🟢 LIVE: Is Winter Over? CLARITY is Coming, AI Sector Hot, EasyA Team Calls in, Brian & Seraphim In

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Thank Lord. We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. >> I think The Rollup is one of the most premier media brands in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. into my library every day.

>> Potentially multi-chain deployments. We are at connect day one. Here I'm testing from space. Heat. Heat.

JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. >> I'm bullish. >> He said it. He finally said it. So bullish. >> It is bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. Heat. Heat.

Heat. Heat. Corola is headed to the top. If 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. Zoom out. The institutions aren't

coming. They're simply here. It's the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. Welcome to the next. See you on the show. Yes, we are indeed. We are live. >> Crypto winter is over, guys. I talked to my fellow quantity. >> You just hit the button to run the FRA. Today's episode is brought to you by FRA Open State compatible.

>> Shout out to our friends over at FRA today. Stable coin summer. >> Yes, sir. Today's episode is presented by Plume. Let's give Plume some love, guys. These guys are smashing it. We're at the We're at the N the tokenization tower where finance and digital assets converge. Ladies and gentlemen, I am coming out on a limb here and saying that my gut is saying crypto might be over. Also talked to my quant um a well-known figure in the space. He told me that he thinks Canton is going to outperform Hyperlid in the coming months. didn't quite get into why, but if there is a hated rally, it could be the Canton network hated rally. Rob, what's going on, man?

>> I'll just comment on that and say that I think Canton is part of this next cohort of L1s. I'm not saying I'm bullish or bearish on these. Actually, in the long run, >> yeah, >> my anti- Loganstreky thesis is that Ethereum is still alive and actually still very much cooking on volume activity. This thing is not dead in >> okay >> the slightest >> guys bullish let's give you some love man >> um however there are several L1s that are being built is one of them they are part of the consortium chains prop pops up every bare market uh the next cohort is with bigger brands than ever before New York Stock Exchange >> every time right every time since 2018

>> there's new L1s that come up every bare market and then it takes an absolutely tremendous Ethereum rally that kind of brings everyone back to the promised land. Uh they realize that no one wants to build on anyone else's infrastructure and the biggest value proposition is connecting disparate ledgers. >> I'm sorry, but is there >> guys been DCAing ETH? Clearly >> is there a better chain in a position to connect these disparit economies, these these ledgers that have been currently just floating? Who cares 247? Who who cares? I want NASDAQ connected to New York Stock Exchange, connected to Robin Hood. That's what I want, man. That's the thesis. And there's only one chain in position to do that. It's not Canton.

But I could see Canon getting a hated rally. >> Man, I got to say, um, some of our clips are starting to create discourse across the media landscape. For example, Austin Campbell at DAS was really pissing people off with his um takes around permissioned RWA or sorry, permissionlessness RWAS and smart contracts. Um as well as a couple others that I've seen. So, keep it up, Rob. We're uh we're making some waves. All right, guys. Let's get into today's topics. We got a busy stream today. Uh we got two guests in the tower, one guest at home calling in. We got the Easy A guys. Um they're going to be calling in. We're going to have some fun with those guys. Um, those guys are XRP

bulls to the max. We're gonna talk to them about XRP chain link. We're gonna talk to them about uh, yeah, this exact thesis, Rob. This kind of Ethereum, Canton, Ripple acquisition thesis. We got Markets and Weather from New York. Then we've got the Asie Ventures co-founder, Brian Wong. Uh, guy has a lot of experience uh, raising capital, investing capital. He's been coming in the tower. And then no other than Saraphim. I wonder what color Sarah Fim's hair is gonna be today. You never know. I've seen him like five times and it's different color every single time.

Today's topic powered by Treasure. Let's give Treasure some love, man. These these guys are amazing. Best horror wallet on the market. Treasure.io code rollup 10. Um that's our topics for today Rob. >> Uh not much else to add on topic. Shout out to Treasure. Uh best hardware wallet in the game. Let's kick it over to Weather. >> Yes, sir. Before we do, let me tell you about our lovely friends at FRA. FRA is building the infrastructure for digital money. Visit fra.inance to learn more about what FRA is doing. It looks like the relief rally was fading a bit. It's 46° here in the tokenization tower. A little bit windy, sunny days, little

chilly. Powered by Relay, our friends, relay.link, link some of the best crosschain swaps in the digital asset space across all public blockchains. None of these permission blockchains are going to be part of this composable thesis. Are there Rob? Look, I uh I I certainly think that these things are going to want to compose with one another, but we heard uh how important low latency composability is with the trading thesis. It's important to connect all of these disparate chains. One day, I truly do have faith. One day these chains will figure it out that we ultimately need one ledger, one global uh internet computer of sorts. Internet of value.

>> Oh, he's bullish ICP, ladies and gentlemen. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The not >> not bullish ICV. >> I'm not bullish ICP. Uh, that sounds like a question for Dom and Phil. Uh, guys, let's let's keep it moving here. Shout out to our friends at Relay connecting all these disparate chains. Oh my goodness. >> What else? The market, >> guys. Market's looking good today. >> Might be the first day that we actually have a little bit. We have some green and we have some red. But overall, I think this is just a timing thing because yesterday >> uh >> we were on the downs slope and we ended up picking up and now reversing trend.

Uh markets are so dependent on the macro >> 100%. I think uh Israel's Netanyahu said that they are going to have direct negotiations with Lebanon. >> Nice. >> Uh that is a step in the right direction for macro and we're rebounding as a result. Um look, markets powered by Zama. Privacy is just increasingly important. I think we're going to see Mir, we're going to see Zama, we're going to see Zcash all continue to bounce hard off the lows. Y >> uh these are some of the projects that we're seeing uh have the strongest rallies. Uh ultimately this thing is all macro. What is your thesis as to why the crypto winter has ended and we are

entering a new era? >> Yeah, I mean so just some quick macro stuff. Um oil back above 100 or close to it after Hormuse was closed then open then closed. Um stocks very strong. I mean, it's kind of this whipsaw market right now. Oh, we're all good. Are we all good? Markets don't really seem to care. Uh, which is which is pretty cool. Um, now we're, you know, one day it's like, oh, okay, we're going to be back in kind of like a deflationary regime. Inflation is going to come down.

Everything's going to be all right. And then the next day we have, you know, oil ripping, people being worried about the inflationary effects of oil. Today we also saw uh Fed chair Jerome Powell come out and announce that he will be stepping down after his term and he will be resigning. Uh that is official now. I think that's something that the market is not really picking up on. Um and yeah, I mean look, I'm still riding my uranium and copper, got my hype, got my Bitcoin, uh and waiting to allocate to more of these NEO finance assets once we get our feet under us uh in the market. With regards to the entire uh winter being over, our friend Ralph Pal put out a tweet who's been absolutely bered on for the last I don't know several

several months. He's been bullish even though after he had a lovely podcast with our friend Chris Berniski. He still was bullish even though Chris was bearish. That was around November. Ralph tweeted, "Total global liquidity rising, global M2 rising, US total liquidity rising, US M2 rising, China total liquidity is rising, and ISM is rising. Try not to overthink it." I quote tweeted that, agreed, said basically like, "Look, we're in a part of the market now where we're getting a new Fed share. We have the best macro environment economically, not necessarily uh in terms of the war, but economically with with the amount of liquidity in the system. Plus, we're in

an interest rate declining environment. I expect that to continue. Secretary of the Treasury Jerome um or uh Scott uh Scott Bessant came out and said rates need to go lower. Um and so I think all these factors are coming together with what Ral's saying. We got the DAT blood. We got a lot of the uh tourists out. I think the four-year cycle, people are still thinking about the four-year cycle in terms of like wait till Q4 allocate year of sideways from there, then we go up. I think people are going to get caught off guard. Uh the the sideways accumulation process that we're seeing right now across the market looks pretty significant. Um, uh, and a lovely signal

of mine, CL207, posted a photo of a cat and a big green button yesterday. That kind of did it for me. So, yeah. I mean, look guys, I think there's a possibility that the bottom is in. Um, it is hard to call these bottoms. A wise friend of mine calls bare markets like a big beach ball that kind of goes under, bounces back, goes down more, bounces up. It's very hard to tell when the bottom is. Obviously, hindsight's 2020. I think we have the best chance that we've seen since 1010 today. And um yeah, I'm feeling more positive about where the general stock market's headed and more.

So anyway, Rob, look, man, >> that's where I'm at. >> I love you, but I think you said a lot of words without saying a whole lot. I think >> I think it's possibly the bottom. >> I think you said oil went up and then it went down. You said the straight was open, then it was closed because that's what's been happening. Good, then it was bad. That's what's been happening. Fair markets bounce up, then they bounce down. You said things go which way? Up, down, sideways, they go everywhere. >> That's exactly what happens. >> Oh my goodness. >> I mean, hey, that's where we're at. All right. >> I mean, look, >> there's a possibility that the that the crypto market winter is over. It's a possibility.

>> There you go. All right. Well, there's always a possibility. >> You heard it. You heard it here first. Markets go up and they go down. >> Shout out to Zama powering encrypted transactions, encrypted assets on chain. Let's move on to the news. Before we do, let me tell you quickly about Near, our AI partner on the show. Guys, we have a lot of news to cover as well today. Um, and Near is our blockchain partner designed for AI native applications and autonomous agents. Um, they are doing a lot of really cool stuff on the open claw front with their ironclaw as well.

Start developing today at near.org. All right guys, let's get into it. Um, we had some cool news from Securitize officially partnering with the currency group to tokenize their shares on Ethereum and Salana. Um, quick video here. Pretty pretty cool video, guys. We're upgrading the financial system as the world one share at a time. Boom.

>> Don't you love like the >> securityized >> essays at the end of all these like companies that are ready to go public or are public that they have to like full on do these like essays about disclaimers? Let's give them disclosure. I mean, these are public companies. They have to. But obviously, these are things are like the terms and conditions. They're regulated. Uh they have to do this. But who's going to read all this? We're not going to read all this. We're not marketing these securities. We're just marketing the infrastructure, right? Like they are tokenizing this thing. No matter what they're tokenizing, it's very cool to see that you are going to get these digital representations on chain. I'm going to be very curious as to what kind of demand we're going to see for these things from the traders on chain. Um,

you know, we've been talking a lot about RWAs. We've been talking a lot about these things. Look, >> I'm very very curious. I I you know I've just recently developed kind of this thinking where you know obviously yield farming 2021 all the way through to 2024 there is demand for yields on chain but >> at the end of the day these are like it's a culture of degenerate memecoin traders shitcoiners and you know arbit like and anons you know how the the the entire yield farming craze was as a result of you know tripledigit APYs to think that we're going to get a cohort people that are going to buy these, you know, 5% things on chain.

>> I'm just, you know, maybe it's maybe it's there, but to hear the likes of, you know, Franklin Templeton and some of these guys say like, hey, we want to we want to tokenize our funds because, you know, there is demand for these things on chain. I'm just I don't know, maybe I'm just cautiously optimistic. Caut I'm a bit skeptical. Although, I do think here what we're seeing is that there's tokenized equities. people want to tokenize there uh because they can tap into net new liquidity, net new demand as a result of tokenized those those securities. Yeah. So obviously two very different products here. Some of these are speculative uh tokenization paths, others are non-speculative. Um overall more assets on chain. I think it's great and maybe it's just not the you know

it's just the network effects once we do get uh more sophisticated asset managers and capital allocators on chain those will be the yield farmers of this new era these institutional yield farmers they're not looking for triple digit APYs uh the old retail cohort that was yield farming the triple digits they're going to be going into tokenized equities um and that's the primary user of per leverage that sort of thing >> yeah I mean And at the top of each cycle when you're trying to derisk, I often find it better for my mental and for my portfolio to just get everything out of a place where I can aggressively shitcoin. So, I see that as one interesting thing, but at the same time,

like I I could see a world where it's just easier to just do this all on chain. I mean, that's the whole point of what we're doing here. And so in any case, it's kind of like that um Jeban's paradox thing where like if you just put enough of these products on chain, give enough people access to equities, to money markets, to different products, then hopefully then they will actually use it, right? And I think that a lot of people in the past 6 months would have been interested in getting some yield in a product that isn't a sketchy DeFi vault or some like overly complicated yield strategy. Put something into a you know secure money market powered by a large uh kind of

manager or asset manager and then do it on chain. So all right let's move on from secured size guys. Uh, shout out to them. Guys are cooking. Um, big big big congrats. They have a big public launch coming out as well. Uh, should be should be good for them. Uh, kind of get the fruits of their labor soon. >> It's one way to put it. Uh, Adam Back says he's not Satoshi. The New York Times says that he is. Adam Back says he's not Satoshi, but he was early in laser focused on the positive societal implications of cryptography on electronic cash. Hence his 1992 onwards active interest in applied research on e-cash privacy tech on cipher punks list which led to hash and other ideas. These

were almost forms of electronic cash before bitcoin was invented. He was obviously very involved in this space. Uh Adam back is uh the CEO and founder of blockstream which is still a very prominent bitcoin company. Uh bitcoin politics is very very muddy. People are screaming that Bitcoin needs to become quantum resistant, have a quantum plan. Adam Bach is one of the oifiers of Bitcoin. Uh, one of the best takes I saw on this was >> do you really think Satoshi would be forming a digital asset treasury company with Cantor Fitzgerald.

>> Yeah. >> Of which Adam has. Um there was al also some some very uh peculiar things that did lead to the direction of people suspicious that he is Satoshi which is uh he had email communications but he didn't want to share the metadata of then the New York Times uh author of this article uh was able to determine that there was some similarities in the way that they uh had sentence structure, punctuation capitalization language these sorts of things that led this author to believe uh Adam did have the character name of Satoshi uh because of this similar linguistical style, but here Adam is claiming he's not.

>> Yeah. Andy, who do you believe? >> I think that we see this kind of stuff all the time. We see uh every couple of months to six months to a year, you get a new Satoshi character in the market. Um and no surprise here that this is a new one, right? I'm not sure. I' I've ever heard Adam uh be the Satoshi character yet. So, I don't have much to add here, >> especially uh yeah, >> the the one thing that's that's funny here is that, you know, I usually the people the people that you're talking about that come out of the woodwork that claim that they are Satoshi, it's them claiming it about themselves.

Craig Wright being the >> the number one infamous case here where he's saying, "I'm Satoshi. I'm Satoshi. Everyone just move the coins." All right, Craig, you're Satoshi. just move the coin, sign the transaction, and he couldn't do it. >> And and they never do it, do they? >> Adam is the only one where uh he is claiming that he's not. Other people are claiming that he is >> and it's in, you know, obviously if anyone comes out as proven, Satoshi, if his, you know, coins move transaction sign from his wallet. >> Yeah.

>> You got to think that the entire market would dump significantly, right? Think >> absolutely. Because if if Satoshi has this immaculate or excuse me, Bitcoin has this immaculate conception idea. >> Um where you just can't really put a pin in it, you you know, you don't know if it's uh if it's some divine intervention that came in and just struck Bitcoin into the world. Like it it's about as amorphous as it can get. Um if any sort of tangibility comes behind Satoshi, I think it crashes the Bitcoin market. And so Adam because he's got a Bitcoin uh he's got a Bitcoin company obviously owns a lot of Bitcoin a lot of financial interest um he's invested and incentivized to say that he's not

>> of course everyone is basically >> right yeah you know I mean Craig right had Bitcoin SV right and so obviously as a Bitcoin fork if he was a real Satoshi he had Satoshi's vision he crashed Bitcoin the Bitcoin fork would go up that he's attributed to Adam has put his stake in Bitcoin and so I think he's incentivized to say that he's not. That being said, I still think he's actually not. It's not just him saying >> I agree. All right, Adam, we'll leave you to your nice privacy. Hopefully uh your DMs haven't been too crazy or anything. Uh we'll move on from Adam here and go into the effects of stablecoin yield prohibition on bank lending. Um, so we had kind of some

conversation as of late about how the stable coin yield is going to affect banks and uh deposits into banks. And again, this is a big fight with regards to will there be massive capital flight from banks if this clarity act goes through in in the way that people wanted to and the Genius Act. And so obviously we had the Genius Act signed into law in July and this is now getting to the implementation phase. Today we had um the Treasury uh the the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant saying that he's trying to urge Congress to pass the Clarity Act ASAP as

well. He he's he's looking to get this economic and geopolitical competitiveness from a national security perspective. Um and he also of course expressed something that a lot of us know which is that there's this time constraint right the there's up until about July to get this through before Congress and House go on their uh tours to to get reelected and Genius Act depends on Clarity Act getting through and so looking here people have done research basically saying that bank lending will be extended and expanded did a lot. If the stable coin yield prohibition is part of clarity, they've done a lot of research

on this. I remember Cody Carbone was pushing for this uh to to have some studies and some case, you know, kind of like uh forecasting done. So, it looks like we got that forecasting here and yeah, I mean it it doesn't look so bad, right? like it looks like that um their banks are coming to terms that it's not going to be that bad for them that they're going to be able to get this through uh in terms of the actual uh setup here. So why don't we flip to Jerome actually if we can or sorry not Jerome Scott talk a bit more about clarity because I think that is what's driving uh what's happening here in Genius Rob and so I think you know it

seems like right now the stable coin yield stuff is not going to um be a huge huge issue but I don't think that crypto is going to get exactly what it wanted here. >> Yeah. So, it's pretty interesting to see this executive summary. Uh, what it says here uh verbatim is that it prohibits stable coin issuers from offering any form of interest or yield to stable coin holders. Uh, that is directly contradictory to what we heard uh crypto and AI ZAR David Sachs talk about. Uh, he said right now the Genius Act does allow uh these stablecoin issuers to pay yield. Uh, and that's where the caveat comes in. It does not explicitly prohibit affiliate or third-party

arrangements that might offer interestbearing products. Uh the report goes on to say at baseline that if you eliminate this caveat, uh it would increase bank lending by about $2 billion. Uh would have a net welfare cost of 800 million translates to an increase in lending about 0.02%. uh large banks would conduct 76% of this additional lending while community banks which have assets below 10 billion would lend the remaining 24%. Um and so uh if the goal, which I believe the administration's goal is to add more lending via community banks, uh eliminating this eliminating this provision on the Genius Act so that you

prohibit any kind of yield bearing uh products um would increase community bank lending by about $500 million. And so that is that's that's the dilemma here. the administration has to choose. Are they going to support their uh their community bank agenda? Remember uh Main Street, not Wall Street, that is effectively uh supporting community banks in local, you know, areas. Uh versus the president who's been, you know, very vocally supportive of crypto. These things are at odds. Uh and it's time to choose.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, look, man, they're they're worried. And I think that I am still of the mind that this is getting through Q2, which is where we are now. We just entered Q2. I put out a prediction that I think Clarity is going to go through in Q2. I still firmly stand by that. I mean, we have heard so much about this getting through that it it feels like a broken record now. CL Clarity Act signed into law in 2026. 59% chance on poly market.

>> 59 >> 59 by 2026. >> I assume I assume that Q2 would be like in the 20s then. >> Yeah. But you know, we've also heard that Q2 would be the time to make it happen because all of these politicians go and campaign by the fall and the winter. And so if it's going to be 2026, I think you're right. I think it would be Q2. I would put it pretty much at a coin flip 5050 if it gets signed in by Q2. >> All right, guys. Let's move on um into what our friend Eleanor has been pushing, which is the Clarity bill uh from Secretary Treasury Scott Bessent.

Basically, he's urging the crypto market structure legislation to get through a national priority, saying economic security is national security. again trying to create the continuation of the digital dominance of the US dollar. And so he he's warning that time is of the essence and that the Senate floor time is scarce. And yeah, I mean, look, we're looking for strong government backing here uh to complete this regulation. I think again cutes you as we said and I mean look if you're if you're sitting around in the conversations here you know somebody like Scott Bessie coming

in and having a strong opinion may or may not mean much to you but I think the more that we get this kind of like urgent opinionation happening from people like Scott the more that this starts to really go forward. So that that's my take on this is that look Q2 guys I'm on you know team Q2 I think it it comes through then um and yeah >> um yeah the genius can't be realized without clarity support I'm going to do we have a tinfoil hat anywhere >> yeah why >> well I I think I think it might be a necessary prop for the office uh and and maybe for the studio here in Miami because I I think there's multiple

things here converging that you know are sort of just spread out. And so just follow me here on this. You know, we've obviously got Genius Act, we've got Clarity uh in in the in the works. Um at the same time, obviously we've got the war going on in Iran and then you've also got Tether that is making a push into the United States. Um we know that Secretary Besson is hellbent on selling US Treasury debt. Mhm. >> He's also made it clear that stable coin issuers could be one of the primary purchasers of uh treasury debturies.

>> And so we know Tether uh as it continues to make its United States push uh is a potentially very large buyer. At the same time, we have this this increased aggression in the Middle East, uh, which is looking more and more like it's causing our Gulf state allies, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, some pretty large sovereign purchasers of US treasuries to kind of fray, you know, our friendship with them. In which case, you know, Trump could be essentially creating the end of the pro dollar, right? where we have cheap oil that gets exported to the US, they pay uh in return with buying US debt. If that is no longer the case, the

straight is closed, Iran is running the straight, and we don't have free flowing oil, it could be the case that um these sovereigns are no longer buying US debt. And this is a very important uh handoff that could that could happen between um the buyers of this US debt being sovereign nations versus the buyers of this US debt being private networks, private stable coin issuance companies. And so I my tinfoil hat says my conspiracy theory allegedly I would suppose that there is some connection between the passage of clarity the entrance of Tether into the US market as they continue to accumulate US Treasury debt. Bessant needs to sell that debt

and we know that we're cutting off a significant buyer in the Middle East in all of the sovereign uh the sovereign Gulf states that are currently uh buying all of that US debt. I think there's a very strategic handoff that is going to happen. Um, and it's important that we get a lot of this legislature through uh the Senate now >> in order to essentially clear the way before we completely cut off our allies out east. >> Interesting. And the passageway being the toll is being paid in Chinese Juan or cryptocurrencies is also a part of this, right? Because that that was that was previously paid in dollars. I don't know

if there was any tolls like right now I don't think there was anything. I mean I I think they were just passing through the straight and they needed to get to where they went to go where they were going. >> Um and wherever they got you know there was some insurance and there was transportation costs and all these things were paid in their local denomination of where whatever flag they were flying on their ship. >> Yeah. But as far as this toll that Iran is now choosing to charge in either, you know, yawn uh or crypto, Bitcoin, I don't think that I think that's a new thing that Iran is only doing to slow the passage of ships through the straight.

>> Yep. Yep. >> You know, the current dynamic of the petro dollar is effectively that these Gulf states are buying up these Treasury debts and they're exporting oil and that is kind of what balances out um you know their imports and their exports. We don't have anything to export be besides our besides our currency. >> Yeah. >> Right. And so I think if we're cutting the off those purchasers, we're going to need to find new purchasers. And I think the the clearest example of new purchasers is the stable coin issuance companies. Uh but we need the the the legislation in order to completely free the way for them to come in and purchase large amounts of US debt.

>> There we go. our local in-house macro expert. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Rob. Guys, dial petro dollar is coming to an end. If we can't get this solved, we've got Dom and Phil Quac, the co-founders of EZA and our local friends here from the UK talking about some of their thesises today on the show. Let's bring them up and let's get the show started, guys. Dom, Phil, welcome to the show guys. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having us on. What's going on, guys? H how's uh how's your conference tour been? I saw you guys were I think you guys did the same the same triple as us. DC to New York to to France.

>> Yep. Yeah, precisely. Yeah, we were leading the UK US delegation out to DC. So, had some great meetings out with the SEC, CFTC, other regulators, lawmakers out there. and then yeah headed straight down into can and then through up again through and then we're actually hosting an event together with super team over in Amsterdam this weekend and then over at Paris Blockchain Week. So uh and then back back in San Francisco afterwards >> and what is the main prerogative for you guys at these conferences? What are you most trying to accomplish?

Really the big thing is of course EZA today is the biggest web3 onboarding layer where we've brought on the world's best builders to build on these blockchains and that's really what we're doing at all these conferences number one and number two is we actually have some very exciting things we're working on EA Labs we're actually building our own onchain products so that's what we're hard at work away on with our partners and also together with our team >> one of you guys works out a lot right >> yeah correct that's me. >> Did you Did you Did you hit the gym today?

>> I'm about to actually after this. So, it's uh it's coming up to evening time in the UK. I normally like to go at the end of the day. Yeah, exactly. >> I do work out too, but it just doesn't show as much. I >> still run. Still run. So, when you run, you can't really tell if someone works out. >> And what's a why why the end of the day? You're not tired from, you know, working out or, you know, doing meetings and running around. Like, why why the end of the day? I mean, I do a lot of strength training and I feel like at the end of the day, you feel, you know, you got more food in you. You've had a whole day of eating and normally, you know, sitting down and working. So, yeah, for me, it's like, you know, it's the best

time. I have more energy in the evenings, actually than in the morning. So, >> yeah. Cool. >> So, >> nice. There we go. >> All right guys, let's get into the meat and potatoes of this. Um, we have a lot of people in the crypto community who are not big believers in XRP. You You guys have this chain link versus Ripple war going on. Why are you guys on team Ripple? What is it about XRP that you guys are so excited about compared to Chain Link? Why do you think why do you think XRP is winning this war? >> Well, I mean, I think, you know, a couple reasons. I mean, I first of all, I wouldn't say it's a war necessarily.

>> I think, you know, I think like on social media things tend to get, you know, a bit overpolarized. Obviously, you know, people like to uh, you know, smash down other people and, you know, Twitter's Twitter's like a, you know, a crazy place ultimately, especially when people are on and they say some wild things, but, you know, Phil and I love it on there. So, uh, yeah, we, uh, you know, we we get into, uh, you know, we get into these things sometimes. And I think for me and, you know, for Phil as well, I know um, you know, we've worked with Ripple for a couple years now and really what we see there is, um, you know, sort of for really, um, land and expand play. Um so obviously you know Ripple started with XRP. Um they sort of you know grew that um and ultimately now

what's really happening is they're actually acquiring a lot of different companies. Yeah that are really deep in the um you know traditional finance space. So you know they bought Hidden Road for example G Treasury a bunch of other uh players which actually have you know many many different paying customers and they're real businesses. Um and you know the the thesis there is you know we bring these kind of companies onto the blockchain and once you own them you can really bring them onto the XLPL which is of course their blockchain and ultimately you can actually do things much more efficiently. You can bring even a fraction of those transfers and transactions onto the blockchain and ultimately that is a huge level of activity that other blockchains just simply haven't and you know probably

won't see. Um so I think you know there is definitely a place for for different blockchains and the future is definitely multi-chain. Uh but for us you know in the near future um I'm personally very bullish on XRP of course um and Ripple as well as as a company in general. So before we start getting into maybe the nuances about you know wh why you know one thing might be better than the other can you just catch us up as far as you know what the Ripple story has been over the last few years because at least from the US perspective it was like the scapegoat for the SEC you know it was attacked it was drowning in lawsuits um and then it sort of went ghost right all of the exchanges kind of delisted it I

think maybe there one exchange that that allowed someone to trade it, but you didn't really hear a lot. It was always just this lawsuit, this lawsuit, this lawsuit. There wasn't really a lot of business operational or research that was continuing to drive forward. At least not that we heard about. And that was the case from what 2017, 2018, all the way through to, you know, maybe 2023 or 2024 when the lawsuit was resolved. What happened in that time frame? Was it all about the lawsuit or what were they doing besides this lawsuit in real business operational standpoints?

>> Yeah, I mean there, you know, there was there was a lot happening. Of course, the lawsuit was what everyone heard about in the public news. The lawsuit was what really, I think, actually, you know, prevented a lot of other companies from working of course together with Ripple. Uh people thought, okay, you know, maybe this is not something we want to go close to. But of course under the surface, you know, the the rails were being built and of course technology development and all of that stuff was still happening. Um, so there's definitely a lot of stuff and you know, not everything can be shared publicly. Um, but a lot of stuff was definitely going on. Um, and now you're starting to see, you know, with those different acquisitions, with those different partnerships, um, you're actually starting to see companies can actually now work um, together with

Ripple and can actually use the tech that they've been building out. So of course, you know, during those times, it was a great time to actually build the underlying infrastructure. The XRP ledger of course is one of the oldest blockchains um and it's you know one of the few blockchains that actually never um never stopped never gone down um so in terms of reliability uh it really is sort of one of the top candidates for uh institutions to use and ultimately um that's really what was happening during the during the lawsuit. Um but I think yeah you know like you said Ripple was uh one of the scapegoats I guess it was one of the biggest blockchains that they could really go after uh because there of course um you know was a team there unlike you know Bitcoin uh which you can't really actually you know I guess

they technically found who Satoshi was yesterday but I don't think anyone really believes that um or really um has much conviction um in that sort of finding. So yeah, really, you know, was a convenient scapegoat and I think ultimately um Ripple was able to uh you know, come out on the winning side and the community as well uh was you know very badly impacted of course by the lawsuit. um people going against the community and people really sort of you know having a lot of um bad sentiment towards them but ultimately you know uh they persevered and and really sort of came out on top and I think going forwards uh is really going to play an important role um in the future of DeFi and the future of uh of crypto and uh I

think the most important thing really to you know sort of emphasize is the power of the community uh you know the we work with a bunch of different blockchains and there really is no community that's sort of as powerful as the XRP army so to speak. Um, you know, they are sort of, you know, all over the world. Wherever we go, we go to Japan, we go to Korea America Europe uh there's always people in the XRP community there. Um, and people really, really, uh, love what the company's doing. And ultimately, I think a lot of times when you look at blockchains and the value, it really comes from the communities.

You know, you see a lot of blockchains that um, do better, whether it's in terms of token price or whether it's in terms of adoption, but it's because people know about them. um you know you look at coin market cap and you look at the top blockchains there it's really about um you know having those people who are actually holding the token backing it and ultimately those people who hold it also then will you know hopefully in the future uh use it right because those are people who actually know about it if people don't know about it hard for them to use it hard for it to actually get implemented and achieve the mass adoption so it's sort of like a uh self-fulfilling prophecy almost um I see it in my mind >> so with the swift stuff. I feel like Chainlink actually had Swift kind of

partnerships happening and then Ripple kind of hopped on and tried to make it theirs. What's your opinion or what's your perspective on the Swift dynamic as it pertains to the community? >> Yeah, I mean I think you know when you look at Swift I don't think Swift is necessarily the major um sort of you know thing at the moment. I think there are much bigger and broader goals aside from Swift. Of course, you know, Swift was sort of, you know, like maybe the original premise. Um, but I don't think that Swift is sort of the limiting factor at the moment. You know, there's so many more use cases. We do a lot of work, of course, in developer um, education, developer advocacy for these different blockchains. Um, and where we see the XRP ledger and Ripple really

standing out is really on the institutional side. Um, and really actually getting those uh, financial use cases built out on the XRPL. Uh we hosted a big hack with them, a couple actually last year. Nice. Um you know, one in Hong Kong um at Consensus of course and we hosted a big one together with them um in Singapore around Apex which is their annual developer conference and we see a ton of really cool use cases both you know being built out on the XLPL but also with RLUSD, their new stable coin uh which is already one of the most successful um stable coins out there. So yeah, there's a ton of uh really cool stuff that can be done beyond Swift and and I think you know um it doesn't necessarily have to center around that and of course there's

so many different things um you know that can be done and we've already seen built uh you know we have a lot of developers who are actually now raising funding for projects they're building on the XRPL um and I think there's a lot of renewed interest as well amongst investors for what's getting built um on on the XRP ledger and in part because of the work we've been doing to get developers to to the blockchain. you know, one one of the companies that has, you know, some striking similarities between, uh, similarities to Ripple is Canton. Um, this is another company that gets, you know, kind of this institutional perspective around it.

There's a lot of, you know, negative sentiment thrown at it because it's got this air of, um, maybe it's not so permissionless. It's it's not so open, not everyone can kind of come to it and see it. has this maybe this feel of consortium or institutions that are sort of running the chain rather than you know a chain for the people if you will. Um I'm I'm curious how you are seeing Canton if you're seeing Canton and Ripple as sort of a similar building with similar design choices. Um if so you know is this kind of a frenmy relationship like you know Canton's kind of rising through the ranks taking kind of a a play out of a the Ripple playbook. How how are you seeing Canton from inside of the Ripple army?

>> Really good question. I think we were actually chatting with some of the Canton team and it's interesting what they're building. I think they're obviously uh you know much newer than the XRP ledger and I don't really necessarily see it as being competition. I I just think the way that I see the whole of crypto, I've been in the space since 2013. First got into the space through Bitcoin mining. I think there's just so much blank space. I feel like everybody's uh sometimes we get obsessed with this PVP nature and maybe it's because we're more of in a bare market that everybody tries to pit each other off against each other but I don't think that anybody within Ripple really uh and also within the XRP army really sees them as much of a threat so to speak. I

think really it's about focusing on where are we going to actually develop in terms of bringing these institutions on chain and so I think you know Ripple obviously are very interesting because like Dom mentioned they've actually made huge inroads into these big institutional partnerships uh including actually making big acquisitions of their own and so you have hidden road which is now you know this big big uh prime broker it's very institutional which is now Ripple right and we have now Ripple custody as Well, so I think Ripple are taking more of this uh I I was going to say sort of Silicon Valley approach in some ways more just building a real company around it. Of course, it's Ripple Labs, right? Ripple is a for-profit corporation. It is not a

nonprofit. It's not a foundation in the same way as many others were founded which came afterwards. Obviously, you know, Jed Maleb founded Ripple and then also afterwards founded Stellar which then was a a not for-p profofit and a foundation. Ripple's goal is obviously in as a for-profit and its goal is really to actually grow grow itself a lot and it's making all these acquisitions. It's just fundamentally a different beast and I think it's actually quite unique in terms of the companies that are out there and that many of the labs were structured as a labs uh and then they had the foundation and the foundation were you know this whole structure is very different to what we see. So I think Ripple out there are doing something different. And I

also think that the way that they're tackling this institutional play is quite different like they have really really taken uh proceed by acquisition and also grow by acquisition approach and now they actually have this full stack of products where you have custody, you have this prime brokerage, you have at the same time you have wallet infrastructure and just across the board you have this full suite that then you can go and you can say to an institution look you can use Ripple suite of products and boom you know that's pretty much all that you need. I think that is a very very compelling proposition to especially institutions.

It's a complete minefield out there. You don't know who to go. You have to it's a patchwork of different products that you have to use. Whereas if you can go to Ripple and say, "Hey, I want to get into crypto and I want you to help me. I want you to deal with the accounting." They now have G Treasury as well, which they acquired. They can just deal with it all. >> Yeah, makes sense. But if I were to push back a little bit, the the you know peer-to-peer nature, PvP, the tribalistic nature is something that's you know intrinsic here. But I think the reason being is that you know the design choices of some of these chains. We have a common goal. It's ultimately to bring these assets and these financial mechanisms on chain. But the design choices of some of these chains are such

that it feels like we're just recreating the same system that we have in traditional finance. And so putting them on one chain, you know, isn't as good as maybe putting them on another chain with, you know, what some would consider the right design choices. Couple that with, you know, the fact that a lot of people kind of believe that, you know, it's one chain to rule them all. Like you said, Ripple's got this full suite of products. It's kind of all you need. You don't need to go to another chain. If that's the case, then it really is one dominant chain and the network effects are such that they will continue to compound and grow in terms of capital and and adoption after they get some of that initial uh that initial um you know uh kind of the initial spark that ultimately gets them to some form of

product market fit. Uh they will just continue to compound and grow. How you know how do we rationalize this? because uh ultimately I think we have this common goal. You know, we have this everything onchain mindset, but it you know it doesn't apply to to what people might consider some of the you know incorrect design choices uh and and the open composable environment that people like when they think about you know kind of this new financial system. Yeah. And I think in in so far as we're talking about the way that these different blockchains are built, I think that when you talk about institutions in particular, I think that actually the XRP ledger got a lot of flak and the team behind it got a lot of flack for actually never introducing smart

contracts in the sense that people typically think of them. And everybody for a number of years looked at the XRP ledger and said, "It's ancient tech, right? And it's like it's outdated. Why do you have this? There's no smart contract. Why are there no smart contracts?" And that actually turns out to be one of the big advantages now of the XRP ledger in that everything that you use, you know, you still have you have you can issue tokens on the XRP ledger, you can issue NFTts, you now have AMM on there, you have of course the uh the oldest decks, arguably the old oldest decks been operating for over a decade now and it just works and it's battle tested and I think when when institutions come they don't want to have to be dealing with smart contract

risk as well. And so I think look, you know, we we look at these different blockchains and I think I I I do think that there are going to be other block, you know, multiple blockchains. I think that, you know, I was on a a a talk together with David Schwarz who is CTO emeritus now of Ripple. But I think we all see the same thing and I think it's just where does each blockchain want to position itself and I think the XRP ledger as David said is really positioned to become the liquidity hub and so you can have different things happening on different chains ultimately if that liquidity comes back to the XRP ledger you know that's you know where it's really going to shine and I think we've seen this with the Ripple approach as well to actually deploying its products on other chains so RLUSD is

actually deployed on Ethereum right it's it didn't just deploy it on uh its own stable coin on the XL P ledger and it's all because it needs to tap into that liquidity where it is and then bring it back eventually to the XLP ledger. And so I think that you know when we're you know comparing these these two together I think when we're looking at Cantor or any other network I think ultimately it's about who is it positioned towards and Ripple from the very beginning and you know the XRP ledger from the very beginning were geared towards the blockchain for business. Uh and I think you know canonography is taking interesting steps towards that as well on the institutional side. Um, but I think, you know, there's there's enough room in the pie for everybody.

>> Yeah. Uh, Phil, something that you and Dom both kind of spoke about was this acquisition kind of aqua hire of several different, you know, revenue generating uh, off-chain entities, companies, and businesses that Ripple Labs has acquired. I think it's something that the broad kind of L1 space is starting to really tinker with. Right? You had these tokens launched worth billions of dollars. the actual business model of doing uh charging fees for block space for transaction fees has really been you know effectively commoditized or brought down significantly as we see kind of like the next iteration of the fast chain cheapest uh cheaper chain etc. And so you kind of have this interesting

setup where these foundations Polygon, Aptos Salana Suie Ripple etc. etc. All of these kind of chains have these really large war chests, but not a lot of like revenue generating activity uh themselves. And so they go out and they buy businesses and they implement their technology or they bring them onto their chain or they just kind of like in-house these businesses. Do you guys think this is something that's going to just accelerate? Um, how do you guys see this like transition from like blockchain that has this war chest, not a ton of like actual generating revenue generating activity on it, whether it be

through fees or through kind of other popular apps. moving into kind of like almost like acquisition vehicles based on the tokens that they've created that have been launched and that trade in the billions leveraging some of that capital to build businesses within that brand. How do you guys see that happening? What's that acceleration like? Um yeah, just curious how you're thinking about that. >> That's a really good question. It's something that I I've thought about a lot. I just look at it in terms of also the progression. When I first got into space in 2013 through mining, the only thing really you could do was just mine the stuff. you could fork your own, you could fork Bitcoin and maybe make your own fork. And so there was Litecoin, Primecoin, Feathercoin, all all those sorts of coins. Um, and then flash forwards to today, I think that we've

progressed. Whereas maybe a couple of years ago, especially around the ICOs, you're right, the business model was basically you launch a blockchain, you sell a token, and that's the way that really, you know, these things actually get a life of their own. Similar sort of thing around 2020, 2022. you now have this split of labs, foundations, uh, everybody gets some amount of tokens, they sell the tokens and then the idea around then was hopefully you can generate fees. Obviously, Ethereum was generating a lot of fees at the time. Um, and you know, now we've obviously seen this commoditization of block space, even of high quality block space as well. And so that's no longer the only thing. But at the same time, what we saw in particular over the past two years, which has never really happened before, is real protocols generating

insane amounts of free cash flow. You have the likes of Hyperlquid, you know, on the meme coins, you have ones like pumpf fun. Uh you have all these protocols which are actually throwing off a lot of cash. And where I think we're heading is towards this verticalization. I think that we are going to see product specific lines where you have this blockchain and maybe the blockchain is under the hood. uh maybe users never really experienced it. We have what obviously we're seeing with Robin Hood uh under the hood. Well, yeah, under the hood, so to speak, and what they're doing together with arbitrum and we have Ripple who are verticalizing this whole product product line. And I think ultimately when you look at crypto maturing into products that people actually want to take the

phrase that Y combinator of course used it's just where we're going to be heading especially because you now finally can actually generate a lot of money if you have a really good product and a really good product line. So I think to your point absolutely we're going to see more of this verticalization. I think we're going to see more of these uh foundations. A lot of foundations are not going to make it through this bare market. a lot of labs won't. And ultimately, it's going to be the ones that actually have products that people really want to use who are going to be the ones that make it through. Because not every foundation, especially in a bare market, foundations can't just sell tokens forever. Eventually, that red line starts to flatline and and die. And ultimately, you know, come to coming towards the end of this bare market, we're going to see

the strong ones who have really been able to build products that people actually want to use actually start to win. >> Yeah. Dom, I'm curious your take on this acquisition story as well. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I obviously agree with Phil. Um, and I think, you know, the growth by acquisition story is playing out with pretty much all the AI companies you look at as well. You know, Anthropic, Open AI, uh, Cognition, um, you know, all of these amazing companies, they are also acquiring a bunch of other companies too. And when you see their revenues doubling, tripling quarter on quarter, that's not only because they're doing better and more people are using AI. A lot of it is down to the fact that they're also buying other companies. is they raise a ton of money from the VCs, you know, just like how the blockchains might have

raised money from um investors in the early days and also retail um and then they use it to buy other companies and that revenue of course gets filtered up into the um into domain company and that's just you know that's just how business works. So I think it's uh you know it's it's a playbook that of course happens in in every industry. Facebook Meta, they bought Instagram in the early days and now Instagram's become huge. >> Um, it's become, you know, more popular than Facebook um, by a lot of metrics. And ultimately, I think we're going to see the same thing with the blockchains. You know, maybe one of the companies that Ripple's bought actually ends up becoming the company um, that sort of generates most of the revenue and actually generates most of the transactions and uses the blockchain the most. So, we'll see. But it's an

exciting time and I think we're at a very unique uh pivotal moment in history where we're going to start to really see the the winners speed ahead and and the other sort of you know 99% sort of wither away. Be >> before we let you guys go, could you just shout out maybe like one or two of the top projects that like you know who is bringing the most in terms of assets under management deployed that onto the Ripple ledger. Obviously the Ripple stable coin RLUSD you know is deployed on the Ripple ledger and then also abroad on you know several other chains but who are some of the other leading projects that are either building some sort of mechanism or rails um you know is there a purpose ecosystem like some of the larger instances of adoption on the Ripple ledger. Yeah, I think there

are some really really cool guys obviously we're what we're building obviously EA uh we have we're building uh on the XRP ledger and so we're going to have a very cool announcement that we'll be able to make at XRP Las Vegas uh which is going to be right at the end of this month. Um of course institutions are building uh we actually have the uh the largest uh XRP treasury company Evernorth who um have very publicly now said that they are going to be deploying capital in this ecosystem. Of course that is a huge huge move. Uh it's got over a billion dollars. Um and this is like you know massive for the ecosystem. Uh and at the same time you know in terms of institutions we have a big u big announcement that Ripple made together

with Aviva for example in order to u you know tokenize and explore tokenization there. And so I think look you know we've got RLUSD which is a huge uh huge stable coin now and growing very very rapidly on the XRP ledger. uh we have institutions who are coming as well uh and of course you know on the grassroots user level um you know we at EA are building um you know alongside everybody so I think you know especially with some of the amendments which are coming up towards the end of this year we're going to see a lot of exciting things come out for example the lending protocol which is going to be uh going live on the XRP ledger you know it's in amendment form at the moment um all of this stuff is you know setting up to be very very exciting >> quite a few more exciting ones too that

we can't announce on air but uh yeah >> might too bullish. Uh so we'll we'll save those uh keep those on the wraps for now. >> Do you are you guys all in XRP like full on like just all in? >> No, I mean we um obviously you know that that's one of the sort of you know high conviction themes we have. Um but we're also very bullish on Salana. Um they were one of our earliest partners back in the day as well. >> Um and you know they they I think they um they really go after a different um sort of target market. uh but they've you know done incredible work with developers and really cultivating that side of things. Um so the way that we see it is you know Ripple's really great on the institutional front but Salana's you know really great on uh the consumer

front and they have incredible apps built on the Salana blockchain like Pum Fun like Phil mentioned um that you know have a ton of users and generate a ton of fees and and revenues. Um so people are building real businesses on Salana too. Um but yeah, I think you know different strokes for different folks and you know some people are more interested in um institutions, some are more interested in consumer and um I think you know there are going to be a handful of blockchains that win. Um but you know a handful I don't think necessarily you know hundred you know all of the different hundred blockchains and the coin market cap you know have to win. Um and they won't either um but you know I think we'll see three to five big winners.

>> Do you own any Hyperlid Dom? >> Uh no actually no I don't. >> Why not? I um I mean I yeah I've never actually well I think now obviously it's run up a lot. Um and I think you know getting in now necessarily isn't the best riskreward. Um but you know back in the day when they were just coming up I should have actually looked into it more. Um but I I think you know that was just my mistake not not looking into it when I first heard about it. Um >> 10,000 hype in a dream Dom. That's all you need. 10,000 in a dream brother. >> Maybe if I can go back in time and uh and invest in them I would. Now, then you would have put more in XRP.

>> You know, all of all of the different tokens, right? When they're just fractions of cents, >> man. You guys really think XRP is going over $10? >> Oh, definitely. For sure. >> Dude, that's just not going to happen. >> Remember the remember the XRP to what was it? 500 >> 589. >> Was it 589? >> No, I think um yeah, I think it could go over a thousand definitely in the next uh four to five years. But wouldn't that like put it above the the market cap of >> you know you look at Bitcoin right you look at Bitcoin I mean why is Bitcoin valued more than you know most major companies out there when Bitcoin doesn't do anything I don't think you know when you look at crypto and you look at

market caps there isn't really like a you know there isn't really a ceiling to be honest and I I >> you know XRP would be 50 to$undred trillion dollar market cap at a thousand in in that range >> be what Let's reschedu the interview for 2030. Let's book 2030 on the calendar and then let's uh let's reync and look at the charts. >> Okay. And so should we put a bet on it then as well? >> Yeah, we can. I mean we we'll we'll think about a good way to structure the bet. Yeah, we can put some money or something. So, uh yeah. >> Oh, I'm just giving you some man.

Uh thanks guys for coming on. Uh hope you guys >> retired by then, actually. So, uh >> Right. Yeah. To the interview. >> Zero or Valhalla, lads. Where are we at today with with this old boy Ripple >> 135? Huh? >> All right. So, we're being for uh 700x. >> Well, I mean in crypto that's not that much, is it? 700x. We've uh we've seen much more. >> Well, we got to get all the bankers on this one then. I'll tell you that much. Dom Phil, thanks guys. Enjoy your day.

Have a great lift and uh wish you the best on this journey to hundred trillion dollar per XRP ledger. >> Cool. We'll see you in 2030. >> See you there. >> Strap in, brother. Take it easy, guys. >> Cheers. >> All righty, Rob. Um, yeah. Uh, 100 trillion XRP. Damn. I really wanted to get them to say something about Chain Link. They have such a rivalry. Um, what's his name? uh chain link God is so anti-Ripple and they go at it about Swift. But look, I think generally the whole acquisition thing is just going to accelerate. Like if you're a foundation

with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of tokens, you're going to just acquire businesses. I mean, why would you not, right? Like I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think they're doing that right. The only thing about XRP that still gets me is just like the way that it was started, man. The whole premine and the whole founders dumping, it's just hard to get it's hard to get behind that, man. But then Bitcoin people will call Ethereum a premine token as well. There's just different like levels on the spectrum, right? Like it's hard to know, you know, who's saying what, who's saying what. So, yeah.

>> I mean, >> I don't know, man. That was that was wild. This is comedy there for a little bit. I don't know how do these guys say with a ripple to $1,000 with a straight face. >> Trillion dollar market cap. >> That would be insane. >> I think that would be greater than the sum of the entire stock market. All of the companies added together. >> Yeah. I mean, wow. I mean, that would be like Yeah, that'd be like 50 Nvidas or something like that. >> Ex Yeah. All right. Um, quick commercial break. I'm going to let you and Brian have a great combo in the tokenization tower. Um, enjoy. And uh, yeah, maybe maybe you know he he's going to have a little bit of a different take than

Ripple to $1,000. >> All righty, man. I'll see you in a bit. Hey, hey hey.

down. Everything feel Get out of here. going

17 7th floor. >> We are live here with Brian Wong is a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur. We are in New York City. >> Yes, we are. >> We are in the Empire State Building. Welcome to the tokenization tower, Brian. >> Thanks for having me. >> Brian, you have a interesting background. A co-founder of several companies. Uh raised a ton of money for your consumer brands. What are you doing in in New York? I also saw that you're a digital nomad. I'm a digital nomad. I've been living in Brazil, Asia, Europe, all these other places for the longest. What are you doing in the city, man?

>> I live here now, actually. >> Okay, cool. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh I love it here. I've been here now technically 10 years, but on and off between San Francisco and New York. >> So, your So, your nomad careers came to an end. >> Nomading has now ended. Yes. Yes. >> What was your top spots, man? >> Uh I mean, I've always been all over, but I still love uh Mexico City. Okay. Um, Vancouver, which is where my family's from, where I was born. Uh, San Francisco, where I spent a lot of time building my last company, and then of course here in New York. >> Nice. >> New York is still the best city on earth.

>> Yeah, 100%. >> Tell us about your fund. Is it Asie Ventures? >> Ask Venture. Ask Ventures. >> Ask Ventures. Um, what's your thesis? How did you get this started? Um, and yeah, man, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Uh, well, ASKI, for those who are nerdy enough to remember, is the precursor to Unicode. It was American Standard Code for information interchange. It's like meant to kind of be like a filter for the nerds that come in and and pitch or that that we work with. But ASKI is a fund. It's a it's a boring tech fund is what we call it. Focuses on behindthe-scenes technologies, things that are powering other things but aren't really seen and are meant to be used daily, but you just have no idea that it's being used daily.

Like those kinds of things. So obviously a Plaid or what was a stripe, we obviously wish we would have been a part of those companies, but no one would have even known those were businesses and they're behind the scenes most of the time, right? you don't really see them. Uh they've built consumer brands on purpose to you know enact trust but most of it is behind the scenes. So we focus on those kinds of technologies picks and shovels. Um we have a unique strategy we're doing primarily early stage so things that are before revenue mainly that's the goal and then we're also so anything under 15 million valuation and anything over 15 billion is what we say. So people kind of pause for a second like what do you mean by that? Yeah we're doing a bifurcated fund. So we're focusing on two different asset classes that are on the way end of

the spectrum, but it's designed to create a shorter timeline as a fund. You know, most funds, as you know, right now in traditional VC has been returning 10 plus years. A lot of criticism. I'm 35 in a few days. I don't want to wait until I'm 50 before I have any kind of return. Yeah. Uh this fund is designed to return around five to seven years, which is super super super short. Um the one thing we're highlighting though in crypto and in blockchain so we do look at different categories crypto and blockchain is one of them is really exclusively in stable coins and the boring tech layer of stable coins which is actually the app layer. So when you think about it, there's there's really no innovation needed, right? There's a lot of trady things are just being mimicked in stablecoin, right? So think uh payday loans, right? For forex,

right? Uh uh business lending, uh you know, even neo banks for, you know, people who are historically not able to get bank accounts, right? Those kinds of things we love. Um and they're just app layer. People like to criticize the app layer, but I think the app layer is where the exits are going to happen because you have a lot of incumbents like the big banks that are not going to build, you know, a payday loan service on chain, right? And are going to be able to do this by just buying a company that's been building this for the last couple years maybe. So those kinds of quick flips, those base hits, those are the types of companies we're going after.

>> Yeah. So it's like a barbell approach, right? where it's like you've got the extremely early kind of preede seed companies and then these large kind of proven Goliath looking to have one more fund raise before they really >> well that's more in secondary so we're actually doing it to find these companies that may not have become like an anthropic or uh you know an open AI which by the way there are many right so a big bulk of capital is focused on those guys but there's still like you know 100 plus companies in the 10 billion to plus valuation some of them have not been doing so great at least perceived wise but their core fundamentals are great and there's a strategy behind that if we buy into the secondaries direct and we're able to build the relationship with the companies there's actually a direct

relationship to buying the companies we're funding in the early side right because these guys need to catch up they want to buy talent they want to buy good companies that have that innovation down path because the issue we're seeing is a lot of companies spent five six years building stuff right now which by the way in a month or two months god forbid AI could just build on a tech standpoint right So, it's the go to market mode that really is what these guys are highlighting because they're early and they might have come from these places. So, we're seeing a lot of founders come out of the banks that left, right, that are starting these things because they know how to do it. They can create a private credit product on chain in like two seconds and then get it in there.

So, that's the goal. And so I saw a tweet from um Chimamoth talking about I think there was like it was like the seven most valuable private companies and he was like I invested in two of these or or sorry I know I know five of these. I invested in three of them in the early stages and then I bought secondaries in two of them. And he was like basically going on to say that as an investor you clearly can't win everything. You can't get into every deal in the early stages. But the point was, as an investor, you also have to recognize when you did make a miss and you have to be willing to kind of put your ego aside and be able to buy these things at a much higher valuation than probably the first time that you saw the

deal or the first five times that you saw the deal. >> 100%. >> Do you agree with that? >> 100%. And that's why like secondary markets have been blowing up lately. But I would say again, I always run a different direction when I see a lot of people running another way, right? A lot of people are like, I want to get open AI, I want to get anthropic and d and these things are valued at insane. I mean 600 billion, 700 billion trillion dollars. It's crazy because you're thinking the public markets need to withstand uh you know sort of three major IPOs and everybody knows these companies at 23 trillion. So you're talking 9 to10 trillion dollars that were needed in this public market cycle of of these guys going public. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. Um and I just don't think the market will be able to hold

that and the market will also need to do that after the lockups end, right? And so I think there's again I'm advocating uh and you know the theme now of these not so not necessarily the top of mind guys but they're also building I mean I'll name some like Canva, Ripling, Gusto, right in the crypto space. You know Kraken obviously hasn't gone public yet but Kraken is you know one of these guys that we want to win. We we would we they have to win for us to to see another boom to the VC uh VC world that has bet so hard on these guys. recently obviously we had like the bit goes and the figures of the world go public but these these types of or figment these are the things that we uh need to have successful. So >> yeah, on the specific to digital assets investing

side, you mentioned kind of the NEO banking, the stable coin side. What is your thesis here? Like is it really just as simple as democratizing access to US dollar um savings and then the US dollar savings rate globally? Like is it really as simple as giving more people access to the dollar at scale? Is it a payments thing? Where you know, how are you thinking about these things from a thesis perspective? And then where are you seeing like like the business case for investing here? >> You're absolutely correct. So the access to the dollar is obviously a big one, but everybody knows this. We're looking a lot at again these kinds of uh products that are catered towards people who are historically not given a lot of these kinds of products and this comes from corridors uh that are emerging, right? So this could be between two

countries that are typically again not not really served, right? And it could be from corridors that are emerging and rapidly growing, right? like I this is not a company we're going to invest in, but there was a company that I recently met that does something specifically for Venezuela and the US, right? Let's just put it that way. And you know, again, if you really want to bet on that, you think about how Venezuela could actually in the future become a part of the US economy, right? Like what does that look like? >> And this is all completely apolitical statement, right? It's just like these are the things that are worth taking into account. So emerging markets are super interesting because the way they adopt these products are very different than we do, right? you and I much like if I were to use the comparison of

desktop PCs to laptops to smartphones and tablets, we went through that evolution. But in emerging markets, right, they went straight to the smartphone. They went straight to the tablet. They're digital natives, which is why live shopping, all sorts of different trends worked there really well. Live shopping, like the QVC evolution that we thought was going to happen, right, where we could just watch a live streamer, talk about stuff and buy from them. That's not happening as big in the US as it is in Asia, right? And there's certain markets in Asia where this has blown up. The same thing happens with money, right? When you look at their first access to a digital dollar, they're not getting credit cards. They never had credit cards. We were thinking this is normal for us. But for them, what is the concept of credit?

What is the concept of spending money? As you know, in a lot of these markets in Africa, for example, the the main currency has has been for a long time your phone credits. Literally, you could get paid in how many credits I could get for my phone. I don't know if you knew this, but it's like literally getting more minutes wasn't currency in these places for a very long time. So, currency is different in how they perceive it. So these markets are better because in my opinion the extreme exponential growth curve rates are more possible in these markets where adoption is a lot more likely by people that didn't have something that they had been used to before. Right. And that to me but we're borrowing from concepts that have worked in America and other developed countries where we know that that people will respond. Right.

>> Right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, something that the audience may not really understand as well or pick up, you know, intuitively is that the adoption of a lot of this tech is actually happening faster in in continents like Asia. >> 100%. Yeah. 100% 100%. It's because there's no preconceived notions. There isn't, oh, I I I used to use it this way, right? Like, you know, it's funny cuz like, you know, when we used to text with the with our like the numerical pad where we had to press the button, that was because we had to learn that and then jump in. But if the first thing you used was a full keyboard with your thumbs, right? It's that kind of thing is what we see with these regions.

>> Yeah. Interesting. >> Okay. Back to some of the uh macro stuff here. >> So, you think that those Open AI and anthropic rounds at the $380 billion valuation for anthropic now into the 700. Uh Open AAI just raised that 820 or 850 billion. You think those are just drastically overvalued and that the market won't be able to kind of manage the float on IPO? I'm not saying they're overvalued. I'm just saying that the markets need to be able to uh provide the liquidity uh for the people that have been waiting quite some time for that. Right? And we saw recently that that cap table published of OpenAI and the early investors and all that. Go Ashton Kutcher. Uh clearly he did very well. Uh and Gaio Siri. But the thing is there's this um there's this dynamic

that I'm observing around liquidity and this has really been the complaint for a very long time with ventures that we're waiting for liquidity. So these three events are a big deal, right? Because they will return a lot of liquidity to the markets. However, uh what I'm saying is there are uh companies that are probably not as over not no sorry that don't require that kind of liquidity event that will still IPO that will do well that you can still play in right um I think what's happening is because of that this crazy I just had this conversation earlier today I loved it this this crazy need for energy this crazy need for capital uh to buy chips is really only important if we believe that the outcomes that are a result of these inputs so inputs outputs the outputs actually matter, right? Right now, there's still a big question mark,

right? We know AI is incredible. >> Are the outputs really giving us that commercial use case that people see that will warrant those valuations? So, that's where we we do the calculations on valuations. Like I I don't know the answer to that question, right? Because it's like the jokes you see on on online are always like, you know, the amount of lakes we've drained just to have people make cat videos. What is that going to to actually mean in the long run? And the beauty of markets is it will always figure itself out and the markets will will will rationalize this, right? How much commercial output is coming accreatively to the rest of the world that's adding real value to yours and mine my's lives that actually lead to more commerce as a result of of of this crazy equation we're dealing with here because the inputs are really energy and

chips, right? Yeah. >> And then the reason why this is happening and people probably know this or don't is that the investors that are already in of course have an interest in telling you about how pervasive AI is going to be. everything's going to be AI, AI, AI. And I do believe a lot of things will be AI, AI, and like with anything pendulum shifting. Um, everything will shift over, try to come back, but usually in the world and human progress, what's beauty about about our race is that it'll always bounce back just a little bit ahead of where that equilibrium was before, right? If you think about it, like the internet did that, right? It's not like everybody, you know, every like, oh my god, when the internet came out, everybody was losing their their minds, right? But like, but of course, everything kind of

snapped back here. We're snapping back there. But on the other hand, there's a lot of other things happening. I don't know if you knew this, but record vinyl record sales hit a like literally a record, pun intended, last year, right? It surpassed CD sales because CDs were dying anyway. But like there's a lot of analog stuff that's happening right now that's like showing how the world will always have these these kind of snapbacks, these balancing acts. And I know it'll bounce back here, but how much of that hop ends up happening net net after everything calms down, who knows? And that's the exciting part about being a more long-term thinking investor. >> Yeah, man. I mean, we're seeing a return to in-person experiences.

>> 100%. >> Like these kind of gated exclusive events, in-person face-toface >> clubs have never been hotter, right? Like like like members clubs, right? You you've heard all the new ones. Shar go like zezys, all these. >> Shargo is great. >> Exactly. Yeah. Because And then there's now clubs that are starting to lock your phone up, right? Like like Sani bungalows, right? So these guys are Yeah. these things are are starting to create a new dynamic where I think the luxury is to not need to be connected and tied to these things. But again, like I don't want to sound like a lite.

These things will always be around and they will always create a lot of progress. Um it's just where does it snap back uh just a little bit ahead of where it was before. >> Yeah. And I mean the question of what are we producing for all of this consumption of ships of energy as you say that you know there's e Elon's posting like some weird form of hentai on X as a means to like you know trigger uh growth. >> I don't think people understand though the the scale. It's funny like we're it's I don't know if people pause to just think okay >> about the the trillions right like and and you you know remember when Instagram got acquired for a billion everyone thought that was that was the equivalent of like $30 trillion today it just felt like a lot of money and that wasn't that

long ago right and when you think about it >> we're just not fully grasping I think most us mere mortals are grasping just how much money is being moved back and forth on these things right meanwhile we're fighting on 5 10 million venture rounds 20 million dollar venture rounds which now kind of sound like a joke and then meanwhile there's like you know couple hundred billion being raised on a regular just to fund these chips. So this the scale is a very different conversation. >> Yeah the scale of the average seed round >> correct >> in AI and in AI venture has just gone astronomically large >> and the expectations are actually squeezing out those who are trying to innovate. Let me explain why. Because of cursor, the expectation is now you need

to do 100 million in a year basically, right? Like it's crazy. And and what if your AI company doesn't do that, right? Like what if you do 20 million in a year? You should be proud of yourself, but that's not enough. I just met with a founder a couple days ago, exited to another AI company. I invested in him a few years ago. Um and he was like, "My gosh, we what world is doing 20 million in in AR like a bad thing?" Yeah. But meanwhile, they did burn 32 million to get the 20 million, but that's not like that crazy bad, right? But like it the bar has been set so damn high though and this is the worry. the use cases now that people are going for are going to, you know, sort of try to whittle to that like where's the fast money, right,

which is the vibe coding, the whatever seems to be trendy. But I want to look for long-term gains. Which is why another thesis I did post and I do want to share with this with the audience is the fact that I believe that services businesses, believe it or not, which have been poo pooed by VCs for quite a long time, right? Like entirely entirely like don't do services. >> Yes. >> Is making a comeback. >> Okay. >> But the the perspective is different, right? I don't know if you got saw the YC memo that was kind of leaked. was like about what they're looking at now and they they do talk about this with just the the return of services but really rather than providing individual services you are the service okay >> if that makes sense so you're literally like like an Accenture and a Mackenzie

and a Bane because they're so damn big they're doing everything for the clients when they come in and it costs a lot of money right but when you are a startup that has let's say I'll give you an example let's say you're one of the companies we invested in was is called Nexa they do agentic autocad so it's a 3D software for construction right um historically it was like hey log in and do your thing use the SAS software and we'll kind of train you and whatever one time and hope to god that you end up knowing how to use it and you keep using it. Right? That that's the premise of of SAS. >> But now because of Agentic I can actually provide you the service of walking you through it, right? Doing the actual work for you and it's just as automated as it was before. So this

whole army of consultants that you would have needed doesn't need to be there and the cost basis is not the same. So you actually are able to provide that service. So I think if there's a vertically oriented business again could also be in stable coins. Let's say again you're creating a a genetic layer for for stable coin transactions to to to clear them for risk or whatever it is for small businesses right like for fraud and you run it the whole thing just for them the banking layer including accounting tax blah blah blah and it's all in one service that's like bre stable coins with a service agent built in which could be what airbor ends up doing right when they when they end up rolling out their products to a wider uh customer base is massive right so the expectation now is that services will

make that comeback but it'll just look differently than what were trying to avoid before as VCs, >> right? Because the frame of thought around services was scale your offering, scale your services, scale your team, you know, decrease margins. >> Well, it's linear growth. Yeah. But that's been broken now. >> Of course, because there are things you can, you know, again, the agentic orchestration, right? Again, I think the biggest profit margin companies will be agents that help you put together agents, right? like a network your network of agents cuz most businesses let's be honest we think America well we're in a bubble right like you have to admit right we're here in New York and there people in San Francisco and LA we think our commerce sort of behavior at etiquette is the same as the rest of the

country no there are people who are busy building companies that are you know doing construction doing you know garbage disposal doing carpentry factories industries they don't have that time right so if you orchestrate that those agents for them they they they are able to do it without even thinking. And this is also where we then creep into promptless, which is another big area that we're looking at as well as a firm. What are things where the prompts are not required anymore, where the is prompting you? It's a big deal. And this closed into crypto land. Open Clause really shifted that too because it went from this kind of a lot of the previous iterations of LLM or just any sort of chat flow was um very kind of like uh descriptive and like giving you a uh you know you have to tell it what

you need it to do versus like uh prescriptive like here's what you could do and like do you want me to do that for you? that that flip is >> once you kind of experience that flip in terms of your usage, it's you can't go back to what you were doing previously with the basic >> LLM. But commerce like we don't scale agendic commerce if I have to tell it to buy things every time. >> Right. Exactly. >> Agenda commerce only grows if it's buying for me. Obviously in trading this has been the case for a very long time with just you know quant firms and algo firms. But when you think about consumers and their access to buying products Yeah. I had a friend again yesterday at dinner. We just talked about it. He has agents doing replenishing of homeg goods. It's that simple, right? That that's that's very

simple. Sounds innocent. >> Yeah. >> But it's a big deal, right? And the thing is without it needing to prompt you and buying things and then using obviously the ramifications here using stable coins to transact and to buy things for us is the wave of the future. And I do believe that that's a big big area we should be focusing on. >> Yeah. So let's get into this prompt uh >> kind of investment thesis. So, we've had this era of LLMs that have been prompt first, right? You >> you you are specializing in the ability to prompt, correct? >> Such that you're trying to optimize for the correct result with the least amount of back and forth. Yes. And headache.

Um, and for so long we had just like, no, that no, that's not no like it's just this constant kind of battle. And so promptless >> talk like talk me through the the functionality here. What does that actually look like in practice kind of let's understand that and then let's get into some of the thesis on the investing side. >> So Anamoka created a product called anamoka minds recently. Not a lot of people know about it. It is their effective version of prompt list where you can put together a lot of agents that work together and agentic orchestration is the equivalent of prompt list in v1. But I'm going to take it a step further. It's really funny though that as human beings we have built this incredible AI and the only way we can really communicate with it is through these lines of of English which

as you think about it language is also very I just be very philosophical for a second it's a very inefficient way to communicate right think about it right like me is basically a bunch of fleshy you know bones and cartilage in our mouth making vibrations to communicate with you if you think about it we talked about this you and me are doing this it's going to take us like 30 minutes to communicate something that a computer could communicate theoretically they can do like that, right? So my belief is where the best prompt list is having the best access to the right data sources at the right time, right? So setting up your your data so that like when you set up your open claw, right? You obviously want to make sure that it's pretty like you know guarded, right? Like it's in one little box literally, but you're

feeding that box with things like you have your file and directory structure in a way that you think you know OpenCloud will able to understand and be able to parse through and then and then be able to do the things you want it to do. So if you think about it, it was the setup of the data of what it's reading through of it what it's being trained through that is making it do what you want it to do without it prompting you or what without you prompting it or it it prompting you right and then of course you teaching it that you know if there are moments where you need to ask me for clarity you should be right but that's really where I think the future lies and that's why data or these data cleanups data dictionary data consulting businesses are still so powerful and

also where your sovereignty comes from with that data is is is key Because once we get into prompt lists, how clean that data is, how comprehensive it is, right? How much of it you own, how much of it you can use is going to be the key and will continue to be a massive part of the business. Like it is own like again it's the LLM, but it's almost like the LLM was trained on the patterns, right, which is what you know the GPTs were on before. The new patterns still come from the same data sources, but you need it accessible so that when it's trained already, now it's able to do the prompting again back to you. And I think we have to also get our minds out of this equation that we think is like cause and effect. Me give it something and it gives me something back, right?

When you think of agents having multiple work streams now is just like the world, right? It's not like I asked the world for one thing and one thing only. There's a lot of think processes happen like just getting your Chipotle burrito. A lot of processes already happened before you came and prompted it. So when you think of your life as that where there's a lot of processes that are already running and then that prompt was a result of all those things that's how you think about the the kind of agentic nonprompt world and evolve from it but >> I also believe there's a lot too much going on you can over complicate it right and I think trying to making sure that you only kind of build in your own life that hierarchy of things that you know can be impacted and then yet not

using it as a crutch is the reminder I give to younger people because one thing that you and I I I hope you're not that much younger than me then then I feel bad but the idea of like you know if you don't if you don't use your own mind to initiate thoughts anymore you actually lose your only reason for existence as a human being like initiating true clean pure uninfluenced thoughts is really quite rare and it is really the essence of being human and I think we should try our best to preserve. >> Yeah. Wow. question on kind of like how you have people thinking about prompting and then prompt list transition. Yes.

How do I go from like a uh a habitual execution of a prompt to get a result to operating now in a more promptless world? Like what does that transition end up looking like for like the end user? >> We'll find uh well in my world it would be finding businesses that don't want to be bothered with the idea of needing to prompt all the time, right? So when you think about it, there is a company we're looking at that is mainly doing promptless executions of experiments of growth and marketing just for small to mediumsiz businesses. So you think about lawyers, you know, accountants, you know, sort of practices like you could even have like a dry dry cleaner, whatever it is, but what are things that they're doing, but they don't have the time again, they don't have the time to to think of the prompt. They don't want

to bother learning how to prompt, right? That's great. Within your own business, however, there are things that are similar. What are processes that just should be automated, that should be constantly analyzed, right? This could be employee satisfaction. This could be treasury management. It could be taxes and expenses. These things that actually as a CEO, because I was a CEO for like 10 years, like what are things that you're constantly needing to think in the back of your mind that you really don't need to be consciously thinking of and that you wish you had someone doing? Those are the things that you you you regularly want to have this promptless model working off of, right? And again, this will become more popular. Again, mark my words. I do believe both perplexity computer and then cloud work co-work eventually all these things are going to have promptless models that are

running in the background that are create that are again working on tasks that you've you've given it as an ongoing thing and then it essentially being a human being that can improve, give you suggestions, you can talk to it, that kind of thing. >> Yeah. And when people are using these kind of more promptless models, are you are you seeing a world where there's kind of like parallel workflows happening on for all parts of someone's kind of like let's just let's just focus on on the business side like is this like a set it and forget it like type of thing? Just like talk to me about how you actually like give us some concrete examples here. Well, there's remember the last time you let your your AI just run free and then and then not monitor

for a bit. It's disastrous, right? Because this thing still is is a little bit like a I would say it's still like a c like an undergrad is really the the you know you think of an undergrad lot of knowledge execution poor right like still like I gota I got to check in with my prof, right? Um tangible examples in the businesses where you're running this stuff. I I think we're we need to overcome this trust gap which still exists with these models where I've tried many times to be super clear in making sure that everything's set up the way it is but they it will break. It will just and then needs you to clarify and step in which >> sometimes the the sort of conspiracy theory is this is built by design so that we do have this natural uh you know

sort of workflow where we're used to checking in right because we just let things run right now. I don't think these AI companies will ever admit that these things are uh you know going to work without error right and then unfortunately if this starts to automate things that where errors do create catastrophes like air traffic control god forbid we don't want these things to keep so I think that that the the relationship we have with these machines where we have to check in once in a while is still pretty important right so again down to the business layer if it's employee satisfaction if it's checking in with with goals right and checking on performance >> um what if it calculates it's bonus is wrong. What if it looks at progress and and counts something that wasn't counted, right? And people naturally want to game the system. So, you do want

to be a part of it. So, that again, you know, the human input that that actually matters, which is knowing when people are trying to trick the system uh really really really counts here, right? So it unfortunately goes back to human fundamentals where where will there be gaming of the system uh and how do you prevent that from happening through check-ins and ultimately why I think again the valuable skills that will still be required in a land is still discretion ethics morals logical thinking and creative thinking those are the things and then questioning right those are the things that will always continue to remain valuable in the in this in this growth area >> yeah I think it's fair to say that if you think about things in this lens right with just the actual state of uh how these tools can be used. There's,

you know, we're kind of we're kind of calling them an undergrad here, but it's going to get to a postgrad and it's going to get to an expert level. It will. But even still, I feel that it's accurate to say that um the AI is going to take all of these jobs claim is still very very far-fetched in the sense that I don't view it as a replacement of someone as much as I view it as an amplifier of someone's already existing expertise or skills. Y >> do you agree with that? >> I completely agree with you. And the the the moat here is people still don't realize that AGI is like a decade away, right? Like some people are still are saying it could be shorter but latest, you know, it could be 10 20 years actually even, right? And but what do

they want us to think? They want us to think that it's closer. They want us to think we got to pour in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars more to keep this kind of, you know, thing going, right? And so again, the that AGI is a replacement of critical thinking and thought, which is really where we're what I just said is pretty important for us. Now, I don't want to be in 10 years like eating my words and be like, "Oh god, like I'm useless now. I'm basically like a piece of piece of flesh that's just roaming around on the earth." But ultimately, that is what will preserve that important part. And then like again, with every crazy prediction that was made, oh, you know, the internet will you we no one need to travel anymore, right? Cuz we just stream video. It's like no, people are still

flying around like this. This will never be replaced. And then the trust factor is one thing I will I will point out. Trust is built through in person, right? There's it's a very very untouchable kind of thing about human beings that you cannot really explain. That will always be needed. And so I think there's going to be that luxury of like how did I build my relationship with you before, right? And so there's a lot of people that I've known for like 10 15 years that our trust actually seems to be compounded more by the fact that there's so much reliance on this virtual connect that the fact that we had in person experiences before is actually compounded. It's making our relationships even stronger cuz now I go, "Oh wow, this person actually

shared, you know, I broke bread with them. We spent a lot of time together." even it was literally just like meetings in person because we were in an office back in the day because we did our office actually used to be um one of my last companies was was a couple blocks from here >> was um you know about that you know just seeing that person and and and I think that it's so simple >> but you can't look at an AI in the eye >> no >> not going to happen >> so then if we're if we're you know of the understanding and agreement there what would you recommend to people who are watching this who want to get more from their people that want who have folks in a variety of different parts of their company or who who have uh or who

are investors who want to get more from their founders. Like when it comes to actual like implementation of these tools just like generally curious how you're thinking about like the progression that you're seeing founders, companies, staff, employees undergo that is like the most you know logical and thoughtful progression in using these tools. >> Easy. So obviously offer to subsidize and fund you know all the subscriptions that's one right doesn't matter which one just go nuts try them have fun number two is actually a gentic day right so get a lot of my companies I've seen them do this where we spent a whole day build your own agents have them work with each other have a task that's an outcome and then give it a whirl right this is the equivalent of back in the

day when it was like build an app right was like go and just do an app or build a website just do something just so you can test it feel it understand it does it need to be a part of your everyday life. No. Right. But of course, this at least gives them that taste and then a lot of ideas will come out of it. The other thing is having the engineers and the non-engineers interact on these things, right? So, hackathons where they work together for a minute mini business outcome. That way, the crazy stuff that the engineering team is starting to to touch and and I can confidently tell you 100% of engineers right now, I can yeah, hands down 100% are using AI to write code and they're really just proofreading it, right? And QAing it. So to me it is really about accepting that

it is inevitable, right? But making sure that people don't use it while being lazy and then having a crutch for it, right? But then also realizing that quantity is not the name of the game, right? Right. Like Claude research super good at giving you this entire list of stuff, right? But you still have to filter through it. You still have to use your brain. Don't use it as a crutch. Right. But it's it really is this soft thing and as a call to to arms for all humans is don't that that really kind of you know and your your devil and your angel and your should be like oh no just use the claw to check it or just use claw to do to prompt the checking of the checking. Don't check the checking. You should do the checking right because at least you you using your brain there

right? But you you've had to like hey just clean it up for me like no you clean it up right but so in the moment use your brain for something >> right? It it's the the meta the meta use case of it is really dangerous because then we become literally like an idiocracy. Like it I I worry that we we all become vegetables because we're not it's it's atrophy. It's it's it's it's neural atrophy. >> Really, >> you know, if we don't use our brains, think about it. >> When you combine that with the consumption of short form content, >> oh, we're all just brain rotting. But that's literally the definition. But but even this like mental math >> Yeah. Okay.

>> Let's just use that as example. >> Sure. the ability for people to do mental math has like declined drastically, right? Since obviously iPhone calculators and just us not why would I need a calculator? I could just do whatever, right? But >> there's a reason why mental math and I don't want to make this a race thing, but why as an Asian we were like drilled to to I know I'm sorry we memorized everything mental math wise. I know. But we there's a real >> dude I'm so dead. It was Asians and the Indians. I would be I would be like in the 90s 89 92 range and then you guys would come in at like 97 every time and it'd be like what the going on?

>> Well, the mental math was actually not about route memorization which is what I thought it was and I hate it. I resisted it so much for my parents. It was actually being able to understand why having that part of your sort of daily t. So when you're doing a math equation on a daily uh thing like like tips simple things right or like oh I'm calculating a few days out or whatever dividing it's always part of something grander. So if you can shorten or make a heristic of one part of it you then become just more efficient and you you understand that that piece is is something that you you actually had to do the actual mental work on. So I think understanding how the sausage is made in that way is really still important. So that's why I think you know having actually most of your employees take a

basics of LLMs and understanding how you know GPTs are trained models. Literally they're trained from previous you know generative uh ideas. That's what GP stands for. That was something that people should understand because if you don't then you you don't realize everything will revert to a mean until AGI completely comes out. Right? So reversion to the mean is is is is is terrifying because then a lot of the ideas and concepts end up being kind of around that same thing that was based on popularism. And we're trying to avoid popularism in the first place. And then also you have to understand these models were trained to please you, right?

They're trained to make you feel good, right? So now we have people who have no idea of actual proper constructive criticism, right? because the guy that I'm talking to or the gal or whatever the gender is of the person I'm speaking to on on on my chat GBT is never going to argue with me or tell me straight up that I'm being dumb. >> And I think that's why we need to bring back bullying. I'm kidding. But like yeah. Um okay. So on the LLM psychosis point, are are you actually worried about that? Right. this idea that you get this psychosis from that grandiose treatment from these LLMs and kind of uh always being told you're right, you know, all the way to the point that I've seen tweets that are like your your your

worst like your worst enemy is a narcissist and is getting told on Shatbt right now that they are so right and that they're perfect or something like this psychosis of treatment from these programs. How bad is it? >> I think it depends on the maturity of the individual, right? And then how much of the world they understood or how much they developed in a world that was preai, right? And like you and I, we had a world where we do expect, you know, healthy discourse, varying opinions, different kinds of discussions that are part of ultimately informing you, right?

The reason why I have these discussions with people who disagree with me is because I want to learn, right? not because I want to get into a fight, you know, or just be combative. And so I think that's the issue is like if the ultimate objective is to learn u then that's really great, but these AIs are not designed to do that. They're designed to make you happier because that way you keep using it more and they get more money as a result of your usage, right? And so this to me, I mean, obviously usage is not tied to the amount of money you're paying it, but you get what I mean. It's it's really this drug. It really al always comes down to that, right? what kind of it what component of that digital service are we using that gives us that that dopamine hit right and then on Instagram

of course it was the the likes it was the comments it was the friend requests it was just the the fact that you felt like you were loved or that people paid attention to you where default you couldn't dislike anything you just like everything it was always about positive right so we all know this dopamine hit comes from that right so I think we just have to be conscious of it and that's why I think companies and so this is another thing that we've been looking at and we actually invested in a company we haven't disclosed yet that does AI ethics right so this idea of deep fake detection, right? Understanding if this is actually biased, if the output of the AI is biased, right? Like if it's it's it's discriminating because the people that were prompting it, we're discriminatory in the first place, but

now we're degree removed away from it, right? That like, you know, obviously I prefer this kinds of this kind of employee, but now and there are AI by the way, they're screening employees now or prospective employees and hiring processes. these kind of biases, we have to systematically go in unearth these issues before they get too crazy because then everything's going to shift slowly and slowly. It's frog in the pot. We will all get boiled alive >> if we don't try to stop these things from getting too far cuz we will not realize it once it's gone all the way out here. The concept of an Overton window, I'm sure you might have heard of that concept. Maybe people know it. But the fact is we live in a shifted overton window now because there's been a lot of extreme conversations about extreme things that now seem normal to talk

about, right? And yet, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we would have never talked about that. We would have never fathomemed that kind of conversation publicly. >> That is the that is the thesis >> of many different products and companies that have grown substantially. Yes. Anything from like a hyperlquid that offers 24/7 trading because the amount of headlines are just absurd now all the way to like an AI ethics company because of bias response based on traumatic life events from a individual and anything in between. It's just this over window has shifted. Uh I saw a funding round for a NSFWI uh protocol yesterday. uh you can take a

photo of yourself naked, put it on there, and then you can then go and basically pimp yourself out uh in the AI world as like an emoticon uh type of thing. Are you worried that people aren't having as much sex because of AI? Like, >> well, we do know that the fertility uh it's not fertility, but the birth rates in certain Asian countries are declining. You have Singapore paying couples to basically have kids. uh the uh fertility and and birth rate issues are real, right? Because if we stop, you know, having next generations, the entire society is messed up, right? So, there's a lot of other things that I don't even understand that will happen.

Go ask an economist, I'm sure, or more more so a sociologist. But these kinds of things are, you know, pretty pretty scary. I also think that we have still this this uh uh extreme end of of the super rich and the unfortunately not so super rich folks where uh if you have too much money and you have too much knowledge about this kind of thing, you're actually disincentivized to have kids because the world you're bringing them into may not be the most ideal for you and what you want for them. And then those on the other end know that they need the extra hands, the extra pair of feet, and so they want to have more kids as a result of that. So I think we're going to have this, you know, sort of divide. I don't know what that's going to look like. Lower population of those

that are on the upper ends of society and then on the other side of society, you have a lot of people but not a lot of enablement. And that's why I I mean this has become a very philosophical conversation, which I love, by the way, is the fact that education and really using our minds to rethink the education model is still pretty real, right? We we had the alt school. Uh we had the adastras of the world, but that that wasn't a full experiment that that went through as if you recall them. This was Elon's school in in in the Bay Area was shut down. The thing is no one's really sat down and said, "Hey, this industrialized educational thinking that we've really done like this this elementary school, middle school, high school model was for the industrial revolution, right? It was to put people

through a conveyor belt like we were doing our products." And we're still thinking the same way. We're still assuming we just shove kids in a school where all the professors have actually never held a real job. No offense uh to professors. Still love you guys. But like a lot of them have not actually held real jobs in the real world that are teaching kids about the real world. And there are schools that are better now that are having, you know, actual faculty that came out of the real world that I think is still required. But these that the curriculum is not catching up, right? They're learning on their own. That's why people want to drop out. And that's for some reason now that's become a mark of of like, you know, like a bragging right that I dropped out. Exactly. because it wasn't serving you. And I think this system is

not serving a lot of kids that have that critical thinking that do know that by the time you're finished learning, right? This the stuff you're learning is not even relevant to what the world is like after four years. Like four years is is a lifetime. An absolute lifetime. >> So, do you have kids? >> No. >> Do you want kids? >> Of course. >> Will you put your kids in in public school? >> Probably not. >> Will you homeschool them? >> Probably. Yeah. Really? >> Yeah. I I would find a a school that, you know, I' I've, you know, I I know of and have friends that have sent their kids to schools that I've looked at that I think would be great. Now, again, I'd have to be a billionaire to send them to these kids. So, to these kids to this this school, so I have to work a lot

harder. >> Couple more investments, man. >> A couple more investments. Yeah. But that that is the that is I'm not quite sure actually. It's really tough because I would rather like I have a niece who's who's turning six >> and you know, she's got uh an incredible reading comprehension now. I don't know if you have kids or nieces. Are you or nephews? Are you? Yeah, >> I am. I'm 26. You're okay. So, you're talking. The thing is >> they're growing up much faster than we did, right? Like, and they're maturing much faster than we did because reality of the world is much more upfront, right? Like when we were younger, because we didn't have that that right in front of our faces through screens, right? We had to go and actually see it, right? Mom and dad took you to somewhere to see it, right? If you're at home, it

wasn't here. Now reality is so close in proximity uh they know they need to grow up faster. This has happened subconsciously, right? And this is not just me observing. This is a well doumented thing. And because that's happening, again, I don't know what the ramifications are for the kids later on, right? Because now there was no period of innocent play. And we all know that play is a great way to develop your critical thinking, right? Unstructured problems come from play. a structured problem of oh barrels of oil are now over $100 because of a war is a structured problem that is placed in front of you that now you are faced with some type of thing you need to try to come up with a solution for obviously not to the 5-year-old but that is not a result of play.

>> No. >> Uh and so I I do think we we're losing play. We're losing the sense of fun. >> Yeah. >> Um you know again I'm not trying to all these crazy contra conspiracy theories but there was this you know there's been a theory for a while that the world ended in 2012. I don't know if you saw this and then we now live in the matrix. Obviously, I don't believe that. But I do believe that there is there was a shift. >> It could have been technological, could have been collective neurosur I think it's neurosis of this idea that we are no longer having agency over our thoughts because we are so plugged into this non-stop information stream that the moment of pause just having 5 minutes to meditate. So I meditate daily but I only really can afford 5 to 10 minutes but that is more than enough

according to my therapist. But the idea is because you can create this peace and calm for your your brain to rest for the thoughts to rest. Much like how you can't weightlift you know non-stop you have to give yourself breaks hit as high intensity as it is still has rest but we are not giving ourselves those intervals to rest >> not our brains >> our brains and it will fry our circuits and it's happening already. That's why the number of people that need therapy or have like you know anti-depressants or drugs in general is not a result of uh I think anything but the fact that our brains are being fried by the just everything being non-stop. So I think slow and and and not I'd say like slow and and dedicated is is what is important for us right now. And we need

to be disciplined in that regard and I unfortunately do not think that when you're young and you're impressionable and you don't understand a world that was before this you have that discipline. >> Yeah. >> That's the fear. Yeah, man. Whenever I find myself in that state, I often just try to go to a place where I can surf. >> And you have that you have that place of peace. And I think I urge everybody to find >> those moments, those places of peace. You don't have to be working 20 hours a day. In fact, in our fund, again, not to do another promo, but in our fund, we actually pay for people's gym memberships and their therapy sessions if they haven't done it before, right?

So, the idea is to turn them on to it, right? And we want a sustainable founder, >> not one that is trying to burn the candle from both ends. And I learned this personally the hard way, right? I was a founder, like I mentioned, uh, two companies. And, you know, it was it was I was destroying my body. And that's not sustainable. And what for, right? Like, exactly. There was no actual outcome, even financial. Great. But you're trying to You don't want to have all the money in the world and not have the body to enjoy it in, right? Right? And people would always tell you is if I if I gave you $10 million today, but the only requirement is you wouldn't wake up tomorrow morning, >> right?

>> You would never take that 10 million. You want to wake up tomorrow morning, right? >> Sure. >> And so that tells you how much your your morning is worth. >> Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Wong, what a conversation. Got quite philosophical there. Thanks for coming into the studio, guys. We'll be right back. Hell yeah. Hey,

hey hey. You know I'm here. Heat. Heat. Hell yeah.

Hey, hey hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

Get out of here. Heat. Heat. N. Hell yeah.

Heat. Heat. Going

70 7th floor. All righty, guys. Saraphim, welcome to the tokenization tower, man. >> What's up, mate? How you doing? >> I think you have the best uh outfits in all of crypto. >> Best or worst one of a depends who's who's asking that. >> Yeah. >> So, you're in New York for a couple weeks, couple months. >> Well, it's supposed to be two weeks. I'm based in Dubai and then it got bombed.

So uh >> that became a bit longer. >> That happened. I forgot about any updates there. Are you able to go back anytime soon or no? >> Uh, should I? I don't know. I'm actually considering relocating to Singapore, so we'll see. >> Bombs are okay, I guess, but I don't know. >> Not your cup of tea, though. >> Not my cup of tea, though. >> Well, congrats on the new role. Um, Salana is lucky to have you. I know you had some good tenure at Athena. I want to talk about that a bit. I want to talk about Salana a bit. You're doing some interesting yield acquisition stuff over there. First and foremost, man, you put out this crazy tweet saying that Ethereum is cooked, that the Ethereum Foundation is cooked, and this was like your introduction to Salana. Um, what was going through your head when you

started that war there on Twitter? >> Not much, apparently. I got a lot I got into a lot of trouble back then, but but to be fair, um, yeah, I thought I just wanted to grab attention really. That's just a good way to start things. And I think the ideal way to do business in my mind is you catch attention even if it pisses people off and then you channel it into actual business. >> Yeah. >> That was an attempt to do it. >> I don't hate Ethereum people. >> No. >> Um I don't know what the they're doing all day but you know like >> I don't hate them.

>> So >> this guy. So, we had um Logan Jester Stremsky uh the frictionless capital co-founder um on the show yesterday talking to him about Hyperlquid versus Salana >> um and just kind of talking about the landscape of trading being the core driver of value on blockchains really that execution and trading is where all the value is happening and that that was his initial bet for Salana on the spot side. hype's obviously kind of uh grown on the per side, but you know, we kind of came around this idea that um the L2 roadmap was a complete disaster. It was just data compression and that trading

is all that really matters. And so we kind of talked about that and then I asked him about per and I think this is a hard question to start about with Salana, but like I asked him this and I'm curious your opinion. I was like should should Salana just give up on pers? Um, Hyperliquid's clearly winning. Lighter's doing well. There's these very specialized infrastructure environments dominating per should should soul just focus on spot. And he's like, "No, I think we should do everything." What's your take? >> I agree. I think there's a lot there. The surface area is so big for Pers. I mean, Hyperlid's obviously done an incredible job. That's why they don't really need anyone like me. They're doing so well. But Per is such a big space. uh they've tokenized a lot of

things like Korean equities, oil, gold, and that's that has probably been the reason why it's performing so well. It's actually not crypto specifically, but there's so many things you could tokenize and actually trade like uh preipo stocks, post IPO stocks, Chinese stocks, u power trading, GPU data, data feeds, like there's just a variety of things that haven't been done yet. And Salana could do it just as well as Hyperlquid. It's obviously different because Salana is not specifically made to be a per chain.

>> Yeah. >> But there's ways around it. Like with spot, we're dominating quite well. You've probably seen we're >> kind of s spot trading on Salana is very tight tighter than than most centralized exchanges. >> I think Salana at some point was the second most traded uh kind of venue for Salana after Binance. So uh if we did that, we could probably do both. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think the DeFi ecosystem on Salana is also something that you're trying to build into a more kind of robust uh framework here.

What is So there's this ongoing conversation right now. I I wanted to talk about that purpose thing. I think you gave a pretty clear answer. Santiago um from Parafi and inversion he put out this post basically saying that the yields in DeFi are far too low for the risks. Um, and then Luca Prosperia from M0 kind of wrote this whole paper on it >> and analyzing morpho specifically and just that they're about 200 to 400 bips too low >> for the smart contract risk that you're taking and other risks that you're taking on chain and that we've kind of failed as an industry here because we've launched something that gives you lower rates than the risk-free rate. Then I kind of responded to Santi and I was

like, "Look, man, in bare markets, the rates in crypto are prohibitively low because you're in a higher interest rate environment and you're in a a very low speculative environment for onchain conditions. No one's borrowing stables to go long right now. No one's borrowing stables to loop and to do all these other opportunities because there isn't much. Whereas in the bull, it's typically a lower risk-free rate environment, but a much higher onchain yield environment because of the speculative nature such that it's just a purely supply and supply and demand dynamic.

>> And so there's kind of this inverse relationship to onchain yields to the risk-free rate in the world. But here we are right now kind of opining on why yields are too low and risk are too high and we're kind of like shooting ourselves down saying that, you know, we haven't accomplished anything here. Where where do you stand on this? >> Yeah, I followed that debate quite closely. For once, something interesting was happening on CT. Uh it wasn't just brain rot. Now, Lucas is a very smart man. I'm no mathematician, but I guess I've spoken to a lot of ops since I got back to work. And I think what the reality is there's actually a lot of borrowing and lending going on in the space at the moment. It's just not happening on chain. Uh there's huge amount of size going through the market.

uh people lending bitcoin, borrowing dollars happening at billions of dollars in size. It's just not happening on chain. The reason is quite simple. First, the var variable rates is not that attractive. More importantly, there's not enough size basically. Um when I look at most lending protocols, there's capacity, but it's not too big. It's hundreds of millions of dollars. But a proper borrower with a lot of Bitcoin will want fixed term, will want to know exactly the size he's able to push through. He does not want rehypothecation of collateral uh wants auto liquidation. So very often these guys want some form of compliance because a lot of these smart contracts they're just that there's no legal wrapper around it. But someone could certainly I could call someone up right

now and they they would say I'm happy to borrow at 8% against $1 billion worth of Bitcoin um as long as there's a compliant setup with fixed terms. And it's just not happening at the moment. So that loan book is out there. It's just not happening on chain. I can go in detail why, but you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I saw you tweet about it. You said that you're kind of working on a Bitcoin product. >> Um but why is that not happening on chain? >> Yeah. I think the lack of legal setups is probably the big problem. And also a lot of this money, the borrowing demand comes from two places. One is centralized exchanges. there isn't enough of a of a connect between say Binance and buy bitcoin holders who are able to borrow

in size from defy coinbase and morpher have done that very well right so coinbase holders can kind of borrow against their bitcoin that has not materialized across different centralized exchanges those two kind of ecosystems are not connected yet they could through defy the second problem is there's a lot of bitcoin that that's in um custodian accounts like anchorage zodias coppers >> and there has not yet been the proper connection between DeFi lending markets and these guys >> because most of the really big Bitcoin holders they are keeping their money in custody and >> there's a there's a disconnect essentially but that can can be mended that can be rectified quite easily and I'm seeing this already on Salana >> yeah so so do do you think that people

who have who are doing onchain yield strategies right now are taking excessive risk compared to what they're Well, there's no such thing as excessive risk as long as they realize what they're doing. And I do think people that are doing this on chain at the moment are very smart people. Uh, okay, that might be too much. I know these people. They're not very clever, but you know, they they know what they're doing. Let's say they have an understanding that we know we're borrowing at a variable rate. We know that utilization can spike. We can't withdraw at all times. They know that. Uh, it's not really retail doing it. So, >> everyone's fine. Okay, >> the problem is we there's lots of there's actually billions of dollars of stable coins lying around wanting to be deployed. Ethena is sitting on six billion. Spark is sitting on something

similar. >> Uh there's guys like Bullish etc. and they want to deploy. They just don't have high quality borrowers >> uh and borrowing capacity. And that's kind of where I think we could come in uh as an industry and just connect these custodians and centralized exchanges to DeFi like Coinbase Morph but on a much bigger scale. That's the new new unlock for DeFi in my opinion. >> Yeah. because I have a a couple friends who work for some Bitcoin, you know, like a loan book here basically, and they do whale lending in a very custodial off-chain call me to change your margin or to sell or to borrow or, you know, shoot me a text type of environment.

>> Um, and it's it's, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's not they're not doing that on chain. They just have a, you know, a credit line from a bank or from an institution and they just issue credit basically to these to these people completely offchain, completely through the the the fiat rails. >> But that can change like that legal structure could be taken on chain the same way kind of Athena came in a few years ago and said we're going to keep money in custody away from smart contract risk and hedge hedge on centralized exchanges. That was a key unlock that was so easy to sell to LPs because money is kind of safe, right?

>> Yeah. >> This would be the next step for lending it would be very similar access money and custody accounts, >> right? >> Uh, but then bringing that on chain though. >> Yeah. Yeah. Like accepting stable coins on chain, let's say through a lending protocol like Camino. They're working on this basically. So you accept stable coins >> on Camino, >> but those that those dollars are being lent actually through a custodial setup to people who have Bitcoin in their custody. There's legal agreements and such. Um that's kind of where the space is where the space is going in in my opinion. Well, if you want to unlock all of that Bitcoin kind of like that's just latent demand sitting there. The thing that a lot of like the Bitcoin L2s and a

lot of these protocols were trying to nail was like how do we get people comfortable to like take their native Bitcoin, bring it on chain in some rapper form or some like identical form and then use DeFi. >> And that was wasn't it? Yeah, >> it didn't work out. No, I mean I think Celsius was the biggest user rapper in lending protocols and they blew up. Um they were cowboy about it, but most guys want to keep their money in custody. That's just the reality of it. So we should come to them, >> not ask them to come to our layer too right?

>> Yeah. Okay. And so you guys think that there's a or will you know and you're working on a product basically that's going to allow that to happen on Salana? >> Yeah. Well, so the people doing this are well the Camino team. They are I think the sec the first largest the one of the two largest lending protocols on Salana and they have kind of cracked this and they're rolling out of water as we speak. There's $7 million now they just rolled out but they're going to try to scale this to about a billion soon and it's just kind of new. So I'm trying to kind of break the new ops into this be like look this is a complicated legal structure so you have to look through it due diligence. Um but hopefully this product can actually take off and will set the precedent. Um

>> yeah. >> Yeah. So that's one team that's doing it. There's other teams trying to do something similar and I I think we embrace this. As long as you bring the money, we come we should we should come to the money. >> Yeah. >> And we should not sit and wait for them to come to us because why would they? We have variable rates. >> Yeah. >> We have rehypotheation. There's no legal agreements. >> Yeah. Um so Athena recently, you know, kind of new topic here. They came out and they were like, "All right, look, we've redesigned our collateral backing." >> Who? Sorry. >> Athena did. >> All right.

>> Uh you obviously know the basis trade quite well. Um and they are doing now new prime structures with uh basis trades on commodities, on equities, on uh RWA non T billill yield products. um and basically are coming out and saying that the basis trade works really well in the bull cycles will likely continue to do that. Uh but in non-bull cycles we need a more diversified collateral set basically something that Sky has known and and has kind of like executed on for a while and those two have gone headtohead. I've been notably bullish on Sky but now that Athena's kind of put this on put this back into the market

it's like okay you know they're thinking about it I think in the right way. They put a lot of work into it. Where do you think this goes? Right. Because there's a lot of push back on these stable coins are just hedge funds disguised as a stable coin, a strategy, a trading strategy, a highly sophisticated trading strategy some may say. Um, where does this market end up? Like do the skies and the Athenas of the world have, you know, what it takes, you think, to be like the hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of stable coins? And like, how do you see that progression? because these these two right now are best bets at like non fiat stable coins like they're like a closest thing to a successful algorithmic stable coin. Um

and they've done quite well. Where do we go from here? How do we kind of scale these things? >> Yeah, the way I sort of see it is that and the that applies to the entire yield vertical. We are sort of selling high quality asset yield products uh based on crypto and western kind of asset issuers like Bidd and stuff like that and we're selling them to the essentially the Asian kind of stable coin holders who have a lot of size cannot access these opportunities but would like to and that's why to them 3% is better than nothing as long as they can pull out the stable coins at will whenever they want to. Right? So if you think of that, there's a huge amount of staples that will be injected into the

system over the next few years as uh there's more capital controls in the world as um dollars seek a place to park their money at and people like Athena and Spark as you know as time progresses they'll know how to do it very well and they already do. >> So we're just in the bare market. Yeah. >> Right. But long term if you take the long view that the world is going to there will be wars and capital will have to flow somewhere it will also need yield and people who can manage it and that's where the growth will be can they attract that Chinese Korean capital um that's another question but I think they're well equipped to do uh so if you believe in that you if you believe in capital flight you will believe in yield

products much >> yeah And and as far as the backing goes, the more diversified approach from Athena signals longerterm sustainability yield. >> Yeah, they have to. I mean, they have no choice. Spark and Athena have to diversify across away from per basis trades. It's just not viable now. But overcolateralized Bitcoin loans, they announced makes a lot of sense, right? Uh there's a lot of demand for that. there's size sitting in Swiss banks I'm aware of that just wants to borrow kind of again at 78% fixed over two months to 12 months quite easily. So plenty of demand there. Uh there's American products like Black Rocks uh high yield products that some of these guys cannot

access for example or they don't want to do compliance for instance. So there's so much stuff that you could do that is very legit, very blue chip but would accommodate these guys in Asia. It doesn't have to just be Asia. It just happens to be the case. They have capital controls. God forbid there's a civil war in America one day and exactly the same thing will happen then. American capital will flee America worst case will seek place to park it and that will be the blockchains. >> Yeah. >> But we're not ready for that conversation. you know, I'm curious what made you choose to work with the Salana team and uh kind of what you saw there as a core driver of where you're going to take your kind of next step from a career

perspective, right? Like Athena was obviously it was big zero to one uh in the stable coin space. Salana is at a really interesting point where there's a lot of competition on the institutional front from Ethereum and these kind of permissioned chains, the Cantons, we had some Ripple fanatics on earlier and that was a hell of a conversation as well. And then you've got kind of competition on the per side with the hyperl liquids and the lighters and on the trading side obviously spot spot-wise um still dominating like where do you see where do you see the next big kind of upside from the Salana like what what can Salana provide to the world that will allow it to um scale to the next

you know hundreds and hundreds of of billions of dollars of users but also really just of market cap like like what does that look like why did you join? >> Yeah, the reason I joined Salana was because I was self-destructing. I took a break was too long. I did nothing with my life. I was parting my tits off and jumping off mountains and and I just basically I just met up with Lily the the head of Salana two months ago in Dubai and I was just kind of catching up and I was like a child showing her mommy the stuff I used to do like oh look I been doing this and that and she was like you're self-destructing here's a job stop doing

it was an act of mercy really and that was why I joined it was just an act of mercy and I was like I do need a job actually After speaking to people in the team, I was like actually I think they might be cooking something here. Uh but it started with the sheer fact that I wasn't doing anything important with my life. Really good with my life. >> Yeah. >> But why Salana specifically? So I I think there's only two foundations or blockchains that know what they're doing. >> Yeah. >> And that's uh Hyperlquid and they don't need my help. And there's Salana. And Salana is in a spot where if I come in and I provide some impact, I can own some of that and I can learn something new. And this is why um Salana is very focused on trading on payments, which is

the core use case of crypto. Um they're very product driven. They know exactly what brings revenue rather than wishy-washy effective altruism Um I'm not a charity person. I just don't give a about this. I I I really like stuff that creates revenue, makes money, grows, and I think Salana kind of knows what they're doing in that regard. That's why. >> But you wanted to get into specifics about certain things. Um >> yeah, just kind of like what you see being the core drivers now for the for the ecosystem for the blockchain, right? Like obviously had this massive uh kind of token launching, trading, memecoinesque era. That era is behind us. Likely the speculation will return.

But like what is the what is the future of Salana that you're trying to drive forward? >> This is where creativity comes in. Basically, it's about figuring it out by trying different things. There's a few things that >> I know would have demand. It's just about sourcing it. And I'm not saying this is happening necessarily. So on the per side, we have capacity to create very compelling per markets. Phoenix is um working on something quite interesting. They're rolling out as we speak. They would quote very tightly. They can roll out commodities, oil as well. They're going to be rolling out a bunch of different markets. So, I think it's going to be quite competitive compared to hyperlquid.

>> So, that's one vector that is kind of like a given. You have to have competition there. >> I think what would be really cool is um preipo Chinese stocks. There's so much demand for getting into stuff like unitry or moonshot AI. There's SPVS being spun up everywhere. If someone could tokenize assets like this in size with core partners in Asia and take that on chain, we could do it today pretty much or Meteora could or whatever. But the question is finding these assets which would be very hard and these are one of those things that would be quite hard.

>> Um >> you could Yeah, there's a bunch of things that we're trying out and the protocols are trying out, but it's about seeing where the traction will really be once it happens. Um I suspect is these things stuff that you just can't get uh normally like if you're like an American guy, you can't get hold of these Chinese PIPO assets. Actually, no one can at this point. It's very hard. But if you did, it's like the biggest unlock ever. >> Um, you could do penny stocks on chain. You could do you can take listed Hong Kong equities in AI as well that are being like just ripping now and no one can access them unless you got a Hong Kong license or some fancy broker. I'd love to trade like ZAI or um Mini Max for example. They've been ripping from

like 100 bucks to 900 >> within 3 months. >> There's so many there actually so much capital formation happening in Trafy that we're completely ignoring and all it takes is a team that's just going to say we're going to list this. We're going to market make we're going to bring it on chain and anyone in the world can buy it. >> Yeah. >> Um this is I think where the growth is going to come from for Salana. >> Yeah. Yeah. And what about the culture side? Do you think that the culture side has adapted to the more institutional era that we're in of the space? How does that happen?

>> Yeah, the foundation is well equipped to handle institutions. They have no problem there. But I do think it's important to note in my that's just my opinion that like we need that Wall Street needs us more than we need Wall Street because when they look at us, they don't see clients. They see well actually they see the stable coins that we have on chain and these are potentially consumers of their yield products >> 100%. >> Like we don't have to pander to the suits too much. They see us as the money bag. It's not the other way around. Surely at some point Wall Street ETFs could recycle their crypto assets like Bitcoin and stuff back into DeFi. But I see that as quite farfetched at the moment. What they're really really looking to do is go into DeFi, tokenize

their high yield private credit fund. sell it to people on the blockchain. So, they'll come to us anyway. They're here. Our job is to attract more stable coin volume, more stable coin deposits, more trading volume, which is actually very cryptonative and is is not about servicing Wall Street. Um, so yeah, I mean, we're we're equipped to handle institutions, but I think personally this is not where the real money is. The real money is like somewhere else >> in Asia. >> In Asia. >> Yeah. or enabling crossber flows stuff that a white guy wants to buy Chinese stocks why not you know Chinese person wants to buy American stocks or American assets let's make it happen you know um or protocols under Salana that would

want to make that happen somehow in a way that is not dodgy or kind of brazen but there's ways to do it you know >> yeah do do you think that um monad is competition to salon >> monad >> or do you what are they doing nowadays I haven't checked Do you ever think about monet? >> I don't want to sound rude or anything, but I don't think about monet. Um, I don't think about Ethereum much and just >> I I think about Ethereum a little bit because there's decent stable coin demand that is very native to Ethereum, but monet is probably the same ops I already know. Uh, so in that regard, uh, it's not something I think about yet. It could.

>> So, what are we doing nowadays? Is it like just yield farms or do we do any trading stuff there? It's It's kind of like the pers trading defi. >> Oh, really? Should look into it. Fair enough. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'm not I'm not dismissing them in any way. Just I've been thinking more about Ethereum native stable coin holders, how to move them to Salana. >> And why would they want to go to Salana, though? I mean, if I'm holding stable coins on Ethereum, what I'm thinking to myself is I'm holding assets on a the more bulletproof ledger. Why would I go to something less bulletproof?

>> Yeah, I think there's a very good point with lending protocols having to earn um the right to host more stable coins because of security stuff. >> Yeah. >> But the reason people move is because first there's high yielding opportunities at scale. >> Yeah. >> Uh they could come from RWA. They can come from um uh stocks for example that people want to actually use to borrow against. So you have to have a wider array of assets that are being used to borrow. Perhaps the custodian thing I discussed I think is a very key part here. Like if we can tap into that Bitcoin sitting in custody accounts who can directly kind of deploy in Salana that's something that Ethereum cannot do at the moment.

>> Um a lot of borrowing demand essentially is what I'm trying to say and that's something that we could bring through >> kind of different ways rather than just smart contracts. Um that's why because again if I had 100 million bucks in Ethereum and I earn 3% now on RV or Morpho uh on USDC if someone told me you earn 7% fixed with compliance no rehypothecation backed by Bitcoin it's 7% I mean it looks pretty good. >> Yeah I mean there's that protocol Apex doing STRCbacked loans.

>> Oh yeah that's that's another vector. Yeah. >> Yeah. So there's people doing uh tokenizing the micro strategy stretch product which yields about 11%. There's three teams doing it that I'm aware of. APYX uh there's Saturn guys. Um >> there's also um Solstice guys. So they're both trying to do the same thing. >> It's a good product. I mean I think OP's quite like lending against that because they they understand that it's Bitcoin. It's Michael Sailor. They know how to price it, >> right? >> Um I think this could take off, but it's becoming commoditized at this point a bit, right? Um, everyone's trying to compete for that particular vector, but I do think it's a very valid uh asset actually. Uh, there's probably going to be some instance of it.

>> Well, it's offering upwards of 10% on stables, >> 11% now >> 11% on stable coins. >> That's very solid given the fact that it's crypton native. Here's the thing about like lenders in this really big lenders. They are comfortable lending at lower yields as long as they understand how it's priced. And you have IWA stuff like Apollo's private credit fund which is a great product by all means but these crypto guys with lots of stable coins they don't know how to price it. They don't know Apollo people. They don't know what's inside of it. Uh but Micro Strategy they get it. This is crypto. This is our kind of stomping grounds, right? So >> I do think it's a very valid product. It will probably be more successful than most other way products out there.

>> Is it APYX that's going to win Saturn or sources? I don't know. >> I don't know. Um, so we did a conversation with Stani for their V4 launch, >> which is kind of a transition from a very like a single low single pool with individual risk per uh per asset to a more it's kind of like a step closer to vaults, right? With three pools and there's a prime, a plus, and a third kind of trunch. It's almost like a a risk tunched product. Different types of assets in there. And then you've got um you've got Morpho which is like all the way down to like vaults, hundreds and hundreds of vaults with individual curators, individual underwriters and then uh originators of the loan

themselves like not morpho is the infrastructure not the underwriter whereas a dao is more of the underwriter for um these what is the what do you think is going to win here like which model do you think has sustainability longer term. Like if think about different types of assets coming on chain like do you have a preference between the vault model and the kind of more pulled model? Personally I like the pool model more because uh that creates just deeper lending liquidity um as in a borrower can tap into a wider kind of source of capital uh for their size. I always felt like it's much easier to convince people to I mean you can do a separate vault by

all means and it's just a lot of work every single time to kind of bootstrap a vault with new liquidity in there. It's almost P2P like it's almost like someone has a product and we have to figure out in theory who would be lending exactly against that and these people have to think about is it worth lending into this vault or another vault. uh which I know is which I know is the kind of the idea behind it but it's just it's nice when there's a big main vault or main market where you have very kind of deep lending uh liquidity where you could list most of your assets and on the side have some more experimental vault with uh Camino has prime capital prime for example which is like an RWA asset they have decent liquidity there or they used

to have like JLP which was yielding 12% so >> yeah I like a hybrid a a lot more. It's much easier to convince people to kind of lend into that directly, I think. >> Yeah. And then if you heard this push back, I'm curious what you would say. Paul from Moro would say, "Sure, I understand that. But if you do this kind of DAO managed or uh single underwriter with a a risk committee management thesis, if this thing if these things grow to tens and tens and hundreds of billions and trillions of assets within these protocols, you're going to have a centrally managed credit facility for the entire world. Is that not the antithesis of what we're trying

to do here? And so that would be the push back on the pool model. >> Obviously, a pool model has more risks if it blows up because it's much more systemic, but at the end of the day, this is crypto. This is DeFi. Smart contracts can get hacked. It's sad, but you know, we have to just make sure they don't. Um, I think you just have to take I mean, I have nothing against Moro. I use that product, but it's just u it's okay to take responsibility. I quite liked when Mark Zella was um in charge of the V3 stuff we used to do at Athena because um we we did create separate markets but eventually we migrated it to the main market and his approach was kind of like >> we take responsibility I guess you know like

>> and thankfully RV RV3 never got hacked. It was uh I think the reason why DeFi lending grew so much is because V3 never got hacked. people got more confident and more and more confident with with that deployment. >> And yeah, that's just my thoughts. I I have no idea. I'll go wherever the money is. All right. But like if I see that morph is working out, morpher model is working out more, I'll be pushing for that, too. But uh I do find it easy to convince people to put money in the main vault. In fact, the ops are thinking, I'd rather accept kind of the risk of getting hacked, but being able to withdraw with ease my stable coins from a very big pool of capital.

>> Yeah. >> Rather than it's very safe and segregated, but uh I can't withdraw because I'm the only lender in the in that vault. So there was a rumor going around with regards to a v3 and Athena and 1010 that a specialized group specifically a competitor to Athena uh instigated a large selling of USDE in an effort to undermine a's protocol stability. Oh >> um and also potentially take two birds out with one stone with a and Athena both. Um, and >> was it Tarun?

>> Just kidding. I don't know. >> And um, and so obviously this event happened and Athena's USD was hardcoded on a to one, right? On a B3, which kind of saved a onchain environment. Binance had these other kind of like market making uh, dynamics there. Um I I'm just curious if you have any reflections from from 1010 or um >> yeah I mean well I was out of D5 for some time but then I looked at the phone I'm like oh my god why am I so poor now it's annoying but and I I looked into this and obviously a has done exceptionally well during that time because and Athena as well. Athena's TV went from 15 billion to seven billion within a few weeks. That's

crazy. >> Yeah. >> Uh Ave had a giant deleveraging event. all fine. Binance on the other hand, yeah, had a huge issue um because of the debing and bad oracle design. I suppose I think it just proved DeFi kind of worked out like and I'm every time a hack or something big like this happens, I'm kind of surprised because we had this during um during Celsius, right? A did fine. um like every time there's some really bad stuff happening like are they DeFi kind of wins and I'm almost surprised at this point because a lot of people in this industry are absolute idiots but like we're doing pretty well comparatively in really stressful

situations I think >> not over time obviously there's hacks here and there um but I think on the lending side of things it's one of the most bullish sector in the space >> curious how you're thinking about the um dispersion in asset performance going forward. Um, obviously we've seen like hypes came off the lows quite well. I coined this term revenue meta, >> pretty silly one, but here we are a year and a half later firmly valuing protocols based on revenues and kind of cash flows.

>> Is there a particular thesis that you have or a particular way that you're thinking about how this next era of the market is going to shape out from a asset performance perspective? Um, are we overemphasizing on revenues and on fundamentals? Is that pendulum going to swing back to more of this kind of network effect trade or even like like the meme trade? Kind of just generally like how are you positioned and how are you thinking about the turnaround that's coming? >> I think there's always bubbles. They always happen like in AI these companies raising billions of dollars in valuation. They have no revenue, no chance of revenue. the founders are I don't know went to jail or something

like I've seen a few of these decks. It's just you know it's just bubble stuff. Yeah, they are experiencing a bubble. They haven't seen one in 20 years. That's why they think it's going to go on forever. We sit here being like first time weeks. >> Yeah. See first time. So I think it's just a period of time where yes the market's bad. People are focusing on revenues because that's ultimately the only way to see is the project solid. >> Yeah. >> But it's not just about revenues. It's also about revenue growth and market expansion. Pump is making a lot of money uh on paper but >> in reality but like the market's wondering can they expand the market share from here right?

>> What people think about hyperlquid when they see the revenue they also they're also thinking they can take on take on Binance take on buy bit >> right >> because it's in their minds a better product they can take on gold and commodities which means they can take on interactive brokers fidelities and such. So it's about growing the market share aggressively. If you grow the market share really aggressively without any revenue, that's better than having really significant revenue but without any market share or ability to grow market share because once you have it, you can figure out ways to monetize, right?

>> So I think it's really about projects that can grow market share in their vertical and beyond it and that's why hyperl is doing well. That whole price thing b hyperlquid price bounced once Jeff said talked about we have commodities. Yeah. And they have more than a billion or something in open interest. >> That's when the price bounced. Why? >> It's not because they made so much money recently. >> Yeah. It's just the way people were assessing it changed. >> Yeah. It's like it's not just crypto now. >> The whole story changed. >> Yeah. >> And that like the whole story for DeFi changed in that moment too whether people have realized it or not.

>> Yeah. for Camino, for a for Morpho, for Jupiter, for Aerodrome, for Sky, for Spark, for Athena. The entire construct of we're building companies and protocols permissionlessly on chain for crypto assets only was completely shattered. No, because the reality is we're not building these products just for crypto assets. These products are going to be for tokenized versions of tons of different types of assets with a hundreds of trillions of dollars of TAM, not the I don't even know what the TBL and DeFi is, 100 billion maybe um you know two three trillion dollars in total assets of the market cap of the entire

industry. So I think like that moment HIPP3 and that whole kind of tokenization wave that's now happening is like shatterings people's perception of like what we're doing here. >> Yeah. And that's the issue with most the reason why dispersion is so high is because everyone suddenly realized that 99% of the teams have no idea how to grow beyond just crypto beyond the classic C2 um circle circle jerk. So Hyperlid knows how to do this. Um I think Salana knows how to do this because memecoin showed I mean Pomvon showed it as well. um Poly Market, Kawashi, there's reasons why the only companies that worked out have high valuations can actually tackle the space outside of the core DeFiCT

>> um ecosystem, right? Which everyone knows already, just no one's actually doing anything about it. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah. Last thing for you, I think um let's say this tokenized asset thing keeps happening, right? to get, you know, trillions of dollars on chain of different assets, whether it be equities, T-Boss, other RWA yield products. >> Who do you think wins the most? Who who who benefits the most? >> North Korea wins. >> Yeah. No, I mean, I think uh stable coin holders win. people who want to take their capital outside of the traditional financial system can access

more and more opportunities to earn yield to trade uh to do what you can't do at the moment and I think yeah people who would say bye-bye fiat mint tether or USDC these guys will win uh and the ones that will lose will be banks uh some governments traditional system will eventually kind of be squeezed out and the capital will flow into blockchains So idealistic. I had no idea I had this in me, but it just comes out naturally really. That's >> Well, man, hope you have a great rest of your time in New York and congrats on the new role.

>> Thanks, man. >> I think Salana's lucky to have you. I'm glad to see you back in the world. >> See, it's best for legal. She's not sure about that. >> Ladies and gentlemen, Sarapim closing us out from the tokenization tower. Guys, we'll be back tomorrow at 12:30. Thanks for rocking with us. We'll see you guys then. Have a great day. >> Cheers, guys. Cheers, man.