🚨LIVE: DeFi's Largest Exploit Saga Continues. Fiskantes & Predicate Call in, Mike Dudas In The Tower

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[music] [music] Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] >> 17 floor. We'll see you around the timeline.

Feels good to be back. >> [music] >> I think the rollup is one of the most premier media [music] brands in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. [music] >> Adding into my library potentially multi-chain deployments. We are at the connect day [music] one here. I'm guessing from base. [music] [music] Heat. [music]

[music] [music] Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> JP Morgan, Black Rockck, 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. So bullish. >> It is bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. [music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music]

[music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Corola [music]

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

>> Zoom out. The institutions aren't coming. They're simply here. It's the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. [music] Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. Alrighty, the hack that shook the world. April 23rd, 2026. Welcome to the tokenization tower, the nest, broadcasting live from the financial capital of the world. I'm in New York City. Robbie's down in Miami. We are lit. [snorts] >> Indeed, we are. Uh, great way to start off the show. Yeah, this hack just continues to uh continues to make

headlines. >> It does. >> How long do you think we're going to be talking about this hack on this show? >> Uh I mean until these funds get unfrozen, right? And it doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon based on the lack of timeline from any of these protocols. We've seen multiple announcements, guys. We're going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about that with our guests and uh we have a ton of tweets to cover and talk about live. We're here in the nest powered by Plume. Let's give him some love. Plume is powering the future of off-chain asset management onchain. We're here in in their office in New York. Today's topics, we got the tokenization tower, of course, markets and weather. We got Fiscantes, the CIO of Sigle Fund, who Rob I think you said what 5,000%

>> 327% higher uh since 2019. That is Single Fund's core performance. >> Is that a 60x? >> I think it's a 500x. 500x. Wow. 6 MV investor. That's Mike Dudas and predicate CEO joins. Our topics today are powered by our friends at Trezor. Use code rollup10 at treasure.io to get yourself a self-custody wallet that will save you from getting exploited. Guys, we have Fiscantis going to join this show. He's in he's somewhere not in our time zone. So, we are going to uh accommodate a bit of an early guest today and then we're going to get into the news after. Uh I am

pulling up the chat. Rob, it's good to have you back. How you doing, man? >> Feels good, man. Just getting a little bit better every day. Uh don't want to miss too much here on the show. There's things that are happening. The straight of Hormuse is open. Then it's closed and it's open again. The funds of who who said the straight of layer zero or the layer zero of >> the straight of layer zero is closed. >> Yeah. [snorts] QM QM have a quif day. IOB con energy based money is the future. How about how about proof of humanood money being in the future?

Shout out to Worldcoin and Tinder. Bang. >> That is something I think we're going to see a lot more of. There's a lot of discrimination between agents and humans. >> Is there? >> There is. We're going to continue to hear more about that. Uh Tempo got a shout out from Stripe on their their uh their Cheeky Pint podcast. Yeah. And they're also powering Door Dash. >> Door Dash. >> Uh, Agentic. So, I think the thesis there is there's going to be a Gentic payments done by agents on Tempo on Door Dash. Text your agent, they go order you some food on Door Dash. Um, maybe >> that's right. Yeah, I think that is how it's going to work. We're gonna talk more about it. Uh, why don't we get over to our first guest? Uh we're we're going

to speedrun and get back to the news, back to the markets, uh in just a bit. Uh and so Fiscantes, I believe it's a 50x. I think I misspoke earlier. 500X. >> I thought it was a 60x 5,000%. >> Just move the decimal places over. How do you get the six? >> Well, whenever you make a 100% gain, you move the like you 2x, right? If you 2x >> That's right. >> So, if you make a 200% move, that means you 3x your money.

>> Did you see uh RFK talking about how Trump calculates percentages? >> Yeah. He said like 60% or he >> said, you know, there's two ways to calculate percentages. Trump's got his own way. You discount a drug from $600 to $10. That's a reduction of 600%. Yeah, 600% reduction. Guys, we've got Fiscantes, the CIO of Sigle Fund, a DeFi OG, friend of the show, and he is a partner at Zprime Cap Venture Arm focused on early stage investments and uh a lot more there. Again, a 5,000% gain on his fund. He describes himself as a joker of all trades.

>> Um has a lot of insights on DeFi markets and more. Sigle has a strong track record. Their entire fund has been early to DeFi, early early to a lot of investments. So, I'd like to kind of separate this into, you know, what [snorts] is happening in the market today. And then what is he seeing for the future investing in um, you know, these newer kind of like credit protocols or these newer DeFi applications, these more kind of like neo finance setups as well. So, without further ado, we're going to bring Fiscantes up into this into the show, get him joining us as our first guest of the day. Uh, and then we'll get into the news, guys. So, let's bring them up.

>> And and before we do, I think we're just getting him ready here in the back room. Um, I see uh and you put out a tweet about uh the N7 index and and I think we're gonna be talking about Neo Finance with with Fiscantes here in a moment >> and uh >> it's crushing. Well, you know, which token should we reduce? Which token should we add? >> Yeah, >> I mean, Sky is on a tear, I think, you know, as a result of some the, you know, a shifting. >> Spark Spark's on an absolute tear. >> Spark is on a tear and Aerodrome is on an absolute tear. And so, we're I think we're going to get to a point where we don't necessarily want to remove too many. like we might turn the N7 into an N8 or an N9 or an N10 because as more of

these coins kind of wrap their heads around what the token model should be going forward. Feels like we're going to end up increasing the number of >> just tokens with a reasonable tokconomics out there. >> Yes, there is something to be said about that. Um I can also see a case for like an N3 um or an N5. >> Call that the global T-wap. But I do like the I do like the and you know 10 11 12. Let's get Fiscantes up. Let's get this Let's get this conversation started. This guy's a legend. Uh should be a fun conversation. Piscantes, welcome to the show. Um hope you're marked safe from the craziness of the last week.

>> Hello everyone. Um thanks. Yeah, we are safe. Uh we are kind of good at dodging these things for some reason. I think it's mostly luck. Um, but yeah, we we dodge everything so far. >> Better be lucky than good. I mean, you guys have been around since 2019. We were just saying on your web, according to your website, 5,000% gain since 2019. You have to be somewhat lucky and somewhat good at avoiding some of the pitfalls in crypto. There's been plenty over the years. >> Well, indeed. Yeah. Um, I'm around a bit longer than that even, but yeah, the fund officially started counting our track records since 2019. And DeFi summer was the uh first sort of uh time period where we kind of made made our

first splash and uh yeah, it was a it was a blast. >> Yeah, man. It was it was I'm curious how you're how you're reading the situation right now. We got new so kind of like two parts here today. This what's going on with these exploits and then thinking about actually investing in the future of DeFi, what that looks like. on the exploit topic. When you're looking at, you know, just what's what's happening, right? These large loopers onchain are facing serious negative yield right now due to excessively high borrow APYs on wrapped ethon. USDC uh and USDT pools for the most part

across chains are also uh basically frozen, but they're not frozen. are just kind of there's no liquidity. Um, what are you like what is your thoughts as to what's happening right now? Whether it be from the state of DeFi, the state of this exploit, what what's happening behind the scenes? We're hearing a is having a lot of conversations about getting loans um to cover this loss. I'm I'm just curious, right? You've been in the space for a long time. How are you reading this right now? Um well it feels to me that DeFi is kind of um failing to some extent you know like it it held quite a lot of promise and we

were uh very bullish on DeFi since uh since very early and the early years were a lot of optimism a lot of sort of uh uh sky is the limit upsides and a lot of games you know fun and games but at some point you know we you need to grow up and uh I it kind of feels to me that DeFi is now in this weird space when it's not grown up yet but it's not fun anymore and it's just like something in the middle and it's basically just this uh belly of that situation and like yeah as you said the loopers are the ones that have the most you know issues now with with what's going on and like what even is looping right why is it a thing that you know anyone should be doing you know of

course you are trying to boost your yield And um it kind of makes sense economically especially when the yields are so low but it's not even useful to anyone else right it's not like providing any value to to society like I can get behind the base DeFi you know dexis money markets you know some uh um some perexis some other stuff but like it it kind of feels like a lot of these like sort of like new defi that we are dealing with now it's not really that useful it kind of got wrapped into itself self too much instead of expanding into the world and like kind of making a difference. And it's it's quite honestly a bit disappointing and jarring. And uh I would expect at this

point 2026 to already have more like adult solutions to some of these problems, more maybe circuit breakers, more sort of uh uh programmable uh features for wallets or DeFi protocols that kind of enable users to be more secure and to define their own risk. I don't know. something in a in a line of you know like if it's programmable, if it's all onchain and permissionless, let's make it customizable so users can define their risk parameters better or the protocol defines what are the uh end states that are useful and the end states that are malicious or potentially

too risky like looping or being able to withdraw all TVL with one transaction, right? That's obviously always an exploit and we don't have any of these like nobody I mean not nobody but there are not many uh builders now thinking about these things. It seems like everybody is just kind of stuck in the past but without the fun and without the high yield which is like the past but but only the sort of like the bad paradigms the bad habits that we created in the in the gold rush era and now we still have the bad habits but the gold is not there anymore. Right. So >> yeah. Yeah. you know, we we have this uh this thesis called the neo finance thesis. Part of this is that, you know, you you have the onchain developers that

have been here when the gold rush was happening and they're starting to get more, you know, institutional quality assets like RWAs. The other part is, you know, the institutions coming onchain and starting to build out their own infrastructure, which I think is really what we can benefit from is all of the compliance and the risk controls that, you know, some of these institutions, they have several hundred people in their risk and compliance departments. Unfortunately, now, you know, we're kind of scaring them off, right, with these exploits. They're going to be slower, but though that's really what we need.

We need safer risk controls coming into this system. Um, you know, also part of this this neo finance thesis is that, you know, decentralization is sort of a it's sort of a concept, but it's not so much practical anymore. A lot of what we've seen and you know, some very controversial things were kind of arbitum deciding to freeze the funds. We also today I saw Thor Chain just let the funds pass through their network. I think 175 million out of the, you know, almost 300 million of the RS ETH just passed through Thor Chain into Bitcoin untouched. Thor Chain even made money.

They made almost a million dollars in fees as a result of the bridging from, you know, the RSH hack uh exploited funds over to Bitcoin. I mean, being in the space for so long, where do you stand on this? Do you think we should, you know, embrace our roots, our e our our ethical beliefs, continue to maintain decentralization, the chain should be immutable, we shouldn't freeze those funds. On the other hand, you know, we're enriching Kim Jong-un and and giving a a known bad actor a nuclear program. It's a tough situation. Where where do you stand on? >> I I think there is a difference between decentralization and like a complete immutability.

I guess what you are talking about is closer to the latter like complete immutability means no matter what happens you know the chain goes on and like everything needs to continue and there is like no uh like fail safe or anything and like that's that's probably like the ideological maxima that's like never useful. It's too extreme. Decentralization just means that there is no one single guy or single entity authority that uh that has a final say and that needs to be bunch of actors coordinating together and organizing to make something happen. So I would say that decentralization is not like you know antithesis to being able to lock out bad actors. It just requires maybe

not one authority but maybe like 10, 15 or how many different actors, validators, whatever to come together and decide. And of course it's tricky because they need to coordinate fast and sometimes there is not enough time. But I kind of feel like there is like a wide design space between complete immutability and maximum sort of uh censorship resistance and sort of decentralization when it matters but also not uh you know rigidness. Um and yeah I think this is where we should be aiming at. And obviously now many of these DeFi quote unquote protocols uh actually aren't even decentralized.

There is someone holding the the admin key. There is like two two out of three multis. So we don't even have the centralization. But when bad start stuff starts happening, it kind of feels like even these parties are so stunned and acting so slow. So we have worst from both worlds. We have like we have centralization that's not even explicit. Sometimes it's hides behind you know buzzwords and and like onchain sort of theatrics but there is like still on the back end is still centralized and when bad stuff happens when the centralization is supposedly you know good because you can actually act fast then you know you are not acting fast so having bad from both worlds is probably where like at least

like 50 to 70% of current DeFi is and that's not a good thing >> and then would you say that Arbitram did is an example of the worst from both worlds or is that positive? Because I could see people arguing that Arbitrum having the ability to reach into a 9 of12 security council freeze this, you know, hackers ETH, which was rare to see that the hacker would leave ETH on an L2. It was almost like a test. It felt it felt like a test. But would you wouldn't that be a fair rebuttal to your take that the ability for arbitum to be you know immutable at the sequencer level but uh the ability to freeze assets from a security council

perspective in terms of elicit activity is that not an example of a more positive outlook? >> Uh it is but uh I'm not entirely sure how many actors arbitrum had to coordinate in order to uh enact this uh freeze. who's a nine of 12. >> Yeah, I I mean I guess it's fine if if it's explicit everywhere that there is like nine out of 12 sort of actors that need to be mobilized in order for this to happen. Obviously, this maybe sets a precedent, but like I never looked at arbitrum as something extremely censorship resistant. I always looked at most of these outs they are closer to some sort of companies rather than like decentralized you know permissionless

immutable settlement layers. This is what Ethereum is supposed to be for, right? So, for me, I'm not even surprised that it happened. Um, I would probably be surprised if it didn't happen to be honest. If they had a chance and didn't do it, that would actually even >> probably make them liable. Um, depending on where they are based and all I'm not a lawyer, but it kind of feels like if you can prevent a financial crime and if you have the ability to do so and you don't act, then you are you can be held liable in >> this. This is the problem with Circle right now. I mean, if we just think back to the hack that happened before this, you know, the Drift exploit, there was USDC taken from this protocol and it was pretty clearly an exploit right away.

People recognized it. >> Circle had some time to act and they decided not to. >> Yeah, that's that's weird. I obviously have don't have any insight into their inner workings, but they are the most regulated stable coin. They are publicly traded company. they they are supposed to be the most by the book. So I'm pretty sure they have bunch of lawyers and other you know experts cyber experts sitting in a room like looking at this. I don't think they are like sleeping uh you know sleepwalking into into you know hackers laundering funds through USDC and there is probably something in their terms or you know in in the law that prevents them maybe not prevents them but kind of gives them this freedom to not freeze the assets or maybe they need

a sena you know from the government I don't actually know what's happening there but I'm pretty sure it's not some random coincidence random fluke that you know they just randomly decide flipping a coin are we freeze or not. I'm pretty sure there are like serious debates, you know, in the background between lawyers and many other uh team members of ci. And yeah, so I cannot tell you more than I just think that it was well debated and there is a reason it didn't happen. Maybe ethically I would be more inclined or like more happy if if they did something because at the end of the day they are still a centralized stable coin. They hold money on bank accounts and T bills and stuff. So it's not like, you know, they don't have to play uh the uh ideological uh side as much. And

funnily enough, Tetar today froze like >> Yeah. Yeah. >> million something uh uh USDT on Tron, which maybe is connected to Lazarus, maybe not. Like I I haven't had the time to look into it, but it's funny that Tetar is supposed to be the more gray one, and it's much faster to act. >> Yeah. You know, I'm surprised that the politicians in the US aren't making a bigger deal about the amount of money North Korea, provably North Korea, has been able to take from this onchain economy. You know, this is they like to they like to talk about everything as a national security issue. Oh, electric vehicles, you know, we need to like save pollution. It's a national security issue against, you know, we have a war

on drugs, a war on the climate. Everything is a national security issue. But when a known state sponsored terrorist group is trying to fund a nuclear program and they're taking billions of dollars from honeypotss that are sitting online. All of a sudden that's not a national we're not deploying, you know, like computer science people in the military and cryptographic researchers at the government. We're not trying to actively stop this as a nation state and putting resources behind this. It feels it feels like there's something going on there that we're missing. Yeah, that's weird, right? Um, yeah, I agree. That's I would expect especially Democrats to use this ammo much more. Maybe they are saving it

for a bit later, you know, kind of just making a big pile of anti-Trump, anti-crypto arguments and then like firing at the same time. Maybe they are kind of like waiting for midterms. I I don't know, you know, the political games but >> it's definitely something that's quite easy to use in a political game. So, I'm pretty sure they will do something about it. Maybe after 2028 elections, you know, if the left side wins, maybe we will have another sort of uh uh choke point 3.0 or whatever or something like that based on, you know, not only uh president's uh President Trump's involvement, but also, you know, all this other stuff that's happening.

>> Yeah. Scott this getting into more of what you're bullish on and what you're looking at in the market. Um Sky and it's one of its stars spark uh has had a crazy run the last couple days as a result of this news from a kind of exploit. Are you are you bullish on Spark? Are you looking at the Sky ecosystem? Also USDA just had a crazy launch. Curious what your thoughts are on that. give us a sense of like what you're bullish on right now.

>> Yeah, we we never we were never able to kind of develop a forwardf facing thesis around maker/s sky. It always felt like it's kind of like undervalued forever but sort of a value trap without much sort of uh growth story you know like it kind of like it kind of sits there is this legacy thing that kind of works well but I never really I could never for I could never see any sort of like big catalyst that would kind of you know like 10x their uh their uh demand or like to make their product you know more and more used. It's kind of like generating some some yield, some uh some cash flow even for Skyholders. Uh for Spark, you know, I I honestly didn't even like think about it. We were

thinking like with with a team like we are going through some of the assets like which assets are going to benefit from uh from this DeFi uh uh sort of exploit season or whatever and we just like couldn't really like we were more like broadly bearish on DeFi for the foreseeable future unless there some new player comes and builds something new maybe like something that's closer to the security standards of the real world or of the new post AI North Korean era or whatever and we were kind of more in the mindset okay so we thought that this market is already solved you know just use a you know it's it's going to like grow and the winners are going to

compound but now I'm more in the mind of like maybe there is an opening for new players to jump in and build something that kind of overtakes everyone I just honestly didn't really think of sky to to be the thing that ultimately benefits I still think even though now I'm looking at a chart part. It's uh yeah, it reprised especially Spark. It repriced a little bit. I'm not sure if it's like a knee-jerm reaction based on the TV or the boost they got or if it's something that's it's going to start a new spark a new long-term trend, pun intended, but yeah, I would I I'm not buying it now.

>> Um with USDI, that's a completely different story that's like connected to the real world. It's like solving a niche need for uh small smaller scale uh private credit for computation and yeah I I actually uh met the founder personally he was quite an impressive guy uh to talk to as well. So I'm quite biased there and we we we farmed it with quite the size as well. So >> congrats man. >> Yeah. So we >> what was the return on that? Um it's it depends on the price, you know, but it's it's been juicy. If if the price stays at this level, it will be uh quite a few double digits.

>> What is it at? It's at a billion dollar FTV. It's at like 900 mil right now. You guys were farming it at like what around couple hundred million or like 80 million. >> Uh yeah, something I don't we are farming in the private deal. So it's even different. we have like a sort of like a terms that that are uh a bit skewed to that. So we are part of the private sort of yield deal. Uh I don't I'm not even sure if I can actually disclose exactly but it just been juicy and it's after a long time where this like farming efforts you know were kind of like very muted. The results were not

there and it's it's quite a nice uh win even though I'm speaking like out of turn. It's still like you know it needs to be unlocked over time but it seems like finally a nice yield farming win for DeFi. And it's double whammy because it's not just this circular uh DeFi that like does nothing but loops itself together, but it actually like tries to reach out to the real world and to something that's uh quite a hot story. You know, like computation is is a bottleneck currently. So yeah, I'm excited about that.

>> Yeah, this is another part of our thesis that we've been thinking about quite a bit. It sounds like you're aligned here, which is, you know, you kind of mentioned DeFi got so bent into itself. Uh, you know, so much looping, so much over leverage, so much rehypothecation, all of that. We we we've called endogenous yield where it kind of it looks for yield to extract from people within itself. And now what you're you're talking about with USDA is exogenous, right? because it's going out, it's going into a new field, uh, net new users, net new liquidity, and bringing that yield from this new energy source into the DeFi ecosystem. And it feels like that's where we're headed.

Have you seen any other opportunities that sort of use a similar model to USDA? maybe not applied to, you know, AI chips or compute or anything like that, but they're going out into a new field where there's credit that needs to be given and then bringing that yield back to stakeholders on chain. >> Uh I have seen some like uh packaged credit loans which was more like you know something sketchy looking for exit liquidity. So not that exciting. Yeah, >> we are actively looking for more uh similar things, but it's it's surprisingly there are not as many like if if uh crypto and DeFi is good at something, it's just like streaming capital to a use case that appears to have upside very fast. So, I would

expect more of like kind of like this maybe underserved niche financial fields to tab into uh tab into this tab, but it's not happening. Maybe you're just not looking in the right places, but I haven't seen anything as legit as USDI. Uh, and I'm pretty sure that someone in somewhere in comments will uh will uh show us something that I'm missing and that's great. So, I >> I invite everyone to correct me. >> Yeah. Um, do you have a perstax thesis? Are you big hyperlquid bull, lighter bull? Where do you stand on per category?

>> Yeah. So, we hold both assets in our fund. We are long uh hype since it launched basically and uh we also bought lit lighter token. We are so we are kind of bullish on both for some reason like even though blighter is very solid in all of the important areas I would say it keeps underperforming. So maybe there is something that we are missing or maybe market is just wrong. It can stay wrong for some time. So uh like let's see and yeah hyper liquid is just one of the best examples of what crypto and defi can actually deliver if you know done correctly with integrity and

long-term uh mindset and you know great product vision. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, there is still a bit of uh for me at least, you know, not to fat one of my biggest bags, but uh you know, seeing all of these hacks exploits happening, you know, and seeing how uh the team around Hyperlid like the core team is still so small, like you know, it's impressive that they built such such a uh impactful uh product and project, but at the same time, you know, sometimes you kind of need to need more eyes to keep watching stuff because like times are getting more dangerous, you know, there is dark forest everywhere

and can 11 people even if they are super smart like stay on top of everything if the ecosystem is expanding so fast. Uh I would I would prefer them to kind of move more into the uh kind of like more major um place where they hire more people from different sort of backgrounds especially on the cyber sec side you know maybe kind of do something with the multisc uh yeah so so I'm kind of I'm a bit nervous but at the same time I'm very excited to uh to see something like that happening because it's a proof that crypto is not a complete lost cause even though we like that too many, right?

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um, VC and the Etherealized guys put out this productive money thesis signaling Ethereum to trade at 250,000 per ETH at some time in the I don't know, let's call it the next decade or two. Um, are are you still a massive ETH bull? What's your what's your honest reaction to seeing a 250k per ETH >> projection on the timeline? >> I don't know, man. I don't Yeah, I don't I cannot take this thing seriously. Like I I haven't read it to be honest. So maybe there are some good arguments that I'm missing and I don't want to do this.

So this is ad service, but just from the number like it's like from the succession series, guys, I love you, but you are not serious people. Like I feel like that like like come on like even Bitcoin is not 2000 sorry 250K or whatever. Um you know like I remember even 2021 where people were calling for uh 10k eat I was already kind of like mentally shorting the number and it's like five years later 10k was not never even close. And we are already like I'm I understand that you need to kind of paint the pie in the sky sort of dream big and kind of shoot for the moon situation especially

after it is underperforming for so long but like come on like >> like let's let's I mean and actually like some of these stratfi sellside guys I'm not even mentioning Tom Lee but even like the more serious ones uh they they actually have outrageous price targets too like especially around Bitcoin like we we always see some uh Goldman Sachs or whatever Annard is saying is like 700,000 for Bitcoin. So it's it's not like specific to crypto but like I always scream so hard and I don't I read it and I change my mind but it's like 1% chance so I don't take it seriously. I'm not a massive ebull and I'm quite about it,

>> but at the same time it feels like it kind of it's lost between being like a worse store of value uh kind of trying to compete with Bitcoin and failing and then also being worse uh sort of uh DeFi settlement layer because all these L2s are like centralized all the DeFi that was supposed to be safe and attract the institutions because they have the longest track record. Now it's kind of you know dissolving uh in our hands with with just use a not being a thing. So even this sort of lag which was kind of Ethereum's biggest advantage I would say like you know the longest standing protocol with the most DeFi money most EVL it feels to me like it it got much weaker recently. So, I

don't know. Um, I want it to do well because it's still, you know, the the prime asset after Bitcoin and yeah, I don't think it will flip Bitcoin anytime soon. But, um, I also feel like I, as a, you know, like fund manager and investor, I can find much better riskreward um, propositions elsewhere. >> Yeah, we haven't talked about the flipping in a while. Um, you know, I I also noticed that you guys have this uh you have your Sigle core fund, uh, which is up quite a bit and then you've also got this Sigle stable fund which has performed quite well. Um, you also mentioned, you know, the Tom Lees, the Michael Sailors. I know Sailor has this

stretch product that's yielding, you know, 10 plus percent. How much when it comes to the single stable fund, are you looking at onchain strategies in DeFi, especially, you know, with the recent exploit? Have you decreased some of your DeFi uh yielding allocations? Are you looking more offchain? Where do you go for yield these days? >> Um we are still mostly onchain. It's not 100% uh like when we started single stable which is our like yield farming market neutral fund. Now it's around would say 50%, we are not really like um decreasing our exposure because you know the hack happened or the exploit but we are just mindful about the riskreward

and we even even before it happened we kind of felt like the riskreward is no longer there and the base yields are super low and the risk is you know kind of increasing with new language models becoming like more capable of exploiting stuff. Um so we are mindful of that and we use or we are now like employing bunch of solutions on our end that will enable us to mitigate some of these risks and some of these are commercially available solutions and yeah um we are now deploying to other strategies more actively uh sort of uh managed market neutral positions on on dexes uh uh and even on exchanges. There is also a quite a lot of value currently and it will

grow in time to have a sort of trfy lag meaning having a trati uh broker an exchange where you know the fund can do arbs and like kind of hedge or trade between uh rwas on chain and their you know the spot or other counterparts in the thrat file. So this is kind of where we are uh positioning our uh our stable fund right now. And you oh you you asked about stretch that's yeah it's it's very interesting we are actually discussing it today for quite a while uh on our call um yeah it's I mean sailor is a madman and kind of a grifter but he f I think like he found like the golden

grift in a sense that it's very well designed what he's doing is very well designed I think he mentioned somewhere he's using AI to kind of help him to kind of design the best possible sort of scheme for for his goals. at the same time he's trying to tap into the largest uh sort of I'm not going to say underserved but it's like extremely hungry capital which is very hard to serve and that's uh basically pension funds >> which pension funds especially in US they hold trillions of dollars in assets and what's happening is obviously the demographic curve is kind of collapsing on the on the young bottoms meaning that there is much much more old people than than young people. So it's much harder

to sustain the pensions and for the pension funds to kind of survive they need to go a bit >> uh you know further on the risk curve. So they are starting to buy some junk bonds and uh there is also like a there was a situation a few years back where fed actually for the first time bailed out some junk bonds because they were held by um by these pension funds right so if if pension funds start buying something like stretch because it gives them 10% yield and it's high enough I think they need something like 8% yield to kind of >> fill the gap of being too many old people for for the young productive uh demographics um they will need to get more yield and this is like something

that they can use and if they start using it if they start like buying it and earning this yield from scratch then uh it becomes a sort of a question of uh bailout if if something bad happens. So if Sailor kind of is able to position himself into this sort of pension fund pipeline and really like make it happen then yeah he can he can sustain this flywheel for quite a long while barring some black swan that maybe he cannot control like I don't know quantum threads you know sucking out Satoshi's coins or something similar or maybe like Democrats coming in power and banning all crypto but barring that I can I feel like it's not going to like collapse anytime soon. it actually can propel a

lot of uh Bitcoin price too. >> And and building upon your ETH thesis, there's been calls that now Tom Lee is going to implement some sort of stretch product on Bitmine. >> Yeah, that could I mean yeah that that would actually kind of flip mysis uh in a sense that that would provide like a very credible sort of marginal buyer. Um yeah, I I believe that it could be better asset because it already has native staking yield. So that's the argument for it. >> Yeah. Yeah. But then you can do it for Sana, right? And then like where do you stop, right? But yeah, it is definitely I mean it's the most obvious thing for Tom Lee to do. I believe he kind of run out of money almost otherwise and he's

almost at his goal to accumulate like 5% of its supply. So now he needs to figure out something else to kind of propel his his game. Obviously he's not in such a good position because like it's much much smaller than than Sailor. He's not I mean even though he always appears on CNBC or whatever I believe Sailor is just much better cult leader and salesman he only has Micro Strategy. He only has Bitcoin and his single religion. Tom Lee has like his granny shots ETF and I don't know what else he is doing. So for him it's just like a kind of like one of the quests but for for Sailor it's you know do or die sort of situation. But yeah, I believe that Tom can do it and yeah, then it will be

interesting to have the conversation if if it's really bullish it and if it should be in our in our uh core holdings or not. Um so yeah, but it doesn't happen yet. So we don't need to wait. I'm not going to just speculate on it unless I see something from uh from him. >> Yeah, of course. >> Last thing I have for you is what does your um portfolio look like right now? like what are you what are you holding? Um you mean in our single core in our main fund uh we are >> long I mean I'm not going to list all the positions because we kind of have quite a bit um of stuff but uh we kind of divided between our like long-term

core holdings that we have like long-term thesis for which is not that many assets it's hyperlquid lighter we actually hold Zcash we can talk about it like a a thing that I kind of believe can have uh uh you know asymmetric upside still um we hold bunch of other things we don't have hold that much defy tokens uh we hold some long tale of speculative sort of almost like venture bets that are like liquid tokens but they just like behave like VC bets because they are so small and we you know they are usually like going to zero but some of them can actually like do something and reprise massively like it can give you almost like a venture outcome. uh we are still around 33%

in uh in cash too with uh with the goal to kind of deploying into these smaller uh sort of uh uh more like undervalued opportunities or maybe when we see some bullish signal like just go go big on uh on it or BTC based on you know the thesis we mentioned we hold some uh uh sana we still hold some soul It's kind of we are going to talk about underwriting our thesis for the future. So maybe we'll uh we'll sell that. Maybe we'll buy more. Let's see how the discussion develops. We are always kind of open-minded about you know uh this uh re underwriting events that we have. Uh we have uh some stocks uh we we kind of

are trading a bit around with uh Robin Hood uh Coinbase, Circle, we also have a bit of uh Galaxy and yeah we were able like last year to kind of sell them quite high and now we are buying them lower. So we have stock portfolio which I mean it's so comfortable as an investor to to invest in stocks where you don't have to ask what is the tokconomics you know what does the token do what is the value acroal it's just like all these apparatus already is like exist and the problem is solved and only thing you need to figure out is like the business itself whereas when you are in crypto like like 30% of your time you are spending on on the on the token utility or whatever value approval how strong it is how easy it is to rack

token holders which which like stock solves. So we are quite comfortable in our stock positions. And lastly what we are looking at now this is not our position or anything but we are uh trying to figure out how to hedge against tailor risks. Let's say you know quantum thread in three years suddenly is real. Satoshi's coin start moving. Bitcoin down 60 70% in one candle like you want to like ideally if you are like long with 70 80% of your book uh you kind of don't want to you know have this sharp spike down. Ideally you want to have a dry powder or maybe you want to have some sort of a tail hedge that kind of gives you more dry power so you can

buy cheaper or you have part of your downside protected. So it's quite an interesting problem to solve within crypto because like nothing is really that liquid like there are no put options or any other like similar derivatives that you can really uh play with any reasonable size and with reasonable like price levels but yeah maybe with stratfi micro strategy there is something there so we are looking at this direction as well. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh last question I got for you Fiscantes is uh just based on your portfolio construction are you more bullish uh crypto stocks or crypto tokens?

>> Uh still crypto tokens. Oh and by the way I forgot to mention one of our large positions is uh a private equity position in poly market which grew quite uh massively. So but it's that one is liquid. So we need to kind of uh account uh accounted with a discount. Uh so yeah if we count poly market as a equity position then it's like very close tokens to to equity but without poly market which is like a private position that we are holding uh we are still more long tokens it's I mean even though there are like it's much more tricky to underwrite tokens these days we still feel like this is our core expertise so you know like hype is our probably the biggest position right now if I count

correctly it's kind of close but yeah I think it's we are still skewed towards digital assets tokens and yeah we are slowly building our our equity portfolio too. >> Got it. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Miss Contes, thanks for joining man. Um I'm glad that you guys were Mark safe. This is a hell of a last couple of days in DeFi. Man, appreciate your time and just interesting to hear how you're thinking about the market and your positions and all of this. So appreciate it. >> Thank you guys for having me. It was a blast and uh hope to talk to you again sometime soon.

>> Let's do it, >> buddy. >> Thanks for coming. >> Yeah, boys. Well, he's bullish. That's good. Someone's got to be bullish. Did wasn't very bullish on ETH, I'll tell you that much. Wasn't surprised to be honest. I think a lot of these OG Defiers are kind of they're kind of shifting their views on on ETH. >> Yeah, I haven't heard a lot of bullish ETH takes aside from the usual suspects. the Etherealized guys, um Tom Lee, etc. >> Yeah, >> I didn't know that Tom Lee was going to do a stress product.

>> It's rumors. I mean, it's speculation right now, but uh it it feels like a natural next step. He he's basically following the same sailor playbook, you know, two to three years lag, right? So, I'd imagine that he looks once he deploys a lot of the capital that he's raised, you know, he's going to look to raise more debt, do some ATMs, do some, you know, do some differentiated income products where he's able to, you know, say, "Hey, I'll sell you this this yield product 8 to 11%, which, you know, Sailor's got two different uh income products. Sell sell those income products, raise cash, and then use that cash to go buy ETH."

>> Yeah. Well, interesting conversation. That guy's a whale and uh has a lot of a lot of size in these positions. I'm sure that poly market position is eight figures now. Um I'm sure his hype position is eight or nine on the fund. So, um why don't we get to the news, Rob? Let's talk about what's going on. Um there's a lot going on and Lido is under fire. Um, I will kind of walk through what's happening here with Lido. So, they put out this thread. It's an update on the Earn Vault. So, Lido has these Earn Vault products. Um, and basically what's happening here, I put

out a quick tweet about it. Just read quickly. Lidos found themselves in an unfortunate and precarious position here. They the earn ETH vault has RS ETH exposure. It's got it's about 9% of the vaults TVL. It has also exposure to other looping and vault strategies which were kind of like if you will like co-mingled that also had exposure to RS ETH. They're getting hammered right now by the high borrow APY. So they're operating clearly unprofitably from a yield perspective.

Luckily ETH has been relatively stable if not up since this happened. Um no sign of timeline for for a fund recovery from uh a or from uh layer zero or from kelp. Earn ETH is however backed by Lido's Dow's treasury ownership which signals that users likely will not lose in this scenario unless this delay lasts weeks on end. Lido's committed to putting up about $3 million of their of their own share in these vaults as a backs stop to users. If this, you know, frozen funds or lack of liquidity, however you want

to call it, continues on for, you know, weeks on end, Laida will offer their users the ability to exit with the maximum anticipated haircut. I thought it was closer to 10 to 20%. I think it might be actually closer to 5 to 8%. Um, and so yeah, that's where Lido's at. They are unfortunately affected with their vault product and none of their actual staked ETH or wrap staked ETH products are affected, but they had these earn vaults that were affected.

So, you can see how they had one vault with exposure. other vaults that had different types of exposure co-mingled and now they're kind of on the hook to the tune of a couple million dollars at least from the Treasury to pay back the users if not allowing the users a maximally anticipated haircut. You know, I I think this is signaling to me that the fact that they had to put the timing thing in there that this lack of liquidity on a may may last a lot longer than we think. It may possible that it lasts weeks.

>> So, let's just back up a little bit now. And I and I I might not have all the details because there's a lot of moving parts here, but my from from everything that I've seen, it's Kelp Dow. Obviously layer zero's involved and it was their core infrastructure that really got exploited and then a got stuck holding the bag. But it's Kelp DAO that essentially has the choice, the unilateral choice as far as I understand it to determine how losses are socialized, whether they're going to apply losses to only the L2s versus socialized losses across all the chains.

C if can they just do this at any is there a and DAO in my mind means that there's a governance vote that should take place right and that is how we're going to determine whether L2s are stuck holding the bag or if it's socialized across mainet as well is that Dow vote happening anytime soon I have not heard anything about it and I honestly don't think it's going to be like a Dow structure the issue is while they can determine what's going to happen a has to manage the the bank run that's gonna happen once this liquidity is returned.

They're gonna have so much liquidity being pulled out of the market out of the A and liquidations happen on these loops. Liquidations will happen on some major lending markets if things don't change within the next 10 days on some of these loops >> because the borrow rate is so high. >> Yeah, >> they're just squeeze. A needs to manage that and they need and they need to manage the bank run the withdrawal of funds. Now if if I that makes sense because if Kelp Dow determines like hey these funds are mute these funds are okay but you know this other batch of RS ETH is is kaput then everyone's going to try to withdraw the good ETH right and borrow if they have the bad ETH supplied to A they're

going to try to borrow funds against that and and get some funds out >> but A has everything frozen right now so >> well it's like it's frozen because there's no liquidity Right. So they just put utilization is at 100%. So >> yeah it's it's fully it's fully slammed. So RS E reserves this is from a have been paused across Ethereum arbitrum base mania. This was done with the objective of recovering additional funds as [snorts] recovery plans progress. So they're yeah they're paused on all the markets for RS.

>> Yeah. Yeah, it just seems like if if you know they're frozen because there's no liquidity, a could actually freeze the markets. Don't allow anyone to withdraw collateral. Don't allow anyone to lend, borrow, nothing. Freeze the markets. Let Kelp Dow determine what happens to those assets. And then >> you have those assets both good and bad locked in the protocol, which would slow down a bank run. And then in the time frame, first you need kelp out to determine what happens to the assets. And then while you still have the markets frozen on a you can determine, hey, this is our remediation plan on a feels like that's how this should go.

>> And layer zero has said nothing. They've been since their since their original announcement, they've been quiet completely. >> Um >> yeah, completely quiet. >> I mean, I'm not surprised. They don't want to be caught holding a $300 million bag, but ultimately it was their infrastructure that got exploited. >> Yeah. So, that's where Lido is at. Kind of switching gears here, another crazy morning. Um, flipping into Tether. So, Tether blacklists $344 million of USDT in coordination with OFFAC and US law enforcement. Um, this was tagged earlier this morning and there's rumors flying.

I mean, it's, you know, because Justin's son was threatening to sue World Liberty Finance or this is Iranian USDT or this is connected to the Lazarus group. I mean, there is just I mean, everything under the book, under the sun is flying here for why Tether froze these funds. And $344 million is no small amount. I mean, this is this is this is significant. Um, so I don't know what's happening here, but people are shocked. like they're shocked that Tether was moving so much faster than Circle on these freezers when they're supposed to be more of like this

like yeah more gray area company and people are just like already like trying to mentally grapple with what's happening with this RS ETH exploit and then this freezer this morning was just like wow >> I I remember when Tether was like this shady organization operated by Bitfinex. It was like, do their reserves actually exist? Are they fully backed? Are they insolvent? You had Bit Finexed? The Twitter account was like constantly berating them. It felt like there was so much evidence against them. And and fast forward, I mean, that wasn't that long ago, like less than five years, right?

Fast forward to today, it feels like Circle's regulatory moat has completely eroded and Tether is completely capitalizing on the US market. they're acting more steadfast in seizing these assets, working with US law enforcement. Um, yeah, it it we don't know. Okay, so actually I'm I'm running a Grock search right now on who this seizure could be. >> Yeah. Yeah, >> and it seems like >> independent onchain analysts uh traced the wallets and found they are hops away from the Hoin Group, also known as Hoin Pay or related Cambonian entities. Uh Hin Group background is Cambodia entity. Uh, US Treasury

Fininsen primary money laundering concern. Long accused of operating as a major laundering hub for pig butchering scams, cyber fraud, human trafficking, and even funds linked to North Korean hacking groups like Lazarus. Uh, Tether has frozen smaller amounts tied to the HON group uh in previous years sites 29.6 million in 2024. >> Wow. What a what a group. Wow. Yeah. I mean, look, man, this is what the freezing ability of these centralized issuers is for. And again, like, if they were given information that suggested that these funds were

illicit by bad actors, are they complicit or are they complicit in the activity if they have the ability to censor it and stop it and they don't? And that is the legal question that they are battling all the time and that they have to face in court or you know basically do what they've done. >> I think both of these companies are fully complying with law enforcement. We don't know how long Tether was working with OFAC behind the scenes in order to you know put a subpoena out there and ultimately you know have instructions to seize these funds or freeze these funds.

The drift hack happened so quickly. I mean, Circle, it seems like, could have could have frozen the funds. They had a few hours, but that is too fast for law enforcement to come in, issue a subpoena. And then Jeremy Aair and Circle said, "Hey, you know, we need law enforcement to instruct us. We're not just going to go freeze funds willy-nilly." >> Yeah. >> Even though it seems like they they should have tripped some alarms. Tether, because this came out of nowhere, it seems like, wow, they're doing all of this freezing like very proactively, but it could they could have been working on this behind the scenes. They were >> I um I just think it's interesting because you know for so long we were talking about central bank digital currencies. What's the difference? Like if if I'm just c you know if you have

law enforcement instructing these groups to seize these funds or freeze these funds it you know these guys are an extension of a CBDC. They the law enforcement effectively has control. I mean they have to be legal and compliant. So it just feels like if we have the ability to freeze funds, what's you know, do you see a big difference here between CBDC's and privately issued stables? >> I mean, yeah. From the I mean, there's obviously like nuances, right? It's like, oh, it's not a central bank issued note. It's not a it's not, you know, you don't have an account with the Fed, right? You know, there's not an account with Tether.

>> But the the main the main the uh was the the main criticism of CBDC's was always the surveillance state. >> Yeah. and the censorshipness or the ability to be frozen like oh you know you say the wrong thing in your public content and you go home and your CBDC account is emptied. I now I guess you you know we had private companies like remember the censorship regime around social media where you know the Democrats I think were saying hey Facebook like go you got to kick Donald Trump off your off Twitter like you got to kick him off Facebook you got to cancel these people at a certain point I think they started to push back on that I'd be curious if we get to a point

where the OFAC fininsen regulatory law enforcement regime gets so far overextended and tries to censor some of these funds that we do get some push back from these private privately issued stable coin companies. I think that would be healthy and it's probably good to have some some separation here. >> I think that's where it's at. Like I I don't think um I don't think circle and tether are just like feeding information to the governments and the law enforcement saying hey come come censor or come tell me where to free I mean maybe they are maybe that's exactly what's happening. Um, but I don't think it's like a you know, you know, it it's more of like a collaborative process, I

would assume, at this point, rather than like a, hey, we're telling you to do this. Like, I don't think the the law enforcement has such a unilateral decision making over the choices of these private companies. Um I I I think it's probably like less than what you assume, but maybe I'm completely wrong. And they're just feeding them all of the data, all of the wallets, all the uh kind of chain analysis and, you know, telling these law enforcement agencies to come back with feedback with uh with direction and we'll comply. I >> I think they need to be in compliance.

They can't they don't want to do anything illegal because then Circle and Tether get in trouble. But I don't think it's as extreme as them feeding all the information. I think they they want to make sure that there's no money laundering. And so Tether and Circle probably have risk controls in place, these wires, if you will, that if they get tripped, they go to law enforcement. They say, "Hey, we had this wire get tripped. Do you want us to do something about it?" In that sense, I think it is very collaborative, right? And they're not just feeding information. And so yeah, at this point it feels like, you know, they're on the same team, but if there I I I'm just I don't want to speculate too much, but if there is a situation in which, you know, a government or a law enforcement agency

says, "Hey, we don't like these people, like North Koreans, pig butchers, human traffickers." Yeah. Very obviously on the wrong side of the law. >> Definitely. >> If there's gray zones like, "Hey, we don't like this figure of speech. this guy we think is doing like harmful like corrupting the children and like you know double speaking and like doing these sorts of things like we had you know in the whole Edward Snowden des like uh censorship regime social media cabal >> then it gets into a gray area and and we might see this relationship between private stable coin issuers and and law enforcement agencies get less collaborative and more like hey that's not the right thing and get more

politicized. >> It's it's going to be a really really weird battle between Circle and Tether to like adhere to the standards of compliance that you know they should be and also maintain the direct long-term viability of the crypto environment. And so I I I would expect to see more and more of that kind of scale up. Let's move on from Tether as we uh have a very very interesting week in DeFi here.

>> So >> this is still tether >> again. This is the specific addresses. Yeah, we can move on from this but you you see it's two addresses 212 million 130 million two the same addresses onchain on Tron. So these are the exact sources here for you guys. and and like who said this is looking to be like it's tied to this Cambodian uh moneyaundering group. >> Yeah, this is wild. >> Let's move on from Tether here. >> It's a it's a it's a weird weird dynamic of the timeliness of these of these two events. So, this Stony Post and what's happened with RS E and then the Tether Freezer. Past few days have been

intense, but I wanted to give some updates as we continue to work on this. Our priority is our users and every decision we are making is aimed at an orderly return to normal market conditions and the best possible outcome for everyone involved. Okay. Um Okay. >> Very. >> Working around the clock, the team has made progress on multiple paths forward with several partners. The arbitum security council also recovered $70 million of ETH which could meaningfully reduce the potential exposure and multiple discussions and solutions are being considered. I'm confident we'll move towards a strong resolution.

Okay. Reviewing what happened and learning from it matters, but pointing fingers is not something that gets us to the other side of this. Well, that is what kelp and layer zero both did. Every bit of my energy right now is focused on the outcome for a users and the protocol. A has been my life's work and this is an important moment for DeFi as much as it is for A. I'm deeply grateful for the support and collaboration as we we've received from builders and partners across the industry. We'll get through this together and we'll continue to publish updates on A. So I mean yeah I mean I I don't have much >> No, I mean obviously people want action, right? This is like this is good kumbaya. Like there's nothing wrong with

it. People want to see that like teams these teams are communicating. >> Yeah. >> I think look you're right. Layer Zero did a postmortem and hasn't spoken about this since that >> and it was completely blaming Kelpa entirely >> and and that's the wrong approach, right? that like we should see more communications coming from them even if it is a kumbaya thing and they don't have like just that they are you know actively engaging in discussions to try to fix how about fix all the DVNs out there that are still frozen all these one one out of ones right they've started to do a lot of this but you know how about we upgrade all those and they've started to make some work there but how about talking to these teams putting out some joint announcements improving the architecture so that we

prevent this in the more transparency, more communication on that front. >> Yeah, I think and then Kelp put out another post today that kind of said nothing like it was like it was very just vague and no one's committing to a timeline. Uh, no one's committing to a kind of date or an overall like process, but you know, you could you can imagine Stonniey's in the war room right now taking calls trying to get loans for a like he's trying to get loans payback over time based on revenue from the protocol or whatever it is. And you know, these are not the type of conversations that get solved in a day.

I mean, this is like you're going to the largest funds and allocators in the space and potentially outside and you're asking for like tens of millions of dollars. >> I mean, look, we we this feels like when CZ offered to bail out FTX, right? And we obviously know how that didn't work out. And so Stan's got to be extremely careful. There's going to be sharks swimming in the water, right? We we know that there's going to be sharks offering all kinds of loan terms to a to Stani. He's going to sift through a bunch. I I do think that there's going to be Look, it's not a whatever it was $4 billion hole like it was on FTX. $350 million was the number that I had seen. Make

that 70 million less as a result of Arbitum. Uh it's a quarter of a billion dollars. It's a lot of money, but it's not it's not insurmountable. >> Yeah. I mean, I think the bad debt's going to be less than that. Should just be around like a 100 and >> 20 maybe. So, >> all right. Well, we can keep it rolling. I think we have another kind of uh you know, this is exactly what you were talking about, Rob. I'm going to pass this one over to you. Rap Bitcoin uh DVN's >> uh this is kind of what you were saying here about like teams upgrading their architecture.

>> Yeah. So, we'll we'll take the rest of these headlines over the line. Andy's going to set up the nest for our next guest in person. and Mike Dudas for Sixman Ventures. Andy, I'll talk to you in a bit. >> All righty, >> let's hop over to Rap Bitcoin. Uh, and so here we go. I mean, obviously huge that Rap Bitcoin did not get exploited. Um, if this had happened, this is a major systemic risk uh to the entire onchain landscape. Uh, Rap Bitcoin has gone through, you know, multiple iterations and changes uh over the years. But uh if this had uh gone sideways, this could have been really really bad uh because Rap Bitcoin is been uh so uh implemented, it's been so integrated into the rest of the onchain

economy, uh that obviously we need to avoid a lot of this systemic uh infection. Um and so what they're doing is they're updating their DVN configuration. Um, so we're moving out of these oneofone DVN designs uh and more into uh, you know, some of these upgraded layer zero architectures. I have a feeling, look, layer zero is going to have some fallout from this. There's going to be teams that are looking at their infrastructure. The initial step is going to be, hey, we're going to upgrade one of one to maybe a two of two, three of three sort of configuration. But then shortly thereafter, you got to think that there's going to be some backroom conversations talking about moving away from layer zero alto together. Um, so

you know, while Bitcoin didn't get hacked here, that's good. Obviously, these guys are working on improving their architecture before, you know, more of these exploits become attempted. So, let's uh let's move on to the next one. Uh, I believe our friend Joel, who has been on the show before, is going to be discussing this Thor Chain. Uh, I want to call it an incident. A lot of the moneyaundering took place through Thor Chain. They profited quite a bit off of fees. I think there's a video that goes along with this. So, let's let's play this video and uh and go from there. We'll see what Joel has to say.

I'm about to lose my goddamn mind. So, a ton of money got stolen from this crappy stupid DeFi protocol bridge thing, whatever. It turns out they had a oneofone deviant multi-IG, whatever the this is. They lost all this money to, again, no surprise, North Korea, the smartest people in the room, it seems these days, the people who actually understand the decentralization or lack thereof in the space. Oh, they're swapping through Thor Chain from one transparent, easy to trace crypto to another transparent, easy to trace crypto that both of which don't censor transactions. And you're saying that Thor Chain and other Dexes like this should be shutting down, stopping this stuff because your crappy

ass centralized lost money. you. Absolutely you. You've been playing around with this stupid ass trust me broi forever, scamming noobs, doing the most terrible centralized, no safeguards, nothing, no decentralization stuff out there, getting people to pour ungodly amounts of money into this stuff. And then they're getting wrecked by who? The North Koreans, of course. But they're getting wrecked. It's your fault. And then we finally get something good in the space. We get decentralized censorship resistant exchanges and you're saying, "No, that's too dangerous." Well, go yourself. I'm sorry. This isn't our fault. We have

been doing things the right way. I haven't had a bank in 10 years. That's because I care about decentralization. I want to live on freedom money. I don't want to be censored and rugpulled, which is all the government and custodians do all the time. and you said you're on the same mission as this, but then you do this one of one and lose all your money. Not just your money, but a bunch of stupid noobs who come into the space buying your stupid ass promises. You lose it all. And then it's my fault. My fault for wanting to be decentralized and censorship resistance. Go yourself. Like, I'm going to lose my mind. This is insane. Kim Jong-un did you guys a favor as the avenging angel

of DeFi, coming on in and being the security researcher of the year, poking holes in all your crap, charging probably less than your actual auditors would charge to show you that your sucks. Listen, he's a bad guy. North Korea's a bad guy. Every all that stuff, it's no good. But it's your fault, your responsibility. every single person who promoted one of these centralized things, every single Ethereum who is like, well, later two scaling road map. And then now you have Arbitum just arbitrarily censoring and stealing people's funds to prevent this hack which should not have had to exist if you had a one of one

boat. I'm going to lose my mind. I'm losing my mind. Satoshi is rolling in his grave. Censor your mother if you want censor. >> Censor your mother if you want censor is hilarious. Um Joel, I love you, man. I I think you you've actually got generally the right idea here and I align with a lot of it. The the part that I don't align with is this. If you have the ability to censor and you know North Korea is flowing and laundering money through your protocol, then yes, you should censor that. You should not contribute to North Korean nuclear weapons. Now, you might disagree with the premise. The premise here is that

you shouldn't have a oneofone. You shouldn't have a protocol that you can censor. And I agree with you there. You know, if we have the throwaway test, right? Throw away the keys. You can't censor. there's nothing that you could do to stop the flow of these laundering funds, then there's nothing you can do. You built truly decentralized censorship resistant infrastructure. Good for you. But if you have the keys and you have the ability to censor and you see that there's money going through your protocol, I think you have the moral obligation to stop it. Now, you could argue you have the moral obligation not to build a censorship uh compatible protocol to begin with. And I think I' I'd actually agree with you there. And so, you know,

layer zero and the one of one configurations, you and I very much on the same page, those should not exist. Those are against the spirit of everything that we do here. Arbitum, you could even argue this is maybe the gray zone. 9 of12 security council centralized single sequencer. That's a very gray area. the fact that they have the ability to censor. Maybe they shouldn't have had that ability to begin with, but since they do, let's just exist in the reality that we exist in. They have that security council, they should use it in this situation. Thor Chain, I don't know if they have the ability to censor. If they threw away the keys, they made the choice to be

decentralized, be totally censorship resistant, good for them, right? That's a smart good. As long as they don't get in trouble for doing that, then they can do that and they re retain the ethos of this industry. But on days like today, if you still have the keys, if you still have the ability to to prevent money flowing into state sponsored terrorism, I'm going to argue that you should you should take decisive action to stop uh that flow of funds. All right, guys. Um I think that's enough for for Joel. Like he said, he's been on the show before. Joel, come back. I happy to uh to chat with you on on the show about this. It's obviously there's lots of moving parts, lots of dimensions to this here. Um guys, we're

going to do quick quick standby. Mike Dudas is going to be joining Andy in the tokenization tower live from the Empire State Building, the nest. We'll be right back with our in-person interview of the day, Sixman Ventures. Mike Dudas, live from the tokenization tower coming up right after this. >> [bell] >> Going 70 7

All righty, guys. We are live with Mike. Mike, a friend of the show. Mike, how are you, man? Welcome to the show. >> I'm doing great and thanks for having me. >> Beautiful day in the city. >> It sure is. And this view, I'm sure every guest tells you, is ridiculous. >> You can see all of your previous >> places, all of your current places, everything. >> Yep. old uh old neighborhood, current office, and uh yeah, it's a beautiful day. >> How about the Knicks, huh? With the uh with the just heartbreaking loss in game Is that game two? >> Yeah. >> So, a little salty, but you know, got a game tonight and I'm in the city, so I'll find somewhere to watch it with some fans.

>> Good man. Well, this is kind of like our annual state of state of venture side of things. I think we did this last down in in Soho last year was a different state of things, different market. Um for sure. >> Yes. Um, we had uh Tom Dunley on from Varys Capital. He he kind of wrote this viral kind of long form piece about just like the state of founders and the state of a venture in crypto and and I think you had kind of been talking about this quite a bit last year as well already. And his his general framework here was like um you know the amount of VC dollars in the space is is dwindling.

There's less raises happening. There's less quality teams. It's just a different world. But I kind of thought of this as like, well, if if you have capital and you can sniff out the good founders, there's a lot less competition. There's there's a lot of kind of newer founders coming in to the space uh with, you know, probably a better pedigree than the than the previous cohort. And we we ended up agreeing that this 2025 2026 vintage was probably going to be one of the, you know, more successful ones. Do you agree with that? kind of how do you think about this current uh lay of the land with this current uh outlook for these founders?

>> Yeah, so I'm a venture capitalist. I'm deploying in 2026. So I'm going to tell you this is going to be the best vintage we've we've ever had. >> LPS listen up. >> Uh so but a couple things. So one, there is plenty of capital uh in the crypto markets uh uh you know in venture crypto markets. the there are a number of mega funds that have been raised. You've seen the announcements. Uh there have been a number of early stage funds including ours that have been raised that folks aren't announcing, but there is a tremendous amount of capital that's resting and ready to be deployed. Uh >> uh so that's not an issue.

>> Yeah, >> it's um the other point you raised is hey, you know, we've been talking about are there great founders? Well, the answer is yes. Um are there great ideas? Clearly there are because you see a number of you know breakout protocols many of them most of them founded m you know many years ago some of them in other bare markets but there are ideas there are founders and there's capital so this absolutely is not a time to be sort of depressed uh about being in crypto based on those things. >> Yeah. Um, what's happening is there's just explosions sort of happening. And I don't want to laugh about it because they're serious, but you know, there's hacks, there's, you know, founders, you know, being accused of things, being

arrested, there's all of these, uh, there's, you know, the Trump family and all of the things associated with them that are looking increasingly sketchy. Um, so there's just a number of really the the regulatory environment in DC where we're really eager to pass laws. we we thought they'd be passed by now or very close to and they're not. Um so there's just a number of sort of crypto crypto macro things happening. Um at the same time that the fundamentals are improving dramatically. Uh so there's not a lack of capital, not a lack of founders, not a lack of ideas, and not a lack of usage. Um but it feels like

every week there's like some thing that you didn't expect that just comes in and the next hack, the next bad regulatory thing, the next person who gets arrested. >> Yeah. And and so are you seeing less competition then on on the deal side than [clears throat] >> I would say yes. Um it's one of those things, right? The the consensus deals are because of what I just said. Yeah. >> Uh are hotter than ever. prices are getting pushed up. You know, I would say irrational. There's always one buyer. When we look in five years, it some of them will have looked rational and they'll be geniuses. Uh it's a so it's a tough market and that I would say >> uh

founders don't have there are good founders but they don't have confidence to take great risk. right now >> the world >> outside of crypto and inside of crypto there's just so much change happening so fast that I do believe and we're seeing it empirically that um we're seeing great we we assess talent and we're seeing great talent gravitate towards not great ideas or towards uh consensus ideas at a rate that we haven't seen in the past. So that's what I would say and I think that's why you're seeing this >> lack of deployment. It's because venture capitalists have this like slightly higher view of the market where they can see a lot of things. They're just

getting the same pitch over and over and over again. So, it's hard to discern who's great and who's not. We're not seeing wild crazy people and we're not seeing >> right now many marginal things that would excite people to to take a risk, founders to take a risk. >> Uh the classic thing would be there's not a marginal retail buyer, for example. There hasn't been I haven't seen a breakout consumer app that inspired people. So I think there's just a little bit of a lack of inspiration right now. >> Uh but you know so so basically >> that's I think what the market sees and that's what's reported on. Um underlying that though there's as I said you know stable coin issuance continues to

increase. There's incredible usage like globally, but it's just not stuff that's reported on and money is moving into those companies, venture money, y um business money, etc., etc. >> Uh and it's not the things they're necessarily reported on like a canton. It's a lot of these other startups are actually building on public blockchains. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that there's um there's a strong shift in the flows towards a lot of the companies that are operating more like in in between this convergence of uh the onchain finance world and the traditional finance world.

You know, we call this kind of like this convergence. You've got a lot of the tokenization companies getting a lot of the bid. You've got stable coin companies. You got interesting onchain credit opportunities. There's obviously a abundance of NEO banks it seems like. Now, um, you know, I'm I'm curious in this vertical uh kind of shifting from like, okay, where is the broader market at to more kind of vertical specific here? What is where do you see the opportunity with uh investing in on the edge of these two worlds kind of coming together? Like is there clear margins that can be uh undercut? Is there clear uh time or or settlement opportunities that can be shortened? Like where is the investing at the margin for the convergence happening? and like like

what kind of deals or what kind of ideas you know have you been seeing there? >> Yeah. So all the way across the spectrum uh the things that we're looking at are what is new and very inventive. And by the way that's like in the DNA of our firm like we prefer things that are onchain even though like my background look I worked at Venmo, Brainree, PayPal. We're looking for things that are native. We think because what happens is you know Vimbo when it came out blew people's mind. There's like you could text people money there's an app for like that was alien. So typically you poly market when it was first introduced idea was alien. It took six years for it to become now it's like

mainstream consensus. >> Yeah. Um, so we're looking for I guess what I would say is are alien ideas in markets that you're talking about. Uh, because we believe that then a couple years out those will become much more mainstream. Um the challenge is so rwas like as an example like looking at traditional assets uh what you're seeing is a lot of them the the alien things like there's the the way to get to them uh and to introduce them is still you know by regulatory arbitrage uh so [clears throat] I'm going to list oil on hyperlquid it's going to become the most liquid market because everybody in the world can play

like market makers don't have to be you regulated like they don't have to worry about the CFTC and others. Um that's that's what's happening. That's where you're seeing like growth and maturity. And so at the venture stage uh because you know this the stable act pass the genius act like things are like things are sort of confusing. I I would say that we're in a bit of a paralysis for a lot of emergent entrepreneurs in terms of like how regulated do I go right now because in past cycles >> firms have been >> penalized by taking a regulated approach too early when their competitors were like yeah we're just going to yolo.

Example would be just like >> issuing private stocks. There's a bunch of these >> firms offering like anthropic shares tokenized. like >> some of them have like somewhat more robust structures with some protections, others are just yoloing and it feels like the yoloing ones are like growing faster right now. >> Uh I don't know and or believe that that's sustainable. So I think you know when you talk about this convergence it's a very confusing time. >> Uh we would probably default again towards so and also the model breaks down. this alien model breaks down when you start to talk about traditional asset classes, right? So things like equities um you know and things like structured private

credit um where you want big names. So it's a I don't like at the very early stage you just haven't seen a lot of capital move into for example RWA issuance tokenization etc companies. >> Yeah. Um you you you guys had a pretty strong focus on and you still do this kind of consumer onchain environment. A ton of deals that you have done have been in that category. Obviously Pump has been like the kind of big one for the market that you know you've grown a name from. I'm curious. I saw one of your tweets about them just absolutely absorbing that supply and the market not really responding to it. And the push back that we get when people present

that thesis is that the idea that is currently somewhat consensus I think is that the token launch market is not going to grow in the same way that per will grow. So that the buybacks for something like pump or the economic model is not valued in the same way that it is with hyperlquid because pers are potentially going to be this massive category and maybe we've reached the ceiling for the onchain token launch market. Why is this wrong? >> Yeah. So I'm not even going to debate I like it's just wrong. Like you can see it like we're in a brutal market. There are folks who are issuing tokens and pumps doing you know million dollars on average or more a day. like it's a almost $400 million revenue run rate

company. I think the more interesting uh questions are around okay given that >> why is the token not trading to reflect that over twoyear track record of revenue and now almost a year track record of buybacks. And what I think is, you know, obviously the the team takes a posture that I don't love. Like I love the team, but I don't love their posture about not communicating with the market um about how robust their business is, how defensible it is, etc. Um so [snorts] they don't do the traditional, you know, investor relations. But at the same time, I also understand a little bit why they don't do investor relations

because, you know, fundamentals in crypto aren't rewarded like and and part of that it's not it's because we don't know what fundamentals are that like matter. it it's and what I mean by that is like equities are you know an asset class that have like decades of um you know rigor around them how they should be valued what the rights should be etc right like you know debt securities like very explicit predictable in most asset class I mean obviously we've had many times when we've you know had obscure ones but but the most straightforward ones easy to understand right like I understand what

a treasury bond is. Uh tokens like there's not standards. They're very new and it means a million different things. And so as an investor, fundamental investors, whatever that means, look at something like the pump token, even the hyperlquid token >> hype, and just don't understand like how to value it. It doesn't have the same rights as things I've seen before. So, um, it's it's confusing and therefore these things trade pump significantly hype I would argue, you know, reasonably at a discount to what the fundamentals of their businesses and the prospects

should suggest. Um, and so candidly in a bare market, I I think it makes sense. Yeah. I think in a bullish market, >> provided that, you know, pump continues to deliver. you're then they'll reflexively go the other way. Now the the question you asked is is pump's business sustainable like I actually think it's more defensible like so than than the many businesses that I won't say more defensible than a hyperlquid or something like that but I see some of the best companies in the world uh trying to compete with hyperlquid right now everybody it's a very consensus opportunity and by the way it's one that I agree with which is per you know a

superior >> you know way to express a perspective on an asset than what we've historically had with options. Okay. So, I believe that the world believes that more assets can be exposed to this. You know, prediction markets will eventually like move in this direction as well. It's like all merging into one. But that's going to be wildly competitive. Like, so there's a question about whether you know what the profits will be at, you know, will they be at execution, market making, um, you know, who knows? >> Yeah. >> Uh, will it be much more? So what Pump has is something that everybody's like it's out of favor. Everybody's like meme coins.

>> Yeah. It's out of favor big time. >> Yeah. Um and >> anything onchain is out of favor. >> And by the way, they're out of favor. They I'll admittedly haven't introduced like over the last year much publicly novel stuff. But I would argue that's because the marginal person who cares about what they do, that retail person, isn't in crypto right now. That person will come back. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so still very much in the camp of being the onchain consumer landscape will continue to grow. I don't know if you invested in Mega E. They have they just announced their token launch on April 30th.

They've got kind of a growing onchain primitive infrastructure. A lot of like gamified like interesting ideas and it's kind of like very very interesting bifurcation happening with like chains like mega e uh protocols like pump and companies like pump and then out like you like you you know tokenized assets rwas onboarding these large players. This is what matters to us. this is what our like the future is of this industry and [snorts] then you only have a couple chains and protocols still optimizing for like this more retail onchain user base. How do you think about why that's happening?

>> Um so Meg E specifically I don't so I really like them you met them I E2s were something I didn't understand. Yeah, it wasn't part of thesis and it like clearly hasn't worked outically well. Uh the I think like my guess with a mega ETH is like it's a great name like they'll probably end up as a super app and like there's there will be a chain uh and then people will contribute to it and like things will feed back like kind of like Hyperlid.

>> Yeah. Hey, trade XYZ being on top of Hyperlquid, it feeds back to the underlying beast of Hyperlid like but you know Hyperliquid's the brand the app. It's different than a Salana and Ethereum uh and Bitcoin is very different. >> Yeah, >> I I'm not sure we're going to see like we probably will. We're not going to expect it and it's going to be obvious in hindsight. Maybe there will be some L1 that does something wild. I don't I don't know like quantum compute or like something like Bit Tensor, you know, with AI. Who knows?

>> All right. Um but something like Mega ETH I would probably value on like just application revenue versus anything else. And I don't know what applications are on it, but I like the team. Seems like they have an excited community. Same thing with Monad. I did invest. I was like an angel investor in Monad team. >> Love them and you know really wonderful and have built I believe fantastic technology. This isn't a shill. >> Yeah.

>> But uh you know it's they'll have to probably go I'm I'm just not convinced you can like be valued monad in the same way that Salana was. So I think it's going to be what's the application revenue on top and I don't know they're >> like is that a time thing? Is that just because the era that Salana was in was like pre this new era of thinking or is it just a >> the pitch is just too close to what Ethereum and Salana are? Like Bit Tensor is very different, right? Like a base or I'm a proof network, something like that is just way different as an L1 retail chain.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, um I could be wrong by the way and like I continue to >> advise Monad, you know, entrepreneurs and I think it's interesting like >> but but I think like Mega E looks more like an app chain to me like >> yeah they're going to be a super app. We're investors in plasma. going to be a stable coin le I think super app with you know a supporting chain around it like that to me can have value but that's different than Salana Ethereum >> and then obviously Bitcoin >> so you bring up plasma we're also investors in that on our fund tempo just came out and um partner with Door Dash to do their agentic payments and yeah

>> what do we so you know re rewind a year ago these stable coin chains like the best thing. They were like the very hot investment. It's kind of changed a bit. Um, but it's still like very different than it, you know, traditional L1. Your thesis around something like Plasma is just that, okay, they have this Plasma 1 neo bank. It's going to just be all around this kind of central app. The rest like like sure, there's other primitives on that chain, but in the sense that like a general purpose chain just kind of ends up being like this is going to be a stable coin, payments, DeFi chain specifically.

>> These are fintech companies. So like Plasma versus Arc versus Tempo. It's just going to be three of the largest fintech companies like it'll be like >> you know PayPal versus ven yeah >> versus stripe like you know that's that's what it's going to look like. It's just going to be a question of you know which rails uh merchants consumers you know all the other stakeholders in you know payment settlement movement etc. uh and financial services operate in. But yeah, you have to look at like Tempo is just a business. Like it's not like you don't think about it like a blockchain. Um and they don't today. No.

>> Um they're they have an incredible advantage. It's like part of the Seoia, you know, paradigm cabal. It's like, you know, Door Dash is working with them. But but like incredible team. I I haven't >> looked deeply deeply into the product, but I assume it's incredible. and um fees in the near term aren't important. It's like can we get people moving dollars across our settlement network, right? >> And that's the same thing for plasma. So like the way that you would think about these specific companies or they're chains but they're more they're payment services based companies trying to ba basically earn money or earn fees or profits and generate revenues just based

on volume of of of stable coin payments essentially. Um yeah to some extent exactly and like what that means like is going to look a lot different over time right like today it's like >> we think of things in terms of businesses and and humans and I'm not going to get like too shy >> yeah yeah the entire train ride in today I was like the six ventures team we've like my partner Carl and I worked at Paxos or Google Wallet Aeron's been super deep in AI and agent payments.

Like we were talking non-stop about how a lot of like the stuff like the way people trade is the way people pay each other. It's not going to be the same in a couple months versus the way it was 6 months ago. >> Uh but I have no idea what that means. Like genuinely like I'm not trying to like fake you and be like I'm some genius seer. So, uh, I think you can make though a safe bet that, um, I'll, and again, legacy bank tech isn't all still built on cobalt, but like I'll I will definitely say that agents aren't going

to be able to transact on, you know, rails that were programmed 60 years ago. Okay. >> Yeah. >> And the way that we're going to buy stuff, the way we're going to express our preferences financially is going to move very differently. And so that's the bet that for example uh Tempo is making you know that's the bet we made on plasma. >> Yeah. >> Um >> I think for the general purpose chains like Ethereum and Salana >> it's they're in a risky moment like they I I actually do think they need we haven't mentioned base by the way which is fascinating. I think Coinbase has really struggled and sort of lost their way and I have no idea what they're doing. But the it's Salana I don't think has clearly

expressed like why would I use a general purpose chain and a public network and why is that better for settlement? Like is it censorship resistance? Is it speed? Is it cost? Is it composability? But like why does that matter to the business or the individual in Argentina or >> sure >> you know India that I actually feel less confident in that story than I did a year ago right >> um so we're just in a like it's super exciting time because things are so fluid it's super confusing and honestly I would say the market feels incoherent uh and so actually a fun exercise would be to go

through and to look at how many different, for example, layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains Visa has done a major partnership announcement with the last 24 months or Mastercard or whomever like wide open. No, I know and I mean you've been in the space for >> about as long as I have or perhaps a bit longer and you know this was not a part of the old regime. the these announcements were like one once a quarter once a year at best and you know prior to 2020 even in even in 2020 to 21 you know there's um so obviously we had this big drift exploit and now this big um you know layer zero a kelp exploit and there's been two separate schools of

thought or actions from the largest stable coin issuers in the world yeah >> circle and tether circle has gone out and not frozen any of the funds that were then uh bridge from Salana to Ethereum and then you know tornado cached and mixed and you know gone and um Arbitrum came out a couple days ago and froze 70k or sorry 30k ETH on their chain and today Tether froze $344 million of Tether that was connected to a group that was doing anything from pig slaughtering to human trafficking and everything in between and also perhaps some Lazarus ties. So these two companies are kind of operating in like a flip-flopped manner than what I think

the public consensus was of them. Circle being highly regulated public company, Tether being kind of known as more this gray area, not so um you know compliant. But as you see, Circle has failed to freeze these assets and that they've gotten a lot of push back and Tether has frozen some some assets as of late and is kind of being I think rewarded in the public eye. I I'm just curious on the stable coin kind of landscape right now. Do you have a strong opinion on let's say we get to a trillion dollars of stable coin supply? Is this just Tether like like just absolutely taking 70 80% of that and circle having a small share?

Is it going to get to be more even? Like what is your broad view of how these two heated uh rivals go head-to-head for the coming years? Yeah. So it's pretty clear that circle strategy is to be as close to a CBDC as possible. So they are basically saying hey government we are completely aligned with you. We lobby we take you through all of your methods of power and execution as our uh you know sort of general ruler, right? and if we don't get a subpoena, we won't freeze funds. Like you, you know, our rails are your rails, our issue. So, I'm

exaggerating a little bit, but that's pretty much the story that Circle's told through their actions, through their silence, and it's candidly in character and not surprising. Uh, they've never been DeFi native. They've never been um you know they're the guy like you know who carries a skateboard behind his back into the high school meme you know and it's like hey if hey buddy so like it's it's a very uh revealing time for circle there's a place for them like they can be the government bucks I call them the cuck bucks they're going to be the government

dollars and by the way that's not a bad product government dollars on a blockchain are way better than the that I get from my bank, right? So, good for you, Circle. You won that market. But I think that that is a smaller market than the world and the way that we're headed. Um, where the reason is because the most the boldest people in the world, what you want to do at any given time is like the people who are creating the future, I want to serve them. I want them to believe in me are not going to believe circle. They're going to believe circle is government tethered tether versus you know innovation future and judgment

tethered and the best people building the best biggest businesses and you know money producing and sharing things in the world believe in themselves and their judgment. Circle's not align with that. you know, it's a bald guy with a suit who's in DC, you know, three times a week and basically would rather a judge tell him what to do so he can absolve himself of any responsibility versus going and making a really crucial decision to protect his customers from losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Tether has said, and by the way, I've had my issues with Tether in the past.

And I think the Tether of today is extremely different than the Tether of seven, eight years ago that I had significant problems with. Um, you know, I won't relitigate that, but, you know, there were pretty clear gaps in their balance sheet. Um, it they weren't super transparent. Uh, they've changed as an organization. They don't like talk to me because I was pretty straightforward about what was going on then. So like it's not like we have a great relationship, but I do respect that. Um they will make difficult decisions. And so I think that these companies need to make difficult decisions because let's

be honest, nobody looks at Tether and USDC circle and says these are decentralized companies and I believe that these are decentralized assets. Once you decide you're going to transact in them, the expectation should be that like I might be censored. I might have my transacted transaction impacted. And I believe that by a wide mile, I mean, we're talking like professional NFL team versus high school football team. Tether has blown circle away in terms of decision making about how to handle absolute black and white decisions over the past month. Uh if North Korea is stealing a hundred million dollars plus from individuals, you should stop that

if you are able to. Circle's on the wrong side of history and they're going to pay for it. >> Wow. Um on that note, is there room for other stable coin issuers in the market? >> Unquestionably. >> Yeah. >> You saw USDA, no exposure. This isn't a shill. Yeah. But there are so sorry I wouldn't say that's a stable coin but I think there's uh there are you know tokens that are yes there's more room for stable coins for starters like we don't have success in stable coins outside of USD at any real scale right and I think that's going to happen >> um and then I think you're going to start to see uh coins that you know generate yield in stable ways like with

USDI and others where hey, maybe you'll pair higher risk yield coins with a stable coin. Um, but I absolutely think that there are going to be alternatives to fiat money. um the same thing that like got me excited about crypto, you know, Bitcoin in 2012, but like with sort of dollar denominated real world asset ties, not like, hey, the machines are purely making money. Although, by the way, a lot of it is going to be tied to machines, but in a very different way than it was historically with Bitcoin.

>> Yeah. >> Meaning, hey, we need GPUs, we need to finance them, etc. [clears throat] >> Yeah. Yeah. USDA has found itself in a very nice narrative position at the very least and product position. Um, >> and they're just great. I mean, they're doing a great >> the stablecoin issuers. Um, the kind of stable cocoin as a service, you got Bridge, M0, couple of these others. >> Paxos, >> Pax, these three are like those are kind of like the big three. What um what's the future for these guys? Like I think the the stable coin issuance business was extremely hot for about 18 months. I think margins kind of came down. I think the amount of capital required in terms of outstanding supply from day one increased significantly such that it was actually going to be a you know a

profitable operation for the uh companies that wanted to work with the Paxus bridge or MZO. How do you think about the specific cohort of companies as they look to kind of expand their business? Um you know there's you you obviously have a lot of you know experience here. What is what is the future of these types of companies as it becomes more and more competitive to launch stable coins successfully as kind of the same thing that happens to blockchains I think will probably happen to stable coins where there's this kind of explosion and then consolidation kind of in the consolidation phase at least for USD uh denominated stable coins >> they're going to look like any other market like it's >> you know it'll be like 70 >> 20110 right uh it's going to be a big market yeah

>> it's not a clear market now right like, hey, should I is the OC charter what I should get? Like, should I issue the stable coin as a New York Department of Financial MDFs coin? >> I would argue that the market's a little bit slower in terms of these every single company that has users and has money on their platform stored should have want it in a stable coin that's back with treasuries. They don't all today. It's not worth the lift. They're they're worried about it. >> Yeah. like everybody's going to be doing that and they're not going to be like going and you know getting the actual charter themselves to be able to issue their own dollars. So massive massive

market for a handful of X as a service stable coin providers. The banks aren't going to do this. It's not their core business. So, um I would I would imagine like Stripe, I would imagine uh meaning like Bridge, I would imagine Paxos and and probably like Zero Hash I think does this. Like I don't know who's going to win, but those are going to be really big companies. And then >> whoever does this internationally because there are very very very big money markets that are untapped there. >> Um so yeah, that's a market I I mean I I spent some time as an adviser of Paxos after I sold the block. Um, so I'm very bullish on stable coins.

>> Do you think Paxus will IPO? >> Uh, great question. I think Paxus will be worth uh I I think I can say this. I'm a registered investment advisor. I think I think it's a val I think it's a very valuable company. Um I don't know what Chad wants to do if he wants to be a public company CEO, but yeah. Um they >> have some incredible partners. It's a very good business. And it's funny, every couple every cycle, they continue to get the best companies working with them, right? It was or the highest revenue producing ones. It was Binance, then PayPal, and now Schwab, and they have a bunch more in the pipeline that they're not talking about.

>> I've heard some insane insane stories about that guy, >> Chad. >> Yeah. Some very uh some very crazy lore of just all different types of uh movies and culture and all all sorts of stuff. He's an awesome individual. >> Yeah. Interesting. And this IPO pipeline, uh, Kraken, has confidentially filed. It's so weird that these confidential IPOs end up hitting the newswire. It's like Kraken's confidentially, you know, filed for their IPO. We had this, um, IPO kind of season, if you will, kind of close to the top last year of the cycle. And, you know, we there's been kind of hints towards Kraken, Paxos, um, Falcon X, >> um, a couple other of these names. How

do you think about the evolving public markets opportunities to invest in the space as it pertains to like just buying the crypto assets? You know, now we have ETFs, we have all different types of products. Like what is the what is the what is the reasoning why like why more public companies on uh that are like on crypto rails or cryptobacked uh entities going public? What does that do for for the industry? >> Yeah. So, uh, in a market where people cared, >> it would be great.

>> Meaning like Coinbase, Circle, you know, Kraken eventually, like it'd be great. People would be like, "Look at these public companies. What else is there? Where's the alpha? Oh, it's onchain." >> Problem is, and this is true not just of crypto, but of many industries, SAS, you know, consumer tech, >> AI is sucking all the air out of the room. So, yeah. Uh it's not that Kraken look Kraken's I would imagine they'll have a successful IPO at some point in you know the not too distant future but >> right now nobody gives a about crypto [laughter] IPOs like let's be honest they're focused on SpaceX they're focused on anthropic they're focused on open AI and um what I think will be

useful for crypto and this could be me with my VC hat on um is >> you have a a lot of folks with a very low cost basis in these companies and they're the types of folks who are crypto like there's a lot of crossover between the folks who incubated >> early crypto and early AI uh some of them are in jail for their lives but [laughter] it wasn't just SPF okay >> so there was a crossover curiosity um in innovative edge technology that disrupted uh you know basically centralized incumbents and you know the sort holders of information, money, etc. Okay, so these companies are going public over

the next year. And there's no question. I can't tell you whether they're going to trade up, whether they're going to trade down or sideways. Uh there's so much at play geopolitically, of course, like who knows? But the bottom line is you're going to get a lot of liquidity for people who are sympathetic, interested in and engaged in crypto. >> And [clears throat] the size of, you know, the companies coming to the public markets in crypto are much smaller. You know, the size that it takes to move the assets that we care about are much smaller.

>> Yeah. >> Like my default view. Uh so the last cycle ended more sooner than I expected. I didn't think, you know, 10 time was going to be the end. I thought we were going to go into 2026. Um, but my expectation is as once we work through like now that we're in this thing and we've been what are we 12? It was sort of Trump was the top. >> Yeah. Um like so two years from Trump is like 202 Trump the memecoin is 2027 >> and that's kind of lines up with you know when all these >> IPOs will launch and four years >> assets will be out public.

>> It's >> I think we're in like a pretty constructive period. Yeah. And it's been fascinating to watch how much bad news we've had. Um, >> you know, narrow bad news that we talked about earlier, >> but like asset prices haven't gone down. >> No. >> Um, I've been surprised by that. Candidly, I have. Yeah. Uh, >> and what's interesting is because the industry has rallied in a way that some would say is unhealthy to long-term like Tether, you know, supporting a drift recovery process. Yeah.

>> Um you know arbitum freezing >> are a right like I think like we can debate these things >> all day but they are stability mechanisms. So >> it's very different. Many of most the issues we've had this cycle have been onchain. >> Yeah. >> But the centralized entities that >> totally effed up like sort of last cycle for sure. not the same ones but I'm saying central like have actually stabilized the onchain ecosystem and that convergence you were talking about it kind of looks like some of it's working it is now that does say the question is okay does then the value acrew to the centralized entities or the

onchain >> either way it's enough to boil up in the bear like a lot of these things they boil up and they keep happening and it's like we had all these like I think in hindsight it'll be like we had the most institutional adoption we've ever seen in the industry the clarity act passed we got through all this IPO AI hype crypto was absolutely left to dry after everyone was chasing these like the largest AI company IPOs and that that's going to come with Q2 Q3 this year definitely by Q4 there's a setup to you know to be had of you know these things launch and cryptos at its you know lowest points and we'll see where we go but yeah I mean it's it's a the amount of attention that is going to flock

towards that period of time and that asset is going to completely leave everything else kind kind of like sidelined. >> That's what I would say for a period of time. And then you know the bullcase is again there's liquidity for a lot of the folks who are interested and then there's this bullcase that again this is for a separate >> uh conversation with actually my partners who focus on this but with you know does the advent of agents and people performing transactions or sorry transactions occurring different ways >> pretend you know a much larger market for crypto than we have today. And like the answer is probably yes.

>> The last thing that I wanted to ask you about was uh I talked to Carl about some of the vault stuff that you guys were >> uh writing about and working on. Obviously this exploit that happened with A was you know kind of all on A's curation model they were at fault. Layer zero's security model. Kelp Dow's um entire uh setup right but this happened in a poolled lending model which is affecting all different types of people. vaults very institutionally friendly because they want a very risk uh managed and kind of like parameter parameterized uh way to express their credit on chain whether it's originating new types of credit new new types of RWAs products etc and they want to do it in like a

very controlled manner more kind of like stepped up here and been like the de facto vaults layer I'm just curious like what is this vaults concept that you guys are working through this vault thesis generally as we kind of close out here >> yeah So the idea of alts is it's really hard for the average person um or even institution to figure out what do I invest in on chain like what is the risk how do I um assess all these different things how do I rebalance over time >> um >> to your point the it hasn't been done exceptionally professionally over the last 18 to 24 months while this vault term has taken off y Um I would say Morpho actually

takes a really hands-off approach uh which sort of absolves them of any responsibility. They're like okay the man like so I wouldn't necessarily say that I wouldn't say Morpho is like solving the problem. I would say they're like pushing a lot of the difficult decisions to folks on you know assets listed on their platform. Um, one of our portfolio companies, Upshift, just announced, hey, we're working with Securitize to do a NAV analysis, net asset value analysis of, you know, basically every vault on our platform.

Um, so that institutional buyers can get confidence that this is a place to invest. So it's not only our own, you know, measurement of the value of these assets, but we have an independent third party who's credible, you know, and and does this professionally for a number of asset classes um valuing our assets. So we're moving in that direction. uh it's not in response to what happened like that that was something like it was clear to everybody that to bring more dollars into uh onchain >> vaults are one you know mechanism um where hey we can select different assets put them together you know we're starting to get into structured products which are things that are appealing to people but the point is um

>> the the last month month and a half has been a clarion call to everybody yeah >> uh that we need to uplevel assessment ment of uh risk management, assessment of asset selectors. Um so there's like vault issuers, the the folks who curate them. Uh and it all ties back though to what are the assets that we're putting on chain. >> Yeah. >> And you know basically and then what are people doing with those assets? >> Yeah. Uh and so obviously having you know in the A situation RS ETH um you know basically be convertible into we at a

>> at the ratio that it was like unacceptable given what it was by how that asset was being used. Everybody knows this. This isn't finger >> pointing at this point. There was like just a chain of poor decisions. And what I'm seeing what I what I'm seeing already is there's going to be much slower pace of new asset innovation at like you'll see you'll see uh massive scale. Yeah. >> You're just not going to see somebody open a $300 million vault with a weak asset with no collateral backing or little collateral backing and poor behavior behind them. Um so I'm very bullish on the structure and very bearish on the behaviors of the past.

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, that's Mike. That is Mike of Sixman Ventures. That is our annual episode. Great to have you. Love to be here, >> guys. We'll be right back. Thank you so much, Mike. That was fun. >> I enjoyed it. >> Cheers, man. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music]

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welcome back to the show. I think it's maybe second or third time. Good to have you. What a what a week. Uh good time to chat. >> Oh, yeah. Uh absolutely. What a week. Funny enough. I mean, I'm like wearing my suit. I was swinging by the Treasury's office, like US Treasury's office earlier today. So yes, what a week on many fronts. >> Yeah, man. What's going on o over there? What's the uh what's the treasury thing? And they're looking for some compliant stable coin products. >> They are I mean it's they're really thinking a lot about this, right? Of like so we have we'll we'll talk a little bit more about this I'm sure in a sec. But yeah, for Treasury they're thinking about rulemaking from Genius.

And so how do we think about >> AML, CFT compliance, all the really boring stuff, but the things that matter a lot to folks like them >> even more relevant now as you see kind of exploits with Drift and then Kelp and like what should stable coin issuers be doing if they're regulating if they're regulated stable coin issuers in the United States. So a lot of like difficult questions there. >> Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I just had uh Mike from Sixman Ventures on and he was um >> he called Circle uh a closest thing to a CBDC.

>> That was quite the take. Um so this compliance so we we've had conversations this week about rate limits about kind of the future of DeFi being I don't know more looking like what we see in the traditional world and that this kind of open just kind of laxidasical anything goes >> aura energy outlook is is kind of one of the more immediate past from your perspective from the work that you guys are doing at predicate like what is this vision for a more compliant regulated or just like more secure safe future future, right? We also had Run on from Sky this week and his main line was like, look, the future of scalability in this industry in terms of size is just predicated, no pun intended, solely on on security and safety. Talk to us about

how you see this this kind of like playing out. What's your vision here? >> Yeah, so I mean I think we've all kind of aligned on the world of blockchains as ideally this global financial settlement system, right? And then you really have this permissionless open infrastructure that everyone can build on. So, you know, take Ethereum or Salana or like really good examples of this is open permissionless blockchains. And so, then as we move to this world of, you know, we're going to make blockchains are going to be the global financial settlement system. You're going to have financial products that are built on blockchains. And some of these will be fully unregulated products and some of these will be regulated products or really products that operate in regulated markets. Example of this is stable coins. It's not just and then you have, you know, tokenized securities,

different types of vault products, yield products, all those types of things. These are really financial products that are built on blockchains. And the great advantage of this is all that, you know, it's 24/7 access, global liquidity, composability, programmability. Those are really what are the driving kind of like product features of all of this. So then when we say great, blockchains are going to be this global financial settlement system and you're going to have financial products that are built on those blockchains. I think you guys have been talk you've had a lot of these talks recently of how do you make this something that actually is secure is safe is compliant is able to operate in regulated markets people can trust that this can be used and not only you know both institutions as well as just you know people who live in normal markets right and I think that's the world that

we're going into and for us it's been this is when you go into the application level right like the things that are built on it so we would consider a stable coin as a financial product and so how do to have programmable realtime compliance enforcement and I think there's different facets to this. There is the security component which is really important and then the other part that's kind of that goes handinhand with that is actually the AML anti-moneyaundering compliance piece. Those go really closely together and you have to account for both sides of that coin at the end of the day. >> Yeah man. I mean, so in this in this instance, right, of this these two exploits, both arbitrum freezing the funds, 30K ETH as of a couple days ago, Circle opting to not freeze, Tether comes out today, freezes $344 million of

USDT that was linked to some group that does nefarious things. What is the right way, the right mental model to uh slap compliance on or these kind of like regulatory frameworks onto these these situations or just similar ones, right? Like it's can it's not a one-sizefitsall kind of dynamic like what is the spectrum of risk parameters and um you know compliant onchain behaviors and outcomes that predicate has kind of identified? What does that spectrum look like?

>> Yeah. And I'm glad you talk about it as a spectrum because that's exactly what I was going to say as well. So I think it's it's not just you know sanctioned addresses that are being identified by OFAC. It's that sanctions list is only around like 80 something. It's like 88 addresses. It's very limited, right? But we know that a number of malicious actors is well beyond that. We know that the uh it was uh DPRK North Korea that was the ones who led the the drift exploit. Those addresses are not on a sanctions list but everyone and their mother knew that it was North Korea, right? We all knew. And so and then the same thing for for for kelp and so then you have this whole question around where does control lie who has control and what is that responsibility there and how is that actually communicated to

users. Uh I think in the case of arbitum you had a security council which is really really cool that you act you have a mechanism for that. I'm going to go a little bit more on the Circle and Tether one because I think this is where like I've been really kind of closely following it and we have a product on the stable coin side that is also kind of relevant for this. But you have a case where Circle of course freezes addresses per law enforcement request, law lawful orders as well as sanctions. What they explicitly don't do per their policy is that they won't have the discretion on their end to freeze when they believe they might need to. It's entirely based off of law enforcement coming in then saying, "Oh, we'll do it." Um, Tether has a slightly different approach. And the reason for that is

because Circle as a registered uh issuer in the United States saying is basically worried about that liability of if they do a freeze that is not explicitly said by law enforcement or by a government regulator, then they can get sued, right? And so they don't want to be in that position. Tether not being in the United States has a little bit kind of slightly different operating approaches to this. And I think that's a really big question right now. So that's when we were actually talking to Treasury about is I think the world is going to go in a direction where and this is what I think the US government is this is what Treasury is pushing for is that issuers should have that discretion.

They might need to have the discretion especially if you're let's say a financial institution and you have an OC charter and you're like we are an issuer that discretion of we know that this is a North Korean address. Everyone knows, but waiting for a law enforcement order takes time. I was talking to someone at FBI and they're like, "At best, we'll tell you we'll be able to get back to you in a week because of staffing. They have so many things they need to do." So, you need that discretion. >> The feds. >> Yeah. Exactly. And like, and we're talking about, you know, [laughter] digital assets that move in like really really fast and it's final settlement. Like, what are you supposed to do?

>> Uh, and so I think that's it's that discretion, right? And you're going to see that when you have someone when an organization has control over something the question is what is that discretion when do they take an action in the case of arbitum they have security council uh and so that's for us from predicate like we're building those kinds of programmable pieces that directly plug into let's say an asset contract >> that gives the organization the tools to say wait there are certain things that happen we want it automatically executed in real time right so OFAC issues an update these addresses should be frozen in real time within like seconds across all blockchain networks we're not waiting we're not doing any manual processes. You know, we we were like let's say blockade or hyper native identifies that there's a major exploit.

Everyone knows that this is the case. We should be taking an action immediately. We shouldn't have to go and spend all these different cycles on it. And so I think that's world we go to is it's a spectrum and it is more programmable in real time. >> Yeah. Um what is um this organization that gets tagged in all these exploits is Seal or >> Yeah. Seal Intel. >> Seal Intel. What is Seal Intel? >> Yeah, they're in uh they're an ISAC. So, an ISAC is an information sharing consortium. Uh this is not unique in crypto. You have them in traditional financial services as well. But really, you know, when you have all these different organizations, exchanges, financial institutions, fintexs, issuers, all these different groups, you have all these different data silos.

Then you also have your blockchain analytics providers and investigation data. All these things exist in silos. >> And so the goal is you have some amount of data sharing, right? in the case of major incidents and you also have investigations around that. So SEAL is an is information sharing consortium and what they do is they're able to respond in real time. You have an elite team that is able to support on incident responses that is able to flag malicious addresses and users all those things that's where they really come in and it's incredibly valuable. It's not only in crypto isex exists at traditional markets as well.

>> Gotcha. So for example, you guys are doing this work with Hyperlane on their native routes to enable um configurable freezes on certain assets. Like >> again, when it comes to like using a team like Seal, using a a spectrum that you that you've laid out here today, you've got to be quite quick in the in the decision-making, right? As soon as Arbitrum froze the 30k ETH, the exploiters immediately started taking action with the assets on Ethereum chain itself and started bridging via Thor chain to uh to Bitcoin. Um how do you manage the speed of execution >> when it comes to like like potentially putting your product into actual use

with real funds, bad actors, illicit activity, you're under fire. How do you manage that? >> Yeah. So I I think you're in the Plume office, right? So Plume is actually uh one of the groups that uses predicate uh for Nest. >> Sick. >> Um >> here we go. [laughter] >> Even better, right? So >> let's go Plume. >> And so an example here is, you know, Seal identifies these malicious addresses, right? They're they're flagging that and we have all these different data feeds that are coming into our system. So we've essentially built in configurable policies and so different organizations integrate us into their into their smart contract.

And so when you have these different data inputs, we'll have defined these like what we care about, what are the markers, what are the flags that we want from TRM, from seal, from blockade, what are the things we really care about. If those triggers happen for addresses that are interacting with let's say plume or with hyperlane or with an M extension on M0, we will immediately that immediately gets executed. That transaction is rejected at a smart contract level through predicate. So we have all these different data feeds that plug in and we define and configure those specific configurations and requirements for each application.

>> So I saw there was this blockchain association tokenization workstream ono unis swap a6z is in it. Um I think you guys are a part of it as well. What what are what are these large like like for I saw a headline today. It was like JP Morgan says that these latest exploits are causing institutional allocators to think twice about DeFi. Like bro, like obviously like thank you for the headline watcher guru like you're really delivering insightful information here. What is the single biggest compliance risk management conversation happening with these types of teams inside this workstream? Or even just like from your perspective, what is that what is that single conversation looking like? Is it just let's not lose our clients funds on chain? Is it that simple?

>> No, it's a bit more. So I think it comes down to compliance is one of the if not the biggest blocker to institutional adoption when we think of digital assets and from a regulatory perspective right and so these types of work working groups such as like blockchain associations tokenization group is really what are the different pieces across different organizations what are we building together and then how are we articulating that from a blockchain association perspective to regulators when it comes to policym so both to congress people on the legislative branch as well as the regulators whether that is you know OC, Treasury, SEC all those groups but we the goal here is that you know there's really good work that's being done across all the different members and so we should

actually have a concerted effort to say here is actually what we're doing these are things that we're literally solving right now these are not things that we're just seeing happen uh we're taking very proactive measures against it >> nice do you uh do do you feel like people take you more seriously in that suit [laughter] >> I'd wear a suit this morning. Um, that's a good question. You have to, you know, you have to change it up, right? Like, if you're in DC, you put on the suit. If you're in New York, you don't, you may not wear the suit unless you're going into a financial institution office. I think you got to be able to do all parts, to be honest.

>> I can see the uh I can see the circle office from here in the World Trade Center. They're >> they're uh they're trying to figure out what's going on over there. >> But yeah, you got to be able to do all of it. But yeah, you know, in some of these cases, you got to put on your suit for sure. >> Of course, man. You have you have a piece on you as well or just or just >> No, I don't not not at the moment. >> Just don't want to get mugged in DC, huh? [laughter] >> Lovely. Um, what's next for for Predicate Men? What do you what's like this has got to like light a fire under your team's ass, right? Like all this all this is happening like DeFi is clearly going to rate limits to these kind of more compliant measures. Like it

feels like like the time for what you guys are building. what's what's you know what's next on the on the pipeline on the integration side product side where's your guys' heads at >> yeah so we had a we had a product launched announcement today actually it's it's live it's been actually in production it's not like we're announcing we're like oh now it's live it's been live with significant usage but it's the the new one is an asset compliance product we plug in directly into a freeze manager role of you know a stable coin or a real world asset and we can do automated you know freezes restrictions for where that asset can go that can be fully programmable. So to make this even more tangible take uh like with M0 they have their stable coin consens uh MUSD right which is by

consensus. So the cool part is you know consensus has a number of automated capabilities that just other stable coins may not have uh with predicate and M0. So you know sanctions update happens that is immediately updated real time across all networks that MUSD is on as they add more networks and then you know when like the drift exploit happened for example consensus was having automated systems so that their asset could not go to those addresses involved in the drift exploit or in the kelp exp the kelp exploit. So, it's that kind of stuff, but programmable real time compliance.

It's embedded into your asset contract, which all doesn't break the composability or the programmability of the asset. At the end of the day, like 99.9999% of users should actually not notice anything. It should really be the malicious users who are real time blocked from accessing assets and saying that cool, your money's no good here, right? Like, we're not going to allow it. >> That's a big question. All right. >> Insane insane developments on this uh kelp out thing as we've been live. Um, Lido is has uh proposed a coordinated RS relief effort on the research form proposing 2500 STE uh to the Lido Labs Foundation from the DAO which will forward the funds to a

dedicated relief vehicle alongside contributions from other participants to be used solely to reduce the deficit, the root cause of current dislocation and mitigate disorderly liquidations affecting users. Wow. Lido is barely impacted here and they're coming out and they are just absolutely saving the day. This is insane. >> Wow. >> It's systemic, right? Like any of these things that some of these things if they go wrong it it's even if BLO is not directly affected, it still indirectly hits them. They have like we all like need this solved, right? >> Yeah. And these pools have just been frozen for so long.

>> Yeah. >> Insane. Nquille, man. Wishing for better days in DeFi. Hope you guys find yourselves on the other side of this with a lot of business. I appreciate you joining. I appreciate the work that you're doing down in DC for the industry. Uh, and congrats on the product launch, man. >> Appreciate it. Thanks, man. >> Cheers, Nil. See you next time, buddy. >> Bye. >> Bye, buddy. All righty, guys. Yeah, as I said, um, pretty pretty uh, big kind of, uh, news here. Lido is saying that they're going to come out and make a 2500 ETH contribution to be made available only as part of a fully funded recovery package rather than as capital for a partial recovery. Wow. Okay. Big

big big news there, guys. That is it for us today. That is Thursday's April 23rd show. Um, where is Robbie? That is the question that we're all wondering. Where is Robbie? Guys, it is a beautiful day in New York. I'm going to get some sun. Uh, I'm gonna go outside. Uh, we got some calls, but I've had fun today. Um, and guys, I think DeFi is going to be all right. This looks the most promising thing that I've seen so far. I'm going to dig more into it. We'll have more information coverage on Twitter and on tomorrow's show. Ladies and gentlemen, we will see you tomorrow. [music]