🚨LIVE: HYPE New ATHs?! SPCX IPO. Simon Taylor, Scott Shay & Base Head of Product Join The Show

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[music] [music] Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Thank you Lord.

[music] We'll see you around the timeline. [music] Feels good to be back. >> I think The Rollup is one of the [music] most premier media brands in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts [music] at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. >> Adding it to my library every day. >> Potentially multi-chain deployments. >> We are at Dev Connect [music] day one here. I'm guessing base.

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

[music] >> [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. Andy's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music]

Heat. [music] [music] [music] Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Corola [music] is headed to the top. If

we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> Roll up is my favorite. >> People from all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry come together for the roll up. [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 next. See you on the show. >> Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the tokenization tower, the nest broadcasting live from the financial capital world. You're watching the rollup. Today is May 21st. We have a great show ahead. Rob, what's going on, man? >> Well, I'll tell you exactly what's going on. It is four words, a total of 14 letters.

uh hype ze near [laughter] vv and uh yeah that is exactly what's going on. There's really nothing else going on uh besides these things. They're uh they're causing uh mass hysteria. Uh bullishness if you're allocated uh disappointment almost depression if you're not >> uh pure disbelief in the market. Uh, no matter which way you look at it, >> all-time highs for VVV coming right now, hyperlid today.

>> Yeah. I mean, hype Zcash near um effectively ended Bankless. They, you know, caused them to lay off a significant portion of their company. Honestly, shout out to those guys. I remember watching Bankless back in 2020 >> and uh it was great great content back then. So, uh, back when everyone was Ethereum pilled, um, >> they onboarded so many people to DeFi as well. I remember reading their early blogs, early days of DeFi Slate. >> Yep. >> Um, man, it's the end of an era. >> The end of an era indeed. Uh, >> how about that Arthur Hayes episode?

>> Oh, okay. So, we're making that one public. Uh, >> we got a banger coming for you guys, >> guys. We recorded this podcast earlier today. Obviously Arthur is in a new time zone every every week. So >> in Asia somewhere. >> Um so we're working around with time zones, but we're able to get him. Uh the thing about this one, it's not just an Arthur Hayes episode. Feel like some of the biggest bangers with Arthur come when when he's uh he's tag teaming it. >> He's provoked. >> Uh so if you guys remember uh around the holidays last year, maybe last fall, we had Arthur and Murad Morat uh Mad [laughter] the memecoin.

>> That was two years ago. That was >> That was two years ago. >> That was end of 2024. >> Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yep. Um [snorts] and that was an absolute banger. Uh probably the craziest thumbnail in the rollup history. Uh and then uh today we had Arthur on with Ilia. So if you guys are keeping track of Arthur's post, you know that his next favorite shitcoin after hype and Zcash is near. And we brought on Ilia to talk all about it. AI confidential intense uh and getting into Near tokconomics as well. So it was >> Yeah, Arthur said what? 20x on near, 5x on Zcash. I mean, come on.

>> That is That is what he said. That's what he said. >> You guys have looked at that Zcash fractal. The uh Zcash Bitcoin 2015 fractal. It's pretty nuts. [sighs] It's pretty nuts. I mean, you know, the the meme right now around Zcash is like, you know, you you buying Zcash at, you know, uh, $659 is like buying Bitcoin at $659. But the people seem to forget that people were trading multiple Bitcoin for one Zcash. >> So, if you're using, you know, the old I think it was on Paloni X, it was seven Bitcoin for one Zcash. And so, you know, it's almost like buying Zcash at $659 is like buying Bitcoin at $94 is is the the

correct math. >> Wow, that is some insane math from our fellow math major there. >> I like to put on the mathematician hat every once in a while, especially when I'm addressing the total addressable market of the labor market, which we also talked about in the podcast. In case you guys weren't aware, it is 11.7 trillion. Uh Ilia is claiming that the total addressable market of Mir addresses the labor market as a whole. This is an 11 trillion market and we're seeing AI uh take more and more uh market share of the labor market.

>> We are >> obviously Mir is uh is at the center of uh of a lot of this especially as a lot of these agents come on chain. They have an AI marketplace. Uh and they are good friends of the show. And so it is a pleasure as always to host Ilia and the team. >> Uh especially after seeing them in Bermuda, Miami. Uh looking forward to more uh more AI conversations because it feels >> that one's going to come out. >> Stop it. >> On Monday, little uh Memorial Day drop. Today we have Simon Taylor, fintech brain food for stabled up. Got Scott Sheay of N3XT, a kind of digital native bank, and Wilson Cusak of Coinbase base

head of product. Uh, should be a good show. Stabled up first with Simon, then Scott, then Wilson. Looking forward to having that one. Um, yeah, I mean, we're going to get Simon up. We're gonna we're we're going to start talking about Tempo, fintech. I mean, I had a I had a representative from a tier one bank here in the office yesterday in New York and they came in and they were so profoundly bullish. Stable coins, fintech, payments, everything in that kind of vicinity. And in that vicinity, they were very curious about L1s, about chains, about DeFi, about how I was thinking about the industry. Um but it

was very clear that they were coming at this from a perspective of hey like we're investing a lot of capital into this space and we want to accelerate the space and we want to uh keep investing into it and so yeah why why don't we move into today's topics um we'll see what is happening from at a glance of course shout out to our friends at Plume. Today's topics are powered by our friends at Trezor. Use code rollup 10 for a new treasure. Like I said, we've got Wilson, we've got Simon, we've got Scott, we've got a ton of news. SpaceX IPO launched. Rob, >> uh I think it's going to list at 1.75 trillion. Uh the pre-market has it at

around two trillion. Um I've got a buddy there who says that uh every quarter uh as they've been preparing for this, more and more uh employees have been OTCing, uh which is actually you know, in an early stage, you know, seed to series A company, you don't want to see that. You want to see the team and the founders invested, but as the company grows into a a size of one of the largest companies in the planet, uh this is ultimately healthy for capital formation. Uh and so that is happening and it's actually led to um because they've been able to well, you know, obviously companies are staying private for longer and longer.

>> Yep. >> For a variety of reasons. Um and so the fact that they've done a lot of this capital formation uh in private markets with private rounds, they've done these OTC deals as new investors have come in, it's led to the uh to the outcome where they don't need to raise as much in this IPO. And I think >> they raised what 75 billion >> I think it's only 75 billion. And that is helpful because it means that um you know there's not as much to dump on people's heads. Obviously, there's people that are going to be uh very very wealthy as a result of this. Uh it was also interesting to get a look into SpaceX's financials a little bit.

>> Um they hold I think it's $18,000 Bitcoin >> uh at around a $35,000 price point. >> I remember that. You remember when Elon was buying Bitcoin? >> That was two cycles ago. >> I remember. I think >> I remember when >> well I think Tesla has some Bitcoin and then SpaceX I didn't realize had also had some Bitcoin. >> Um but they've held it and now it's publicly disclosed because they're you know they're as a result of their uh going public. Uh the other thing that shocked people uh well there's a few things. One was that uh Anthropic pays them a over a billion dollars a month.

That was pretty incredible. >> U 1.25 billion. So there's, you know, [snorts] people are because these companies aren't public yet. Everyone is like, well, we're paying you, you're paying us. Where does the money actually sit? >> And I think, yeah, Elon did that out of spite for Open AI as well, right? Like, you know, obviously they he just lost that lawsuit. uh on Hyperlid yesterday when the earnings dropped uh the SpaceX preipo traded sub about 5% dip and then was quickly bought up. It's just once again very very very very cool that the most reliable form of price on chain is for preipo stocks is a

crypto venue like that is it is forcing these companies to pay attention to hyperlquid and so you you got to be excited about that. Rob, we got our first guest Simon Taylor. We're gonna take a quick break. We're gonna get our lovely animation set up guys and we're gonna get live with Simon. We'll be right back with Simon Taylor, co-founder of Fintech Brain Food and a new addition to the Tempo team. We'll be right back, guys. [music] [music] [music] >> [music]

[music] [music] >> money power. [music] >> [music] >> Welcome back to another episode of Stabled Up, our premier weekly show covering the ins and outs of digital dollars, stable coins, and the [music] future of decentralized finance.

>> Show is made possible by FRA, and FRA is powering the financial engine of the internet, powering FRXUSD and genius compliant stable coins. This is [music] the stable coin super cycle made possible by fracks. Now enjoy stabled up our weekly stable coin show. [music] [music] >> Welcome back to another episode of Stabled Up, our premier weekly show covering the ins and outs of digital dollars, stable coins, and the future of decentralized finance. Show is made possible by FRA and FRA is powering the financial engine.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Stabled Up, episode number 33, our premiere weekly stable coin show powered by our friends over at Fracks with our FRXUSD product. Visit frack.inance to learn more. None other than Simon Taylor today. Big fans over here. Uh you are the fintech uh encyclopedia along with Chuck. I I would call you guys the dictionary and the encyclopedia one by one. So good to have you on, man. >> I appreciate you guys. Uh you guys are crushing going daily. I do not have the lungs for that. Big respect for the content you guys are pumping out. Really appreciate it.

>> Thank you, man. Yeah, it's a it's a grind, but uh but we love it. We do it for the love of the game. Uh you you have a great show as well. Obviously, give a shout out to tokenized. uh we got introduced uh via our mutual friend Pet uh and uh you know he he said you guys have got to have Simon on uh and so Simon man you you've been in the space a long time. Why don't you just give give the people a quick uh you know a quick blurb as far as what led you to uh tokenized tempo and everything uh and your your focus now on stable coins. >> Yeah, I'm a recovering banker. So I did uh sort of 10 15 years in banking. I did cards and payments. I worked in a bank doing like separate implementation and

fed wires and swift and all of that kind of good stuff getting this stuff into production. And so I saw the pain. I saw how hard it was. Um and then when uh Bitcoin kicked off, Ethereum kicked off back in 20134. I was the guy walking around internally going we should pay attention to this. And uh eventually uh back at Barclays I became head of crypto R&D back in 2015. And when you have that job at a bank, they roll you out in front of every regulator in the world to go explain what Bitcoin is. And it turns out my superpower is taking complex stuff and translating it. So now I call myself the TRDFI translator. So in the the past 15 years, I've been a consultant. Uh we bootstrapped an advisory business on the back of launching Blockchain Insider and Fintech

Insider. Um and then since then, you know, I've kind of worked with a number of startups. um most recently Tempo, but I run my newsletter fintech brain food and the tokenized podcast which I co-host with Kai Sheffield uh from Visa and as you know uh when you have conversations like this every single day uh it just makes you so much smaller about the industry. You get to interview the smallest people and so sharing those learnings is a real passion. Um and I love it too. It's it's really really fun. >> Yeah, that >> most definitely. >> I mean we we have a very similar mindset. I the thing that I love about doing the show so much is that we talk to people smarter than ourselves. You know, we constantly upgrade our mental model and our thesis and then we're just re reiterating it back to the next

person to to check it once again. Upgrade and it feels like we're constantly learning and uh we're able to to share those learnings with everyone that watches along. I'm just curious on on the tokenized side um and just as you're going, you know, what has stuck out like what are are there any moments from the tokenized podcast that were just like massive light bulb moments and and said, "Okay, this is a point where I'm going to shift my mental model because this is so, you know, transcendental to the way that, you know, this industry is shaping up." >> Yeah. I I got to give a shout out to Kai on some of these things. He he said some of the big ones. Uh the first one was like how uh Western Union and MoneyGram are the opposite of cooked because of stable coins. I think that was an

assumption for quite a while. And what he came up with was like actually stable coins are a way for them to monetize the recipient of the payout. Like historically they monetize the person sending the money. You would charge that person a fee and then it gets to the last mile and it's cash. Whereas now with stable coins, I can give that person at the last mile a mobile app and I can give them a card attached to that mobile app. So now I'm making money from them. Maybe they can I can offer them a yield product. Maybe I can offer them tokenized equities. So this is like a really good thing for those businesses and it solves a bunch of problems for them. So that was number one. And the other thing he says a lot is like um I want to ban bank holidays. Like we

should just kill them. Like weekends and bank holidays just need to go away. And uh stable coins don't, you know, uh banks don't work bank holidays and weekends, but stable coins do. They're instant. They're 24/7. Now, there's some nerdy drawbacks to that as well, like um you know, you don't get some collateral efficiency. you don't get to do netting and some of those things, but I think in a market that has hyperlquid doing SpaceX preipo stock type of stuff, I wouldn't put it past the the innovators in DeFi to like come up with some really cool stuff to solve those problems as well. And and that's what's so fun for me is like I have this history and all of these relationships in TRFI and banking and I see those folks now like

really grappling with this stuff especially after Genius thinking hey maybe this isn't just a threat to me maybe it's an opportunity and I see the stable coin industry going hey how can I learn from how Trfy always did things. So it's like the world has come and discovered my weird little obsession and I'm stuck in the middle of it and it's it's a beautiful place to be seeing both sides of that. Yeah, man. I mean, we often call this the convergence uh neo finance. It's really just kind of this bringing together of both these worlds and really just kind of making it into one. I actually had a a pretty large bank uh associated kind of head of a in innovation with regards to fintech in the office here yesterday. we're in New York and he he was talking about how

their specific bank is investing so much capital into fintech neo banks and and into really this idea that stable coins and tokenized tok to tokenized assets are going to end up being a large part of their balance sheet of their usage and of a lot of these products that they're funding you know Simon when it comes to thinking about the thesis at large right you've been very directional on why you believe that crypto rails for fintech just makes sense. And I think there's the obvious kind of faster, cheaper, better settlement times, etc.

But I'm curious kind of how your thesis has evolved since you've been working in, you know, kind of in the juncture between these two industries as of late. All right. Obviously with Tempo, there's a focus on private payments, too. kind of how is the how's Simon Taylor's fintech meets stable coins meets payments kind of this trifecta how has that thesis materially evolved over the last couple of years into where we are in the industry today given the institutional adoption kind of walk us through what your core thesis and core idea is >> yeah um I I'd been playing with it for a while I called stable coins the rail above rails probably about for six months before that I was calling stable coins like this alternative to the euro

a dollar. So, you know, Euro dollars are dollars that exist outside of US banks historically, but only other banks could hold them. The Euro dollar for everybody else was my original thesis, which is, you know, I'm in Argentina, I've got hyperinflation, and I just want to uh hedge that inflation risk. And I think people kind of get that now. It's kind of understood. Um, but then this rail above rails is interesting because we have Fedwire, we have Visa, we have Pix, we have UPI, there are all of these like domestic rails and then the Swift and they all sort of sort of connect to each other but not very well. But stable coins are like um it was actually Henry at uh Privy described it this way.

Stable coins are like getting into orbit. Like it's really hard to onramp to orbit, but once you're there, you can move around really quickly. And that was another way of describing what I call this rail above rails in that like once you're in stable coins, uh, then everything gets way lower friction, way easier, way more instant, but it's a lot harder to get there in the first instance until you've got like regular, you know, until you've got uh SpaceX coming along and just making that super easy and super cheap. And I think that's what the process we're going through is now is the the old plumbing is all getting wired up to stable coins. A bit like how the internet service providers and the ISPs all had to get wired up to the internet and upgrade their

infrastructure. We're kind of going through that process now. But then once you're on stable coins, it starts to look like the WhatsApp for money, right? So, uh, historically, you have all your ISPs, they'll sell you a data plan, um, but they also sold you a voice plan. Right? Now, you can just live off a data plan. I can call anybody anywhere using WhatsApp. I can send them any message and it's global and it's instant and it doesn't cost anything. And I think that's where we're going with with money as well. So, Starlink for money and WhatsApp for money are like my big thesis. And far from uh stable coins competing with cards, far from stable coins competing with Swift, I think they just slot in and become this thing that sits above them, none of those old

things go away. the ISPs are all still there, like they're still doing their thing, but maybe they just didn't take the opportunity that was presented. So, stable coins become this like platform that you can build new products upon. And that that's uh that that's a big big trend that I think is going to be one that fintech start to lean into. Um I look at what RAMP's done with it global accounts and Stripe and others. You know, we we joked for a while uh in our little crypto bubble that, you know, Ethereum and uh Coinbase were L2s on uh on a on a stable coin L1. Uh but, you know, it it also seems as if you know, Visa, Mastercard, Rain, you know, all of these businesses are ultimately building

on the platform of stable coins as well. Uh, and so they really are, like you're saying, they're this underlying infrastructure, but they're also this rail of rails, this rail for rails, which is is very uh is very incredible to think about the scale of of stable coins. I think, you know, everyone at this point would would almost certainly agree. It's a stablecoin super cycle. There's an AI super cycle, tokenization super cycles in the in the air as well, but you know, stable coins um are are are really proliferating. Who do you think, and I'll just preempt my question by saying you'll probably say Tempo given your affiliation, but who do you think is in position to benefit the most from the stable coin super cycle as we continue to see this play out?

>> Well, I think anybody who has distribution, right? Like uh that's that's one of the most uh interesting characteristics. Um can the incumbent get uh innovation before the innovator gets distribution? And and that's the the difficult thing here. And so uh who has distribution? The remittance companies. Who has distribution? Yes, obviously a company like Stripe. Uh who has distribution? There's a a lot of banks do. The banks have an interesting um challenge in that uh for them stable coins are actually very expensive to hold directly on their balance sheet. So they do look at first glance a little bit like a threat. But stable coins used only at the weekends for banks. Or maybe

I'm not one of the gibbs. I'm one of the smaller banks. Uh then maybe it's better than correspondent banking even for me as a bank that does correspondent banking. Um we've uh at Tempo we've announced Coastal Community Bank is going live doing stable coin settlement between them and another bank in another country. And so that I think is like this this um narrative violation of like actually there's all of this money to be made as a bank by leaning into stable coins as another payments rail, another product being being a really great off-ramp. So, anybody who's got distribution and anybody I think willing to do the hard yards of like understanding your risk appetite,

understanding who your vendors are, how do I wire all of this stuff together, how do I make it safe, how do I comply with regulation, like that stuff's not easy, but there are people figuring that out. So, I think you need the book mixture of those two things. Um, but it's kind of like uh who wins is a little bit like uh who gets to play to their strengths. So, I always think about it like a personal trainer. like the my answer for you might be different um than it is for somebody else depending on where they're starting at. Like if I'm a if I'm a a founder or an entrepreneur, I'm going to say right, you can go global instantly like Cass did, like Altitude did, like Dakota has done. You know, they they just play into that the fact that they can quickly go

global and they can do like a Mercury ramp type of play. But if I'm Mercury or ramp, I can use stable coins just the same way to to go globally and and solve a bunch of problems. So it's like what's your strength? I don't know that anybody is immediately advantaged or disadvantaged other than those. I think the most dangerous position to take is I'm just going to sit back and lobby against this. I'm going to assume it's nothing but a threat and I I can compete. And I think the smart ones and even some of the loudest ones are not actually only doing that. um they might be saying things in public but behind the scenes uh working really really hard to understand their opportunity especially where there's client demand to do so. And so the Genius Act was just such a watershed moment for people

starting to understand that there's hey there's there's revenue here that there's opportunity. Um and you know if you're if you're one of the biggest banks in the world you you have to take time to figure it out otherwise you know the costs of failure are just too high. But you'll get there and you'll do a great job. If you're smaller, then your advantage is speed. >> Yeah. And you mentioned uh Mercury. They just raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation. Four years profitable. I think like $650 million of revenue looks like conditional OCC charter coming, you know, from the Mercury from the ramp perspective. I'm curious kind of for their NEO bank play.

How does that how does that differ from some of these um you know smaller kind of more upstart NEO banks right like it seems like there's this cohort ramp Arabore Mercury that are really starting to be kind of like a real threat and challenger to actual banks but I'm just curious like this embedded finance take an approach what do you see as like the strategic angles of gaining market share over the next year what are the pivots what are forks in the road that you know the ramps and Mercuries and Arabors will have to take as it pertains to kind of stable coins, agentic finance that you think will be decision makers in the future for their own success or for

their uh you know kind of lack or or gaining of market share. >> I I think the answer varies depending on each of them, right? Like uh for Arabore like one could argue they're the Bank of American dynamism. So if you were previously fearing being deplatformed, uh you wanted like a bank with just really great tech and really great APIs, then something like an Arabore solves the problem for you and you can go to them. And they've attracted uh something like a billion dollars of deposits in seven days. That tells you I think there was some demand uh certainly from from some ports parts of the tech community for exactly that product. Mercury came

up a different way, right? Mercury is uh unapologetically a bank where the center of gravity is the account. This is your operating account. It's where you pay invoices from. Um you start as a founder on Mercury and you grow with them and then maybe you take um debt products from them and a card and spend management and all that stuff later. And you know they've had two really big jumps of growth. One was when um SVB and uh Silvergate and Signature and FB uh were were all collapsing. They just saw a spike in account openings. You know who else saw a spike in account openings? JP Morgan. So being in the right place at the right time, I think really really helped them with a product

um and a and a distribution uh strategy. The the second spike in their growth now is is really um can they uh as more companies are created from vibe coding from AI you know the app store is seeing more apps created after a long-term plateauing stripe says Stripe Atlas is seeing more new companies formed than than any time in their history and it's it's accelerating. Mercury is one of the first places you go when you're opening your first bank account. It's a place you put your first um you know uh VC check, it goes into the Mercury account quite often. And when you're bigger, you get a few more banks and whatever else.

So for stable coins, for them it's like well a lot of these companies want to accept stable coins. They want to pay their staff in stable coins. They want to move them internationally. So that's just like a thing they should add and they absolutely will. For RAMP, it's a little bit different. Like look where they started. They started with the best spend management card in the world and it's like how can I save you as a company as much money as possible and how can I make it so that you have as few clicks as possible like they are aggressively focused on how can I save you a millisecond of time can I make that page load a little bit faster and so if I'm a company if I'm a CFO today and I'm logging into Coinbase to manage my stable coins and I'm logging into uh

RAMP to manage my fiat Well, that just sucks. Like why don't we just put this all in one place and the CFO gets to see a single dashboard? But also then uh they see that as territory expansion, right? Because there are parts of the world like um Nigeria and the global south more broadly where getting access to things like Netflix and chat GPT isn't as simple as just using your credit or debit card because there isn't a local ramp or a local mercury. But if you open a stablecoin backed account in those markets, then they can open that for you and they can assign a card to it and presto, they've got a new customer.

So each of them, I think, is thinking about it in in slightly different ways. Um, and this won't be one sizefits-all. I think there's actually a lot of complexity here where every fintech, every neoank, every upstart, uh, every incumbent is going to have a slightly different answer. >> Yeah. Yeah. And then Simon, I mean to flip that on its head then even like that's kind of like the big behemoth neo bank and then you've got Tempo, you've got Arc, you've got Plasma, you've got these like underlying like blockchain settlement layers which ultimately will be competing for that flow, right? Like these banks and their customers are going to >> likely choose one perhaps offer of a

couple. The end of the day customer just wants to move that money. they don't want to really think [clears throat] about or care about what chain they're on, but the those blockchains and those banks, they really need to make sure that things are all, you know, tight, squared away, done up, and also win those relationships. And so, one of the things that Tempo has prioritized is this kind of MPP, this machine payments protocol if I'm not mistaken. >> You got it right. >> And in addition to that, privacy. And so these two things feel very very complimentary and also uh futuristic and kind of forwardlooking you know within the tempo stack s I'm curious what makes tempo one of the best places for stable

coin payments at large um and kind of how does how does the technology end up leading to winning some of these relationships to building out a very vast network right because w with these things the network effect really really hits big Tron has been dominating tether payments simply because it has been dominating tether payments for so long that you you you know you just use Tron with Tempo. How do you how do you see the technology side leading to winning some of these commercial relationships distribution through Stripe? How does it all kind of come together?

>> I I think actually it's uh thousands of little things. Like if you think about a really great product, it's very rarely just one thing that makes it great. I don't know what your favorite um brand is or sports car or whatever it is, but when you when you have something of high quality, it's the thousands of tiny details that really add up and really matter. And to payments professionals, there's just hundreds of paper cuts in using uh the existing blockchain infrastructure out there. Surprisingly simple one, uh gas gas is volatile. Um gas fees can spike. Um so being able to pay that in stable coins and have fee consistency is extremely valuable. And it's not surprising that um there are now a class of blockchains doing exactly

that feature. But I also think there's uh a lot of other things as well being able to pay fees in any stable coin or tokenized deposit. So there's a lot of especially financial institutions that don't want too much exposure to a stable coin for precisely the reasons I said about balance sheet risk earlier. So being able to pay fees in their own tokenized deposit is like an amazing thing. uh other small things that you have to do as a CFO, as a payments business, is you have to take all of those stable coin payments and match them to all of your fiat payments.

That's really hard to do and no blockchain has tools for that. So, we just made it really easy to add memo fields and to make all of your referencing work. And and I could sit here for hours going through every tiny feature. And honestly, um it really depends on who you are and what you want to achieve. There's probably a top three or four features that I would give to you. Like if you're a large bank, I might lean into how we're doing privacy zones and how that can give you like uh your own version of uh tokenized deposits that's closed loop. But actually on Tempo, it could go open loop and you could swap that for stable coins really easily. And we've put a lot of detail into uh into how all of that works. I think generally as well uh from

the uh stripe heritage from my heritage uh there's a lot of people at tempo not from stripe I'd say 90% are either paradigm heritage or from fintech or or from crypto but have done payments we're payments nerds we've been there we've had to deal with the fact that reconciliation is a real nightmare and we've had to deal with the fact that uh ISO messages are really painful and every bank uses them slightly differently and it's these things that like what's the Uh if you know you know there's thousands of those where people look at tempo and al honestly when I'm with a prospect or when I'm with a client I get this sort of moment where everyone has this like oh finally somebody did it native account abstraction like most people today going

to you know a privy or to a bridge or to a BBNK or to any of those players they don't have to think about account abstraction because you know somebody else has taken care of it but if I'm going to start moving enough volume on chain. Maybe I want to go directly to the chain myself. Maybe I want to run my own RPC node. Maybe I want to run a validator. Well, then suddenly that matters a whole lot more that the chain can do more out of the box. And so again, I I don't know which one. It's like what's my favorite child? You know, what's my favorite movie? I I like the industry. I like all of them. [laughter] >> It's fascinating. Um, you know, Simon, you mentioned earlier, and I I know we've only got a couple minutes left

here, but, you know, one of the things that's holding back these larger banks, those who can really move significant volume, uh, I is, uh, the idea that stable coins are very expensive, uh, to hold on the balance sheet of banks. Um, what, you know, h, how do we overcome this? Is this what you think is the biggest blocker to ultimately making stable coins ubiquitous in the payment space? Is there another bigger blocker? how how do we ultimately overcome and and uh really scale uh to the point where I think everyone understands this is inevitable but uh you know fighting the good fight how do how do we get there so I think we just have to realize that tokenized deposits and stable coins solve different problems for different people and they're both valid so tokenized deposits are money that stays

still and can only exist inside of the bank stable coins are money that moves it's open loop it can go to anybody with compatible software instantly ly and 24/7. What stable coins can't do is offer the same kind of yield uh that banks do it. Also, if you park $50 million at a large bank, guess what? Your lending rates are going to get a lot better. Your FX rates are going to get a lot better. And so, there's a whole bunch of advantages to deposits and tokenized deposits that I think we just don't recognize sometimes. Meanwhile, stable coins, they can go open loop. They can go anywhere instantly and 24/7. So I think what we have to do is make the business case for why these two things coexist and why that's beneficial to the financial

institutions. And that's where I spend a lot of my time, which is like, hey, there's new fee revenue here over the weekend. I don't know if you've noticed, but at weekends there's quite a lot of geopolitical and price volatility at the moment. I'm sure your clients are screaming about doing something about it. Wouldn't it be great if you just had this small pocket of time in which you let them settle with stable coins, but the rest of the time it swapped back into tokenized deposits so you didn't bleed out too much balance sheet risk. Oh, and by the way, since you do that, that's a new service. You can probably charge quite a good fee for that if the clients really want you to do it. So, this is actually instead of losing money from trading deposits, >> you're going to be net making money. And

so I think we have to frame things in those terms so that we can start to start to make sense of it. And so that's where um maybe not this Sunday but next Sunday I'm going to release like the business co business case for stable coins for banks on fintechbrainood.com and it's something really top of mind for me because I think it's something that's um that's not done enough and not done in a way that a banker would write it. you know, uh, often when we talk about stable coins being cheaper or better than deposits, that's immediately the banks are going to dismiss that because it's obviously not true. And the second thing we can claim is that uh that you know, oh well uh you should just do it and you should compete on yield and something of that nature.

You've got to make the case in their terms and they're going to say you haven't even mentioned uh SOC 60 or the liquidity coverage ratio or how am I going to take this to Alco all of these jargon terms that to a bank is like how do I make money and how do I make this comply and that's the stuff that I think uh the industry is now starting to wrestle with and which is why I love my job. Can you tell I'm a nerd? I love this stuff [laughter] >> man. For everyone listening guys go to fintechbrainfood.com. I'm a huge fan reader of your LinkedIn, your ex, your newsletter pod. So, Simon, thanks for spending some time with us.

Go get your kids. Go educate them on finance. I'm sure they've already got an account on Tempo. If not, they soon will. I would highly recommend it. >> Thank you so much, guys. It's been fun. Take care. >> Absolutely. See you next time. Thanks, Simon. >> Matt Fintech brain food. Simon, great to have him. Guys, we're going to take a quick break. We've got our next guest here in the studio, Scott Chay. We're going to get started actually kind of like piggybacking off of that conversation. Uh more kind of debanking, neo bankanking and more guys. We'll be right back. [music] [music]

[music] >> [music] [music] >> Money power. [music] Big [music] money know we get deep we get [music] deep

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[music] talk. See you next year, [screaming] >> second and third of June at the Louver Palace in Paris. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music]

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[music] [music] >> 70 7th floor. All righty, guys. Welcome back to

Stabled Up episode number 34 powered by our friends at Frack. We've got Scott Sheay talking neo bankanks, debanking, stable coins. Scott, welcome to the tokenization tower. Great to have you here. It's a nice view. It's a nice day. >> It is a great place and a great day. >> Yes, sir. It is. Well, man, we got a lot to talk about. There is this rise of cryptonative neo banking happening. You've got quite the background uh from some of the larger banks. You've been through some of this DBanking, some of this operation choke point uh happening.

Scott, maybe just give us a quick uh tidbit into your background, what you've been working on for the last 20 or so years, and then we'll get into the conversation. >> So, I've I'm a founder of four banks now. Bank United, uh Merrick Bank, which some of your folks may know because it was it was an it was an original payment bank, credit card bank. Then I was the f I was the founder of Signature Bank, and most notably my claim to fame is I created Signet. Um and then right now I'm starting the bank. I'm really most proud of which is actually not a NEO bank. It's not a fractional bank. It's something that is new under the sun. It is a 100% full reserve bank, which I think is finally a

bank that has a real bank that has the ethos of crypto. And I'm really excited about it. You know, we're we've created we put our core operating system on a blockchain. We're really the only NEO we're only not we're the only native crypto bank out there. I mean, I go to a lot of conferences. I see you at like 110% of the conferences I attend. And Robbie, of course, too. And um uh we're the only ones literally that transfer a real dollar.

>> Yeah. And people wonder like we just had uh Simon Taylor on from fintech brain food and >> tempo >> tokenized tempo. We were talking about the difference between tokenized deposits and stable coins and kind of what that you know what how actual banks refer to these things and think about them and treat them. Maybe you could just elucidate a bit about the core differences here and how traditional banks are thinking about tokenized deposits versus stable coins within the lens of customer experience, profitability, um, moes. There's a lot of kind of conversations about stable coins with clarity. Now, what is the difference between tokenized deposit stable coin and what is the bank's approach to these

things? >> So, I'm going to I'm a obviously, as you can tell, I'm a bank nerd. So, I'm gonna have I'm going to unpack a little bit of what you said. >> So, first of all, a they're they're really when we talk about tokenized deposits versus stable coins, >> a stable coin is essentially a receipt for a dollar. It's saying, "I put the dollar in that bo box over there. Here's my receipt for a dollar. You've got it. You transfer it. You transfer it. You're on a crypto rail. So you have to go on to a crypto rail. You have to go get that dollar somehow get that dollar off a crypto rail and having

created signet. I can tell you one thing whenever you go on and off rails and we see that obviously with bridges which are really you know have inherent risks. >> Yeah. My view is like what most banks have done with tokenized deposits actually including signature because I we knew we were what we were doing when we were doing it is like it's stapling signet was like stapling crypto on it was like stapling paper onto cardboard. >> Yeah. >> It the two systems are not fundamentally compatible. I mean if you look at the banking systems that work right now they're actually I don't care which one you're using to be embarrassed. I mean they take this building we're sitting in

I mean famously took one year and 45 days to complete and it like it's a real building and it's like you know you have a great view and like there are gazillions of people in there for a big bank and for the operating systems of the FIS's the Fiser the Jack Henry's it takes more than a year for them to make a significant change whereas by what we did which is building in a blockchain a we're compatible, we're native. So when when developers look at when crypto developers look at how to integrate with us, it's like, hey, wow. It's like not all of the contortions and you know, uh I mean, if you have a developing background, it's

not all the stuff you have to do to to staple cardboard and paper together and hope that they work and know that there's risk. So, we've um I think and this was our goal with uh with my co-founders um Jeff Wallace, Arel Bonell, and Kylo O'Donnell was to actually create the first native bank. There's one more part, and I don't want to get to a monologue here, but there's one more critical part. When you use a tokenized deposit from a regular bank, Yeah.

>> you actually are not transferring a dollar. And that's what people don't like wanna it's like cognitive dissonance. Um what you're transferring is a promise to pay because the the deposit is insured up to $250,000. Maybe the uh the the the the um the FDI and the Fed will, you know, make good, maybe they won't. But you're not actually transferring a dollar where Satoshi's fundamental, this is what got me. I started on my crypto journey in 2013. What got me was when you trade a block of Bitcoin, you are trading the actual crypto. You're trading the actual

I'm sorry, currency. When you're trading a block of Ethereum, you're trading an actual amount of Ethereum, >> right? >> You're not doing that when you transfer a dollar. >> So, what we did is by putting all of the money in the bank, but not investing a penny. So there's nobody like, you know, Signature Bank hadn't had a is public knowledge. We were a lender on the Empire State Building. >> Yeah. >> So if everybody wanted all of their money, we'd actually go have to go to, you know, the owner of the REIT that owns this building >> and say, "Tony, please give us the uh the money back." It doesn't actually exist. What we've done is we put all the money in a T plus0 environment. So on any business day, we can get all of it.

We don't take interest rate risk. We don't take credit risk. And so when someone moves a block of dollars on our block, they're actually moving a physical unit of USD cuz we are a bank. >> We're not a receipt for a bank or a receipt for a custodian. >> Yep. >> And that's it's subtle. It is really something new under sun. It's subtle but fundamentally puts us in a whole different category and takes us out of trad.

>> Yeah. >> I mean, you've been going to all these conferences and everybody wants to kumbaya, you know, about trad, you know, it's like >> no, >> no, >> it doesn't work. >> Yeah. Scotty, you know, I'm curious. Um, >> what what were some of the learnings from the, you know, I I I want to get more into ND and to N3XT. super excited about. >> But what what were some of the learnings from Signet from the entire Signature Bank kind of process? Like when when the on and off ramp, you know, choke points were happening and people were being debanked.

What was happening like where what was happening in your mind? What what like lessons did you learn? What did this trigger a as far as you kind of coming to build a fully reserved bank? Like man, what the hell happened? >> Wow. Well, this is I assume this is a family show, so I'm not going to take off my shirt and show you some scars. >> Yeah. >> Um [laughter] I believe I mean, look, signature was debanked. >> Um I've it was wrong and unnecessary and I testified before the House and the Senate should open the next day. But as some of your listeners may vaguely recall, there was a time that the administration in power at the time

didn't like crypto, right? They didn't like crypto friendly banks. Um, and this is wrapped up in a bigger actually if we had like hours we could talk about this, but >> the regulators have because we live in a fractional banking world. The regulators have enormous power over the banks because they control the insurance. The minute a regula the the the regulator says you're not insured, you're done. or the minute that you want to exercise having your collateral and the regulator or the bank and you know the lender of last resort doesn't say that they're going to lend

against you, you're kaput and by definition you're always a fractional bank cuz you know five people put in $10 and they all think they have $10 but in reality $40 was lent to the Empire State Building REIT, right? Or other people like that. I'm you know generalizing obviously but it's been lent out. So by definition fractional banks are creatures of the government. >> Yeah. >> So the first thing one thing that was really fundamental that I wanted to be part of was saying no we want a bank that's more robust where we never need a lender of last resort. Everybody wants

to take all their money out on any day. We can do something that not even JP Morgan can do. We can just give them the money. Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, JP Morgan will be built out. They're too important. They have 35% of the market share of the, you know, the United States and they're, you know, >> we just where it's JP Morgan's world. We just live in it. Um, but we have that special superpower of all the money's always there. you transfer a dollar when you transfer uh you know a bitcoin or if you just want to transfer if I just want to pay you forget about cryptocurrencies >> personally my vision is much bigger I

mean that's why I'm doing this >> I want to I really believe that we need to retire and say thank you to the 20th century almost 19th century business rails of banking where a quarter of the way into the century actually more. >> Yeah. >> What are we still using 1980s programming for? >> Yeah. >> In banking. >> Yeah. Well, then so the core reasoning for the Frank uh fractional reserve is this ability to lend. It's this ability to then generate yield off the customer deposits and make money in a fully reserve bank. You know, it there's got to be a creative way to generate revenue. How does that work?

>> So, excellent question. um you know investors and others always ask well okay that's great how you gonna make money >> sure >> um and um uh and we have a great we have just like some fantastic investors who saw the vision farelless paradigm um hack um names you'll you know names you know and um and they got it um the um the the way we make money is three-fold so First, we do make some money from float even though we only invest in T plus0 um direct US government obligations. No repo, no nothing else um month duration.

We still make some money from there. Number two, we're going to starting in 2028, um we're going to start charging monthly account fees. We're only businessto business, so we're going to charge it monthly. businesses are used to paying monthly account fees and no one's actually, you know, we're going to charge relatively low compared to the big banks, much lower. The third, and this is where we're doing shipping and logistics, is if I ship you something, you know, if I ship you uh, you know, uh, you know, $10,000 worth of those water bottles, um, one of us is taking risk. Either I send it to you and hope, hey, you're usually pretty good for it.

um I'll send you a bill or I say you got to ship me for ship pay me first because these are such you know these are in such demand or more likely if it's a bigger amount of money you get a letter of credit >> so letters of credits are very expensive and what really we found at Signet was and this really blew my mind and it's why I was so excited about continuing the 24 by7 payment delivery >> is by the end of Signet By 2022, before it was shut down and the money was sent back by the government, um 50% of the transactions were not crypto but were shipping and logistics

related and they were for much lower amounts. So another so people who we wanted to do so a typical transaction in that arena would be 17,000 100,000 >> the crypto transactions would be a million you know they'd be aggregated a million 2 million 10 million we even at 100 million but here if I ship something to you I can essentially create a self-serve what we've created and the team the engineering team is just remarkable is a selfservice letter of credit if you will it's a programmable payment, which people in the crypto world are used to.

It says, "I've shipped you those bottles." Check. You say, "I got the bottles." Check. Robbie, who's not here, says, "I went in. This is what we ordered and um the bottles look like they're fine." Check. Once the we've agreed on that, those are the three things that need to happen. the money and the deposi the money and the the um uh the the uh letter the um letter of uh bill of lighting the certificate of authenticity the you know if it's if it's pharmaceutical if it's whatever there's a whole bunch of certificates it's it's I'm summarizing obviously but all the documentation required >> and the money change in it doesn't matter whether it's 3:00 a.m. in

Detroit, Dublin, Dar, Dubai. You don't have to wait for the bank to be open. You don't have to have lawyers. Now, look, 20% of the transactions are going to require they're complicated. They're, you know, they're big. You're going to want a lawyer involved. But for but for 80% of the transactions or some number like that, we're going to charge you 10%. And we still make money. That's how big and fat the margins are in banking. >> Yeah. I mean, you guys have launched this ND product as of April.

>> Yeah. >> Um with a couple other other products. Um what is this what is the ND product like? What what is that and how does it relate to the bigger vision? >> So ND is part and parcel of the bigger vision. >> Yeah. uh which is what ND does next digital dollar is actually if you want you don't have to you can have a regular bank account like what I what I just described it's all under you know secret nobody knows from you it's under the bank secrecy act you know but there are many pe there are many players companies that are thinking actually we want to show that we've paid somebody and have it be public

so between clients of the bank, customers of the bank. We've put NDD on the Ethereum blockchain, which is obviously the most used blockchain. Um maybe there it'll be it'll be on others in the future. You just talked to as you said to Tempo and others, but in the meantime, we started with Ethereum made most sense. And now you can see that I paid you. That's really important in a certain in the universe of of suppliers in that >> first brands which is the famous uh you know the famous bankruptcy where people thought others were getting paid.

>> If I said you know what I'm the fin I'm the I'm the um the factor. I'm the finance agent. I'm the private land. I want to actually see your payments public. I'm not going to be able to touch them right. They can't touch them. But I can observe that you're actually making payments >> that is enormous for protecting credit. I mean that's you know thankfully that's where I you know personally I do and other people in the in the in the group really have the understanding of banking because we've actually that solves >> a central problem of private credit lenders.

>> Interesting. But that's actually opposite of what we've been hearing, which is that privacy is crucial for this next era of payments, of institutions using crypto, of the average person wanting to use stable coins for payments. H how do you balance this desire for privacy with this, you know, B2B public need to show like, hey, I'm good for it. How how do those two go hand inand when I think a lot of these you know businesses and enterprises want to keep their finances private why make it public is it just solely for this credit reason how how do you balance the desire for privacy here so first of all totally agree many people I don't know we don't know yet most you know probably

I guess most are going to want their transactions kept private they're not people that get their companies most companies who want their transactions private But let's say you're literally a borrower in the private credit markets and you've got five different credit five different creditors. They don't have visibility to the other credits that you've extended. So it's always been a problem in banking in that if I'm borrowing from five different people, I could you could be playing three card monty with the collateral. This protects you against it. I'm not saying everybody's going to want it. Yeah.

>> But boy, for those people who do want it, they're going to say a prayer of thanksgiving that they used it. >> And the other people that may want it, and I think this is going to be a use case, um are some exchanges >> that want to say, "Okay, here's the clearing. >> The dollars are flowing. We want that all on the network so that everybody can see the finality and the it's it's almost like a ticker. Yeah. >> You know, and there could be ways in the future to semianomize that. So it's, you know, it's just exchange to closing agent or to custodians. So it's not like I'm saying I know you bought X shares of SpaceX or whatever today's, you know,

>> uh, hot story is, but um, it could say somebody did on this exchange, it closed, you know, that's yours. The other guy knows that that was his, >> right? you know, that's that's again a real serious use case that we're solving. So, we're not, you know, we're not just trying to throw things at the wall. We're actually, I think, solving Yeah. >> real necessary cases. >> So, I noticed that you guys were doing some work in Wyoming as well as as part of like the jurisdictional kind of like landscape. They've been very forward with this digital dollar, the Wyoming stable token.

>> Yeah. I I think is what it's called. And they've been very kind of like like the first states to embrace a a stable token for a state and for like a local a local uh state level government. What is the relationship with Wyoming for uh NDD and for kind of the collateral and legal side? What are you guys doing in Wyoming? >> So, we're just we're just chartered there and they we're supervised. um they did start their own um stable coin and more power to them, but that really doesn't have anything to do with us. The idea is that if you're a citizen of Wyoming that instead of using cash um if you want to use a stable coin that you know that the reserves are going

toward parks and you know you know they're going to state government. Wyoming is famously a low tax state, a no income tax state. So, they are very keen on finding ways to get revenues. Um, and more power to them. I'm happy for them, you know. I'm happy for I'm happy for the state of Wyoming. We're a taxpayer, you know, so I'm happy >> that they've, you know, want to figure out other ways to also raise money. >> Right. Right. Okay. So, kind of, you know, chartered there. it's friendly. >> When it comes to actually people using this this um FDD or sorry, NDD, this this kind of new form of a bank, what is the appeal to someone like myself, someone in the younger generation? Why

would I like why should I care to put my money into this? What is the what is the benefit to to Wells Fargo or to JP Morgan, Chase, or whatever it is? Well, first of all, you aren't our target market personally. Your company could be. Okay. >> So, when we talk, we're B2B only. >> Yeah. >> Um, and you may want to use this because you can minimize your your working capital. If you you can get if you get paid on the weekend for those proverbial bottles, you can reuse that the next you can use that immediately. You don't have to wait for the wire transfers. You don't have to pay for a wire transfer.

You don't have to pay for Swift. So if your those bottles are being shipped from Manila or they're being shipped from Manila to Perth to here, you don't have to worry about the time zones or the different bank have a bank there, a bank here. You can just make that payment atomically. So for your business, I mean, you're not in the water bottle business, you're not your local business here. Um, but for many businesses, wow, we can offer you a lot of service that'll lower your costs and fees and simplify your business and mean that and and make you have less working capital. Um, I would say um, you know, in terms of the big banks, to be perfectly honest, I think we're competitor to big banks.

>> Yeah. >> I mean, we set ourselves up so that we keep all the money in just short-term US treasuries. So we have the quality of a gip in that we have no credit risk um but we have the immediate transfer the flexibility of having a blockchain as a core system >> we're bank supervised we have a supervisor we were fully examined before we opened >> and you're doing daily transparency checks as well >> yes uh yes 100% >> we're we're going to and we're going to start posting those actually on our transparency page.

>> Yeah. So, kind of as we kind of uh slowly come to a close here when it comes to integrating the importance of the crypto rails to this, could you just kind of reaffirm why this is only possible using Ethereum using a blockchain? What what makes this so much different and more unique than a typical banking setup that is enabled by using the onchain tools at hand? So most banks and again Signet and we were working on on on you know other stuff too. I would say they may have a cool 24 by7 system that shows you got paid and the other person you know you you paid the other person

got paid but in reality to a great degree they're debits and credits. They're actually not the movement of the money because even the biggest banks really run their batch twice a day and there's still I wasn't totally kidding about 1980s technology. >> Um I mean there are big banks which have you know sort of holidays on changes for two months because they're just integrating what they've integrated over the last year um or what they've started over the last year. It's it is fundamentally you can make you can make it look like it works. Again, it's like stapling paper to cardboard, you know, >> but it fundamentally doesn't work because fundamentally

what what everybody's talking about is bringing tradi and and and crypto together, but they just don't work together. It's like trying to put, you know, VHS and Betamax together. It just it does. They're incompatible. You can run them on the same system and it's got a third system. It has to have a third system that records from one, transfers to the other. >> It is a workaround. And what I'm so excited about and I hope people are talking about and writing about in 10 years, I I really really mean this is that we really revolutionized the banking system. We brought crypto [snorts] to the banking system. Not

some earth sets, you know, put together. >> Scott, just coming to a close. I mean, what is the roadmap here for you? What do you most focus on throughout this year into next? You mentioned by 2028 there will be more revenue generating features and products. How does the next 6 to 12 months look like for you guys to really capitalize here? Well, I we're clearly looking at how to make um ND more powerful. Um and like everyone, but I think we were we're doing it uh I hope uh in a great way that we'll hopefully have some announcements coming out at some point. Um we're looking at AI. One thing that was nice about starting the bank when we did in 2023, 2024, 2025

when we were doing all the building was we knew AI is here. It was no longer like something, you know, where you could you could put it aside. We know AI is here. Um, I do think adoption to finance is going to be slower than everybody thinks. Part of that is due to the tools involved and part of it frankly is due to the risks involved in AI and you know you've I I think you even talked about AMMs. I'm watching those obviously closely but >> um you know even the folks that essentially have AMMs like Renaissance and others um that had AMMs before they were really called AMMs.

there's a human being watching them because you're never going to want to say, "Hey, dear shareholders, all the money's gone because our, you know, AMM went wild and we didn't check it until Monday morning, you know, or it had it had im it transferred out faster than someone could push a button from all the money from our accounts." I think it's there's no question it's going to happen. There's no question. The very first thing I did, if you've got one more moment, when I was at started out, I was my first job was at Solomon, my first real job was at Solomon Brothers >> and um I did the the the um training um training class that uh Michael Lewis so famously depicted. So,

one of the things that I did was they I rotated through the moneymaking through not moneymaking, marketmaking areas on the OTC desk when there were phones and people would call and the trader who had a good sense of humor and my first day said, "I'm going for lunch. You take the position for an hour >> and in addition to being scared to death, you just got my MBA." I'm like, "There's a decent there's a real position here for Solomon Brothers." um the um you know and I got back I I think I lost like $2,000 in the hour and he was oh that's great you know [laughter] he was like when he he he enjoyed it was like worth it to him but [laughter] um and um I didn't know what I was when I was happy it was only that but um ultimately there was somebody there

would have pushed the button and I made it and I started really using his position somebody would have stopped me. >> Yeah. And someone's got to do that when you're talking about the, you know, the repo market. I'm sorry. Is it the the repo market is about a $13 trillion a day trading market? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Someone's going to watch that. >> It's not going to happen so fast. >> Yeah. And so you think that kind of framework applies to how the banking industry is going to evolve? >> Yes. just this different removals of checks and balances, implementing programmable kind of immutable technology, but then watching it and then same thing and just kind of evolving through that process.

>> I think so and I think we're part of that revolution. I I'm really I'm I can't be more excited. >> Scott, thanks for the time, man. Thanks for being to the studio. That is Scott Shay Stabled Up episode number 34, guys, live from the tokenization tower. We'll be right back with our next guest. Stay tuned. [music] Heat. Heat. [music] [music] >> [music] [music]

>> money power [music] big [music] money hour. I'mak >> [music] >> We get deep know [music] we get deep we get deep know we get deep [music] we get we get deep we get deep we get [music] we get deep know we get

>> [music] >> attend the Davos of Web 3. [music] [music] See you next year, >> second and third of June at the Louver Palace in Paris. [music] [music] >> [music]

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[music] [music] >> Wow. Send everything. >> Send everything. >> Zcash is ready for 700. Boys and girls, you heard it here first. >> What happened? I don't know. I was just talking to Scott about stable coins. >> I had to I had to jump back on and let you know the war is over. We're not we're not going to get drafted. Uh Trump brokered peace in the Middle East. We have we've we've attained world peace.

>> What does that mean for my um Zcash and hype and nearbags? >> I think it means everything's going to send. >> Okay. >> I don't know. That's not financial advice. I think uh I think the S&P is going to get to 7500 before near gets to 7500. But I think near or excuse me Zcash gets to 7500. But I think I think Zcash is going to get to 10,000 before the S&P gets to 10,000. >> Wow. So this is amazing news for the state of humanity, for everyone involved, for for everything, man. I mean this was uh >> for you and I and Love on Earth. This was just like such an annoying just six months for everybody and everyone everyone hates Trump more now. Um I mean

to be honest but uh war's over so that means there's less [screaming] hopefully oil will take a chill pill. Is that >> logical? >> Gas ought to come Yeah. G uh oil's sliding down. Stocks are pumping. >> Uh you'd imagine gas and jet fuel and flights are going to come down as well. Um, you'd also think that, um, you know, we've got the new Fed chair coming in. Inflation was starting to run a little bit hot, right? We looked at CPI and PPI last week, I think.

>> Um, and you'd imag, you know, >> could >> Yeah, let's go ahead and look at a little bit more of the detail around uh around this deal. But yeah, it it does seem as if this is going to be healthy for things overall. >> So, what do we have here? So obviously an an immediate uh comprehensive and unconditional ceasefire on all fronts, land, sea, and air. Uh so we're going to stop fighting. That's nice. Uh mutual commitment not to target military, civilian, or economic infrastructure. Not sure what that means. If we have an immediate and comprehensive and unconditional ceasefire, uh doesn't that also include infrastructure by default?

Guess uh that's called out in particular. >> Cessation of military oper. So, we're gonna cease military operations. Again, that seems to go without saying as part of a ceasefire. Respect for sovereignty. We are codifying respect. We're both going to sign on the dotted line. Territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs. Guaranteed freedom of navigation in the Gulf, Straight of Hormuse, and Sea of Oman. >> Establishment. So, obviously that's a big one. Guaranteed free freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuse. >> Um, >> that's huge for oil. I saw that there was going to be some sort of joint monitoring system. Uh guaranteed freedom makes me think that it's like unfettered

uh freedom. But if they're monitoring, then you know they're monitoring for something. I think there's going to be more details that come out of that. Here we go. Establishment of a joint monitoring and dispute resolution mechanism. Launch of negotiations on outstanding issues within seven days. >> What does that mean? uh gradual lifting of US sanctions in exchange for Iran's adherence to the terms. Uh affirmation of compliance with international law. You know what's missing from this list, Andy? >> What's that? >> Uranium.

>> Uranium. The the the lack of uranium enrichment uh and uh you know the path towards a nuclear weapon for Iran. >> Yeah, I didn't see anything. Wasn't that the biggest issue as well? Was like the Iran >> nuclear power. You know, obviously the straight of Hormuz, you know, then captured everyone's attention, but yeah, Iran nuclear threat was the biggest, most contentious point as to why we were there to begin with. >> Not mentioned in this peace deal. >> Wow. Wow. Um, so my initial impression here is that uh Trump Benthany uh unless there's news that comes out saying, you know, Iran won't be going after uranium uh enrichment and looking for a nuclear

weapon. >> Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. All right. Well, this is good news for Thursday before Memorial Day weekend in America. I think people will be a bit more relaxed. >> Yeah. Yeah. Good for the vibes. Uh why don't we get back on track here and uh you know shift off of the geopolitical news uh get into something that's a bit more topical. >> Yeah. >> So I mean dude >> take us away Andy. >> I mean these ETFs are nonf freaking stop. THY BHY 50% jump in volume again today headed for combined 40 million in trading yesterday. Perfectly timed

launch. Everything's in the gutter. Hype's flying. New alltime highs today. Just in time. The big boys show up just in time to push us over all-time highs. Gotta love it. You got to love when they launch the ETFs, right? As we need a little bit of a bigger push to get over the line. We We made the push. The most in demand ETF since the launch of the Bitcoin ETF. These numbers are astoundingly large and it's extremely extremely impressive for the Hyperlquid team for Bitwise for 21 shares completely completely beat BlackRock and and all the other large ETF players to the game here by

being in the know. Bitwise bought I think $20 million of Hyperlid or so in the last I don't know however many weeks. um they want to come on the show, talk about their bull fees. It's like literally like they launched these ETFs right when we needed them. Couldn't be better timing. I think rumors are are swirling. David Sheamus and Bob Diamond are hitting the ATM on PUR, meaning that they are uh selling some PUR or taking debt on their shares to buy more hype. I think they're probably doing things behind the scenes right now because they are at a nice premium. Everything's lining up for hype. People are sidelined. People are calling for $100 targets. I guys, guys, believe in something. Dream a little bit. Please

dream a little bit. $100 hype is not the endgame here, guys. Um Rob, I mean, come on. Hyperlid. >> Yeah, not much more to say aside from Hyperlid. I do think that we are starting to see more and more of these products. Um, and so I, you know, obviously, you know, that we've seen this, uh, play out with only pretty much with respect to the Bitcoin ecosystem, maybe the ETH ecosystem, but, you know, I'm I'm what I mean is that, you know, we've got a spot asset, we've got multiple ETFs, and we've got digital asset treasury companies. And I'm just >> considering to myself, obviously, Hyperlid is bullish. I think, you know,

maybe oil is not going to get as much attention now and we're going to see more activity around some of these other assets, some of these other markets, but I'm just thinking to myself, you know, kind of weighing, you know, ETFs versus DATs versus spot >> and >> where it makes the most sense to get exposure. Like you're saying, the ATM, I think, means that, you know, the DAT is taking on more debt. I don't think that they're selling hype. I think. >> No, no. They're they would be selling some purr to raise cash to buy more hype.

>> Yes. Yes. Exactly. >> Yes. >> Which would explain a little bit of the underperformance in purr today. For example, it's only up 5.6%. Hype's up 7.5%. >> Okay. >> Um but still I still am the firm believer if if hype goes up uh another 30% from here, per will outperform. I think it's just like it's >> another thing another thing based on uh our conversation this morning with Arthur you know part of it part of you know my curiosity was you know how does this all end like when the why why is the why would the music stop and it was essentially around AI given you know we we had Ilia on and whatnot but obviously Hyperlid is part of his thesis if

there's a anti-AI political regime it doesn't seem to affect hype And so I think hype might be insulated from some of the political overhang uh whereas maybe more of these AI companies may not be >> maybe I mean I think it's generally just more like a if AOC gets into is the leading candidate then um people are going to freak out I think is what Arthur was trying to say. So, it probably affects all risk, but I get what you're saying. It's not like directly correlated, but you know, less IPOs, less excitement, less risk behavior affects hype. So, >> I've got Wilson Cusack, the head of product at Bass, ready to join the show.

We're going to bring him up. We're going to let you go, man. Have a great afternoon. There's a lot going on with AI and base. So, I got I got some things I got some things to say. Let's get out William ready to come up. >> Yeah. World peace indeed. I mean guys, Venice, GitLob, AI tokens, BAS app. I mean, stuff is happening. Stuff is happening on base. We have to talk about it. I am bullish. I'm excited. Um, I'm going to go straight forward. I'm not going to hold anything back and we're going to find out the hell is going on over there because, uh, Salana's aura is in the gutter and bass is on the comeup again somehow. So, we're back. We got Wil we got Wilson. We got bass in a great great time. Wilson, good to have

you on the show, man. What's up? >> Hey, glad to be here. >> Yo, that's a sick background. Are you in a cabin? >> Something like that. Yeah, this is cool. >> Office situation. >> Nice, man. Well, um, as I said, Venice taking the AI world by storm. People are looking at BASP, seeing vertical charts. People are actually excited this time about real real applications of AI and blockchain. Like we had these multiple iterations of these, you know, autonomous agents and these kind of fugazi, but now we're like private inference, private chat, uh delivering new models on chain, scaling the way that people are investing in compute on chain. A lot of it is happening on Bass.

I think Bass has done a good job of being like the home of this crypto AI innovation. I know we have a lot to cover, but starting here, man, I'm sure it's been a busy past couple weeks. Give us a state of base. >> Yeah. No, it's exciting to see. I mean, from the chain point of view, you're always sort of just trying to foster serendipity, right? And so, you're trying to like be in the right place at the right time. So, we've done a ton of work and and scaling the chain, scaling the infra, having the right partnerships, having the right teams in place, and then you're kind of hoping to be in the right place, right time. Um, and yeah, I I resonate with what you're saying about every time it's a little bit more real, you know, and so we've had like a few of these eras of AI coins

and to some extent it's sort of like a microcosm of the whole crypto macro, right? Like every cycle we get a little bit more real, the use cases get a little bit more real. Um, and I think that, you know, in the same way that crypto uh it kind of became too big of a bucket to talk about all at once, like there's so many different stories within crypto. I think we're kind of starting to see that with AI as well in terms of like you mentioned that, you know, we have the inference stuff, we have the stuff that Venice is doing, and then you have like the X42 stuff, the Aentic stuff. Um there's kind of now a lot of different AI stories. Uh and yeah, I think we're doing quite well on on all of them. And so, you know, we see we've

had a few rounds of some of these, you know, more AI meme coins, AI tokens, inference related stuff, but also X42 being sort of the lead the leading agentic payments uh standard and base, you know, leading the way there. Uh I think we're now seeing you know tens of thousands of dollars of payments a day and so we're not you know we're not in the millions a day. We got a long way to go to catch up to Visa etc. Um but you know a lot of those companies are coming on chain and and I think the the trajectory looks good. >> Yeah man. And I mean I think also just like the base app in general is you know the full focus on trading it it's kind of allowed people to use use base as really a home for their uh onchain building wealth building a portfolio

trading etc. And I think again like not to stick too deep on onto this but there is a lot of interest that is kind of leaking over from the investment in AI capex in SF and broadly and that's coming on chain and there's like some really really quality uh teams building interesting technology that's getting a lot of uh usage like like um Venice is doing 60 billion I think plus tokens uh in production per day. couple other smaller companies uh are seeing significant growth as well, seeing uh interest on Twitter from the likes of Sam Alman and others in the space. You know, I guess I'm just curious like what the what your perspective is on the

development of the AI landscape within Bass. Um and then you know, we can talk more broadly, but give us a sense of like the holistic landscape of what this looks like. I'm sure you can't name specific, you know, companies or projects, but what does this kind of look like from the investor's perspective from the builder's perspective? Why are people choosing Bass? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I would say, you know, from the chain point of view, I think we're still kind of focused on like meat and potatoes sort of functionality uh that serves all of our users. And I think that uh you know, some of that focus on the chain. And so, you know, you you'll see Brian and Jesse talk about a focus on trading, payments, agents. Um, I think that some of that

also, you know, I don't sit on the app side as well, but sort of the app side, as you mentioned, sort of like back to basics, like let's get the must-win uh correct. And so, you know, what we've been very focused on is like making sure that we have the best uh market infrastructure, making sure that we have the best dexes, making sure that we have the best lending protocols, and you know, building all all of these things, making sure we have the best payment rails. And then again, you're sort of like hoping that hey, if we you know, I think a lot of you know, why are teams like Venice and stuff building on base? I think they're they're uh you know, is is a is a brand there that people resonate with bass. Um and you know, you can say some of this is cheesy and being

bass, but I think there is a part of it that is is really real and attracts just quality builders. I think that uh some of this is just comes from Coinbase as well, right? Coinbase is just seen as a trusted name in this space that time over time has built products and done the right thing. And I think that that's why people were excited to see Bass get into or, you know, Coinbase get into the blockchain business of like, hey, here's a team that's going to be super focused on product, not noise, building something that people want and helping real builders get distribution. And so, you know, that's how what we've tried to do. Haven't always been perfect, but I think that, you know, it's sort of like the the Bezos line of like this quarter was baked three quarters ago or something. you know, the things that

we're seeing happen right now, I think are like the products of like months and months and possibly some of it years of work all culminating to like unlock what's here right now. And so, it's not one thing that we did in the last couple weeks of like, ah, let's do, you know, let's make AI this thing. AI has for sure been top of mind, but a lot of it has just been this, you know, compounding month-on-month, uh, trying to get right, trying to build the the right ecosystem and relationships, support the teams that are here. >> Yep. Yeah. So, I remember at E Denver this year, it was breaking news. base is basically going off on their own to build a more beefy chain to support the use cases.

>> Now, you know, you guys are post this kind of azour upgrade targeting gigas scaling, right? likely thinking towards agentic future like hey like these things are going to require a lot of TPS a lot of a lot of actual kind of uh beefiness in terms of the product >> post Azul where are we at with base product the chain the infrastructure stack what kind of technical improvements have been made over the last six months >> yeah yeah yeah and so for for those you know not following along with every detail here when base started we were building on the op stack we worked with Optimism uh for a long time, had a great relationship, but as we kind of like tried to press scaling as far as we

possibly could, uh it became kind of like, hey, we want exactly the things we need and nothing that we we don't need. And we want to build something that's purpose-built to our use cases and we also want to be able to sort of have more control of the stack to be able to ship faster and see opportunities and, you know, sprint sprint to meet them. So, ASU has landed on test net. Actually, mainet is supposed to be uh later next week, and this is kind of like the first just getting us onto the new stack. The only shift that we're seeing here is moving to more of a multi-proving architecture. So, off of just the fault proving that we had for um on uh the OP stack, moving to a multi-proving architecture, but we're trying to, you know, come right on the heels quickly. We're looking at uh you

know, end of June the the next hard fork. Um, and in that, uh, we're going to be shipping native tokens. So, tokens that are sort of built into the chain itself. >> And this is kind of on the same theme of like, you know, trying to find these unlocks that benefit all of our use cases. And so, you know, what we're trying to do with our native tokens is first of all, have, you know, a native trusted standard that people can use. And so, you know, we have uh templates there. And you know there's a stablecoin template, maybe there's a commodities template, maybe there's a to equities, you know, template. And so these are trusted standards that people can use.

Um, you know, one interesting thing of people teams that build both on Salana and the Ethereum ecosystem, you know, all of the SPL tokens basically run off one contract. And that gives a really simple trust model for anybody integrating with it. Whereas, if you're an app that's trying to like integrate and and catch the next runner, you actually have to do a lot of diligence to check like how is this contract written? Is this a rug? You know, can the dev steal the funds or whatever. So there's some goal in just getting like a trusted template there, but there's also scaling unlocks that we can get from having our own tokens where we in the node itself know exactly how this token works, how the storage lookups work. And so we can buy more throughput just by trying to move more activity to a token

that is like highly optimized to our stack. And we can possibly give some of that back to users as well. And we can say actually we can discount the cost of using this token to transfer. It's a cheaper transfer cost because it's more scalable for us. And so this is something that unlocks uh you know not only cheaper uh uh and higher throughput payments but also cheaper and higher throughput trading and and cheaper and higher throughput agentic activity. So these are the kinds of things that we're we're we're looking towards um and generally just uh yeah you know trying to a little bit of like smoothrain some of these things of just like what are just the obvious things that would make this work work better for everybody.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think uh we've came a long way with the user experience. I mean BAS app's great. Uh you know the Phantom wallet's great and it's it's like these small low-level things that the end you know person doesn't really know or care about but they you know they make a difference when it comes to scaling things in the right way. you know, when it comes to the stable coin side, the the ties with Circle, Coinbase, you guys have also kind of placed a priority on base pay for stable coin payments volume. Base has also consistently been growing.

Let's talk about this vertical of the business. Kind of ties into some of the RWA side as well, which is, as you know, all of the rage today, tokenization. Let's start with base pay. what is your kind of holistic view of Bass as a payments chain right uh there's a consumer focus there's a payments focus how do you kind of reconcile the payments aspect of bass and you know what are some of the drivers for the recent growth of stablecoin transaction volume >> yeah so uh bass has actually been number one uh for a long time in in on >> I thought it was polygon transfers there's like I think it's like 37 trillion in the last 12 months but I you know I'll just tell you openly I think Everybody knows these these metrics are

a little bit hard to get right be because you know you look at a stable coin transfer and it's hard to know exactly what was going on there. Uh in particular you know you'll see some noise around people be moving uh stable coins that if you look at multi-transaction flows are actually related to trading and you know like is that is that actually just a trading metric or is it a a stablecoin metric? >> Yeah. >> Um you know I think we have uh great partnerships. I think you know uh we we've invested in like making sure we have great on and off ramps uh to base which are very critical. Uh I was a big part of the uh a big part of my last year was on the the the Shopify partnership um and seeing them you know settle their sort of doing their stable

coin um uh checkout experience settled to base. Um you know teams like Slash which is cool Neo Bank they now have their own stable coin on base and they have like a Visa card so you can use it globally. Um I think you know to your question the the you know base maintains sort of this uh you know we have our focuses but we're we're we're we're still sort of in this general purpose blockchain space. You know we think that having an open programmable blockchain is very important. We think there's sort of a few must-win categories right now of like you know trading tokens these are like the fundamental building blocks and like winning here is important for everything that comes next. payments is also just like I mean really just looking at what are the things that

today blockchain is making 10 to 100x better than the offchain version of it that's you know those are the areas that we want to win but we also anticipate that uh you know the the the future is going to have all kinds of unexpected ideas things that we couldn't think of and those are sort of like I I kind of think of like the beta of like the known opportunity of bringing all traditional finance on chain and the alpha of like what what is unknown that that comes next so I think that there are like probably more uh you know ecosystem benefits and network effect benefits than people maybe typically uh admit and so if you're asking you know h how can bas be doing you know stable coins and payments and you know how does that rank against the the trading and I think that

there is just this idea that trading and and lending and payments these are all sort of financial use cases that are often proximate to each other and and services that serve a user in one case often serve users in the other >> and so you know bass wants to be the best sort of like one-stop shop for this like permissionless finance, you know, uh that you can it's sort of the like instant global and then like fill in the blank instant global trading, instant global borrow lend, instant global, you know, payments. And uh I think so far we're doing a pretty good job. We're we're able to deliver subscent transactions both for the trading use case and for the payments use case. Now, in the payments use case, um there there's a lot of those customers are

looking for, you know, a whole set of services that are built on top of that. And so of course we're working, you know, really closely with our partners in CDP and and that's a team that that's a Coinbase developer platform. They originally wrote the X42 standard. Um but also external teams, you know, Privy, others. They're building on base. We have great relationships with them and they're they're that's sort of helping sell the whole whole stack of payment services that people want. >> Number one. Number one. That was my mistake. I thought it was Polygon. They have to the Polygon army's going to come get you. >> Yep. Yep. Um, you know, one of the things that uh Salana has been well, okay, let's just give some context.

Salana versus Bass was like the war. I mean, it it was, but Salana's chosen to go after Hyperlquid now and Pers and Phoenix trade and push this idea that Salana is a place for pers. And so, they've kind of given you guys a little bit of a break. Um, but but but I see like a very clear spot trading winner here. like Hypquid's kind of dominating per it's going to be hard to compete with them or lighter or variational. It's kind of like it's kind of like maybe not even worth it in a sense, but there's a onchain deck spot market for crypto assets. And then what we're now seeing with recent rumors from the SEC is also an innovation exemption for tokenized equity, specifically onchain,

making them tradable. And so there's going to be a onchain spot depth liquidity liquidity war for all crypto assets and then non-crypto assets and I kind of see it as base versus uh Salana. Um maybe you don't see it that way but I do. And so I'm curious how do you guys go from what four five billion TDL? How do you take that kind of strength and that capital grow that significantly and be the home for the best liquidity onchain, best execution for spot trading crypto assets and then also non-crypto assets? I think this is this is a a place where be where bass can make a ton of money and also establish serious

market uh you know share and dominance. How do you how do you keep winning this category? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good question. I think I mean on the setup I I agree that we're competitive with Salana. I I admire the Salana team. I think they've done a lot of great work and they're they're a motivating competitor to have. I also you know I highly respect the ecosystem. So you mentioned Phoenix and Ellips's trade. You know I I I talk to the team there pretty frequently actually when I want second opinions on things and so um a lot of good a lot of good builders over there and they've done a really good job you know scaling their chain. But yeah, this spot market is the number one metric that I watch to see sort of the value of the product that we're providing. What is our share

relatively of, you know, the the DEX spot market um among other chains and for most of last year it was sub 10%. We're now actually if you look at uh the last couple days we're at 20%. Um and but recently you know the the trend for this quarter is like 15%. Our goal for the year is to become number one by by spot trading volume. Um you know what we focus on here is and I and I think that you know a lot of our focus so there there's a trading focus and then I think within trading we have a big focus on quality assets and so part of that is just crypto majors and so a number that we look at is just uh you know what are the spreads on BTC and ETH and other

major assets on base versus everywhere else. And I can tell you we have the number one spreads right now on BTC and ETH or somebody's going to come after me and and and tell me I'm wrong. But our you know we have our own dashboards that we watch. Maybe you can somebody can educate me. Um and so we want to we want to make sure like hey even if people hate base for whatever reason if we have the best trade execution it's the best product. You have to send your your orders there or your out your your user hostile. You know the other focus on quality assets like you mentioned >> uh tokenized equities would be very cool to get something going there. We've done these uh you know tokenized uh stock indexes with with centrifuge. We have the tokenized S&P 500 and I think that

this you know the it speaks to the value of tokenization. So I think that like tokenization still matters. The hyperlquid team has uh you know uh uh operated very well but you know hyper core is not a a general programmable environment and so you cannot sort of use these per in like a programmable environment where you can send them between you know different protocols and stuff. And so I do think that uh and I understand the playbook, but like I think tokenization is harder, but I think the tokenization matters and is important because you get the whole open permissionless finance ecosystem. And so you know when we saw Centrifuge uh launch their uh tokenized S&P 500 on base, the the day one they had integrations with Aerodrome, they had uh

borrow on Morpho and they had shorting on Uler. And you know this is like the kind of stuff that we would have dreamed about like three years ago, right? of like oh it's like it's like actually here open permissionless finance S&P 500 anybody who like has the thing can like go and borrow it's extremely cool and I think it matters and so I do think that like this general programmability is important and uh yeah we'll see you know I think per their own game that's quite hard to win of course we have some some teams on on base competing there as well um but yeah that's kind of my thought on on tokenization and the numbers that we watch to to try to win here and I think it's just a matter of like we just have to have the best products we just have

to have the best execution uh and then and then the the orders will come. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's how we've been thinking about it with the tokenized side as well in the sense that a lot of us in the space had been thinking about these blockchains and these DeFi protocols, these applications for solely crypto assets, meaning you know there's a couple trillion dollars in the market cap, you know, hundred billion on chain. This is our TAM, maybe we get to 10 trillion, maybe we get to a trillion on chain, great. But it's like that entire notion has been just completely shattered over the last I mean it feels like six months but really over the last year or so where it's becoming very clear that the onchain environment that

we're building is not just for crypto assets it's for highquality speculative assets highquality non-speculative assets tons of tokenized equities T bills money market funds private credit whatever it is it's coming on chain it's going to be tradable it's going to be borrowable it's going to be lendable. It's going to be uh be able to put into an index product. These things that you're mentioning with the S&P 500 on base is exactly the example. And so I think like when you start to extrapolate that the value of base, the value of centrifuge, the value of uler, the value of aerodrome, all these applications, there's a rerating that's going to happen in investors minds when they realize that this is not just a little crypto ecosystem that these applications and products and chains are are built

for. It is actually for whatever the total flow of global finance coming on chain equates to be in the next couple years, 10 years, 20 years. And even if we just chip away with BIPS in the next couple years, it is a meaningful increase to what is currently on chain. Thus, you know, this this rerating should be significant. And so, I think a lot of people are starting to grasp this. We just keep hammering this home. It feels like every day like guys like think about what's actually happening with the tokenized equity asset space and reset your priors about what the scope of what we're trying to achieve here is.

>> Yep. Yeah. I think that's right. I you know I think it's approximate to the the sort of Chris Dixon of like it starts looking like a toy, right? And you you sort of build all these things. I think, you know, you and I were both in like the NFT fractional financing stuff for a bit and it's like you build you build the thing for the dog pitcher and it ends up working for the the subprime mortgage or whatever. Um, and then I think, you know, it's interesting. I I don't know, uh, you know, things never analogize perfectly, but there there's a part of me that also wonders, right? Like again, the the size of the skuorphic version of it versus the size of like the the the onchain native version, right? And so like the internet comes around and somebody's like, >> "Oh, I get it. Like you could you could

put the New York Times on this website." And it's like, "Yeah, but not it's much bigger than that, you know." And so I do wonder maybe you could say financial markets are a bit different and and sort of like actually the biggest thing in in crypto will will be just bringing the existing financial stuff on chain. But but I think that there's you know there's a part of crypto that's just sort of uh a generative experiment in like what happens if the marginal cost of sending money goes to like nothing and the marginal you know time goes to nothing. What sorts of like things get built? Um I would say that like prediction markets so far are uh you know the the thing we've seen there. Um obviously there's big winners in Kali um and poly market but uh Limitless on base is also doing quite well. did 200

million in in volume last month month is now the number five uh prediction market chain um prediction market uh exchange. So uh yeah a lot a lot of you know a lot of bringing the world on chain to be done and then I think a lot of still just things to be discovered uh of like what what is possible in this new world. >> Yeah man. Well, Wilson, kind of some closing thoughts here. Just what do you say to the base community, the people who use the chain who have supported you guys? I mean, they want to know about, you know, base token, what's coming next, how what the next alpha is, anything, any words of gratitude for the community?

>> Uh, I mean, of course, of course, thankful for the community and all the amazing builders we have. I would say generally my my energy is, you know, show don't tell, less less talking, more shippy. So, I'm personally just trying to sort of put my put my head down and make sure we have the best product possible. Really excited about the ASU launch and excited about some of the things we have coming next. And I think the feeling we have internally is it's just starting to snowball uh and accelerate. So, I'm I'm excited for the rest of this year. >> Love it. Wilson, have a great rest of your day. Enjoy the cabin. Looks beautiful. And uh we'll talk to you soon. All right.

>> All right. See you. Appreciate it. >> Cheers. Cheers, buddy. had to had to uh had to slip the little uh when when token in there. Not sure if that was on the PR sheet. Ladies and gentlemen, that is our show for today. Simon Taylor, Scott Shay, Wilson Kusack, Wars Over, Hyperlquid, Zcasher, Arthur Hayes episode coming out on Monday. You are watching the roll up where digital assets and finance converge live from the financial capital of the world. Thanks for rocking with us. We'll see you guys tomorrow. >> [music]