🚨LIVE: SoFi Stablecoin? HYPE ETFs Set Record. Public COO Talks AI Agents & Kyle Reidhead In the show

Transcript

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

[music] [music] We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. [music] >> I think The Rollup is one of the 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 to my library potentially multi-chain deployments. >> We are at the connect [music] day one here. I'm guessing base.

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

[music] >> [music] [music] >> JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. Bush.

>> He said it. He finally said it. So bush. >> It is bush. I'm bullish. We're bullish. >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music]

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

we're We're not already at the top. We're going to the tigers. >> Roll up is my favorite. >> From all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry come together for the roll up. [music] [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> 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. There we are. Welcome back to the rollup, ladies and gentlemen, fine scholars investors speculators gamblers builders CEOs developers and anyone else. You're watching the rollup live from the financial capital world where digital assets meets finance. Today is May 27th. We have a great show ahead. We've got the CEO of public and we have the co-founder of Melk Road, Kyle Reed Head. Hyperlid

needs to rip. Zcash is [clears throat] on life support near looks great. Rest of the market, I don't know what's going on. Rob gave us an AI privacy bull thesis yesterday that included IONET. So, yeah, that's where we're at, boys. Yeah. So, it's a secular bull ran out there, boys. Be careful. stay patient and uh don't go too far down the risk curve because that's when things get a little bit sketchy. Um there's war, there's peace, there's war again, there's peace again, there's a memorandum of understanding that no one calls legitimate and no one has ever heard of. And this is the roll up. And we've got a great show for you guys here

today. And >> you guys ever been full port at Treasury Company? Ever been fullport digital asset treasury company? If not, you gotta try it. I'm telling you, you gotta try it. Monday to Friday, locked in three minute chart. >> Weekends are all yours. >> I uh I want to pull every clip of Andy talking about treasury companies being cooked. Uh all of the ones that said this is how the bull market dies. It all ends with a big fiery explosion of the treasury companies. And now fast forward to today when we are full port all in nothing short of leverage on treasury

companies. >> Indeed per. All right guys, we had a great show today. Um we've got a an amazing tokenization tower of course powered by our friends at Plumemaster their onchain asset management and vault product that they just got their license for in Bermuda. So that was a big win for them. We've got markets and weather as always live from New York. Uh AI supercycle episode with public.com's COO. They've uh actually just launched like a use AI agents to manage your portfolio workflows. Yeah. On the same day today we're having them on that uh Robin Hood launched a MCP way to invest. So clearly these large

kind of I don't know what what would you call these things? They're like Neil banks. They're like super apps. Public is very similar to Robin Hood. Like you just buy and sell equities, whatever else. >> It's like uh hedge fund tooling. I mean, there's a lot of companies that are doing this and enabling it with AI agents and these teams have, you know, think about think about like our yield farming days in 2020, 2021. uh think about a company that might do that at scale, might take on other, you know, outside capital to go and execute some of those strategies because there are a lot of opportunities out there.

The same thing happens offchain and tradi. They're looking for best execution across different venues. You know, they've got their terminals. They've got you know their different uh you know their different engines in which they can execute whether it be options trades, carry trades, ETF products, right? going on all these different venues to access certain products, uh, get best execution. Um, and now there's tools that can help enable like, you know, a a an agentic workflow that can go from, you know, interactive brokers to Schwab to Robin Hood and look at all these, you know, because liquidity is fragmented in the equities world as well. Um, you just have all these different broker interfaces. Uh, there's there's several reasons to use, you know, one of them

versus another. Uh, so a lot of that is being becoming more efficient with agents. Public helps do that. Um, >> and also like you just don't want to trade. You just like give the agent some money and you know, >> trade trade for me. You're smarter than me. You're less emotional than me. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to hallucinate, but you know, you're going to you're going to make money hopefully, right? And then we have Milk Road's co-owner or co-founder head Kyle Reed head in the tower. He will be joining us talking markets, risk, AI, what's happening out there. As always, our topics are powered by our friends at treasure.io. Give him some love. Use [screaming] code rollup10 at treasure.io to grab your hardware device. Secure

your future. Powering all your favorite networks. Um, and yeah, I would not use a hot wallet at all. I would only use hardware wallets or uh brokerages or exchanges. So, let's get into the markets weather. >> I don't know if we have this in the news segment. I think it's just worth pointing out, you saw the co-founder of Open Zeppelin say that all DeFi is at risk. >> Yes. Yes. And then Open Zeppelin came out and said >> that he's no longer with Open Zeppelin and that, you know, uh his statements don't reflect the work that their auditing firm does is quite the they're like he was the CTO, he left 2019, he departed. His statements do not >> Yeah. So it's

>> resemble what we feel as a company. >> It's great that we have a separation and a distin distinction between the behind the personal >> behind the brains of the company that founded the company. Uh >> I think certainly a very intellectually in intelligent person uh is the one claiming this. Of course not the auditing firm would would never be the auditing firm. >> No, definitely not. All right, guys. Let's get into the markets and and weather. Before we do, let me tell you about FRAX. Building infrastructure for the future of onchain money, open stable, borderless. For more information to start using the future of digital money, visit frax.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a nice 78° overcast, zero rain, kind of warm, but pretty nice here in New York. It's probably way hotter in Florida. And yeah, feels like 81. doesn't really I mean it's it's like officially spring summer in New York right now. I mean it's been walking to the gym this morning was just elite. It's just headphones on. No one's wearing a bra. I mean it's just it's unreal out here. East Village, home of the grungy brawalless. Everything everything you could ever even like imagine in culture and characters is uh between uh Avenue A first a second a third and 10th street

all the way down to about second street. So >> that is your village rack recap brought to you by relay >> top link your favorite crosschain swaps. Let's move into markets. Before we do, let me tell you about dinari, our tokenized equities partner, [screaming] building infrastructure for tokenized US equities, bringing real world stocks on chain. Explore onchain access to public markets atari.com. Rob, what's going on out there, man? I've got my eyes on per hype, Zcash, and Near. Just need Bitcoin not to die. >> That's exactly what's going on out there. I also have my eyes on Near. Uh looks good. Holding that 250 level. Uh, Ethereum is struggling to hold the 2K

level. Bitcoin at 75. Uh, per hype looking good around 60 bucks. Um, man, I feel like, look, there's not a whole lot to go on about today. Not so much has changed from today to yesterday. It feels like we're just really clinging on to these levels. Uh, we had quite a bit of pop. Everything was hot. privacy uh near hyperlquid and Zcash things have retreated a little bit just a little bit of air taken out of the markets but if we're looking at catalyst we're gonna get some Kevin Worsh clarity it seems as if we're going to get some more clarity on the war these things just continue to go back and forth but it feels like it feels

like there's just there we're just inching our way closer even though we're still pointing fingers uh between America and Iran and then obviously equities just continue to charge on >> so I Equities are holding up. Bitcoin is holding up. If they can continue to do that, I think we're going to continue to see the privacy trade rally. >> Yeah, oil's kind of cooling down. Uh rates and bonds are cooling down. Bitcoin's just under 75K. ETH just Yeah, hanging on to that 2K level. Um AI trade is obviously keeping risk alive. Oil and rates are kind of deciding how much oxygen is in the tank for these uh for this 100 foot dive. Are we doing 120 foot dive? We pushing it to 130 where you need some extra scuba

training. Are we going to go full adrenaline junky for 150 foot dive? It's kind of like it's kind of like yeah oil and rates are dictating how deep you want to dive. And uh I don't know. I'm not an experienced diver. Uh you know I' maybe I maybe want to try it 30 feet to start 30 35 45 50. Uh but it seems like the market's sitting right right at about a 100 foot dive right now. If you want to keep going, you're going to need those oil prices to come down, rates to come down. >> At some point, you need to go back above the surface for air.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And oxygen doesn't really help that much when you're deeper than 100 ft. You need a mix of like nitrogen and other uh gaseous chemicals to provide a more uh saturated uh experience for your brain because your brain will you will lose your mind under 100 ft underwater. you'll literally start to lose your mind. >> Yeah. So, nitrogen, [snorts] oxygen, all of these things are be pumped through the street of Hormuse. Uh if we see that there's flows continuing to open up, then we're going to we're going to get the air quality that we need to continue continue this dive.

>> Yeah. Our market prices are powered by our friends at Zama. Shout out to Zama.org board for their private confidential transfers, tokens, and more coming out, especially next month in June. They have a big launch. Uh it's very clear that that the privacy era of crypto is here. It's happening. Let's move on from the markets. Like you said, Rob, think there's not a whole lot to go over here other than kind of good things are probably just consolidating and get another leg up and the rest probably just continues doing what it's doing. Let's move on into the news. Before we do, let me tell you about Near, our premier AI partner. The blockchain powered the blockchain meant for AI agents powering autonomous AI activity.

Visit near.org to learn more. Rob, is DeFi dead? What's trying to tell us here? Value locked by category calling DeFi is dead. It looks very similar to where things were just a little while ago. lending, liquid staking, RWA, DEX's, restaking, and 56 other categories. That's the part that confuses me. >> We're in a decline. If we scroll down a little bit, we can see the time frame on this chart. Uh we can also get a sense of where is going with this, but we're still 200 million.

>> The peak was um October last year. >> That's right. That's right. And so since 1010, it's just been it's been a cataclysmic decline in onchain activity across all these sectors. But like I think the point that we're trying to make here is like and you know specifically puts the arrow when there's a little bit of an uptick that like DeFi is dead, but we're sitting at $150 billion total value locked. Um, we're obviously seeing new primitives, new ideas come out and you know there's a flash crash and this massive leveraged wipeout in October and you know there's this ongoing

skepticism that in this industry we consistently call a category dead when there is a draw down right before they evolve right before they become the protocol landscape and foundation for all of the tokenized assets in the world. We call protocols dead right before the stable coin growth is going to literally hockey stick to unparalleled levels. We call DeFi dead right before the amount of tokenized equities, T- bills, stocks, money markets, commodities, and everything on chain explodes. And so I think like the idea here is we're like mocking people calling DeFi dead because we're getting a little bit of AI exploits when in reality if you can think second third

order what happens now with AI kind of ruining a lot of DeFi all it means is that in the future we will be building protocols and software that are far more resistant to AI because AI will help actually develop that software. So to say that DeFi is dead because of exploits is to say that software is dead because AI is eating software and you can't even build software anymore because AI is just going to break it down or or you know make it obsolete. So look, more institutional forms of onchain finance are coming. They're happening. DeFi is not dead. I think it's easy to kind of be in this mindset.

But again, like one thing that we've been pushing on this show is you need to remove yourself from this idea that the crypto asset landscape is just being built for the $160 billion of crypto assets and $3 trillion of total market cap. No, we're literally building this for the multiple hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets that are coming on chain. DeFi is not dead. Long live DeFi. I'm with Hib here. Don't let the haters get to you. We're in a good spot. Um, not a whole lot more to add to that rant. I think it was a good one. The only thing that I'll point out is that if you look at all the categories here, only one of them is growing since 1010.

>> And what's that? >> Well, it's the light blue. >> It's the RWA. >> It is the RWA. >> Lending has gone down. Liquid staking has gone down. Restaking has gone down. Yeah, reststaking has gone down. Dexes have gone down a bit. Um >> but yeah category that has I mean it looks like it's almost doubled since 10. >> It does. >> Uh and then the 56 other categories, right? All of those have also just kind of stayed the same. RWA uh uh DeFi is what we're continuing to see tokenized assets. We call this the area of institutional yield farming. We know that these assets are becoming tokenized. Black Rockck is talking about it. New York Stock Exchange is talking

about it. Right. the equities market is holding up and in tandem they're building out their their technology and they're tokenizing these assets once they come on chain we know that they need places to go. I'm very curious as to what like RWA Defi is going to look like. I think there is more and more capital efficiency, 247 market settlement, 247 access, greater access to these markets that we're going to see as a result of tokenization. I think once we start looping and staking and you know taking out leverage and rehypothecating things could get very funky. But

>> there is benefits to fractionalizing shares, creating some different strategies. Ultimately, there's going to be new ways to express certain types of exposure to certain asset classes that has never been done before. And I think it's we're going to take a lot of shots on goal and a lot of those shots are going to miss. But there's going to be a couple new primitives that are applied to highquality assets, speculative assets like equities and non-speculative, you know, cash bearing, interestbearing assets. And we're going to see some of these primitives take off. And I think that is going to be the catalyst for the next wave of DeFi.

>> Love it. Love it. Let's keep it rolling into our friend at Matt at Bitwise. Shout out to Bitwise, man. Shout out to Bitwise and 21 Shares for absolutely just launching the hype ETFs right when the boys needed it the most, giving us a push over that $50 resistance level. Having done it now a few times, I can say discussing Hyperlid with financial advisors is magic. The fact that 99% of fees goes to buying back tokens make the makes the conversation so easy. Um, I mean, Matt, this is the revenue meta in its finest. Go to a financial advisor. I mean, look, I was talking to David Sheamus here in the tower maybe a month and a half, two months ago, and he was

like, "Look, this thing has a billion dollars or more of free cash flows, and it's going back to buy the tokens." Like, when I talk to institutional investors, all I have to say is that, and that piques their interest enough to double click and to look into it. And you know, I I I know Matt's been doing a good job of going out and pitching all the different ETFs that they have, but I guarantee you that Bitwise is going to start to readjust their focus on their institutional pitches from, let's say, Bitcoin and Ethereum and the traditional L1s to, hey, what's working for our business? Like just think about the like the incentives, right? Bitwise wants more AUM. So they need to make a convincing case to allocators, to

financial adviserss, to pensions, to institutional investors that they should buy their products. And what are they going to do other than pitch their best product? And what is their best product? Their best product is literally the best token in the entire crypto market that has the highest potential upside that has performed the best this entire year. I mean, it's like it's like all the incentives are aligned for Matt to go out there and sell this ETF, earn their, you know, 1 2% fee and get a ton of allocators interested in hyperl because when they ask about all the other ETF products, they ask about the fundamentals, they ask about the revenue and the traction, the answer is just not

even going to be similar. It's not even going to be close to the same ballpark. So like these ETFs unlocked a in the same way that the Ethereum Foundation is like looking for Tom Lee and some of these other DATs to like go be their institutional BD, these Hyperlid ETFs just unlocked this next wave of incentive aligned Wall Street salesmen. Like it's just it's exactly what we needed to get this thing to allocators and to make this pitch kind of go global. And so >> yeah, >> you know, it's just it's easy.

>> Good rant. Um, you know, we talk a lot and especially we we did talk a lot during our more, you know, uh, hunkered down technical design architecture days where you and I were in the trenches learning about a lot of these things. And it was a joke. It It was truly like an inside joke to say that the token is the product, but like to Matt and Matt's customers, the token is the product. You know, we and we heard from uh we heard yesterday from Kinetic, you know, the Hyperlquid team is not paying for a thing. Not for marketing, not for market makers, not for listings, not for ETFs.

They're not paying for a thing. So Matt took it upon himself and upon him upon himself and on behalf of Bitwise to go out find the asset that is going to help his customers, which are investors in his ETFs. And Hyperlid helps him accomplish that. Hyperlid is one of the best token products on the market right now today. Does it take anything more for the Hyperlid team to pay or do in order for companies that are incentivized to bring good products, meaning good tokens to the outside world, find more capital and invest into those products >> and the incentives are just aligned.

It's beautiful. So, >> actually on this note, uh let's keep it moving into our next topic which is actually quite similar. Before we do, let me tell you about in Infinifi, our premier DeFi partner. Building DeFi infrastructure for simpler access to onchain yield, liquidity, and capital allocation, higher yields, no leverage. Explore more efficient onchain finance at infinifi.xyz. So, Rob, I mean, look, look at this. Spot ETFs have absorbed 1.04% of hype's market cap in their first 10 trading days. Strongest debut of any spot crypto ETF to date.

>> Yeah. Yeah. almost double Bitcoin over double ETH triple on Salana. Yeah, >> obviously this is relative to their market cap, right? So the nominal volume of ETF volume via Bitcoin was probably higher, but relative to Bitcoin's volume, it was, you know, it was proportionately lower. So that means that there's quite a bit of flows happening for Hyperlid via these ETFs. And I think again this is true to the thing because you can't get exposure everywhere. people on, you know, hype was just listed on Coinbase. I don't think it's still not listed on Binance spot. So, people are looking for access to the Hyperlid spot asset or just Hyperlquid ecosystem in general and

they're finding it through these ETFs. And so, you can see, you know, via Bitcoin ETH soul hype. Um, this is uh 10 days after launch, Hyperlid has overtaken this somewhere between the fifth and the seventh day. This thing exploded. uh once people really started to see that it moved, I think the market was probably somewhat correlated for this, but we saw how important the ETF launch was with the Bitcoin and the ETH ecosystem. To say that Hyperliquid's ETFs are a greater proportional share of its market cap is an even bigger deal.

And so you can just think out as to what the repercussions, the positive consequences at play here. And I think this is going to be extremely positive for the ecosystem. Look, this is why we've seen it outperform >> is >> this is just an indication of what flows have already begun and what I think we are insane. >> Yeah. >> Like there's the assistance fund buybacks, there's uh now the ETFs, there's um you know, there's the DA companies there. It's just like it's nuts. It's nuts right now. The flow and it's just like somebody's absorbing these flows right now at 60 and selling which makes sense. There's been some pretty big unstake unstaking. Um, and yeah, I mean, we'll see how long the market can absorb

these flows. I don't think they're going to be able to absorb them for for that long. So, my take is that this this thing is not going to hang around the $60 range for for much longer. So, let's keep it rolling. Um, one of our new kind of entrance into the fintechy uh, web 3, if you will, space, neo finance space is SoFi, Rob. SoFi, S Ofi D. The first stable coin issued by a US national bank. Feels really a big and important redeemable one to one for cash or cash equivalents rolling out now.

It's built for how money moves today. Fast, flexible, 247. Uh, feels important. uh built for public blockchains, ETH, Soul. Uh it's not FDIC insured. It is not bank guaranteed. I don't know if it's banks bankruptcy remote. Um but it is one 101 and it's the first ever first ever national bank. >> You know, I uh typically you don't read the small print, right? you know, when you're you don't read the terms and conditions, some of these things, but I I think it's important just because a lot of these things are actually uh you know, the details of these technical designs reveal themselves in the small print. And so I think it's worth just kind of picking out some of the highlights here. You know, it says SoFiD

uh the SoFi dollar is a payment stable coin. That in and of itself is relevant. this the fact that it calls itself a payment stable coin means there's no interest and that means that it is uh it falls within the genius compliant uh structure that we've already seen lay out. These things might adapt or evolve uh with the Clarity Act but for now it's a payment stable coin meaning no interest uh it's issued by SoFi Bank which is regulated by the OC. We've seen the OC issue more and more charters to crypto companies >> and so we know that there's going to be more of these stable coins coming out because the OC has issued charters to crypto companies. Uh SoFi dollar is designed to maintain a stable value relative to the US dollar. Uh it's designed that way. It may not, but it's

not a deposit. So dollar is not a deposit. It is not insured by the FDIC or the SIPC. It is not bank guaranteed. It is not legal tender and it may lose value. All right. So, SoFi is covering their ass. There's obviously tons of tons of things there that [snorts] say, you know, there's there's there's plenty of back stops and whatnot. Uh, it also goes on to say blockchain transactions are generally irreversible and may be subject to delays, disruptions, permanent loss. Uh, terms and conditions may apply here. So, I think there's tons of details. Uh, SoFi is taking the very very conservative approach, but the industry is working on making these things a lot more uh, integrated into the banking system. uh were working on

things like tokenized deposits, right, which would make them FDIC insured and it would mean that they are legal tender and that they could become composable with normal bank deposits, meaning that they could get lent out, they could be transferred to other banks. There's all kinds of things with tokenized deposits that can be done. Uh and then there's payment stable coins as well. So, we're kind of working out the nuances here. I think this is the right approach now because regulation is still evolving. So I taking a very conservative approach but I'm looking forward to how these things become more and more integrated uh into the existing banking system.

>> Agreed. Agreed. Uh we got another thing from Poly Market that I'm going to leave to you. I'm going to get our first guest here Stephen in the tower set up. Before we do, let me tell you about LeFi, the infrastructure for crosschain swaps, bridging routing across the onchain economy with their Lei intense product launch. To explore smoother crosschain execution, visit leap.fi. Yeah. Um, this one surprises me a little bit because Poly Market is the one that I was hoping uh and somewhat expecting to not bend the knee uh to the regulatory uh powers that be here in the US. Uh obviously insider trading is a big big important problem for uh what

we're facing right now in the prediction market landscape. Poly market wants traders to ID themselves as it faces sanctions and legal risks. Uh I expected you know and I think Khi already does do this. The fact that Poly Market was working on a US launch it's also got Donald Trump Jr. as a board member and an adviser. I was hoping that it was going to uh stay out of this muddy regulatory water, but honestly, if it's coming into the US and it's going to serve US customers with its pol with its prediction markets, the CFTC is going to want to regulate them. KYC is one of the things that is going to apply.

I want to get to a point where we have we don't have KYC, we get some permissionless finance. I'd also like uh if you know there's certain markets that fall within these regulations that you know we apply these KYC laws regulations directly to those markets. I can see how um you know there might be uh potential scrutiny around you know markets that fall within a certain class whether it be political markets or economic markets. Maybe we KYC those sectors but we treat those differently than say sports gambling right sports gaming comes with its own regulations. we should treat them as such uh and we should treat economic political markets as a different market class with a different market structure and they

should be regulated differently. So the fact that poly market is doing this I think that if we do have more regulated markets it does open the way and the possibility for a less regulated more permissionless prediction market platform to come about. I think there is room in the market. I think the market wants that but maybe that's not great. Maybe we end up just seeing insider trading flow over to that platform. Um, I'm a big fan of permissionless finance, but I think there is a a balance to strike between a regulated KYCed version for certain market classes, market segments and a permissionless uh unregulated uh market platform as well.

Ultimately, we want fair market access. We want everyone in the world to be able to access these markets. And part of the part of the the value here is the wisdom of the crowd. You have multiple market participants contributing to one market. And if we get a place where you know these things are KYCed, we might have less market participation which ultimately could mean that we get less truth and accuracy in the odds of these predictions. So that's my two cents. It's a very very tricky balance to strike, but I'm confident that the size and scale of these market platforms will give us what we need. Uh, and also the willingness of regulators to participate and and have these conversations. I think this is ultimately what we get to when it comes

to the best capital efficient market structure possible for prediction markets. Big fan of Poly Market. Guys, we're going to take a quick quick break. Uh Andy is getting our first guest, our AI super cycle guest of public.com ready in the tokenization tower. I'm going to kick it over to them right after this break. Guys, don't go anywhere. Great conversation coming up right after this. [music] [music] [music] >> [music]

[music] >> money power [music] big big I'm [music] big [music] money. [music] We get deep. We get deep know. We get deep [music] know. 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, you know. We get [music] [music] attend the Davos of Web 3. [music] Welcome back to AI Supercycle, our premier AI show airing every single week presented by Near. We cover the ins and outs of decentralized AI, privacy, and

the future of this massive technology. Near is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps. You can check out Near's latest AI product at near.ai. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Going 70.

>> All righty guys, welcome back to AI Supercycle. Episode number 35 powered by our friends at Near with their Near AI product suite agent marketplace and more. I've got Steven Sykes, the COO of Public.com. He leads brokerage operations crypto institutional expansion alternatives customer support, legal compliance, risk, a former US Army veteran, cavalry officer, engagement manager at McKenzie, and more. Guys got it all. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. Yeah, for sure. Looking forward to >> Good good view. Good day in the city.

Totally, totally. Great, great book over my shoulder. >> Yeah, exactly. Exactly, man. Intelligent investor. Well, I mean, where else to start other than this kind of convergence between financial markets and agentic finance, right? I mean, more than ever are we seeing this transition of portfolio management, workflows, operations, decision making happen from a LLM first kind of like mindset from from humans, right? even so much so putting their own capital in and wanting higher levels of intelligence to be managing their capital, managing their emotions, etc. Maybe just let's just start high level with your kind of current view on the state of this agentic investing world from from what you're doing up at at public and kind of

uh we'll start there. >> Yeah. So, I think like helpful to put where we as public are in in context overall. I think it'll kind of help explain like how we're thinking about the world. So I think we see ourselves and we've branded ourselves as sort of the platform for serious investors and serious traders. That's led us on a journey to build out sort of the best uh platform for asset class exposure, right? So serious investors and traders need access to equities, fixed income, corporate bonds, treasuries, crypto, options and you know you can keep going and we're going to keep going into you know futures, prediction markets and so on. Like we first viewed our job as like make sure we have the platform that can do everything that serious investors and traders want. The second thing we found

serving that customer base is like they need the best tools and that's like data content uh and increasingly it's AI tools and so we've been on a journey to serve this serious investor and trader with AI tools literally going back to summer 2022 even before you know when it was just uh GPT3 via API to help support our customer support team all the way through chat GPT launching later that year in 2022 to our first product uh which was uh you know still is in the app. It's called Alpha. That's our AI research assistant, which made a ton of sense, right? I think in 2023, we were looking at a world where there's never been better content, information, market data for retail investors. There's never been more of it, but waiting through what was most relevant from a research

perspective was really hard for people that weren't professionals and weren't doing it full-time. And so, Alpha was great. It helped sort of filter out filter the universe for what's interesting, what they should know. We built a product called Why is It Moving? So we found like most people like what do they show up to public to do? They look at their portfolio what's up what's down. When things are up or down by more than sort of the market they want to know why AI is phenomenal at figure even back to 2023 and 2024 AI was phenomenal at figuring it out. But that was like the first sort of research summarization phase. Uh then what we saw people using it for and started to build was like how do I build how do I use this sort of filter on the world of information to build better portfolios. So, how do I

take a theme or a co, you know, a custom point of view, a theme, a strategy, and build that into my own sort of direct index, my own custom index. And so, we built generated assets uh in 2025, release that to help people build a broad portfolio. Awesome way if you have a point of view and you just want, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 individual names in a long-term portfolio, professionally managed, you know, by our system. Awesome. Awesome product. But like, you know, that was 2025. Yeah. Now, we're in 2026. What did we see at the tail end of 2026 or 2025 was the emergence of this agent, right? We saw we saw Claude Opus 4.5 make a huge jump in terms of what it could do from a you know logic software development and just agentic process uh technology and that jump led us to like

you know just start exploring like what can we do with it like I think you know all of us in the on you know sort of the senior team at public had open claw and Mac minis on our desks within you know a few days of that catching fire and we've been playing with it really since sort of you know again late last year and the very first thing we started working on was all right now we've got research we've got portfolio management what's the third level which is like basically full automation on top of your brokerage account using agents to be able to execute trades again across the full platform that we have money movements trades alerts whatever you want um our sort of agentic brokerage can do it right now uh we've rolled it out to I don't know somewhere between 10 and

20,000 uh of our customers off the wait list we have tens of thousands maybe almost 100 thousand more people still waiting on the wait list to get off, but uh we're rolling off, you know, 5 10,000 a week at this point, just bringing people into the product. And you know, it's awesome. It takes the best of sort of the agentic world with all of the sort of safety, security, and control of what you expect from public um within sort of, you know, our UI. Now, you asked a question like what is my point of view overall, right? I had to tell that story, I think, to to get everyone in the audience up to where we are. But I think we're in the middle of like a really important platform shift, right?

I think our industry of investing has been through many of these, right? Like the first plat, you know, like the most, you know, call going back to like the time we might remember like the first platform shift was from like showing up at a broker to calling your broker. Then it went from like calling your broker to like doing it online on a web view. Then it went from like web to mobile. Now it's going from mobile to AI. And like sure, dude, we still have people calling in trades at brokers. So it's not like the prior versions are going to disappear, >> but we know that this AI, you know, use case, this AI UI, this AI UX for investing is the next platform shift and we're really excited about it. Well, I mean, I described our agentic brokerage, but we've made two other big bets which

I think will, you know, be really important and like the first is our sort of direct to consumer API. So we have basically our entire brokerage stack, our entire investing stack available via API. You can sign up for public and you know deposit money, move your account over and grab your API keys in three, four, five minutes. You can take those API keys, you can give them to open claw, you can do what you want. Great. So like you can roll your own agent, use your own API keys and execute sort of whatever you need to against your public account. It's all there. The second thing is like you know the middle version between you know you roll your own with our API keys or you use the public UI with our own agent inside the public app. The middle version is like,

okay, you want to use claude, you want to use open AI, and you want to use an MC or perplexity, and you want to use an MCP behind it, right? Um, we have that as well, right? So, we've done sort of all three of these bets because the truth is we see the platform shift, but we don't really know where user behaviors are going to go. Are more people going to want direct at the metal API key access, roll their own agent, third party open source agents? I don't know. More people going to want to use their own sort of clawed UI, clawed co-work, and an MCP behind it? I don't know. or people going to want to use the public uh you know UI and experience that we've built to help you know work with agents and the truth is like it's probably going to be a bit of all three

and right now we've got all three built and they're all humming and they're all great businesses for us and you know we're excited to drive adoption across the board. Yeah, I think like this entire shift that you described from phones to digital like the next big shift is kind of like this like prompt shift totally like this like kind of like and also the big breakthrough with openclaw was that previous kind of iterations of LMS or models were very like um you had to prompt them extremely well to get the result and they were they were far they were far less prescriptive than openclaw was. open call came to you and was like prescribing the solution to whatever you were saying and suggesting an action and like then doing the action >> versus like kind of like having this

back and forth to get to your end state. It was like no no here's your end state. Do you want to do you want me to you know take you there? And so when it comes to investing that like promptless or that prescriptive unlock of openclaw or of this you know next era of intelligence is going to allow such a breadth of of prompts or ideas to go in and for the feedback to come back and to change the entire scope of thinking for any given investor. >> Totally. And I mean I think it was that that change was like you know the ability for these models to sort of iterate inside themselves right asking is this the right thing and like be able to iterate on their own prompts and make sure they're really identifying your goal and be able to agentically achieve sort of the goal or intent or strategy

that you wanted and like it's still not perfect right we all sort of even with like open clock 4.7 no we're still iterating as humans on top of it but it's way you know we know we're sort of interacting with a real intelligence again it's not the same as a human it's not there yet but I think this is the worst it's ever going to be, >> right? >> And it's kind of wild to look at it. And so I think, you know, >> and the most expensive is ever going to be as well for this level of intelligence. >> Totally. I totally agree with that. Also insane. >> Maybe. I mean, again, I'm like, yes, it is. >> You don't agree? >> I think what's going to h I mean, again, I think we will see the state-of-the-art intelligence. My guess is it actually

probably gets more expensive than the state-of-the-art intelligence today. Really? >> Again, I just think we have more people chasing more finite commu compute. Like >> I don't know. We're still in like early adopter days of this stuff, right? I still think we've got a lot of especially when you get into the agentic world. Um, you know, our our, you know, dads, moms, grandmas aren't really doing the things probably that you and I are. And like, you know, we haven't really crossed that chasm to like mass adoption yet. And when we do, again, it takes I don't know if it's 6 months, 18 months, 24 months for really that to happen. you know the agentic the volume of demand for intelligence is going to grow beyond

even what our comput I mean like I don't think our compute >> demands are con you know are constrained right now right we see claude with you know latency issues and and trying to trying to talk us into doing simpler queries all the time like you know I don't know if that what that's related to but in general it's like >> you know I I don't know my guess is the state-of-the-art is actually going to get more expensive I think you're right for the current level of intelligence that will probably get cheaper over time. Yeah, >> but there will be like this like god tier like if you want to access the best of the best. >> Yeah, it's going to get even more expensive, my guess, >> right? >> Um because again the use cases are that valuable. I think that's again I'm like

you know speculating here but that's that's sort of my guess. >> Yeah. So so then let's kind of think think about this agentic workflow product suite that you've laid out right and think about it from like a practical use case. I've got an open claw. I use all different types of of LLMs. Um, you know, I would say like the like the consumer demand is I think there's a way to make better investment decisions based on a intelligence that is 24/7 that does not have human emotions, human biases. Totally. And I want to tap into that. And so like how how how would you envision somebody going from like not using AI in their financial investing kind of career to like just starting to

like dabble a bit like what does that process actually look like? Yeah. I mean I think there like I don't know we'll take it in two parts. I think there are two things. one um like the real hardcore algorithmic trading strategies, strategies that are only accessible by software, right? Which means you have to write your own software to be able to actually execute that strategy profitably or with the latency required etc. Um that's like one end of the spectrum by the way that is now unlocked >> for a universe of people that it was not. But I think where you're going is actually the other side of the spectrum which is regular people, right? I think what we've found is we really do have the smartest, most sophisticated, most serious retail investor uh population

we've ever had. Right? Again, I said earlier like we've never had better access to like content, analysis, data, educational materials for the markets for retail investors. We've never had it better. Um and as a result, we have entire generations of investors who like really know this stuff now. They again not being professionals understand it at the level of a strategy or an intent. Now how you execute on that strategy and that intent like we sometimes see it get a little suboptimal or off the rails. Right.

>> Of course. >> And like I think it's like I don't know take the take one of uh my um favorite ones to talk about like a very classic covered call strategy. >> Okay. >> Right. um you know you own a big position in Nvidia or Micron because you're way smarter than I am and you bought that stuff two three years ago as you I again we have a lot I mean we have a lot of members who have made a lot of money but now they're sitting on these huge positions um and they're willing to like you know both like they want to take some income they also want to hedge a little bit of risk like a covered call strategy can be helpful in those in those veins and they know they want to execute a covered call strategy but that's about where it goes I want to

generate some I don't actually know should I execute uh you know how far into the future, how many days to expiry >> or like you just know you want to take some risk off or that you're feeling a little uneasy and you just kind of want to do something about it. >> And I think we have a lot of people that really understand that those are things you can use options for, right? >> But the specific implementation of that really matters a lot and there's optimal suboptimal, there are different strikes, yeah, >> in the option chain where there are tighter spreads aka like lower costs to enter. there's, you know, different levels of volatility depending on where you're at in the days to expiry and like, you know, sitting down with public surgent brokerage and having that conversation. Here's my intent. You know, what how should I think about

this? Where on the options chain should I be looking? And then like you can actually do that sort of education about the strategy directly back and forth with a really smart, you know, trading AI. You can then filter and screen sort of the options chain for the stuff that you now think is the right decision. And then you can take the third step which is you can implement it and you can automate it and you can you know not worry about every Friday do I need to be on my phone or my laptop at 10:30 I think that's the optimal time to roll my strategy. No >> don't worry about it like write it up. Our basically the way our agent works is it takes your intent. It takes your strategy and then it commits it to a deterministic workflow. It just builds a stepby-step trading strategy or

step-by-step you know transaction stream. if this then that. All fully deterministic. No AI decisions happening once you hit the authorize or submit button. And there you go. And you're off and running. And so like you've got the security of like knowing what you just said you want to happen is what's going to happen. You don't have to worry about anything downstream of that. And you get the the convenience of it being fully automated. So like you know that's sort of like the use case that we again a good example of a use case we've seen. Yeah. um is just again people that are really smart, serious, understand these strategies, and might even have an idea how to implement it, but aren't totally sure if they're in the optimal place.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, that goes for a lot of people who have an idea of what they would like to get out of the market and, you know, Yeah. As you said, they don't want to do this complex strategy or execute this intense kind of research to figure it out. You know, I'm curious when it comes to this workflow. Today, Robin Hood announced this kind of MCP uh workflow as well. Yesterday, I saw like a more crypto uh cryptonative company called Liquid. They also announced like an LLM front end basically to trade per hyperlid. Um >> what is like obviously this trend is happening, but like let's get to the bottom of kind of like what's actually happening these agent workflows using MCP like what does that even mean? and

and how is that going to change my interaction with like public's AI, Robin Hood AI, like like what does that even look like? >> Yeah. So, I mean I think the the what we're seeing and again we're seeing this very similar from the liquid and the Robin Hood teams today. Um we're seeing the model where you can go into Claude, you can add a custom connector is what they call it, right? which is a custom MCP that somebody else has built that gives your instance of Claude in the UI that you're used to talking to access to sort of the APIs or some subset of the APIs of those providers, right? Um, you know, I think I haven't really gone deep on the Robin Hood one yet. I'm not actually sure if it was working. I was I saw some 404 reports uh on on X as I was

coming over just trying to see what the latest state was. Um, but what we've heard from their announcement was it's equities only and you have to have a separate account just for this thing, right? So it's not like able to help you with your current positions. You're not actually, you know, really using it to ask about your current uh account. You're not able to do transactions. There's no options. There's no crypto. So it's a more limited implementation. Now again I said earlier we at public believe in sort of this model custom connectors MCPs on sort of you know your favorite LLM interface and we've done the same thing but you know the difference is we've built and allowed the sort of full power of of the public platform all the asset classes all the transactions you know with great documentation that allows the LLM

directly to sort of work within our API stack to do what you want again it can interact with your individual account uh and you can you know sort of do similar transactions. Again, it's it's what I said, there's a platform shift coming. I don't know, you know, we think we're going to see a bunch of uh investors that want to use the public experience where it's more controlled and trusted. Um, you know, we also think we're going to see a lot of investors that want to roll their own via our API. We also think there's a middle way where people are really comfortable again using Claude and using the the sort of uh UI that they have there and just pulling in sort of an MCP or custom connector in order to do that.

>> Yeah. Okay. So I have openclaw running and I don't have a public.com account. I set up we should do that right now. I set up a public.com account and let's say I put in a grant and then I can essentially talk to the public.com API through my open claw >> and dictate the movement of my funds or give permission of the investment of my funds based on a given like whether it's risk tolerance, strategy, asset class, whatever that you know there's a maybe some questionnaire that happens effectively >> and and I can control all of that from my open claw.

>> Yeah, totally. And so like there a couple ways you can do it, right? There is an existing sort of claw hub openclaw skill that we've built that allows open claw specifically to deal with it. But if you have again really any third party harness that you want to use um grab the API key, grab the docs the model and they're smart enough now that they can do it and like honestly tell it to build its own skill. Hey this is what I want you to focus on. Again, I think where we are now in the agentic world, it's all about giving it the right primitives, which is, you know, a fully featured API and then full documentation for it to understand sort of what what uh what it does.

>> Um, and any of sort of the harnesses that are out there are going to do quick work. Um, and again, the API by design, it's we call a first-party API. You have it. You have complete control of your account, your API keys. It can see sort of your entire all of the accounts within your own user. Um and you know it can basically do any transaction that you can do via clicking buttons in >> multi-asset strategy it doesn't really matter it can do equities commodities crypto bonds >> and it's all it's all like KYC and custodial so it's just kind of like it's not the same as actually like so that seems easy to like knock down right because it's like you guys have a backend you guys are able to kind of like have this AI manage this backend

it's like credits and debits and it's kind of like this entire kind of system of data. And then if you actually do that though on chain like on the blockchain where the agents are actually moving assets and buying and selling on a protocol or buying and selling on chain sending there's a whole another kind of like world of of like requirements there totally which is going to be like a I think a lot more difficult to figure out but also probably a lot more longer term fruitful for payments for microp payments for transactions etc 24/7 uh optionality I'm curious Like do you guys see any transition to bringing in more like onchain offerings for public? Like just give us like your blunt view actually

hold on. So give us like public's blunt view of crypto. It's in the gutter right now. Its perspective is its perception is terrible. Like like what is public's view on crypto? >> Um you know I listen like I said we exist as an investing platform. Right. >> Right. Um you know you don't have a view. You have to be you have to love all your children. >> No that's I mean that's right. Like again, we see crypto as an asset class first and foremost, not really like a um >> you know, not a method of payment, >> right? Not a currency. We see it as an asset that people want to buy and have exposure to as an asset class. Um so all of our sort of decisions around crypto flow from there. Um you know, we've invested in uh you know, making it really easy, making it really secure,

making sure we have all the order types that you might want, integrating it with all of our awesome AI tools, um building tax advantaged crypto accounts, right? So, we have a crypto IRA. Basically, you can own spot crypto of I think we're up to like in, you know, 70s something tokens within your IRA, right? Great way to buy and hold any sort of spot crypto. And, you know, we're one of the few platforms that can do that and probably the only one that can do that in sort of the broad-based platform uh that we have today. >> And so, we've invested in that as you know, viewing it as an asset class. Now I do think we see over time as you get to more maturity in true DeFi opportunities where hey there might be in individual opportunities that haven't crossed into the more centralized uh

world you know we've dabbled in those right I remember a few years ago we were like you know we did some experimentation in NFTts you know we had a platform where um we actually offered sort of securitized interests in NFTts if you wanted them now that world came and went pretty quickly but we're always staying ahead of like where are there interesting asset classes or interesting emerging asset classes from the crypto rails that we think we could make use of. Again, thinking about things like um you know tokenized securities be those public companies uh that are tokenizing their own equity or you know third parties tokenizing private company equity like you know we have sort of a dim view on that second one but we'll we'll follow where the sort of uh capital markets infrastructure goes. Um

but again always focused on it as an asset class first and foremost. >> Yeah. Yeah. Know it's just like like the world of using AI to kind of uh manage your portfolio is like is like one thing and then the world of using AI to like manage an onchain environment of like payments and transfers and and uh settling uh crossber things or doing trades 247. It's like kind of like a whole new uh endeavor as well when it comes to actually like the portfolio management side. Um what what is the most soughtafter kind of uh or like what's what's been the most successful soughtafter use case for AI? Is is it just as simple as this kind of strategy that we talked

about? Oh, I want to, you know, execute this kind of more complicated strategy. Um like what are some of the the highest uh success rates or what are some of the most uh used AI strategies? Yeah. So I think there like you know um two categories of things that we're seeing most prevalently. The first is what you said. It's hey I have a strategy. I have an automated trading strategy. I either am executing and it takes me a lot of time and I find it very annoying and I can just automate it or hey I have one I would like to do but it's so annoying I wouldn't want to do it on my [laughter] own. So like we do see again a lot of it is that sort of automated trading and it's things that are like regular you know sort of regular always on trading

strategies. It's buying the dip. It's buying at a certain level, selling at a different level, RSI based, you know, trigger based, indicator-based. Uh it's options strategies where there's a defined time horizon and you need to be able to roll those and manage those on an ongoing basis. Like I think that's a really big one. I think the other thing I'm seeing a lot of is just um using an agent to to to find this sort of infinite customization of like a feature that already exists, right? So like a um stop-loss or take profit, right? Um you know you can any trigger any set of rules that you could imagine you could implement. Now dividend reinvestment is

another one that um we're seeing a lot which is like hey if I get uh my Apple dividend I would really like to reinvest those proceeds in Google. And like you might be like well why would you do that? That doesn't make any sense, but like people want to do it. I don't know. Like, you know, infinite. Yeah. Infinite. Totally. And it's like >> like whatever your heart desires. >> So, it's basically like all of these. The way I think about it is like somebody that's been building this business over many years, >> you know, >> prior to the agentic world, any individual thing we wanted our customers to be able to do, Yeah.

>> we had to have a product manager, a product designer, and a bunch of software developers build it. >> And it took a while. >> Totally. you want to build like a um you know you we wanted to build one of my favorite order types and this is this is one that I always wanted but I was like a man on an island screaming at our product team was like um you know what what you call like a walk a walk the bid order a walk order right so I want to buy something and it's got a wide bid offer spread um I want to move up my limit price one penny every 10 seconds every 15 seconds every minute whatever uh until I get executed right >> I want to just like walk it on in until till I get the price that I want. Um,

and like you know we again I'm one guy we didn't get a lot of demand for it and it's not a big request but the thing I always wanted and so like now that's like the easy like you tell the agent that's what I want to do you know this is the option I want you know walk the bid walk the bid in in five set you know in five increments every 15 seconds you know for the next 20 minutes y boom done >> boom >> and like there's stuff like that where it's like basically all these features it used to require a software you know multiple software developers to build any of these features Now it's like no, we actually just build like a real thin layer of like orchestration on top of all the features we already have >> and just a new way to build features and

a new way to help you know bring the power of all the infrastructure we've built to our members. Uh that isn't like a human building a big blue button where they can press it you know. >> Yeah. So you seem obviously very forwardthinking, innovative when it comes to using these tools. Kind of zooming out from the public.com product and more to the actual company and the people. >> You know, we saw Jack Dorsey lay off a ton of employees from Square. We saw Coinbase. I just had a great conversation with the Kraken co-CEO. He talks about how right now they're undergoing a massive kind of shift in uh focusing on AI proficiency within their company as a core driver of whether they'll be at the company in the next 6 months to 12 months. You know, when it

comes to being one of the executives at public.com, a company with hundreds of people. Yeah. >> Hundreds of people. Uh, how do you guys how are you guys reacting to the AI proficiency shift in the in the world to keep up with your competitors to be lean to be efficient? How do you manage your team in an era of AI proficiency being not a nice to have a mustave? >> Yeah, I mean for us like I I think there are kind of three big things. First, we are in um a space that we love because there's literally 10 years of work ahead of us to build. We could build, you know, there are so many products and features across sort of the capital markets and the investing space that we

could continue to build into and like we have to make hard decisions about what hits our roadmap every quarter and if we get a few more things every quarter because AI makes us more productive. Amazing. Amazing. Now, we've always run second point. We've always run like a lean shop because we want to be able to deliver the best possible outcome to our customers to, you know, to our members and our like our shareholders and investors. So we've always run pretty lean and like hiring people is never the first answer whenever we're trying to solve a problem. We don't throw people at a problem in that way and like you know we are continuing to take all the amazing tools that are here you know that there that exist here in order to give them to our awesome you know high talent density team members so that they

can do more and the last thing I'll say is the current state of uh the coding like this the current state of the coding ability of these LLMs today is good it's good for like internal tools it's good for like QA and bug bashing it's not good for trading systems, right? I think we've seen uh a few competitors from the crypto world let go a large portion of their engineering team and maybe say things about vibe coding infrastructure and like that is not advisable, right? And like we take very seriously our obligations to build really serious back-end infrastructure for accessing the capital markets and like you can't vibe code that stuff. There's a level of

detail, a level of expertise required and like there's a level of trust, right? like we have people trusting public with their life savings. Like I'm not going to risk losing that on, you know, something some code that Claude built. Now, it does make our our team members more effective and efficient, but like we're not going to get to a place, at least in the short run, where we're truly like, you know, letting Claude build an entire back-end feature or really integrate with um you know, major sensitive uh trading infrastructure. Now, this is probably the worst the technology will ever be.

Maybe two years from now. uh we will find it's capable of doing that and we will stay ahead of ahead of it again because we got so much to build but for now you know we don't think that's you know the best use of sort of these these uh these coding tools >> okay and and so then I guess just to be very blunt your competitors will use this technology they will scale their companies with it and they will try to take shortcuts do things better do things faster you go to market faster, launch products faster, they will cut their costs more. Um, but you're not at all looking like people are worried about layoffs. Like

>> I I don't want people in your company to be worried about getting laid off because of AI. >> No. No. And and again, I don't know what I mean. Yeah. That's not how we're like >> we are in the stage where >> we will take every bit of technology and every bit of help to do more. Yeah, >> like we have a long track record of outshipping our competitors despite having much smaller teams and we do that by having phenomenal people and giving them the independence to deliver, right? Um, you know, we sort of organize our engineering team in a bunch of atomic units. keep those units and teams as small as we can so they you know so they can each build awesome individual features and so every quarter we're getting six seven eight major features 10 12 and really affect and like we're

going to see that ramp up and we're actually going to add more people because the ROI on each person goes up as you've got your best developers now not just operating with the you know the sort of uh leverage of their own fingers writing code but they can actually start to leverage multiple other you know sort of agents underneath them. So, no, I think if anything, it's going to probably lead to a growth in team, but like >> I'm not worried about uh competitors >> vibe coding uh trading software uh or or passing us in, you know, again, we're 120 we have 120th the size of engineering team as many of our our competitors and um we still out ship them out and we still outship them and we will right and we're not, you know, we we sit in a wonderful spot where we

just have such good people and uh such a great a great org design and structure where we're just an execution machine and like that's going to that's not going to change. It's only going to get better with AI. In fact, it's only going to allow us to invest in more people and more teams to continue to be more effective. And my hope is that more of our competitors do vibe code stuff because that level of reliability that we, you know, that we deliver while having uh a high a high pace of of delivery um is unmatched. And so, you know, all we need is uh more of our competitors to to fall on their face from reliability perspective. And, you know, we'll be we'll be welcoming it.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So there's a there's a kind of broad you know meta question going on here which is like this AI displacement you know that's been happening and um in in in in DeFi we're seeing exploits to the fullest extent you know tens of thousands millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of dollars some of them linked to some sort of like AI honeypot software uh in the traditional markets we're seeing memory stocks um we're seeing chip stocks we're seeing manufacture stocks, energy, everything just fly. Um, we're seeing layoffs. So, the AI displacement is already happening based on in uh um capital gains, inequality, market inefficiencies,

layoffs, you know, when it just comes like holistically as we kind of wrap, what is your current view on AI displacement for human labor? I think there's something to the tune of 11 trillion dollars on a yearly basis of kind of human labor as as part of a capital force. How does this economic force shake up going forward? What is your like broad view holistically on AI displacement? I again comes back to like sort of how what I see it public. Um we are a growthoriented firm. We will take every bit of uh advantage we have every bit of new technology to grow. Yeah. Um, we will take every dollar of savings that we get, every incremental unit of

productivity and we will reinvest it in the business because we see such a big opportunity ahead of us. Um, and I think that is I believe that that mentality that we have is actually shared across the economy. I believe there are thousands of companies that have the same sort of mindset as us and they see such big opportunities in their own individual segments that they're going to keep investing behind it. And that means sure they're going to spend more money on tokens, but they're also going to spend more money on people as that unlocks more new businesses for them to be in, more new opportunities for them to go after, more sales people to sell the new products that they need, right?

Again, I don't think Claude's picking up the phone and calling and and executing, you know, major sales. So again, I think like listen, like there are sort of I don't know, generally speaking, there are two parts, you know, there two styles of business. There's one that exists to sort of build profitability and return profits to shareholders. those firms might take the efficiency, they might let people go. They might you know push those uh you know efficiency improvements down to the the bottom line. Um but on the other side there's the growth oriented firms are going to take every bit of that efficiency to grow faster and build new businesses.

And the experience of the American economy is that the second one always wins. the growth the growth oriented firms always take more share, always build bigger businesses, and always consume more of that resource and labor that's let off from the profitability focused side to continue to grow uh the economy over time. And like I think that's going to continue to be true. Um, you know, time will tell if this is this time is somehow different, but again, I'm going to I'm going to trust in like what I see and the way we approach the work every day and the way I see all the companies we work with driving that sort of growth. Um, I'm going to trust that that exists and that we're all going to be really excited to build more new cool stuff, more new awesome businesses, and

honestly make more money together over time rather than sort of take these like narrow profits without getting the growth in the top line. >> Yeah, very interesting, Stephen. Very, very interesting times. Quite a timely show today as well. Thanks for thanks for joining us. Great points. Uh, stoked to see the success of public.com. Going to try it out. I I've been dying to get my hands on OpenClaw. It's a finance kind of movement happening. So stoked to try it out >> for sure. For you in the audience, man, I'm an easy guy to find uh on X. It's Sykes Ske. And then we have our own subreddit uh public app, r/public app. I'm a mod there and very active. So come find me if you're interested in public. Happy to help you get set up or uh set you up

with one of my teammates who can get you uh everything you need to to get your first agentic trading strategy rolled out. >> Yeah. see if it'll outperform me. Ladies and gentlemen, that's been AI Supercycle episode number 35. We'll be back up next with our next guest, Kyle Reedhead of Milk Road. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Thanks, Stephen. >> Thanks for having me. [music] [music] [music] >> [music] [music]

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>> [music] [music] >> attend the Davos of Web 3. [music] See you next year. >> All righty, guys. We are back here at the Tokenization Tower with Kyle Reedhead, the co-owner of Milk Road, one of my favorite news, media, education outlets in crypto, macro, and AI. Kyle, welcome to the tower. Hope your time in

New York's been treating you well. >> It's been nice. I'm happy to be here. I love the token tokenization tower. It's a It's a sweet name. It's a great spot. Views unreal. >> Yeah, man. Well, hope hope your time in the city has been treating you well. And let's I mean, >> well, Nick's in the final, you know. >> Knicks in the finals, [laughter] man. It's epic. >> Good time to be in New York. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a great time to be in New York. Uh it's a great time to be in markets. There's a lot going on. There's a lot happening in crypto. There's a bifurcation happening. I think kind of the key thematic here is this bifurcation in returns, attention, interest, institutional investment.

We're clearly seeing this happen in real time. Just in the last couple weeks, there's been like, you know, pockets of excitement, pockets of kind of signs of a bull market in a specific assets or uh kind of narratives, but obviously not this kind of like holistic bull market that that people know to, you know, come and love or know and love. You know, probably still going to get that at some point, but still kind of in this earlier phase. I put out this tweet saying revenue, good growth story, transparency, good tokconomics, meaning like the positive and negative of the token actually makes sense. Um, and a damn good story is kind of what you need right now at the baseline for performance. I would just love to get your understanding of the what I call

the return to fundamentals in this market and we're clearly seeing it play out from an asset price performance perspective. Yeah. >> Just what is your view on this? Yeah, I mean I agree. I think there's one more thing I would add to it. So the three things that I care about when looking at an asset in the crypto space is like one does it have real revenue obviously. Uh two is it distributing that revenue back in some way bringing that value back to to the token holders. So obviously buybacks is a big way to do this. And the other one that wasn't actually mentioned in that tweet is and this is what I've been kind of talking about for a long time is the the world doesn't care about digital assets so much right now. Okay. They care about building on blockchain especially the institutional

world. They don't necessarily care about accumulating a bunch of digital assets. And so what I want to see is are these revenues that these protocols are generating, are they not reliant on the price of a token going up, the price of ETH going up, price of Bitcoin going up? Because there's a lot of DeFi that makes good revenues. You know, Lido, a etc. But all of these DeFi protocols I'm not extremely bullish on, at least not right now. Not because they're not good protocols. Eventually when we have tokenization of everything I think you know the obvious of the world and these kind of things they'll do well but the the thing I want to see is are they reaching other assets outside of the crypto space right and this is why Hyperlid has done a great job the thing I loved about Hyperlid the move where I

was like oh hyperlids for real is when they they pulled oil right into it and then they put silver I think were the two like big ones they started with now you can do like S&P NASDAQ I think you can even do like Micron is on there so like they they're they're kind of bringing per to more than just digital assets. To me, that's the signal. That's what I want to see. This is why I'm like bullish on Sky, for example, right? Sky is kind of uncorrelated to the the the price of Bitcoin, let's call it, the price of Ethereum. There's there's not a ton of of of protocols yet in crypto that are doing this. USDA, another one that I'm super excited about, right? I'm super bullish obviously on on AI. We've talked about it a lot at Milk Road. And so, it's like who is is tapping into

that market because that's where the real bull market is. You know, you said this isn't this huge crazy bull market everywhere in crypto yet, but there is a raging global bull market happening right now. I know >> it's just not in crypto, unfortunately. Right. And so I'm like, who in crypto is at least tapping into that? That's what I want to see. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think so a mental model that we've been trying to like shatter on the show for people is that look we've built this DeFi landscape for I think there was a tweet from Hib that we actually went over today that was there was 160 billion or so total TVL and DeFi. >> There's the total market cap of all of crypto assets is somewhere around 3 trillion. Um >> that's you know that's not the TAM that

these protocols and trading venues and stable coin platforms are building for. It's very like the hundreds of trillions of dollars of tokenized assets which are going to come on chain and so we're trying to slowly break that mold of thinking too small. I think that like the market's thinking too small and and you're kind of hammering that home about like hey like it's not just this asset class that we're thinking about. We're thinking about all of the other asset classes that are going to be tradable uh borrow you know ability to borrow against uh lend lend etc. All these different like primitives on chain.

>> Yeah. Well, I think we built the best, at least I believe, the best capital market system in the world. That's what we've done with with blockchain. Yeah. The problem is we just don't have good assets on that system or in that system. Not yet anyway. Right. Sure, Bitcoin is a great asset. It's a global asset and and the world has kind of accepted that, but outside of that, like you kind of have ETH, you kind of maybe have soul and then you you don't really have anything. Hype, I know you're super bullish on. It's an exciting thing, but like it is not a widely accepted global asset by any means, right? And so, okay, if we're going to have the best global markets infrastructure, which is the onchain capital markets, that's what I call this. It's like we need to have the best assets in the world because

otherwise we've built it all for nothing, right? So, like the world loves Nvidia, right? The world loves gold whether we do or not. The younger generation, a lot of people do love gold, right? It's a I don't know what it is right now, 20 trillion asset or even 30 trillion. It's like these are the assets the world loves and uses every day. Treasuries, dollars, etc. It's like that stuff needs to get in our capital market system, the onchain capital market system. And once it does, I think the world will see, oh, the onchain capital market system is better than any other one, better than the the US one, better than the Singapore one, the Hong Kong one, right? Like, but we just need good assets and that's the thing we've been missing.

>> I think that's the reason why we've had such a difficult time in crypto markets over the last few years. >> We're starting to get it right. Like I think tokenized stocks is now at like I don't know 1.5 billion if I remember correctly, but it's up like 10x in the last year. So that's good. Stable coins up like 50% or so in the last year or something like that, you know, at 320 billion. So like we're we're getting things on chain. It's just it's nowhere near enough for this to make a big difference to the the actual institutional world yet, right? And so like I just think we don't have our big moment again until we have the world's best assets on chain. That's when you'll see the DeFi 2.0. That's when the the the actual DeFi products we know and love will get the real use case out of

them, right? And and so until then, it's like we're just kind of rehypothecating ETH. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> And and we know that that gets us into trouble as we've seen. >> Yeah, man. What is your uh what is your outlook on ETH? People I think uh the Bankless guys are just like had a weird kind of like split up and David sold all of his ETH. Tom Lee just bought another like $200 million worth of ETH last week. Price isn't moving. Yeah. Um, I I own way more hype than I do ETH. There were like hype equivalents and kind of been like that for a while. I I don't know, man. What's your ETH take?

>> Yeah. So, I still think if you're going to put a long-term bet on the crypto ecosystem, ETH is probably still the best way to do it. Shortterm, I'm not extremely bullish on ETH by any means. I just think regardless of how you kind of value it or look at it, um I mean it's still worth like what is it 250 billion or something like that which is a ridiculous amount considering what's actually done on it today. Like it doesn't have a ton of meaningful value yet to the world but I think it'll get there and I think Ethereum will be the the blockchain that wins. So like in the short term I'm not overly bullish on ETH. I do think something like Hyperlquid holding hype is probably a better bet. But I do think, you know, as the agentic payments come on chain, uh,

as tokenization comes on chain, as more dollars come on chain, as more treasuries come on chain, as stocks come on chain, like Ethereum is probably going to benefit from that. And I do think ETH has a place. I think David wrote a big article, was it yesterday, or maybe it was today, I don't know, where he basically was like, I think Ethereum is going to be great, but I don't think ETH is going to be any good. Uh, I disagree with that, but I agree with it in the short term, right? I think we need a lot of assets and a lot of activity to come onto Ethereum before ETH is actually going to matter. Uh, and I don't know how long it's going to take. So far, it's like, you know, it's funny. There's a lot of people in crypto like, "Oh, we're growing so fast. Stable

coins are up like 50% in the last year." And I was like, "Okay, that's actually not that fast. Did you see the growth of Enthropic in the last like year?" Right? They're like 50x revenue. So, you're 50% growth is nothing compared to 50x growth, right? So, it's like we're still just really slow. and and maybe just is gonna take the clarity act. I don't know. Um but we just need a lot more things to come on chain before I'm super bullish on ETH. >> Yeah. Interesting. >> Or or any L1 for that matter. It's not just an ETH thing. >> So on the revenue side, what's interesting is if you actually look at the revenue numbers for Hyperlid and Sky um the way that the market is pricing these assets are far different. Like the market is pricing Hyperlid far more expensive or or valuable. like it's

pricing the revenue at a a much higher value multiple. Perhaps that's because of the TAM of PERS or I'm not sure what that's kind of the question. And then Sky they're the market's pricing Sky the asset as at a much lower multiple to the annualized revenue than than Hype. >> Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's a massive discrepancy in the market pricing two different assets when it's just purely revenue? um you know the the sky to high price ratio would would indicate sky to you know be quite a bit higher but it's not and so is stable coins just not as exciting of a of a business is is it not as big of a potential why why does the market price

hype to a higher price to revenue ratio than sky >> yeah so for context I think the PE of sky is like maybe 15 right now right uh whereas hype is like I don't know >> I think it's like 50 plus >> yeah I think it's even more than at this point just based off the kind of repricing we've had in hype in the last little while cuz the revenue hasn't really moved but the price has gone up I don't know whatever it is so it's it's it's way way way more um why is that well your tweet that you brought up at the beginning here is probably story uh I think you know hyperlid kind of like you know want to call it tokenizing every market in the world or you know per putting per on every market in the world is I think probably a better story

at the moment I do think a lot of the the the run in hyperl right now is is just kind of crypto capital and so you know Skye's been around for forever. It's the literally the first app that was ever built on a blockchain. So like uh everyone knows that but um and and they they've invested in in Maker many many many years ago whereas Hyperlid's kind of this like new thing and I think there's a there's a bigger story there right now. I think where Sky is really focused on is, and this isn't really sexy to the crypto people, to retail people, but it is sexy to institutions, which is just being the lowest risk way to get yield in the market. And the thing is, it's really freaking working, right? Almost every single one of their competitors has completely blown up,

right? You know, you had Athena in 1010 that blew up and that was their biggest. They were taking so much market share from Sky. Now they're basically not fully wiped out but like pretty well gone from that. Then you had a which was the the biggest competitor and it wasn't necessarily A's fault but obviously their reputation at least from the institutional side of things has been taking a big hit here right they didn't do the best risk due diligence whether it was because of layer zero or or RS or whatever whereas Sky has just they they just have never had an issue here like all they do is just make sure that they're not going to lose funds to their users and that's not a very sexy story right and so even over the last six months we actually work with with Sky uh and and multiple different ways on on PR

and marketing and and IR and a lot of the things on what we've done for the story of Sky is just like we all we care about is capital retention right now. All we care about is just like can we ensure that if any institution is going to do their due diligence on Sky. They see that all we care about is making sure that we're not going to lose users funds. And sometimes that means less buybacks. Like right now Sky was once giving 75% of all of its profits into buybacks. It's now down to seven and a half percent. Right? They switched this when kind of the Iran war happened and oil went crazy and it was like, okay, what's going on with markets? They were like, you know what, let's be even more riskadverse here, right? Like we want to we want to just make sure that if anyone

was to look, it's it's we are not taking any risk whatsoever. >> And so that's not a sexy story to the crypto people. And that's really I think all the capital that's in the space right now is just crypto people that want high results. And that's that's not Sky. Yet, if you look at their revenues and their earnings, they're growing like crazy right? >> Are are you interested in like lighter aster variational um edex in the purpose market? Like when you're looking at it, it very clearly just feels like hyperlquid than everything else. There's probably room for a couple others just like Binance, OKX kind of Huobi run ran the show for a while now. That's more like Bybit, Binance, OKX. How do you think about the uh perex landscape as it evolves and

then we'll kind of get to the actual spotex market too. >> Yeah, sure. So, I am interested. I have never I haven't bought anything outside of hype previously. My analysts we have a few different analysts at Milk Road Pro and um they were quite bullish on lighter. The problem with with with lighter is that um it's just got a token that is you know the FTV is so much higher than its market cap and so there's just a lot of dilution to come from that and we've seen how you get burned on that so many times and so it kind of doesn't make as much sense as an investment even though lighter I think is growing and doing well and like I think there's potential for other perexes to to to make an impact and be useful um but just no one has the story

on their token like hype does so great product not necessarily great asset day, but that could change and likely will change at some point. Um, it just to me it's not super interesting from a token perspective right now. >> Okay. And then on the on the DEX landscape side, it seems like Aerodrome is really coming for Uniswap. >> They've got a very good token model as well. You know, I'm curious I'm curious how you think about token models at large because AirDrop is a good example. Hypoid's a good example. Um, Sky is a good example. There there's a lot of good examples where you have a what you could call like a net token value flow where if you look at all the expenses if

you will or the credits and the debits of this kind of like balance sheet you get a positive net token value flow meaning emissions salaries inflation uh payments to market makers payments to exchanges to whatever it is service providers etc on one side And on the on the other side, it's it's essentially like what's coming into the token, buybacks, revenue, um you know, anything that kind of contributes to the token value and trying to keep that as flatlined or positive as possible. It's kind of like this new way of thinking in the industry. What's your thought here on the evolution of the token value flows in the industry? Obviously, some

of these names have set an example. Do we need to go all the way that far that it has to be like a a plus, you know, is it have to be bare minimum like a flatline? How do you think about the evolution of token value flows as it pertains to like becoming an investable asset class? >> Yeah. So, in general, like if you're running a business, you don't as long as you have investment, you don't need to be profitable all the time, right? Like most companies don't run in profit in their early stages for many years and then eventually they do. You know, the Amazons of the world uh was like, I don't know, a decade or a decade and a half not being profitable, right? So technically like negative value flow as you could call it, but they had growth.

And the other thing is like when you're investing in that asset, it's okay because it's a stock, you know, you have rights over it, right? The problem with crypto tokens is we don't have that today. So it's kind of weird because we don't have that. People don't really want to buy it. Like you don't want to be caught holding this token that has no value captured to it and you also don't have any rights and liabilities over it. Like it just kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. And so we're kind of forcing these like young companies to like put all their revenues back into the token, right? And kind of like create capital distribution back to the investors at a at an early stage, which I I don't love.

I actually hate that. But there's just not really any other option right now. So I don't know what we do to fix that. Um and I think it's a big problem that we have in this industry. I know, you know, there's there's companies like Blockworks and that that are trying to help here, but ultimately without, you know, without rights to the token, this is just a thing that we're forcing on on companies. And I don't love it because I would rather them keep their their capital and like invest it, right? Like build a better team. I don't know, acquire a different company. Um, so I don't know. I'm kind of mixed on like what a what a company should do. Like for example, Jupiter was one that, you know, they had all these extra tokens and they just decided, you know what?

We're just going to burn them all. >> I know that was wild, >> right? And I was like, I get it. Like, you kind of have to do that to fit this market of crypto, but like probably not the greatest business decision in the world. Like, if I was the founder, I don't think I'd want to just burn all my equity. But like, it's kind of we're forcing to do that. So, like >> I don't have a good answer here. I don't know what we should do. This is why honestly I'm not super bullish on almost any tokens at all. I'm a lot more bullish on >> the the equities like the companies uh public companies that are integrating crypto, right? because you can actually get rights on their on their stock. And so like I want to look at what are the I don't know western unions of the world,

the sofas of the world like how are they integrating crypto and making their businesses way more efficient because of crypto, right? Because to me it's like there's a good asset there at least that is generating real revenue. Um and it's not forcing them to like put that all back into the the asset. They do it when it makes sense, but it's not always. Whereas in crypto it's like you just kind of always have to do it. And I think that's a big thing that we're we're we're doing that's kind of hurting this industry in my opinion. >> Interesting. cuz we need to grow fast. Like we need these companies to put that money into investing more things, not into the investors. Like if I'm buying a company, I don't want them to give me dividends if they're a three-year-old company. That makes no sense. I'm like,

I want you to go up 3x over the next, you know, year. Not that a little. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So, we've kind of done what I think is some damage to the industry and to tokens. So, >> yeah. You know, on the complete flip side of this, we had um [clears throat] Arthur Hayes on the show giving his Zcash bull thesis, right? >> Zcash is just like this like private Bitcoin, [snorts and cough] >> excuse me. >> Or at least that's what they're kind of like calling it. >> Yeah. >> And doesn't really have flows, fully diluted, proof of workcoin.

Block times are super slow, not a whole lot of users, things flying, and people are like very excited about privacy again. We had uh Kaleo on yesterday. He was like, "Look, man, I'm very skeptical about this privacy narrative. Like, I'm very I've seen this like five times in this industry. I'm really just really skeptical." I I was talking to a um longtime Zcash holder and he's like, "Look, man, nothing's changed. Like, I've been in this thing since the beginning that all the fundamentals are the same. just like the narrative and attention has, you know, really accelerated as of late. Nothing's actually changed. Um, I'm I'm just curious like where where do you stand on this privacy thesis as it pertains to blockchain? You bullish Zcash? Do you do

you think it's worth an investment? What what's your take? >> I'm not bullish on Zcash at all. Uh, I think privacy is important, don't get me wrong. Uh, but that's obvious. It's kind of like when the revenue meta became a thing like last year, I was like, why is this a meta? This isn't a narrative. this is just the basics of running a business which is also like the basics of finance is like it should probably be private right like uh for most cases it should be private it's like obviously um and so I think everything on blockchain everything in finance is going to have some sort of privacy layer built into it right like Ethereum is already going this route with their L1 you have this across probably every L1 is going to to end up having some sort of privacy layer whether it's L1 L2 like whatever however

that all ends up so like I think privacy makes sense for financial cial services. The problem with Zcash is there's no financial services. It's literally just nothing. Just a blockchain, right? Like it's basically just just Bitcoin, which is great. It's a thing that you hold, but like why do we need that to be private? What we want private is like if everyone's going to be using, you know, DeFi, for example, on Ethereum, well, we need privacy features for that obviously because like we can't have Black Rockck come in and just start using A and you can just like read it on the blockchain and see everything they're doing. That it makes no sense, right? So, of course, we're going to have privacy in DeFi and in in money and in payments and all these things. So, it'll exist on blockchains, but is Zcash going to be

the blockchain for that? Like, no, I don't think so. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, like private payments on Ethereum, private transfers on different networks. We're already seeing that with some of what Near's doing with like their confidential intents and these types of things. It's just going to be integrated at the public blockchain level. >> Exactly. And so, privacy makes sense. It is a thing to be excited about. like yes it is the next like upgrade that we need in blockchains because we sort of we built these blockchains they were all very public which is great for some use cases but at the same time you're like well actually we need to make these things uh private for some use cases so like cool we've got to go build that uh and so that's exciting I don't necessarily know that that's a narrative that's going to like drive a bunch more

revenue or or that I should be buying Zcash just because it was the first one that had some privacy you know uh so I think look who knows how how high this thing can go if if you know there's some bullishness in the markets then sure it can probably keep going up. Um, but I think that this is very much just a retail driven, momentum driven type thing. Um, which is fine if you want to trade it. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Um, but it's it's not a long-term hold for me because I want to bet on privacy. >> Yeah. Le let's talk about Milk Road for a bit. You guys have grown, you know, substantially and done a very very very good job of education and just kind of building a media presence in the space.

You guys have a big community as well. What what's been some of the biggest unlocks as of late or breakthroughs for Melk Road last six months? I you know it's been kind of a slowdown in crypto. So you guys expanded a bit into the AI landscape as well with kind of like the subbrand. You guys are executing kind of like this house of brand strategy. How do you how do you think about uh Milk Roads growth and some of the latest breakthroughs? It's actually I I can use Milk Road's growth and kind of what we're doing there to help me actually navigate the markets because what's funny is you know we launched Milk Road AI uh a little over a year ago now. So thankfully and Milk Road Macro um and you know they've both grown it's very hard to start a net new it's not a net

new media channel but pretty close right it's a whole different topic. Milk Road's been known for crypto. So, like, can we get ourselves into the AI space and be known in the AI space, too? Very hard to do. But, we've really caught on over the last four months. And so, we've gone from like, I don't know, I think it was like 4 million impressions on Twitter to like 40 million in the last uh like four months. The growth has just been absolutely insane. And when we first did it though, what's funny is our audience was pissed. They were like, "Oh, what are you guys doing pivoting?" It's kind of like what happened with David recently selling his ETH. They're like, "Oh, are you guys getting out of crypto?" And I was like, "Listen, we're not getting out of crypto. We're just trying to go where we think it makes

sense." Right? Like if you look right now in the AI world, you've got like uh I think the the estimates from uh JP Morgan is there's going to be 1.1 trillion spent on the AI infrastructure build out next year. It's like obviously I want to go invest in that. That's huge. There's going to be like 7 trillion over the next six years. It's like of course I need to go and understand that, right? Crypto should be doing that. And so we're like listen we just think this is a place that you guys need to go and and and learn about as well, right? Because it's going to come back and you're already seeing it with like, you know, the agentic world came out. Well, that's really going to apply to crypto. And I actually think now like a bet on crypto is kind of a bet on the

agentic world, right? So like there's a lot of of of synergies between the two. And so we've seen incredible growth today and we have not seen a lot of growth uh from the crypto side which to me what I can see just internally from our community is it took them a while but they've all are starting to move over to the dark side to the AI side. Uh and it's funny because that was it Jason what's his name from the allin podcast put that tweet years ago. always like if you're in crypto AI was that like three years ago now and he's like dang he was kind of right you know >> not actually like I'm not bearish on crypto by any means but like obviously if you were an investor you know you could have >> you could have done really well and so

yeah we're seeing a ton of growth there and what's funny is it's just it's all the retail investors that were in crypto back in 2021 they're just over there now which is why when I think about the crypto market I'm very skeptical when I see something like Zcash go like this because it's like it's not going to get a run like Bitcoin did where it was like not just retail but then institutions came on top of it. It's like it's not getting that right because retail's not even here right now, right? So there's like a little bit of crypto pool that's left capital and like that's kind of moving between like Zcash, Hyperlquid, and like Venice maybe and near I guess.

Uh and it's like that's kind of it. And so a lot >> this guy's bearish man. This guy's [laughter] so bearish. So I I just >> sidelined. Kyle Rita, the owner of Milk Road, is sidelined, ladies [laughter] and gentlemen. >> I still hold tons of crypto, don't get me wrong. Okay. >> I just I what I'm seeing is just that that retail really is is is caring a lot more about AI right now than they are crypto. It's like what we need to do is is crypto needs to tap into that. And that's what Hyperlid's doing. That's why I'm actually really excited about Hyperlid is because like they're seeing that going, "Oh, everyone cares about oil and silver and micron. Let me go tap into that and add per like onchain per to that." like perfect idea. USDI, I absolutely love them because they're like, "Oh, what's the best product in

the world right now that's in the most demand?" It's GPUs. Okay, let's go create a financing tool for that using stable coins. Like, oh, these are the things that crypto was actually made for. >> Yeah. >> And so, instead of creating another form of another way to rehypothecate a digital asset, it's like, let's go to where the capital is, and that happens to be AI. And so what it's allowing me is to see where is that market going in AI and then where is who in crypto is actually like attacking that and trying to be a financial tool or financial infrastructure for that new world that infrastructure buildout right so um they are merging it's just there's not a ton of them that are actually doing it >> yeah uh Kyle closing thoughts here just you know thinking about the industry at large the market at large um you know

your work how how are you approaching the rest of the Uh yeah, >> it's kind of a broad question like you know what is some of the roadmap items for Milk Road personally? How you thinking about markets? How you thinking about kind of your work, where you're spending your time? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good question. So the big thing that we focused on in the last little while is is we used to have a kind of joint portfolio that Milkro had that we we sort of like if you signed up to Milk Road Pro, you could like track our portfolio. What we ended up doing is we've got a bunch of analysts now across AI, across crypto, across robotics, and they all have their own portfolios now.

And so you can actually track their like live trades of what they're investing in. A bunch of them were like really early on like Micron and Bloom Energy and stuff like that. Um, so what we're trying to do is just find more analysts that just love markets. They understand cross technology. So not just like I only know AI, I only know crypto. It's like how are they all merging? Because I think what's really happening here is like we're in the craziest bull market ever in AI. we are not that in crypto but I think it's coming right because I do think crypto is the financial infrastructure that's needed for everything that's about to happen and so I think there's this like and then I think the next big thing is robotics and then probably space and so for me I'm like okay who are the analysts that

understand these things and want to write about this create content about it want to trade it um and so that's what Milro is trying to cover so right now we have we have crypto we have AI we have macro we're probably going to be launching space and robotics soon so it's like the one place that you can come to just learn about all the different markets all the different techn technologies and how they sort of integrate with with each other. >> Beautiful. Kyle Reedhead, thanks for joining us in the tower. Great conversation. Uh please don't stay sideline on hype for your own mental health. [laughter] You know, you definitely definitely need to get in there. >> Multiple of our analysts own hype. Don't worry, we are not we are not bearish on hype.

>> Good. Good. [laughter] Ladies and gentlemen, that is our show for today live in the tower. Let's give some love to Kyle, man. Guy Guy came in here hot. Great show today, guys. We'll be back tomorrow uh live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern again. Thanks for joining us today. As always, you're watching the rollup live from the financial capital of the world in the tokenization tower where digital assets meets finance. I see you guys on YouTube. Drop a like, drop a sub. We'll see you guys here tomorrow. We we also see you in the chat. We'll be there tomorrow. See you guys then. [music] >> [music]

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