Welcome to the show. Thanks for rocking with us. And uh before we move on, guys I'm going to tell you about Near. Uh or excuse me, no, I'm not going to tell you about Near. I'm going to tell you about Frax. Frax is our uh stablecoin partner. Uh open stable and border- borderless, genius compatible. I had a great uh chat and sit down with Frax in Vegas. Uh Sam's based in Vegas. He's uh talking to the Secretary of State of Las Vegas. Uh excuse me, of Nevada. And uh doing incredible things. There's a lot of large institutional uh institutions in Vegas. You guys know them as casinos.

But the reality is that they turn around billions of dollars and they can massively benefit from stablecoins. And so Sam and I had a great discussion about this and they are ahead of the curve as it pertains to US regulation in the stablecoin market becoming genius compatible before all of the other stable coins. Big big shout out to Sam and Frax. Next, the weather. It's hot, no surprise, and it's hot sponsored by Relay. Let's keep it moving. We've got plenty of tweets to get through today. Today's heat is sponsored by Relay.

85° patchy rain nearby. King's clips, very nice day in New York. That's why we've got our friends going on the streets. Before we get it over to our market segment, big shout out to Denari on a day in which they've got some exciting things happening. Denari had an article come out. They are bringing tokenized equities to market at scale. They have D-shares. And the cool thing about D-shares, you might think tokenized equities, how many SPV wrappers am I going through?

Well, these are actually stocks. These are actually equities. They give you all of the same benefits, shareholder rights as typical stocks do. Denari's advantage is that D-shares are positioned as securities under US securities law, rather than around it. Regulated posture is what a broker-dealer's risk committee is signing off on. So, big shout out to Denari, and they are now bringing tokenized equities to US investors. We're going to get into the nuances with Denari about why it's important that US equities tokenized US equities are in the US market because a lot of the value proposition around tokenized equities has been, "Hey, we're going to bring US equities abroad. We're going to broaden access abroad for the US equities

market." Everyone wants demand. Everyone wants access to these investors. US investors, they can already open US brokerage accounts. So, we're going to get into why it's important that we also tokenize US equities for US customers. We're seeing essentially flat, but man, I was chatting with uh my co-host Andy and uh man, the thing what the thing that we're seeing play out here, it really does feel like this seismic shift because for so long this was a bear market where, you know, things were getting drawn down. Uh it was almost like any sort of bullish news would still just face headwinds in the market because of momentum.

Uh momentum was down, it was pulling all the fundamentals down with it, you know, we had this massive news DTCC is launching, you know, tokenization services, New York Stock Exchange RWAs tokenization taking the world by storm. All of this bullish narrative momentum that's playing out. Uh and yet we just couldn't catch a bid. And so what we're seeing play out now feels fundamentally different. Uh and it's essentially that momentum has stalled. We've reached a point where there is very little volatility. That means no more momentum to the downside. Uh and so in this flurry of good news that we're continuing to see, uh no reaction. In the flurry of bad news that we're seeing, no reaction. And so what we've seen is that momentum has

been sucked out of the market and now we're able to value these things based purely on fundamentals. And now it almost feels like momentum is starting to shift because we had bad news uh that is now no longer weighing the market down. And so now the market has gotten totally apathetic to both good news and bad news. We can totally value things based on fundamentals and this is the transitionary point where momentum starts to return. So I'm very excited. It feels like a disbelief part of the market feels very apathetic. Uh and that is what uh the market conditions that we find ourselves in today. Sully Sports Cards wants Bitmainer content, let's roll. We will cover Ethereum's uh proposal to reduce inflation. This directly affects Bitmain's preferred

offering. Uh I think it was at 9 1/2% or 11 1/2%. The thing that I keep coming back to on Bitmain, uh they just continue to buy where Saylor is now selling. So, I think you've got sort of this three-person race, this three-company race for the best digital asset treasury management. You've got Tom Lee with Bitmain, you've got Saylor with strategy, and you've got David Chamath with hyper hyperliquid strategies. For a while there, I would say David Chamath was in the lead while Saylor and Tom Lee were just buying on the way down. Now, I think Tom Lee is in the lead. He's doing incredible things. He's continuing to buy. ETH is turning around.

Saylor's selling. He's dead last. And I think David Chamath is just kind of feeling out the market. Do think hyperliquid is bouncing off the bottoms now. New type trader, yeah, it's tough if you're a cold wallet company, not going to lie. I feel more safe using a custodian like BitGo or simply just buying a Bitcoin ETF. No one hacks BlackRock, and they have FDIC. Yes, that is part of the conversation. CZ from Binance made this made this point as well. It is just statistically safer to keep your money in a centralized exchange at this point rather than self-custody. Market is tired of being bipolar worse than my last girlfriend. Kings Clips, man, you're a character. And uh solely, Tom Lee is restless.

Very well-run company, excited for the future. I think that is what we're seeing play out. These are the markets powered by Zama. Let's check where Zama's token is today. These guys were doing fantastic. We had a Zama privacy day the other day last week where we covered all of their updates from quarter two, and they find themselves in the midst of the privacy narrative. Squid's token went live. We're going to be talking with the Squid team in just a few minutes. Let's look up Zama. Where is this thing headed? Down a little bit, but man, almost at that 5-cent mark. Had a massive jump. Feels like this is the correction that we were all waiting for. I mean, it almost basically doubled, maybe 80% climb from

30 30 3 and 1/2 cents to 6 cents. Uh now back down to 5 cents. So, yeah, pretty uh pretty baller on Zama's front. Raised a ton of cash helping uh keep RWA tokenization confidential. Guys, let's continue to move. Uh big shout-out to Zama uh on the equities front. And big shout-out to Near as well. The uh Near's another team that had a proposal go live uh with their proposal to reduce the inflation. They had a more novel way of looking at this rather than just arbitrarily lowering the inflation. They said that they're going to create a sovereign fund. It's going to start with about $30 million. They're going to generate yield on the 30 million, and

the yield is going to pay the validators for economic security. This is extremely exciting. This is ultimately what takes an L1 inflationary currency and makes it fixed supply or even deflationary, uh which is obviously uh going to have significant impacts on the economics of this token. So, I'm watching the Near token. You guys know I'm a believer. Uh I think this is uh this is very bullish development. And uh Near's also doing great things with uh AI. Uh they released Near staking. So, now you can lock up Near, use it to pay for AI credits, as well as Iron Claw 1.0. So, I mean, I just I think Near's going to be a leader of uh this upcoming cycle, uh especially as AI equities continue to

rally. I would imagine that there's a rotation uh into crypto AI as well, Near leading on that front, as well as the privacy front. Uh Lighter has a updated design, uh refreshed interface improvements, navigation market views. Uh these guys are doing incredibly well. Uh there's a cot catch-up uh between Lighter and Hyperliquid playing out uh right in front of our eyes. Uh the rifleman in the chat is saying that the clarity vote is imminent. Let's go ahead and play the clip with Lighter as we think about the leaders of this next perps supercycle.

>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> All right.

Very, very [music] cool. Uh this is Lighter bringing a new design to market. Uh I mean, for so long it felt like Hyperliquid was leading in the innovation front because they were bringing pre-IPO perps. They were bringing these things to market. That was very cool. Um now, uh and I see you guys talking about this in the chat, uh is Trade XYZ going to leave Hyperliquid? I don't know. There was speculation that they are raising capital. I doubt it. Uh and yeah, we did see Kobe confirm that. Um Lighter on the other hand feels like the more innovative perps team right now.

So, you consistently see them shipping new order types, shipping new asset listings, shipping new designs, new UX, web designs, overall usability. Uh these are things that are happening uh on the Lighter side. And just frankly, I get it. Hyperliquid still have a nice place to trade. Very, very liquid. But, uh ultimately, uh it's still an open open game. I mean, this is a wide-open race. And uh the more innovative team is positioned to win. Uh so, big shout out to Lighter. Um I mean, you got all the user experience benefits of a of a centralized exchange, except uh this is a ZK decentralized uh perps platform. So, very cool how they were able to uh bring together the best of both worlds. Uh bullish Lighter, and

I'm sure you guys saw we posted a tremendous uh interview with uh the founder of Lighter, Vlad, uh just a couple of days ago. So, go check that out. Let's keep moving along. I mentioned this uh in our NEAR shout out for today, but here's the proposal from Illia. Uh he proposes a new type of protocol fund, posted this on the NEAR governance forum. I thought DAOs were dead. Here's the founder of a protocol posting on the forum himself. Uh new type of fund to pay for public goods and make token economics more sustainable for the long term. Very, very cool to see a founder focusing on the token. This is obviously the value accrual mechanism.

Uh the thing is that this is already Technically, it's fully diluted, uh but there is an inflation mechanism baked into NEAR. And so, in this proposal, I just took a quick skim through it, but it does say how um the uh this new sovereign fund uh on NEAR, from its treasury, would effectively pay for what the token inflation is currently paying for. And so, if this is able to be successful, you would effectively have $30 million. And again, I you don't know how much this is able to generate. Uh on the very aggressive side, let's say it you know, grew 10% a year, you're generating $3 million per year. How much does NEAR need in an economic security budget? I don't know. Uh but it feels

like the validators are willing to um they're willing to secure the network for much less these days. It used to be like, well, if you had, you know, a billion dollars on the network, you needed a billion dollars in economic security. Not quite the equation anymore. Proof of stake is a little bit different. Um and so that's uh that's kind of what we're seeing play out. Uh I think this fund would start out with 30 million. We don't know how much yield is going to be generated, but ultimately that yield is going to be used to pay validators. We also don't know how much uh in uh service fees these validators are going to charge, but I'd imagine it's it's a rather smallish amount relative to the amount of TVL and fees and you know, uh

revenue that the NEAR protocol is generating. So, I think NEAR is crushing it. This one still feels a little little bit under owned. It's just uh you know, it had such a run-up in previous cycles that it's going to be difficult to get up to those levels, but they've also got this incentive program that I haven't heard them talk a ton about, but it's like this 333 like if NEAR reaches $3.33 and then some other dol- uh numbers some other price targets above that, it unlocks like these community rewards. So, if the community rallies together, hits this price target, and if the you know, moving average stays above a price for a certain amount of time, like everyone gets paid.

There's obviously details in there. Do your own research, but uh very very cool uh program to see similar to uh some of these other like KPI incentive programs that we've seen. Guys, uh we also have a liquidity protocol that is doing tremendously well. They just announced Aqua, the shared liquidity protocol uh 1inch. Uh products like 1inch Aqua let you approve one wallet balance uh to back multiple positions at the same time across pairs, ranges, and chains. You're not splitting your tokens, and you're not depositing them, but you're not leveraging either. It's a totally different way to keep your liquidity active in more markets. Uh if you want to know more, check out 1inch.com/aqua.

Uh we're not going to spend a whole ton of time talking about the gazillionaire Jeff Bezos. Uh Uh but effectively what you have here is the hyperscalers returning to prominence. So, Amazon was up like 15% the other day. Uh Jeff Bezos probably made the $4 billion that he dumped in a single trading session. Uh pretty insane in terms of gains. Uh this is a trillion-dollar company going up like a shitcoin. I mean, literally like half a trillion dollars added to market cap in the span of a few hours. Uh so, yeah. No surprise Jeff Bezos is taking a little bit off the table uh and booking some of those profits. Um I don't think there's much else going on here other than that. I don't think he's doing inside of insider trading or

anything like like that. Uh yeah, he took a little bit off the top because it was, you know, 15% uh candle to the upside. Uh what the bigger story that's happening here though is that, you know, we sort of said that the Mag 7 was slowing down and then you had this rotation trade that went further down the risk curve, right? It was started with in in the frontier models private markets, right? But the the hyperscalers built out this massive CapEx expenditures. They raised a ton of money. Uh then they ended up spending all the money that they raised. They put it into memory. They put it into chips. They put it into DRAM. And then those stocks ended up going up because they had all this increased demand from the hyperscalers buying their products. Uh but now we've seen all of those

uh memory companies, chip companies, DRAM companies correct. Hyperscalers, they also kind of stalled. Now, uh it feels like the cycle is resetting and uh the hyperscalers are leading the way. So, Amazon is doing uh is doing just that. Let's keep moving along. Uh we've got clarity this week. So, Senator Thune. I think this is Senate Leader Thune or Speaker uh Thune reaffirms the Senate will vote on the Clarity Act before the August 7th recess. Uh Monday Senate schedule had no vote of the bill four working days remain. This is as of yesterday.

Uh today still wasn't on the docket. And so we are going to need to uh just continue to monitor to the situation. Today's Tuesday. It's not on the docket today. So we've got Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We got three days to get a cloture vote. If there's a cloture vote, it basically means that the Overton window is now inclusive of this bill. Uh they essentially they vote to decide whether or not they even want to talk about the bill. Uh not just that it's going to go through or not. But the thesis is that if they can get this cloture vote before the the recess on Friday, um

then you can put this forward on the floor and then you can actually start talking about it and the theory is that if we can get the cloture vote uh and it gets the 60 votes that it needs, then it is a much, much higher likelihood that it actually ends up going through and we actually do get the vote for real and the vote does go through. So we are watching this like a hawk. We had several conversations about clarity over the last few days in Las Vegas. And so this is something that we are just continuing to watch um because it is it is make or break it time uh for the Clarity Act.

So let's continue. Uh next up we've got Let's see. Let's see. What do we have up next? Uh we've got uh another company that is shifting their assets uh from the LayerZero protocol over to Chainlink uh CCIP. According to Chris, who is a friend of the show uh and a representative of Chainlink, the tally is near $15 billion. Of course, remember LayerZero was I mean, there was a whole debacle when it came to Kelp DAO and, you know, RS ETH and all this all this shenanigans, but uh ultimately it felt like Layer zero was to blame for this exploit. Uh

that cost a tremendous amount of value. It was a huge headache um and it threw off this RS ETH peg as a result of the DVM getting uh uh hacked and it was configured in a very centralized way to begin with. And so, uh there's been sort of this capital flight off of Layer zero and in this case onto Chainlink. Uh and that is not just something that's been uh isolated to this move with BitGo. Uh BitGo is the custodian the primary custodian for wrapped Bitcoin. Uh this is obviously still a billion-dollar protocol.

Uh I even though you do have multiple other Bitcoin alternatives, wrapped Bitcoin is still very much up there in the lead with the rest of them. Um And so, you've got Chainlink that is sort of just in the position where they've been doing this a long, long time. Uh they're uh they're trustworthy, they're resilient, they haven't experienced some of the vulnerabilities that Layer zero has found themselves with. And so, uh they are now in a position to subsume a lot of the capital that is flowing off of Layer zero. A lot of that has found its way over to Chainlink. Um so, you know, that is just ultimately uh what we're seeing play out.

$7.3 billion in wrapped Bitcoin assets now part of the Chainlink CCIP program. Uh we've got a couple more tweets that we're going to get through uh before we move on. Just about two more. Um and so, we're going to cover our partner Denari who has uh founders from Stripe and Apple alumni. They partnered with Circle to offer tokenized stocks to US investors. This is a fascinating development. They've been friends of the show for a long, long time. We know tokenized equities are extremely exciting.

Uh this article is paywalled, so we're not going to scroll too far down, but uh what happens here is that Denali plans to put the entire S&P 500 on blockchain rails, letting users buy and sell tokenized shares through self-custody wallets. Obviously, um a big value proposition of tokenized equities is that it democratizes and broadens access so that people around the globe can participate in US capital markets as a result of these things being tokenized, but now Denali's bringing tokenized equities to America, to US investors who presumably already have access to these assets. So, you might ask, "Well, if we already have access and the value proposition is broadening access, why do we need this in the US?"

I think there's something deeper at play here. I think the real play is going to be collateralizing, margining, and making these equity assets more productive in the US. We don't have a very sophisticated margining system for these equities. And so, that is what I think we're going to see, and I think Denali is going to help us get there. I'm excited for a world where I can have, you know, hyperscalers, I can have Mag 7, I can have indices, I can have all these things as collateral, or I can have them in a vault, they can be earning interest. There's so much more that we can do with our stock tokens, with our tokenized equities once they're tokenized, that we can't do currently with equities in a typical brokerage account. Uh so, it's very cool, and they

partnered with Circle uh to use USDC for instant account funding. They also take advantage of uh instant settlement, which is very cool. And uh yeah, 60 trillion dollars in the US equities markets, uh Denali is going to be tapping into that on the tokenization front. All right. And without further ado, let's go ahead into our daily equity segment for today. Nice little segue there from Denali. Our daily equity segment is powered by Denali, and we're going to get right into it now. >> [music] >> Daily Equity powered by Dinari tons

happening in the equity markets. We've hit all-time highs today after the correction after Leopold was liquidated. Citadel says says this is not a bear market rally. This is literally the the the cycle has reset and it's time to go higher in the equities markets. CMS here, big uh big fan of the uh of CMS and and he's a friend of the show. He's been on a couple times. Always a great conversation. Here he's saying that he thinks an L1 should try and bootstrap equities commodities trading by buying a bunch of it assuming they have cash and then just flooding a bunch of pools against their L1 is as much liquidity as possible trying to set a standard for the L1 to trade against these stock tokens. It feels like Robinhood has done exactly this with

ETH. If you go on Robinhood chain, uh they have seeded a bunch of pools. It's not quite flooding the market with these equities tokens with liquidity, but it is denominating most of these trades in ETH. Um I think what CMS says here is just incredibly thoughtful uh because this is the way to just vampire attack a ton of liquidity and then become the de facto place in order to get access to these tokenized equities markets on chain. And so if you do this, let's just play this out for the sake of our daily equity segment. If you were to flood the market with a bunch of equities tokens, let's say you just bought up a ton of equities, you know, as a labs company and then just permissionlessly um

put your token that you wanted uh into a pool with these equities, you can do exactly this, uh create a bunch of liquidity. Anytime someone wanted access or exposure to these equities on chain, they would go through your token of choice. You could do this with ETH, you could do this with Solana, you could do this with really any token. Uh but I agree with Sam as that this makes sense to do at the L1 level because then they're the ones with the most the most capital. They can flood the market with liquidity and uh this is essentially uh the way in which you can bootstrap liquidity and become the de facto venue for trading these equities tokens.

Um that's been daily equity for today, guys. I think it's just a matter of time uh before we see uh someone play out this strategy. Coming up next, we've got uh Fig and X-Tina, the founders of Squid. Uh I mean, these guys have been building for a long, long time. Fig and Squid just go together like uh salt and pepper, peanut butter and jelly. And uh it's a big congratulations to them for launching the Squid token. These guys are uh they've been building for a long time, like I said. Uh we're going to get them up on the show in right now. They're ready in the back, so

let's go ahead and bring them up. Big congratulations for launching the Quid token. These guys are crypto native, you can tell because they use the uh the money symbol as part of the ticker to spell Squid. And uh the ticker is Quid. Guys, uh Fig and X-Tina, welcome to the show. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much and and thank you for the shout-out. We're very happy with the launch, but I think even more happy with the ticker. >> [laughter] >> Awesome. I mean, uh we've been we've been friends for a while. We've wanting to get you guys on the show. Thanks for staying patient in the back while we uh we made our way through the news section. It's always fun when we can chat with a new team that just went live with their token. Typically, we see like some eye bags, some like sleepless

nights leading up to these things. And uh and you guys you guys look like uh you know, you guys have been hard at work, but you guys look great. And uh it's really, really cool to see this come to fruition. So, just tell us like how does it feel to to have this token live in the market um on a day like today? >> I I think first of all, like euphoric, you know, we're really really happy. We're so proud of the team. Uh so proud of and you know, grateful for all everyone that's believed in us and gotten us to this to this place. Uh but I I I think you know, Fig used that uh perfectly earlier. Like you pay for this little life force. I think I'm wearing my glasses so you can't see but the rings are there, you know? Like

>> [laughter] >> My my uh yeah, my whoop score is like terrible. >> [laughter] >> Fig, um yeah, Fig Fig, you too? Like sleepless nights or I mean, you guys have been building, you guys know how it works in crypto. Like we we've seen this before, but launching a token is like nothing else right? >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, we've been doing it for it's 5 years now, right? So, it's been a lot of life force spent on this, but definitely the last 6 months leading up to this token launch.

It has been Yeah, it's been a big sprint, but it's an amazing result. So, so uh yeah, we're really happy. >> And so, tell us like why now? Because you guys have been building for so long, you've seen the ups and downs in the bridge space, cross-chain space, payments in general. You've seen all of these developments play out. What what made you guys decide like, "Hey, now is the time to launch a token?" >> Cuz no one else would, right? No, I think uh you know, we were pretty aligned from day one that we wanted to focus on building a product first. We wanted to focus on building a product that uh there was a clear use case for, one that is beautiful, one that is easy to use, and one that is secure, and more importantly, one that has a continuous

high uh retention rate of users, right? So, effectively product market fit. Like like that is what we wanted to solve for. Uh and once we decided that, you know, we were sufficiently at that level, we wanted to start thinking about a token to to and and implement that into the ecosystem, right? Uh, and I think ultimately, you know, you have to make those decisions independent of market conditions, even though that may feel scary and it may feel counterintuitive. Um, like you need to know when the time is ready and that needs to be a decision based on on your own metrics, right?

Um, and and that's what led us to doing it to doing it now. >> Well, like you said, you you guys were, you know, more intentional and proactive than just letting the market decide for you, but it also feels like now is the time, even if you were looking at the market conditions. I mean, it feels like we're at the precipice of some some market conditions improving, kind of this transition from bear to bull. Um, and so that is what people ultimately want to see. If you're looking, you know, a year or two from now in hindsight, it's going to look pretty nice if if the market does turn around and uh, rising tide lifts all boats, right?

>> Yeah, I I think there's a there's an element of we're so close to tokens and the market that our product is buying tokens on all these different chains and and I think we could tell if over the last few years that we were at the end of a bull market and um, that a lot of the tokens launching were really for extraction only and that's not what we're looking to do, so it just I think we were um, we're also very cautious of of that. And it it feels like a really exciting time for the industry.

Um, people aren't realizing just what's possible, I think with crypto. The old dreams of of sort of DeFi, I think we've we've moved on from and we've got there's obviously part of that week. >> growth in the next 6 months not 6 months not necessarily just on Squid but in the whole industry.

>> Yeah. It I mean it feels like we are at this convergence point between several super cycles. We've got tokenization. We were chatting about tokenized equities a little bit earlier and then stable coins of course perpetuals like so much is coming on chain. A lot of that is becoming siloed. We know that there's not going to be one chain to rule them all like there you know was a thesis that was going to be the case there for a while and so we're going to need cross chain. We're going to need routing and you guys have done 6 billion according to my notes here in volume all time and you know pretty much been always on for the last 5 years um so just talk us through like what the growth strategy is and then tell us

about how the growth strategy correlates to value accrual. These are the kinds of things that like everyone wants to know about these days as it pertains to tokens is like okay if the protocol generates money is that money going to flow to an Equity Labs company or is it going to flow you know to my bags right to the token. Can you just talk us through how value accrual works at the Squid at Squid? >> Yeah of course. So I think you know value accrual to to the token holders are is a incredibly important for us and that's absolutely how we've structured this. I think ultimately like we're already we're already fee

generating and I think you know subject to subject to governance and and subject to to further approvals like that will effectively lead to to buybacks Um, and we we of course we also have staking implemented to the token. So, there's a very clear flywheel effect as to as to how there is value accrual. >> Awesome. And obviously a big part of this starts with fees through the protocol. The protocol grows, it's able to monetize, and then like you said that that flows into the value accrual component. So, let's just talk about, you know, the fees that you guys have been able to generate as a protocol up to this point. Where we at now, and then how do we 10x this over the next couple of years?

>> Sorry, I was muted. Um, yeah, so the the fees we have on the on the app are coming through some of our partners. We've got about over the years we've worked with 1,500 different businesses. A lot of them don't exist anymore cuz that's crypto, but we still got a few hundred live and and there's fees being generated on those. We've got fees on cross-chain swaps, bridging, single-chain swaps inside our own apps as well. We've got quite a few apps, both both our own on our website, but also in partnership with Minipay.

Um, and then we have also a lot of fees which are generated off-chain as well. Not necessarily fees from from swaps, but where these are all part of the same ecosystem. So, you know, Squid is a really really experienced and powerful tech team. We're mostly focused on like building really good products, good engineering, good brand, good design. And we work with a bunch of different partners to build crypto solutions. And I think over this next few years, like you say, we're at a precipice.

Um, we're seeing real finance start to come on chain or slightly be outdone by by on chain. >> [music] >> And I think we've seen some of these deals progress much faster than in the last few years. Like these things are starting to happen, and the revenue that we should be able to generate generate from that, I think we'll outgrow whatever the 10,000 real users of crypto are today. It's I think it's going to get into proper institutions and like wider retail. >> And is there a particular segment of this kind of like impending market that you guys are focused on? We've heard, you know, some companies really hyper focus on the non-speculative,

uh you know, securities, if you will. Like some of these funds, the bidels, right? And they're starting to go in a more KYC'd route. We've had other ones go in a more, you know, equity focused route, more like the speculative ones. But But again, you know, kind of in this component of RWAs, I'd imagine that there's still a massive market here for crypto native tokens. And so, where are you guys hyper focusing and targeting, um or is there particular routes? Uh you mentioned a few, you know, great partners. Uh is there any routes that you guys are prioritizing? What do you think is the the you know, unique differentiation, the edge that Squid has versus some of the other cross-chain enablers out there?

>> True, yeah. Our um our biggest focus on partners. We've got three big focuses. One is Ripple, who I think doesn't don't get enough credit in the crypto ecosystem, but are doing an amazing job. Um they have this approach with RWAs where they're trying to make them native. Like an RWA can be just a receipt token of something which is off-chain. Uh you know, it's actually an equity, that's the native part. But Ripple's trying to bring things natively onto the onto the blockchain, and and they've got the treasury and like the uh the relationships in Wall Street and all over the world, actually, to to make

this happen. So, we're working really closely with them on um you know, growing their chain, growing their tokenization efforts, working with them on payments as well. They've got um amazing stablecoin called R USD that we work with. Um and then another very powerful institutional chain is Canton who we just launched on few weeks ago. And you only need to do a quick Google search to see Canton's got some incredible partnerships. I think the DTCC, got a Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, like we've got huge names um behind them and I think that's still fairly early days in terms of real use, but um we're seeing pilots come online. Squid's there and we're

uh you know, very well integrated throughout the ecosystem already. We're working with most projects that um that are live there. So Canton's another really good one and then um Stocks I think are really exciting. Um just the idea of having global assets available to retail. Uh no matter where you are and you just need you can self-custody it. is incredible. So as well as those like huge institutional uh sides, we have a few other names on the institutional side we can't talk about yet. Um I think Ando and Next Stocks are crushing on retail and we're going to be doubling down there as well.

>> I think just to yeah, just to add to that. I mean, we've built like a real expertise in in connecting and and also adding support for these more uh what should we call them? Exotic exotic exchange rate and like that sets us up extremely well for success with in terms of adding support for all these asset types that are now coming out chain, right? So like Figment hit the the nail on the head there with in terms of of global access. Uh and I think you're exactly right, you know? Like we now as an industry, not just us, but as an industry, we have product market fit. And and it's like it's amazing, you know, that we have we have all of this. And then for Structure is is truly there to to build a a pure financial system

uh that involves self-custody. And uh uh yeah. >> Man, I'm I want to be a believer in self-custody, but it's been tough the last few days, man. It's been tough. Um I do think we get there uh and you know, with hardware wallets and with uh you know, some other tools, I think we can we can bolster a lot of that um and ultimately put the hand you know, the power in the hands of of the people, put the custody and the assets back in in the people's hands so that otherwise, it feels like you [snorts] know, we what we end up with if we go too far in the direction of oh, centralized exchanges are better than self-custody. If we go too far in that direction, it feels more like you know, some of these like consortium chains with tokenized

deposits are going to be moving capital behind the scenes rather than cuz I take I take it I and I realize that this is going to require some context. I take it that, you know, your business primarily benefits from users with their own assets moving in across chains. That's where a lot of the flows come from. Um whereas, you know, if there was like institution that was maybe moving a lot of capital, but not doing it very frequently, maybe you guys could tell me how you react to that. Like the institutional use case of a lot of capital, but maybe only moving once a day or twice a day versus like a lot of retail flow that is moving very frequently and collectively is a lot of volume, but you know, maybe small

transaction size. How does, you know, your business react to to those two different use cases and are you targeting one in particular? >> Yeah, I think you're right. We we will stick to retail and small enterprises. Um and I think that's partly why the partnerships we're focusing on are so interesting because Ripple has their own payments team who can do absurd size like close to transfer size and um that's going to remain off chain. That's not going to be self-custodial. They'll KYB. They'll just handle the $100 million transfer you want to do if if you want to do it.

But, they're not going to go and add support for all of these different chains, all these tokens. There's so many stablecoins appearing these days, and you need some kind of normalization layer for them. So, I think as we uh mature in crypto, we're going to be blending these two solutions. We're going to have the sort of the Squids of the world which can get you anything anywhere very quickly, no KYC, um and then you have the Ripples of the world where maybe they um they need to KYB, but they can do very large size and just a limited set of tokens. And we're already seeing institutions all over the world go in this direction, I think. We're We've done a lot of work in Korea the last 6 months and have some

good institutional adoption there. We're seeing like similar thing where there's clear use cases where it's not It's not good enough to have a uh enterprise um user experience in a lot of cases. Even businesses want things to be easy, right? They don't need They don't want it to always just be a very slow, manual process. They want to just go to UI and then do something quickly. So, I think Squid will still be able to sit in that range of um of being able to serve most people. And then once it gets into real super size, um it's just going to go off chain.

>> Yeah. Makes sense. All right, guys. Well, congratulations. I mean, it's been absolutely incredible to see the rise and uh the journey Interop and cross-chain has gone on for, you know, gone through so many ebbs and flows. And so, now that the token is finally here, I'd I'd love just, you know, a last word on uh on, you know, if you were to give a message to the community, our community as well as the Squid community, to close this out here, you know, what is what is the elevator pitch on why they should buy squid. >> Well, >> [laughter] >> Not financial advice.

>> I was going to say I don't know if we can, huh? Except looking at like if our our testament of life force right now is a is a testament to to the effort that we're putting into this. >> [laughter] >> Well, you guys have been working hard. I've seen you at several conferences over the years. So, it it really is very very cool to see. Um congratulations and I would love to have you guys on again and you know, we'll get this 6 billion of volume to a 10 billion dollars in volume real soon. >> Thanks, Laura. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, guys. And congrats on your success as well, you know, it's been it's been cool to see over the years.

>> Much appreciate We got to stick together. We're trio G's at this point, all right? >> Congratulations. >> All right, guys. Thank thanks so much for joining. We will we'll see you again to real soon. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks, y'all. Fig and Christina couldn't happen to a better group there. Very very fun and good friends of the show. Really appreciate them for coming on and we're going to keep the show moving. We've got Matthew Siegel PM at VanEck coming up. So, he is going to be our AI super cycle episode four today and we're going to get him ready in the back. I think he is just about ready.

AI super cycle tons happening on the equity side. I'm excited to get into everything with the on-chain economy and everything that he's seen in the market front. So, let's go ahead and get AI super cycle. Andy's in the chat, my co- my co-founder, my co-host out there skiing Patagonia like a legend. That's that's the man out there. Portfolio update. Yeah, let's get into a portfolio update here with our with our boy Matthew Siegel from VanEck. Let's go ahead and get AI Supercycle rolling.

We're going to do a quick standby. We'll be back on the AI Supercycle. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Yo, yo, yo. What's going on, guys? This is Etan with The Roll Up.

We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City, getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes. People who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere, all five boroughs. We're taking over the 212. >> We get deep.

>> [music] >> You know we get deep. We get We get deep. We get deep. We get We get We get deep, huh? You know we get deep. >> [music] [music] >> You know we get deep.

>> [music] >> We get deep, huh? We get You know we get deep. >> [music] >> We get deep on. We get deep. You know we get deep. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]

[music] >> We get deep on. We get deep. [music] You know we get deep. >> Welcome back to AI Supercycle, our [music] premier AI show airing every single week presented by NEAR. We cover the ins and outs of decentralized AI, privacy, and the future of this massive technology. NEAR is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps.

You can check out NEAR's latest AI product at near.ai. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. All right, we are here and we are back with AI Supercycle, uh the uh head of digital assets research at VanEck, uh Matthew Siegel is joining us today. We're going to be chatting about when this equities trade is going to rotate back into digital assets. I'm excited to get into it with Matthew Siegel. Matt, thanks so much for joining us today, man. >> Good to be with you.

>> Absolutely. Um Matt, maybe you can just give us an update on, you know, what what you're seeing out there. You know, it feels like we're transitioning, you know, we had a market condition where it felt like no matter any kind of good news that we had, the market wouldn't react positively in the digital assets. You know, we had DTCC coming on. Clarity looked like it was coming through. These things just weren't generating any kind of upward momentum. It feels like we've transitioned into a market where now we have Saylor selling. Clarity doesn't look like it's going to go through. It's not like we have any negative momentum, either. Market feels totally apathetic.

Um and it feels like the equities market and the AI trade is just swallowing up all of the liquidity. Can you just tell us how you're seeing this? Is it Are you seeing this, too? And and what is your reaction to what's happening out there in the market? >> Yeah, I think the first 5 months of the year were a very concentrated market. And [clears throat] what you what we saw was that the companies that were spending the most on CapEx had the the best performing stocks.

Uh uh and since June 1st, that that relationship has flipped. Um I'm putting aside the last few days where we bounced off the social awareness bottom, it was the company spending CapEx that that were getting punished. Uh so, you know, I think Bitcoin and crypto kind of fell into the software bucket, right? So, the the semi-to-software ratio was uh something that a lot of people were tracking. And in the end, Bitcoin is software, happens to be open-source software. Uh but the you know, the things that you can do with cloud code and with codex, they're they're having meaningful impact on some

of these open source software projects that are, you know, they their upgrade cycles are are not as fast, not as top-down driven as like web two companies. You can't just force an upgrade. And we started to see, you know, vulnerabilities. And maybe it started with like the Zcash issue. Uh, but I think that kind of software underperforming is a lot of what's been weighing on Bitcoin and crypto. Uh, and and then it's just, you know, the four-year cycle and people kind of respecting that pattern. So, I'm hopeful that um, this kind of changing equity market regime that we've seen since June will

create some more balance, some more dispersion in the returns, and will bring back, you know, the ability to harvest alpha from kind of single stock positions, single asset positions, rather than just the factor bet. I don't think it has to be, you know, A works and B doesn't, B works and A doesn't. I think the market will be more nuanced than that. And in terms of my own positioning, still pretty exposed to the to the AI infra theme via the Bitcoin miners.

Optimistic that Q4 will bring a bottom to Bitcoin and and some again some more balance to the market, but I'm also like kind of happy to buy on good news when there's some volume, rather than play this chop which we seem to be in with the Bitcoin price. >> Okay. Let's talk about where you're positioned now, and then we'll get into maybe the court Q4 bottom and and and some more of that thinking. But where you're positioned now, um there's some tickers here, but effectively it's Bitcoin miners converted into AI data centers uh because they've already built out the infrastructure. They've got power and energy capacity in rural areas, and this

is all of the same raw components that we need to do a data center and AI. They can take the same hardware that they already have, switch it to a different product or different end end product with the same raw materials, end up becoming way more profitable. Mara, Riot APLD WULF these are some of the tickers here. And so um you know, this seems like it's a trend that's going to continue to play out. Data centers are just now getting built out and and there's still plans for a whole lot more. Um one question is how long you think this trend to continue for? And then the other is like what kind of adverse

effects here happen on Bitcoin if so much of the computing power and the hash power ends up leaving and going into the AI world? You know, obviously we have this mechanism where things balance out. Hash power leaves to AI, the difficulty adjusts, and it becomes easier to mine Bitcoin. But, at what point do we reach some systemic um effects of a lot of hashing hash power leaving the Bitcoin network? Could that pose for some systemic issues um to the Bitcoin price?

>> Yeah, so uh our largest source of returns in the strategy that I manage, which is the NODE ETF, and we launched uh now 15 months ago, uh and we've managed to outperform Bitcoin by nearly 100 percentage points, uh and that was driven by, you know, identifying uh early that the Bitcoin miners were being uh you know, valued at uh a very low multiple of the megawatts of power that they control relative to the few data center REITs that existed at the time.

So, you know, the early Bitcoin mining model was dilute shareholders with equity issuance to go out and acquire Bitcoin mining ASICs faster than your competition so that you can at least keep up with the growing hash rate. But, because the you know, your revenue fall by 50% every 4 years, it it was kind of a melting ice cube problem and a very capital-intensive not particularly profitable business model. And what you know, what we can see now from the debt issuance, not just from the hyperscalers, but on the back of these data center construction leases, is the cost of capital for these names has collapsed. They're able to fund their capital needs in the debt markets

instead of the equity markets. And each successive lease that's been signed has pretty much been at better economics. And then you add on the lower interest rates to that, and there's been a lot of value creation. So, you know, that that's where we've been when we you know, that that the change in the market regime that started in June obviously hit the leveraged folks way worse than us. We don't run any leverage. We're very conscious of trying to underweight the companies that have the most leverage. And when we saw that it was taking down, you know, a fund-like situational awareness where we had a lot of overlap with the positions, but but

here was a leveraged seller being taken out by the prime brokers, we took that opportunity to lean in. We made the largest single-day trade since we launched last Thursday morning at the open exiting uh, almost 10% of our kind of lower volatility, lower beta exposures and doubling down on some of the miners that that we like the most. Um, so, you know, those are the actions that we've taken. Um, we haven't seen any fundamental deterioration in the return on capital that the hyperscalers are expecting from this investment. In fact, if you read the transcripts from Amazon and others, those returns are

tracking better than their earlier expectations and companies that had been renting older GPUs for $2 an hour are now trying to refresh those contracts quite a bit higher. So, you know, first and foremost, we're looking at the fundamentals. They're still improving and it [snorts] got to a point where some of our favorite names were pricing in just the value of their existing leases without anything ascribed to the terminal value of these data centers or the pipeline platform and the prospect for for new leases. And that work was done even assuming that the 10-year rises another 100 basis points. So, we saw a pretty pretty good margin of

safety at the lows where Leo was blown out and so, you know, we've increased those positions. You know, we can get into some of the historical analogies people are comparing this to you know, the the railroad capex boom of the 19th century. I wrote a long piece of that that we can get into it. Um, you know, that lasted 20 years. We're in year three or four here. So, I think there's a long way to go and and I don't think that there's a systemic issue to the Bitcoin price because as you noted, the more the hash rate falls, the more that those who can stay connected will earn, you know, additional profits. So, some of the names that we've that we've

added to like Bitdeer and Mara, which still have quite a bit of optionality around whether to you know, repurpose their facilities or or keep mining Bitcoin. There could be a Bitcoin price here where people are talking about when pivot back. So that type of optionality we really like. And and in terms of increasing exposure to say some of the altcoins or some of the kind of tokenization infrastructure companies. I'm waiting for more clarity to emerge on clarity or rulemaking by the SEC or just better prices accompanied with some volume.

Right now the volumes have been pretty dismal across across most of the crypto tokens. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean that that is a you know, it's a great great explanation. And it's you know, something that I think we've been watching for for quite a while. And now we're we're starting to see how this plays out. And so when it comes to these facilities that you mentioned this optionality where they you know, now are seeing the profitability of going and converting their data their their their hash power into AI data sensors for compute. But you mentioned how this might be a pendulum that ultimately swings back presumably if the Bitcoin price appreciates such to such

an extent where now despite you know, maybe another having block reward is lower, it's still becomes more profitable for them to come back into Bitcoin and contribute their hash power and their compute into the Bitcoin network rather than some of these AI networks. Does this create some sort of like a reciprocal flywheel where they're almost chasing one another in a spiraling upwards? Can you just talk us through what some of the like the financial thinking is as you sort of see this pendulum shift back and forth? Sure. Uh uh Thiel, who's the CEO of Mara, was on a podcast a week or so ago, and he said that if Mara wanted to, they

could fit all of their Bitcoin mining machines into the one new facility that they just purchased in South Texas. So, for those miners who are running containerized facilities, there's I think I'd just call it optionality to use these facilities for the purpose that suits them best at at any given point. So, it's I'm not calling for a pivot back for those facilities that have already been repurposed. We estimate, for example, that CleanSpark would need 360K per Bitcoin in order to, say, tear up the lease that just that they just

signed. So, you know, that that's not going to happen. But, in terms of moving these ASICs around into underutilized facilities while they prepare to lease them and make additional CapEx, you know, I think that's going to be a viable strategy. So, you call it a reciprocal flywheel. I would call it optionality. I would say that companies leveraged companies that are serving a new market are going to have a lot of volatility, and that's what we saw with Bitcoin in the early days. That's true in AI. If you can package these two volatile businesses together, you know, maybe they can even themselves out.

And I think that is is still underpriced by the market. >> Yeah. Um it certainly feels that way. And you also pointed to how sustainable this is. Maybe you could just give us a quick rundown of your article and how this comparison shakes out to the railroad. You mentioned that was a 20-year build-out of capital capital expenditure. We're in year three of the AI buildout. Um maybe you could just help us understand why this comparison feels accurate. Um and I think that's what a lot of people are starting to question is how sustainable is this.

We've seen, you know, these large capital debt raises by the hyperscalers. Then it felt like a lot of that capital started to move down the supply chain as the hyperscalers started to move. Uh you know, then we we got DRAM, we got chips, we got memory. Um and now it feels like things have reset. The hyperscalers are kind of coming back to life. Have we just gone down the supplying chain, reset, now we're going to run back to the same playbook? Or, you know, do you think uh you also mentioned dispersion. Do you think there's maybe some some new market conditions at play here that we should keep an eye on and why, you know, this go around is maybe not the same playbook as what we had previously seen in the AI equity markets?

>> Yeah, I mean, my my bet is that the fundamental scarcity here is now atoms, uh no longer bits. Uh you know, we spent three decades de-industrializing the United States because commodities and manufacturing capacity opened up around the world. Uh we learned from COVID that these integrated supply chains are vulnerable. Uh and so there's a reshoring uh requirement here. And then you add on to that the demand shock from AI where these this intelligence cannot be served globally, right? France does not want their AI served from a US data center. So you essentially have to

double build everything and you lose those economies of scale. Plus the you know, the NIMBYs have made it so hard to build anything in this country. Uh that puts a fundamental cap on how quickly this capacity can come back on. So the the you know, maybe the Bitcoin miners were lucky, but maybe Bitcoin kind of always anticipated that the world would shift back from bits to atoms. You know, we can debate that, but but that's my thesis. And those who push back on it point to the railroad boom of the 19th century as a great example of a capex cycle that transformed the economy, but destroyed a lot of the

initial capital. So, we can compare it on the scale. Uh and then we can compare it on how it was financed. So, on the scale, the US essentially put 3% of GDP into rails for almost two decades. Uh we are now, I'd say, 5 years This is year five of post GPT, and we're only hitting that 3% of GDP number once this year. Uh at the current equity valuations, there's no way the market is discounting that this continues for two decades. In fact, most analysts see it peaking by by 2030. So, I I see a disconnect in in the scale, first and foremost. Uh the second

is that the railroad boom was actually government-engineered. Uh US Congress passed a law in 1862, the Railway Act, uh and it granted uh millions, hundreds of millions of acres of federal land to these railways, but the titles would not transfer until the whole network was built. Uh and not only that, but the US Treasury floated construction bonds, and those construction bonds were subordinated to private capital. So, the government engineered a financing boom. The largest railways were selling bonds overseas that they were marketing as safe, uh

which were dependent on these land transfers, these land sales, and the companies didn't even have the title to the land at the time that the bill was passed or that the bonds were sold. Uh so that that was a bubble, right? And the other thing is that these these rail networks, they didn't provide the true utility until the East Coast and the West Coast were were connected. You can contrast [snorts] that to an AI factory, which as soon as it's trained the chips uh or has connected to to the grid and has the proper fiber, it can start uh training models and serving inference immediately. There's no need for, you know, some type of a global network to be to be synchronized. Uh and then the

last major difference is the the contracted backlog that is supporting uh the financing around this. So, uh you know, there was no one buying rail tickets in 1870 for a uh a a route that wasn't completed until 1885. There was no forward freight market. Uh it it was speculative based on land sales. Contrast that to these data centers, where just the four largest cloud providers alone, Amazon, Google, uh they they have more than $2 trillion in contracted backlog. Uh Microsoft and Oracle are half of that. Many of those deals include customer prepayments,

customer-supplied GPUs. Uh these contracts uh are more than 5 years in in duration. So, there is uh you know, legitimate purchase orders associated with the compute that will come out of these factories, uh and the financing uh is based on that, uh not based on a government handout uh to the to the private sector as it was in the railway capex cycle. >> Yeah. So, now the argument the conclusion of this argument is that And much more sustainable. >> Yes, more sustainable backed by a private sector rather than government handouts and secured by multi-year backlogs by the hyper scalers.

>> Fantastic. Um Matt, we've got a few minutes left with you. Really, really appreciate that and I've got this bookmarked so I can read through the entire thing a little bit later. We've got New Type Trader in our chat here that's saying uh he can't remember if it was 2021 or 2023, but you were calling that Solana needed to correct the pause button on the L1. Uh New Type Trader here is curious, what would Solana need to do for you to remain bullish? Um I think, you know, that that's one question and then I'll I've also I want to follow up with We see a lot of L1s starting to reduce their inflation and commitments to economic security.

Probably a little bit of a different question, but what would Solana have to do in order for you to remain bullish on Solana? >> Yeah, um you know, we took down our kind of L1 exposures across the firm after the election when many of the tokens doubled and there was no acceleration in in real-world adoption, uh no app that that kind of went viral and took in uh you know, uh global um capital. Uh and what we've seen since is it's been these corporate chains.

Um Circle has one, Stripe has one, Robin Hood has one. These kind of quasi-permissioned blockchains that allow uh public companies to customize the user experience and extract some of the economics. And I I understand that's not in the spirit of open-source development and um you know, new cryptographic money but um the folks who want to use these networks at scale, want predictability uh of the fee stream. So, I know the question was about Solana, but I'll like pivot to ETH for a minute cuz it was an example of a chain that had very volatile transaction costs and many large institutional

participants, you know, want more predictability. So, generally these corporate chains have taken a lot of market share and that's been the focus of our investments since the election. You know, Solana doesn't have that that fee variability, but it you know, Solana still until recently in New York, you couldn't really buy USDC on Solana and I think we saw another headline this morning Wells Fargo working on tokenized deposits. It's going to be their own custom-built blockchain.

The banks and the regulated entities don't want to put real capital on top of these open-source chains and then to the extent they do, they end up having to dilute their interest by supporting, you know, three, five, or 10 L1s rather than just one. So, there hasn't you know, you have a market share loss and then you have a lack of kind of winner-take-all characteristics within those that remain and that's left us, you know, very underweight these tokens. I think there could be a you know, there's many people who think like me. I'm not the only one who's thinking this. So, there's it's one-way positioning, I'm sure and if there's a clarity act that somehow passes, although the odds of that are at a

year-to-date low, I think there'd be an enormous relief rally in some of these coins. It would provide a disclosure regime where we actually would know who were the beneficial owners. You know, you wouldn't have people tweeting and shilling this stuff without having to disclose their ownership. You would see how many tokens the labs owns versus the foundation etc. And it's been that lack of disclosure, I think, that has made many institutional investors ignore this space. So, I want to see that change before we can get properly bullish on many of the L1s.

>> And last thing I have for you on this front, also on the L1 front, is ETH, Solana, and Near all came out with proposals to reduce the amount of inflation that they have going to pay validators. Ethereum as early as this morning, Solana, I think, put out this proposal earlier this week. And then Near has this fund that would generate some yield, and that yield would go to paying validators. All of this would take the inflationary supply of ETH, Solana, and Near respectively to down to almost zero if these proposals go through. Still very early in the proposal process. How relevant do you think these inflationary measures are to the market conditions for each of these L1s? Do you think they have some

weight, or is this thing really getting held up by the rise of these consortium private permission chains with the banks and the lack of clarity? >> Uh yeah, I mean, we did a an exercise a couple quarters ago where we looked at the average inflation rate of L1s compared to their user growth and fee generation. And there, you know, there's definitely an inflation problem across the space. And we started this conversation by comparing the software companies to the crypto tokens. And you know, the the year-to-date outperformance of semis versus software forced a lot of these software companies to have a reckoning with how many new

shares they were printing. And some of the dilution in that space has come down a lot as well. So, I think it's a an appropriate thing to explore. I think the details details will matter. Let's see also what the impact is on you know, companies that are relying on these uh staking revenues to fund initiatives like Bitmain would be a good example. They're often touting their staking income. So that you know, this could collapse. There could be second order effects, but I think it's wise now, you know, six years after the L1 kind of birth to you know, rethink some of the inflation.

>> Yeah. Certainly. Matthew Siegel. Uh director uh uh head of digital asset research at VanEck and PM of the actively managed VanEck on-chain economy ETF as well as the node uh the node fund, which is doing incredibly. Uh Matt, thanks so much for joining us, man. Really, really appreciate it. Um great insights just across the spectrum from AI equities uh all the way to digital assets, L1s, and beyond. Uh really appreciate it. I'm going to check out your uh your article here on the comparison of the AI build-out and the railroad build-out in the US. Uh love to have you on again real soon, and uh thanks so much for joining.

>> To be with you. >> All right, Matt. We're going to see you again soon. Uh guys, we're going to do a quick standby break, and then we're going to keep rockin' and rollin' uh here at the Rollup. So guys, don't go anywhere. We will be right back with our next guests M and Slater. Thanks guys. >> [music] [music] [music] >> Yo, yo, yo. What's going on, guys? This

is Eitan with the Rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere, all five boroughs. We're taking over the 212.

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We get deep. You know we [music] get deep. We get deeper. We get deep. You know we get deep. >> All right, we are back live with M team and Slater. These guys are building at Spire. Quick disclosure, Spire is part of the Good Idea Ventures portfolio company. We wrote an angel check, small angel check, but uh to support young founders in Ethereum. Very, very happy that we did and uh excited for an update. Guys, Ethereum uh sentiment was not looking too good there for a little bit and uh it feels like things have started to turn around. So, uh I'm curious how you're seeing it from your

sides, but but first uh welcome to the show. It's been quite a while for uh for both you guys. >> Thanks, Robbie. Yeah, one thing on the on the market sentiment side, like we're we're pretty heads down lately. Uh but in just just to about a week, we're going to we're going to do a huge launch. Uh we're launching a third-party our first-party, excuse me, consumer product. Uh it's a trading application for uh for using Prop MM's and also aggregating over all sorts of venues on base. And um I think Slater will talk more about some of the the things we're going to be doing on that launch day.

Um but going back to Ethereum, like this is an Ethereum product and we're we're unashamedly building on the EVM. We think there is there's a whole bunch of like kind of different streams of momentum across the space right now. Like you have the hyper liquid side. Uh obviously you have I mean, last guest was amazing talking about VanEck um and some of the more more macro stuff, I guess. Um and we're focused right now on a chunk of the market. Um we're focused on on trading on base. Uh but our our ambitions are much more than that. And I want to talk a little bit about that, but uh I'll hand it over to Slate Slater first.

>> Yeah, I mean, there there's the old adage, I mean, you know, best teams are built in the bear market, right? And you got to stick it out when the times are hardest, especially in this space, but but really in in every industry. Uh but you know, we've definitely taken that to heart and this has been like uh uh two-three infrastruc- two-three year infrastructure build out that is now kind of leading to this platform where we think we can really make a difference in the EVM trading landscape. And so I kind of like the fact that we're finally getting to the point of taking this to market and I'm joining the team at a time where the market's low and and people are kind of looking for for something new and interesting. And and I feel like we have something new and interesting. So you know, there's the

the market pains, uh but it can also be a good thing for for a business as well. >> Yeah. Um and just for for the audience's reference, uh Slater is previously head of marketing at Etherfi, another good idea ventures company portfolio company scaled zero to a billion dollars on the card volume very cool and then Matt is product and strategy co-founder at Spire deep deep insights into MEV and everything kind of happening on ethereum. And so I mean this feels like a rockstar team.

I guess two questions. Why the prop AMM and why base? Those I think are going to be the two highest level questions to get into from a product standpoint and then I mean I'm I'm there's there's plenty more that we can get into but let's start there. What are you seeing in the prop AMM space? Why did you decide to allocate resources time bandwidth mental energy into prop AMMs and then what we'll get into the whole base aspect of this. >> Yeah, Robbie let me paint a picture for you for prop AMMs. So on Solana everyone is so concerned about and in prioritized on that trading experience getting the best quotes on chain.

You see some of the honestly the best teams in the space have ellipsis building out like just some truly incredible infrastructure. And what they're what they're running into and what they're encountering is these prop AMMs that are run by real professionals. I mean we have Wintermute running to Sarah and you have all sorts of other other market maker teams that are that are putting their best best trading teams onto these prop AMMs. And the reason they're doing that is because a prop AMM is like the next evolution of market microstructure. So for a long time in crypto we had Uniswap V2 was like that's the big one everybody knows everyone can trade on Uniswap pools.

Then we had Uniswap V3 which is an innovation that allows LPs to be more capital efficient with how they allocate capital to a pool. Now we have Uniswap V4 which allows pool creators and LPS downstream to pick and choose exactly how they want to allocate capital when and you can build all sorts of like fancy mechanisms into into Uniswap V4. Um and then in a separate parallel track, we have all these tradfi and centralized exchange venues use order books. They're just super low latency high frequency order books. Now a Prop MM is where these two kind of parallel threads meet at the top. A Prop MM is better than an order book for all the things order books are good at and it's a lot better than Uniswap V4 for trading

on chain. That's why we're so excited about Prop MMs from a you know, fundamental theoretical level cuz we get better prices and we're tons and tons more capital efficient. Um here's another number for you. So we we've been talking to some market makers lately and one thing that we hear repeatedly is that their cost of capital and you can read that as like what yield they're getting is maybe around 40% and so for them to for them to kind of be generating that revenue has to come from somewhere and of course that's a whole 'nother discussion. Um but what we recognized is that Prop MMs actually allow those market maker strategies that are yielding 40% in huge amounts of of liquidity and bring those to the masses.

Um and so that's something we're going to be we're going to be working on is is bringing that that high yield to the masses and kind of decentralizing market making but without all these these trade-offs of of traditional AMMs like Uniswap where you're getting destroyed by LVR. You're getting um you're getting bad quotes. You're just generally getting terrible quotes compared to what you can get off chain. A Prop MM is is is purely better on those on those aspects. Now you also asked why Base. I think the Base question is is is more of a technical one. Um we we know the Base team well. We've had quite a few conversations with them um and we're confident in you know, that they're going to stick around for a while. Um maybe a better question is like why not

Ethereum layer one? Like there's tons of teams who are building layer twos directly on Ethereum, something we could be doing. Um like variational, you have lighter. And I I think these teams are are making a real a real bet on Ethereum and it's it's one that we'd love to make. Um and in a sense are making. It's just uh for now, we'd like to start on Base and expand to Ethereum. And so this isn't isn't so much a bet on Base as much as it is like a a grounds for us to to start building um and start to get some market share in a in a smaller market first. So you guys, do you want to you want to say something?

>> And I like that you mentioned uh tradeoffs cuz this is I'll put my simple BD brain and and and hat on uh for for my explanation uh which is basically every single trading venue to this point that we've come up with that can operate with smart contracts has been tradeoffs, right? As sure. Now this can be immutable and now it can be universally accessible, but what's the cost of that? And and the cost of that has been worse quotes um uh than you could produce on a centralized limit order book and Prop AMMs are a huge step forward um in that you can provide much better quotes, especially on top of the Spire stack um where you can basically quote for free and submit as many as you want uh because of the architecture

which I won't go into deeply, but but basically the team has a long history in the Base roll-up space and we kind of have an L3 on top of Base that allows us to submit orders uh sorry, submit quotes much faster and and at much better prices than you would be able to on a an AMM. Um and when you take this to like its theoretical limit, uh in in theory, we could push this to a point where you could actually have better, more efficient price discovery on chain with Prop AMMs than even a centralized limit order book. And so given that that's like theoretically possible, I think that's what we should be chasing as an industry, right? Like not how can we make this almost as good as closed How can we actually maybe even make something uh better? And so so base is kind of

uniquely a chain that the infrastructure works very well on and then also has liquidity and and network effects and and users as well as a new kind of push around tokenized stocks and so we're going to kind of put all of that together and some of the go to market stuff I learned at etherfi and and consumer growth stuff we did there and put it together in a really great retail trading platform that kind of takes it again to the conclusion like what are we really trying to do here? We're trying to get people the very best prices they possibly can and the way we're going to do that is with literally what we call the best price guarantee almost like Walmart Target style like stop even worrying about all these different trading venues literally we'll guarantee it or we'll pay you two

times the difference so that's kind of our marketing hook you'll probably see a lot of that over the next few months and we're serious about it like the tech is that good we're able to beat quotes on chain that consistently and so that's kind of what what gets me excited about about this launch. >> Yeah. Um couple couple of things here which is very very exciting to get you know the this technology brought on chain on base one is that you know I I I recently saw this this post I think it was by Michael Egorov who is the founder of Curve and he said that there's intent based aggregator solutions that are missing the best quotes and so these are not finding all the best routes and so how

how are we able to you know essentially guarantee the best the best price and then you know obviously you mentioned like best price guaranteed for people on chain you know that also we can extrapolate that out to you know agents as well like I'd imagine that agents are going to you know be trading for us at some someday and you know you they're going to be scanning for the best venue to execute some of these swaps as well and they're going to be looking essentially like aggregators at where they can get the best price and so, having the best price available to to execute a swap has a ton of advantages because you end up getting all of this order flow and, you know, ultimately the these things are just completely rational. Uh they will go to where they

can get the best price. Um and so, how much inflows do you guys anticipate? You mentioned this thing is going to go live next week. What are we currently seeing out there in terms of trading activity on base? How does it compare to some of those other chains? And how much of that proportionally do you anticipate it's just going to convert automatically once this thing gets turned on? >> Great question, Robbie. Um I want to I want to go kind of one by one here. And and I'll start off by saying um on the whole like uh price sourcing or quote sourcing question or or um The big thing here is that anyone who's providing liquidity um or trading on a market is choosing a price either implicitly or explicitly.

If you're on an order book and you're a market maker, you're saying, "Here's exactly what price I'm willing to trade at and when and how much." Of course. Um so, for example, you might have a a spread of 10 bips. You say, "I'll buy at this price and I'll sell this price." They're they're 10 bips 10 basis points apart. Um you could also go on chain to something like Uniswap V2 where your spread is going to be maybe very low, but as you start to get a higher depth, that spread is going to increase. So, for a for a legitimate um you know, full trade of couple thousand dollars or or something, your spread is quite high. Um Now, you also have market makers who are and maybe they're liquidity providers, maybe it's retail like you or I, but in most cases you're trading against one of the

big boys. Um and they have their own preferences. They have their own pricing models. They have their own alpha that informs them what spread they would like to set. Um and most of the time that spread is kind of rapidly changing. Um if volatility goes up, that spread is going to change. If they see a a a huge order from, you know, from Michael Saylor, those spreads are going to change. And so, we have this kind of mismatch between what the venues support and what the market makers want to put on chain. Um market makers, maybe they want to quote really tight, but Uniswap V2, they can't do that. Maybe they want to quote really loose, but um Uniswap V3 is too brittle to allow that kind of flexibility at runtime.

And so, what Paradigm does is they unify that expression those two desires perfectly. Um because a market maker gets to put exactly what they want on chain with the most up-to-date information with with literally zero latency price updates. Um so, it's that's very exciting is is you can kind of you can remove all of this this middleware layer that's just causing uh quotes to artificially widen. Cuz market makers are willing to put good prices available. They do it all the time on centralized exchanges. They have they have great prices. Uh well, let's bring that on chain and let's let's match that exactly instead of approximating.

Now, on the flow question, there is a there's a big market right now on base. Uh one of the interesting things about EVM is that a lot of flow doesn't go through aggregators, whereas on Solana, the vast majority of flow is going through like Dflow or Jupiter. Um and that's just kind of a a market structure thing that that we're going to have to come up against. Um I personally think we'll be we'll be sitting in a position similar to KyberSwap, 1inch, 0x, Matcha. Uh these aggregators that people use. And also as a back end to some apps people use. So, we've we've already filled um quite a bit of volume on FOMO uh through a through an integration we've done in

the background. Um and you know, it's not a direct integration with we have we have FOMO just to be clear, but uh we're connected with one of their service providers. So, going through like kind of all these all these ways we can get integrations, I think we can get a quite a significant proportion of flow. But maybe the bigger thing that we're we're exploring is how to actually grow the market. Um because while we're still trading meme coins and and and crypto tokens on chain, I think there's I think there's a lot of that market we can capture and it's it's available market. There's been unicorns built off that. Um but I think Slator has some some bigger ideas for for what market we want to grow into, right?

>> Well, well they're your ideas, but but I agree with them. Uh which look, if we can have a better price discovery mechanism than even a centralized in order of like that every asset should eventually use that, you know, and and I think that's like where Spire goes from like wow, this is a really obvious go-to-market, strong team, really good investors, um a piece of tech that gives you real a real pricing edge um that probably lasts a while. Okay, like duh, let's plug that in with all the aggregators, let's make better prices available on chain. But then yeah, with the advent of tokenized stocks, kind of all the excitement that's happening there, the amount of retail trading interest that exists just to capitalize on the trend. I mean, that's the type of thing that you can really build enough momentum to to reach

escape velocity and and all of a sudden maybe this becomes an everything exchange, right? Where you can still keep those principles of of self-custody, you can still keep your own assets on chain, but but you have an end-to-end trading experience that can rival what's available in first world markets like America for for for stocks, right? Or something even better or even more unified, um which kind of composability unlocks for you. So yeah, I don't want to be too long-winded, but uh the point is not only can it be a great crypto go-to-market, maybe it could be something much bigger than that. We're good.

>> Yeah, I I want to make that explicit. Like we we call ourselves like trying to get to the place of an everything exchange. I mean, everyone says that in crypto. And one of our biggest um competitors at this point I think is Hyperliquid with TradeXYZ and all the things that they're listing, all these commodities and futures. Super cool. Well, we can have better prices than Hyperliquid. Um we have a fundamentally better theoretical market microstructure model for expressing market maker preferences on chain. Um, and I I think that's uh, that's super important and and I just want to call that out.

>> Big shout out M team. A lot of people are too uh, afraid of of uh, calling out their competitors uh, because they're too worried about making friends, but competition isn't bad. We love competition here. Healthy competition gives users uh, better prices. That's ultimately what what we're doing here. Better experiences in general. Um, so I love to hear that. And you know, kind of on on what both of you guys are saying, I think, you know, just on this, you know, everything exchange, tokenized equities as this asset class gets built out on chain, this is one a $60 billion asset class.

Another thing is that it's just so early. So it feels like the infrastructure is just continuing to play out. Uh, earlier in the show we covered a tweet by CMS uh, that he posted earlier today, which was maybe you guys saw this. It was effectively like "Hey, if there's an L1 that decided to just flood the market with tokenized equities and then pair those tokenized equities with the native token, they would have they would become the de facto venue to trade tokenized equities." S- I feel like Slater's like, "Oh my god, the strategy is out. Like we just got it just went public."

>> There there's so many things that you can build with this, right? Like, I don't know. It makes sense for us to meet the market where it is, right? Put the technology in the hands where the users are already trading today. Go do all the integrations, so on and so forth. But yeah, ultimately really in ways when you have what the crypto market's been missing forever is just assets with real value, right? Like once you have assets with real value, the the alchemy that you can perform with them in in crypto combined with something that gives you better prices of trading uh, the possibilities are endless. Uh, now you're making me want to start an L1. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Well, you the thing is you don't have to do you don't have to be in L1 to do this, right? >> Yeah. Yeah, well I think we're what's really interesting and maybe Matt here this is where you were going is if you start to enshrine this piece of tech deeply within a blockchain is when you can really start to accelerate the the outcomes as far as prices. I'll just say that. >> [snorts] >> Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I think the to me there's a what crypto as an industry has been driving for it a long time is bringing price discovery on chain.

And part of that is is price discovery on existing markets, but also there's I think a lot of better markets that can only exist on chain or or that will only exist on chain. For example, like price discovery on a lot of these huge private companies right now is is terrible. It's done completely off chain and I want to bring that on chain. I want to bring open AI on chain. I want to bring the the next startup that you know is is in the YC batch right now, I want to bring that on chain. And I think bringing price discovery on chain in a way where market maker preferences can actually fit the market and aren't like all crammed into this honestly centuries old market structure of of a you know central limit order book for every market

with futures and derivatives kind of laid out as their own markets. Well, we now have programmable trading environments. You know, before it was completely impractical impractical to say like we can insert the winter mute brain into your order book, but now we can do that. And I I think bringing that that expression closer to reality is is going to enable a whole new class of markets and um at Spire we're we're building that. We're not just we're not just talking about it. Like we're out there. We're doing the integrations for now, but we're also building out the future as well.

>> Yep. >> It's very very cool. Guys, just a couple of minutes left. The go to market is happening as we speak. Uh going live next week. One, is it Does it have a name? Is it just called Spire? Where can people find it? Are you guys doing a points program, incentives? No harm, no foul if you guys aren't. Like, honestly, cool to see these things just interact in the wild, but I want to make sure that our our audience gets, you know, all all the download because this thing is coming out pretty soon. And uh we want to make sure that everyone uh goes, tries it out, uses it, see sees uh the prices that they can get.

>> Yeah. Um so, we will be doing a a points and incentive program. I am pro points and incentives. Uh I know either if I get some flak for for my opinion doing it very well. Um but, I think the teams that do it well will benefit from it. And And the community still benefit from it. Like, the core idea of sharing uh ownership uh and and upside in utility tokens in the ecosystem is is a good idea, right? but the It's all It's all in the execution. And so, we think we're going to do it uh the right way. Um and the website is actually called Baibai, b a i b a i. It's the Japanese word for trading. Uh I I think we we used uh the same design team as many of your favorite uh projects. So, you'll probably enjoy uh the UI. There's a cute little capybara.

Um and and the UI I think is is is pretty [clears throat] engaging. It does its best to really show you the outcomes in real time and and what's happening underneath the hood. So, you'll see quotes from various venues in the the base ecosystem kind of all right next to each other. You'll get a cute little receipt as soon as you make a trade, and it'll show you exactly how much money you saved. And one of the fun things we'll be doing in the next few weeks is like a a report where you can scan your address, see all your trading history, see your total P&L, and see the MEV, bad pricing, ways that you've lost money on chain without even really knowing it in the past. And based on how wrecked you are, you'll get an additional 5x points boost uh for your initial trading

volumes. So, that was something It's mostly selfish because I've lost so much money on chain, you know, just trying to trying to help myself out as part of this uh go-to-market. But yeah, please give it a follow on Twitter. B A B A I B A I _cx and check out the website and pay attention over the next few weeks. We'll be making some more noise about that. >> Very cool. Guys, thanks so much for joining. I'm excited. I'm going to try it out. I I need an aggregator. I need a way to get good price execution on chain. So, I'm going to be going to bye-bye. And going to say bye-bye to my coins.

>> We've got to say bye-bye to bad prices. That's good. >> [laughter] >> Say bye-bye to bad prices. >> Yeah. >> Have a good one, Robbie. >> I'll see you guys soon. >> Thank you so much. Bye. >> Cheers, y'all. >> Cheers. >> All right. We're going to keep things rolling on this side. And yeah, proud angel of the Spire team. These guys are doing great. Prop AMMs feel like they are they are the future. And the on-chain to central the the the decentralized exchange to centralized exchange ratio is just is just continuing to shift in favor of the decentralized exchanges.

So, it's very very cool to see. And I think I think we're going to continue to see how tokenized equities play out, which plays into our next guest of of Denari. And so, Gabriel, co-founder of Denari, is going to be joining us here very soon. We're going to get him ready in the back. And uh we're going to close out the show with a tremendous last guest, Gabriel. Is the co-founder and CEO of Denari, regulated platform that issues one-to-one backed tokenized US stocks and ETFs.

We're going to bring him up in just a moment. Previously founded three known AI-driven early cancer detection company that recently went public after earlier work as a software engineer. Forbes No, Fortune article just went live today that said uh guys partnered with Circle uh and I believe uh USDC is going to be the margining uh of choice for these tokenized equities. Uh these guys are going to be launching in the US. So, very very excited to chat with Gabe from Denarii, co-founder and CEO of Denarii. Here he comes. Let's get him up on the show.

There he is. Gabriel, welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. Congrats on uh this announcement that went live. You guys are coming to the US and partnering with Circle. >> Not coming. We're live in the US. >> There we go. Okay, so why don't we start there? I mean, where can where can people participate? Where can they get their hands on tokenized stocks? What stocks are currently live and uh how can they find them? >> So, it's a complete change in paradigm. Today, if you want to go buy stocks in the US, uh you have to go to Schwab or Robinhood or, you know, whatever broker dealer.

Um now, you can come directly with your wallet uh and your uh stable coin either to app.denarii.com or any one of our uh partners. We announced a few uh wallet partners today like Privy and uh others. Um we will be launching with other partners very soon. >> Very cool. Um so, a lot of the value proposition, a major piece of this that we've been talking about on the show, and uh Denarii is our tokenized equities partner on the show. So, you guys have been fantastic. Um and so, we uh we've been talking about tokenized equities a lot over the last few weeks and months.

And a lot of this is about broadening access, democratizing access, bringing you the US capital markets outside the US to the globe, uh and and helping uh those who previously didn't have access now uh get exposure to US equities um as a result of tokenizing them and putting them on chain. You guys are now bringing tokenized equities to the US. And I think, just to clarify any confusion here, uh the D share is a true stock. There's no SPV nonsense at play here. This is a true This is a true stock with all the same shareholder rights.

Now, I'd imagine that there's a lot of value at play here with tokenized equities in the US. You can do fun things with margin and collateralization, making these things productive. And I think the slogan is do more with your stocks, right? So, I'd love just to kick it over to you um for for a little bit of a deeper explanation about what the value is of having tokenized equities here in the US. >> From the standpoint of customer access, uh there is this uh wonderful idea of actually owning your stocks.

Which by the way, today, if you're to buy stocks at Schwab or something like that, you own an entitlement. You do not actually own the stock. It's very not portable, right? You can't just do whatever you want with it. Um it would take weeks to even get it out of the uh the accounts. So, part of it is just um financial freedom, which has always been the a promise of this entire space. However, obviously, we're working on much more interesting things. Um some of which I can talk about now, some of which we'll talk about later.

Uh but I think ultimately, there's this immense benefit for the end user uh as the wallet experience has gotten better of being able to control your financial uh life in a single place. And that is not a single place that locks you into that place, whether it's, you know, Robinhood or something along those lines, but it's a single place uh called your wallet that you own, and you can take it to whoever you want um and transact now stocks and crypto and bonds or whatever it is, all alongside uh of stable coins uh that you hold.

Eventually, there's going to be a transition where the capital market infrastructure, and this is where Denarius really focused on in the US, is replacing the existing legacy infrastructure with blockchain based infrastructure, not only at the broker dealer level, but also at the exchange like national exchange level that will unlock benefits to the US customers such as native swaps. So, like swapping directly from Apple to Nvidia.

No more waiting days to settle into fiat and going into another ticker. Why is that so important? Well, one is speed. But the second thing that most people discount, that's the that's the biggest gain, is when you swap from one ticker to another directly and you never settle to fiat. You have to ask yourself the question, is that a taxable event? And can you now keep your money in the capital markets while investing in new assets and not be taxed on on every time you have to sort of come out of the

the asset in question. And this I care about so much because it actually benefits the poorest of us. Because the poorest of us cannot have net new capital that they're putting into their brokerage accounts all the time. Which means almost inevitably, they are always coming out of one ticker and going into another ticker. And that you mentioned about geographical democratization. I also care about socioeconomic democratization, and that's why this news is so exciting and this is just a beginning of some of the things that we're going to bring to the US markets.

>> Yeah, this feels huge. I mean, this is a $60 trillion market and it still feels incredibly early because we have just tapped into the $60 trillion of equities in the US capital markets. And so, I mean, it feels like there's real implications here. It feels like there's both this retail angle where, you know, you can get broader access and then you can also get like the institutional angle of just getting, you know, less I mean, faster settlement, of course, but also less tax liabilities is such a huge value proposition here for all of those across the investing universe.

And so, I mean, I'm on app.tenary.com right now. I can see the Nvidia stock here, Nvidia Corporation common stock. You guys have, you know, several on here, Tesla, Cisco, Google, like there's tons here. I think you guys are planning on tokenizing the entire S&P. And so, there's >> Already already did the S&P 500, pretty much every ticker on there and pretty much any ticker you can think of. >> So, give talk us through a little bit about how this works cuz, you know, we've we've talked to some people on the Robinhood side about how they're tokenizing they're bringing tokenized equities online. You know, they're kind of minting them on demand onto Robinhood chain. How are you guys if I were to

connect my wallet and go through the process here? Is there a particular chain? Have you guys, you know, already you know, just hoovered up a ton of equity liquidity and that's what you're serving to customers. When I click buy, you know, what is sort of the the what happens after I click that button? >> Yeah. So, it is all automated from the user's perspective, right? But, we did want to bring the best experience possible to users. So, when you click the buy button if it's during market hours, it will mint on demand through the market.

If it's after hours, it will go through our ATS. And then if it's during the weekend hours, it will go through our Dinari Financial Network, which is our on-chain order book that has its own liquidity provider such as flow traders and other major liquidity providers that are so like their sole purpose is to make sure that you have the best spread possible during the weekends of any on-chain order book out there. >> And they're streaming quotes even while the market is off.

>> Right. >> Awesome. And so So, the market could be closed or it could be open, but you're streaming quotes to anyone on the Dinari website that wants to come and purchase stocks. And and those stocks are just provided on demand depending on whether you're within market hours or on the weekend or during closed market hours. The The liquidity The The equity could come from a different source, but that is the source that's providing the quote, and then you guys are just routing the capital, routing the order behind the scenes to whichever venue happens to be online at that time.

>> It's a cross-chain. So, DFN the Dinari Financial Network is natively multi-chain. So, we have everyone from base to Avalanche integrated. So, the liquidity might not even live on the chain that you're originating the order from. But, it will come to you and and the transaction will settle instantaneously and then the sort of cross-chain settlement will happen after that, but the price will be locked in, everything will be transacted. The important part here also though, is app.denari.com is probably the least interesting place you can go and buy it. Like eventually, it's every wallet, every app that you can think of will be part of this

this liquidity providing engine. As you rightly pointed out, it could come from like there could be an order that's made on one of our exchange partners, right? That that's really coming from some somebody wanting to sell that stock on a wallet app somewhere else, right? And it's so really this idea of aggregating the liquidity on a coordination layer so that ultimately everyone benefits from maximize liquidity. And there will there's a lot more partners to come on this that I can't name today and I really want to. But but it's only going to grow from here.

>> Incredible. Well, we we are going to bring you back when you can talk about those, but we've got more to talk about today because you know, this is a really exciting launch. Not only that it's happening in the US and we're based here, but also because you guys have what seems to be the broadest, like the most breadth when it comes to the tokenized equities offering, the entire S&P, which is just tremendous feat because it is so many assets and previously the models have required to hold inventory of these assets. And so this feels fundamentally new and innovative and so it's very very cool. And so let's talk about you know, you you mentioned after you press that buy button, what happens?

It kind of depends on whether the market's open or closed. And then you know, the trade gets routed to one of those liquidity providers and then it gets minted on demand. And so it it lands in your wallet on a chain of your choosing ultimately. And you know, then what can we do with this to make this more productive than just a typical equity we would hold in our brokerage account? Can we use this as margin? Can we use this, combine it with other assets on chain and put it in a vault? Can we earn yield on this? What what is now possible as a result of making these equities tokenized?

>> Everything that you just mentioned is possible now. Um and again, this is where the uh partners are very important. We're we're going to announce some partnerships around this very soon cuz uh Dinari has always been let's do things compliantly. Let's do things in a way that protects the end investor. And so we're not obviously not going to you know allow sort of people to get rugged and you know things along those lines. So we pick our partners very carefully.

But everything that you just mentioned is going to be possible. >> Wow. Um I want to ask you know how important is the Clarity Act? It's do or die time. I honestly I just know that you know if we talk about this people are going to chime in and they're going to engage with it. So I want to ask you how important is it to Dinari to get the Clarity Act through? What kind of business lines does it unlock and and what can you guys just go ahead and do anyway even without the Clarity Act in place? >> Yeah, so I think the Clarity Act is going to be really good for the industry as a whole.

But as we just demonstrated it is not the only way. And so for so long people in this industry has said to get tokenized stocks in the US market there's only one way and that's the issuer sponsored way where you have to go and ask each company whether they're going to tokenize separately outside of the existing capital market system you know their cap table so that they can have those tokens available. We just demonstrated that that's not needed and you can still be legal and within the reg NMS the national market system, and launch these tokens.

Now, the Clarity Act is only going to solidify that and clarify that even further, which is not a bad thing. But, I think that broadly speaking, Clarity Act is going to be good for the crypto markets. It's going to make institution institutional partners much more comfortable with engaging with tokenized stocks. And like you said, we're in the first part of the first inning, man. First part of the first inning in terms of the capital markets transformation, and the Clarity Act is only going to accelerate that.

>> Yeah, it it is really really exciting. And we talk about this a lot. This is a thesis that Andy and I on the show, we like to call it the neo finance thesis, which is that we are now in the the midst of this tokenization supercycle. There is quite literally trillions of dollars at stake here that is now coming on chain. Denali is, you know, this this I mean, you're carrying the flag pole, you know, and and and you're the flag bearer of the tokenized equities industry here. So, you're bringing a lot of this on chain. And and part of the thesis is that all of the DeFi protocols that were previously just, you know, valued based on the TAM of crypto native tokens. We have 2 trillion or so, you know, total market cap in in crypto.

That is now getting re-rated, and there is a, you know, 30 to 50x the total addressable market potentially at play here that is going to then flow the these tokenized equities are going to get tokenized and and come on chain. And then they're going to flow into these DeFi protocols, which ultimately like just levels up the lending markets, the decentralized exchanges, the vaults, the perps, everyone as a result gets this massive upgrade. And so, you know, you can you can kind of guess as to what happens to asset prices as well. And so, man, I want to talk about these new partners, but I I guess just broadly, generally, what like where are you most excited about? You know, things are

tokenized, they're brought on chain, people go to Denari, they buy these tokenized equities, then what? What are you most excited about what happens after someone buys their equities on Denari? Is it the fault complex or the yield or the margin or the collateralization? Where do you think there's going to be a really, really killer use case for these things to flow after someone brings them and buys them on chain? >> Again, I go back to why I started this in the first place, which is making accessible tools that are only for the rich today for everyone. So, for example, um if you have enough stocks in your portfolio, you can margin against that portfolio, but if you only have a few

shares here and there, that is not possible today. You can't borrow against it. So, you have to do the worst thing possible, which is sell that stock, get the tax event, right? Get get the get the tax, and then uh use that capital for something else, and you're not even invested in anymore. Um atomic lending and borrowing on a per ticker basis is going to be so big to make it sort of accessible. And just to be very clear, again, to democratize it as much as possible, I think we need to be linking up with all the neo banks uh that you know, with people that have hundreds of dollars in their accounts,

get them to invest in these stocks, and then be able to borrow against it and use it for whatever money that they have without ever coming out of that investment. That's a ridiculous concept uh from a perspective of traditional finance. It's now going to be possible at whatever neo bank that you want to do this at, whatever you already use, uh no matter what the socioeconomic level you're at. Um, so to me that's a that's a phenomenal application of something like this that just isn't possible today.

>> Yeah. It's incredible. And just talk us through how you guys were able to accomplish this whereas others failed. Because I remember and I I forget if it was open AI or Anthropic, but there was these, you know, pre-IPO markets and and it felt like there was either there was two ways to do this. Either you could go through these hula hoops of SPVs and and and tokenize some of these things or you you had to go and talk to all the issuers as you talked about earlier. These felt like neither one was, you know, on one side it wasn't quite realistic that all of these were going to elect to tokenize their shares. On the other side it felt simply dangerous to have investors exposed to all these

SPV wrappers. Is it just that you were able and willing to do the hard work of compliant where others didn't or was there something that you figured out technically or or regulatorily? How were you able to bring this to market where as others failed? >> It's actually all of the above. Um, we were willing to work with the regulators. Um, that is that is one thing. And then we listened to what they said was needed uh, for this to fall within Reg A and MS and be legal. What they said was needed is super boring and very complicated infrastructure that you had to build.

Um and that I mean that's a credit to our engineering and product teams as well as the FinOps teams to actually make this work. Um, but it was just grueling uh, work. Actually, this has been years in the making now. Um, between the regulatory clearance that we got. I mean I don't know if if you remember, but we actually said this publicly We were the first ones by FINRA to be given the permission to tokenize these stocks, and that was announced a year ago. >> Mhm. >> And then it was like between that and like making the product real in terms of actually getting it out there in the US was just a monu- monumental effort. I give so much credit to my team.

>> Yeah, it's it it is fantastic. Um and I think now you've set the example for others. And so when you say it was the you know the boring hard work that you guys had to build, is there anything like this that exists? What is Is there things that like this that exist in the traditional equities world, but you know they didn't quite have the crypto, you know, perspective on it? Or is this simply because you've got kind of this dual perspective in the equities world and the crypto world that you were able to bring this to market and it is totally unique, totally new? >> It is totally unique and totally new. Um you know, people talked about for a while like wrapped and unwrapped, and that was the argument and things like that. And like this is neither.

Um it really is its own thing. Um but what I will say is we're already talking to broker-dealers. Again, uh can't can't mention who or something like that, but broker-dealers today, let's be very clear. Broker-dealers today cannot take stablecoin as payment for stocks. Let's think about that for a second, how mind-blowing that is. Right? Um with if if they work with the uh Denari infrastructure um uh and integrate our technology to do it, they can.

Um and and so it's not that we're holding this technology that we have built tied to our chest. We're actually making it available for everyone. >> You know, there's broker-dealers that I've heard that are building their entire ATS alternative trading systems because they want to accept stablecoins, and you're saying that, "Hey, you You need to build an entire new ATS. You can simply plug in Denari and accept stable coins and get the same sort of functionality that you would get if you built out this entire system.

>> API integration. >> Yeah, this is this is going to be huge, Gabe. Uh what are you going to do with all the money that you're going to make? >> Oh, I already have money. Um but but uh to me it this was never never about the money. It really isn't. And if you actually look up the other co-founders who by the way are way more impressive than me, right? We have Chad Rosenthal who did LegalZoom. Um and then uh we have Brandon who did Crunchyroll. Um to us uh thankfully thankfully we've all had successes in our uh previous companies. We wanted to do something big um and we wanted to do something that I actually said to investors uh when I raised money for this, there's probably

less than 1% chance of success. >> [laughter] >> Um uh but but we did realize exactly what you're saying is uh people around the world don't have access. And actually the poorest of the people in the US don't have access. Um and and we need to uh we need to bring this uh the best assets in the world to those hands. And that's been the promise, right? That's been the promise literally of the entire crypto space all along. And we finally 5 years in 5 years in we get to [snorts] fulfill that promise.

>> And you just so happen to launch this the day after Leopold Situational Awareness goes kaput. So, was that that fact factoring to the timing at all? >> No, not at all. >> [laughter] >> But uh but but again I here's here's what I will say um to your viewers and and since sincerely, um I was not planning on starting another company. Um because thankfully, and I I really uh thank so many people uh for this, uh my my first company was successful despite me.

Um but then when I made some money, I actually realized just how much the capital markets were designed to make the rich richer. It really is. Um in in in a way that was mind-blowing. Um and and so the promise of Denali has always been access. I'm really glad that we're taking the first major step in that now. Um like I said, 5 years in. Um but we're definitely not going to stop um because it it really matters to us. It It really matters to uh my co-founders and I um uh that that we're doing something um that actually makes finance better for

the majority of us. Um not just the people that are lucky enough to have made some money. >> You know, you're absolutely right, and I think a lot of people are you know, they came into the space, some have left, some are still here, but they're somewhat disillusioned by the institutionalization of the space. Um they see a lot of these consortium chains and tokenized deposits, and they feel like we've lost the plot. And I could see how they think that, but you know, when there's a company that comes in and they're looking at broadening access for an asset class and and you know, the equities market, which has been typically just taped off from those that you know, didn't have access.

It just feels like we're we're returning to our ethos, and we're applying some of the same principles that we're now applying in in a new regard, in a new asset class, which makes me really, really hopeful for the future. So, it's inspiring what you guys have done. Uh and Gabe, I I really appreciate you coming on during a very busy time. I I get it. It's very very uh busy dealing with the regulators, but hopefully you had some more fun with us here today than you know building out some of the compliance tech and uh we uh we're very excited about the partnership. We appreciate your support. We love supporting you guys and uh yeah, come on again soon and we'll talk to you about some of the the partnerships that you couldn't talk about today.

>> Thanks so much, Rob. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. We'll see you again soon. Thanks Gabe. >> bye. >> All right, guys. Well, there you have it. That's been uh that's been Gabe on Denarii's launch in the US around US capital markets and the equities market in the US. Man, I mean personally like I'll just tell you guys a quick little anecdote. I uh you know, I was sort of a uh born on chain. I'm crypto native through and through and so I had a crypto wallet before I had a brokerage account, which means that it was easier and more familiar for me to get access to crypto native tokens like ETH, like Bitcoin than it was to get onto a brokerage, do a bunch of KYC, and and go buy some equities.

So, there's a lot of other people out me out there like me that have followed a similar journey whether that's in the US or abroad and now they're looking at the just absolute phenomenal rise of the US capital markets, which feels like it's just going to continue. I mean now people are saying that the the policies on a macro level are going to keep this thing running right through all-time highs all the way up to midterms. We'll see. Um but guys, that is our show for today. Uh we don't have any more guests. So, fantastic show. It's been an absolute vibe.

Let's see what we're doing on the on the markets front. I know S&P's breaking all-time highs as we speak. Um Europe could foot the bill in a new plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And then I've got Oman and Iran reaching a deal or proposing a deal. So, seems as if the geopolitical situation is improving. Um we saw the US intervene in the Japanese yen market. So, the macro situation is looking a little bit more expansionary than it was last week contraction.

And we have tokenized US equities to the tune of the entire S&P. Um so, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool things that are happening out there. Um massive SpaceX shorting ahead of earnings. And then uh the Clarity Act the Clarity Act, the Clarity Act, the Clarity Act is right in front of our faces. We've got 3 days. It's not going to happen today. Maybe it happens tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Guys, be ready for some volatility to end the week. Markets are looking good. Got to say markets are looking good. Do your own research, but I'm a I'm bullish, guys.

People are going to say out there, they're going to say it's chopped, they're going to say we're ranging, they're going to say you know, we're we've got one more leg down. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think the sentiment out there is that this rally will fail like all the others. Equities are just continuing to rage on. I do think uh we don't [snorts] really start to move um until there's some sort of capital rotation because I I can understand why are you going to go into crypto right now when AI is just going ballistic in the equities markets. So, we're watching that. We're watching everything. We're monitoring the situation and we are rocking and rolling with you guys as always. Shout out to everyone in the chat. Give me some dubs in the chat for your boy.

And uh we're going to we're going to catch you guys tomorrow. A little bit of a later start tomorrow. We're going to be starting about an hour or two later than we typically do. Got some things going on at the house, but uh guys, we're going to do some incredible work together. I hope you guys are prepared for the bull market. I certainly am. I'm excited. I'm going to see you guys soon. King's Clips, you're the man, and uh we're going to be we're going to be rocking with you guys tomorrow. Much love. Peace. Stay bullish. >> [music]