The Neo Finance Bull Cycle Is Here - Chuk Okpalugo

Transcript

Oh, you want some money from after we just had dinner and we want to go and let's just split the bill. What's your tag? Boom. Sent. Doesn't matter that your wallet is a Neo Bank that's on Plasma or mine is a Neo Bank that's on One Money or Tempo. It should just work. >> I think those are the companies where you can think that there is a broad market where there's a lot of horizontal room and a lot of these different players. Uh we could see a lot of winners in that part of this stable coin stack. >> And then how that pertains to this barbell thesis. I think that would be a really really good closing point as as far as this investor outlook on how to think about the stack.

Welcome back to another episode of Stabled Up, our premier weekly show covering the ins and outs of digital dollars, stable coins, and the future of decentralized finance. show is made possible by FRA and FRA is powering the financial engine of the internet powering FRXUSD and genius compliant stable coins. This is the stablecoin super cycle made possible by FRA. Now enjoy stabled up our weekly stable coin show. All righty guys, stabled up episode 16. Welcome back to our premiere weekly stable coin show powered by our friends at FRA with their F FRXUSD product FRANET and a lot more coming from our latest conversation with their co-founder Sam with their genius compliant stable coin. We've got Chuck, the man, the myth. Some have called him

the LinkedIn warrior, the fintech financeier and the master of terminology. Sir, good to have you, man. >> It's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. Hey Chuck, I think you saw we released the Neo finance market map and as you know this is a thesis that we're extremely excited about. We believe that the legacy financial system requires an upgrade and and frankly crypto native infrastructure slop has been getting too much VC dollars and and has been persistent for too long. We believe this deserves an upgrade as well and they don't just didn't need an upgrade. We actually believe that they're going to upgrade to the same point and that is this convergence point. It's Neo Bank. It's fintech 2.0 know and this is what we're calling Neo finance uh and and so Chuck I mean maybe you could just give us your first

reaction to the thesis because we we value your opinion we uh we want to we want to hear from uh knowledgeable people in the space like you on whether or not we're thinking about this the right way so first impressions on NEO finance >> yeah I mean I think it's absolutely right it's what a lot of us have been waiting for and look no uh qums about you know DJN we've all done it we trade we have And but when you think about the evolution of blockchain and what it can do, you're thinking about replatforming the financial system and the convergence of TRFI and DeFi is this constant battle and we're making a ton of progress. 2025 was a kind of a excellent year for that.

Obviously, a lot of that has to do with regulation and then certain big signals with acquisitions, but the infrastructure has been built out and been folks have continued to build it out over the last several years. And so with infra uh on offramps with liquidity as that's all coming together, you're starting to get really really good consumer uh applications and business and infra uh and so you know I think it's bang on and we're just at the beginning of what will be like a multi-year evolution of finance. So it's exciting to see.

>> Yeah, man. And and we, you know, we just had Sid on from Maple and Rob and I have just continued to understand that this specific category is a set of highly capitalized teams as well as skilled operators at the helm, which is a core difference from some of the let's say earlier crypto teams that we've seen as well as a core difference from traditional just legacy finance team. It's the combination of expertise between the fintech which you you possess and the web 3 space that is really kind of creating this value um in the in this in this uh architecture.

We want to really take this time to educate and learn ourselves from from you as well as our audience and I think the best way to kind of start is just to think about this from an investor point of view. Chuck, we've been thinking a lot about how value is going to be created in this category. Where does value acrew is often the question that in investors want to know and and so when we think about this category at large to put it simply Chuck who's making the most amount of money where is the best business models who's doing it well and how are you thinking about the actual onchain business models and offchain business models of this category let's start here broad and then let's get into some of the specifics on the market map.

>> Yeah, absolutely. This is the question on everyone's minds. It's a billion dollar question. Some might say it's a trillion dollar question. And as you are seeing infra proliferate, you're seeing apps proliferate. You're seeing, you know, barriers to entry have decreased in certain areas of the stack. Uh but network effects and uh switching costs and licenses and other combinations of those things are going to start to enable folks to acrue value. So let's start with uh I guess when you think about the full stack from applications on one end all the way to bare metal on the other side. Uh and then there's v various ranges of infrastructure in between and many of them use each other.

Uh over time I think value acrru to either of those sides and less in the middle. What I mean by that is enduser applications whether that be retail consumers or SMBs or uh or enterprise they have the interface of that of that customer and they can continue to add value with bundled products uh and continue to expand there and that becomes a very sticky relationship. they often are where the brand sits and the brand value uh and depending on the particular product then it can be network effects. Flip all the way to the the other side where in certain uh areas of of the of

infrastructure stack yes licenses aren't impossible to get uh but they're not easy to get either. And so the right set of licenses, being able to plug into the bare metal, so having a master account uh at the Fed uh or close to it, uh having the right uh combination of uh owning the kind of the full stack down to the various different real like fiat rails in the particular regions that you want to participate in. That starts to build up uh strong reliability and low cost. Uh is that alone enough for strong value acrruel? maybe not but a combination of using that infrastructure to then win large enterprises the large payment players the large PSPs and then

continuing to add additional products so not only do you on offramps you then start adding cards card issuance you you do orchestration and so on then you're keeping them together with switching costs and so I think those that's the way I think about value acral only the end user add and this is the playbook you've seen revolute and and and stripe and others. You start with one product, one wedge and you continue to expand and then at the far end uh really going down to the metal uh and then hopefully also being able to build uh either liquidity advantages or also bundling.

>> Makes a ton of sense. Now Chuck, let's apply this framework to the market map. Let's pull it up and give us a sense of which categories, which companies on this map are further towards the bare metal and further towards uh uh the distribution and the consumer app. Um if you've got it in front of you, give us a sense where does the bare metal fall and then you know where where's the other end of the barbell and then we'll talk maybe about um you know which which one to focus on. >> Right. So uh I'll start on the application side. I think you've got the new players and the existing players. Uh and I think the existing players, the revolutions of the world who are entering the stable coin space with with

their applications. Stripe obviously they've entered with with acquisitions. Uh they were in the market beforehand through infrastructure partners and then they entered it with more force with acquisitions as well. Uh and then you know folks like PayPal and so on who already have existing customers, networks and so on. Then you have the the newer enduser applications, the the casts of the world, the aviches uh and so on. And they are still in the early stages. Uh they're they're still unproven, but they're growing very rapidly. They're showing product market fit. Their revenues are crossing from tens of millions into eventually hundreds in the next year or so. Uh and your the test of can you build a sticky consumer app is being we're going to

watch it in real time. So I'll I'll start there and then on the other side Oh go ahead. >> The I I I hear most of those companies are falling into the fintech and the neoank categories are primarily consumerf facing and and currently owning customer relations. >> That's right. That's right. >> That's one end of the barbell. Cool. Okay. And and the other end of the barbell is bare metal as you were saying. >> Yes. And this one is not one uh the promise of stable coins particularly for crossber payments has been one that has been talked about for the last year or so. cross border payments are structurally broken in terms of how different countries manage their, you know, central bank and monetary systems.

They don't talk to each other. Fantastic. That's a a great area for uh a unified rail and unified liquidity and and 24/7 rails to to make a difference. But there are lots of existing players, you know, the Airwalkers, the world, the wisers of the world who figured out workarounds. uh and so uh when thinking about you know who is going to be enable infrastructure to to enable crossber payments to be really really efficient and fast it's how do you build uh to the rails in as many countries as possible for your customers and if you look across the kind of the major infrastructure uh players uh who are enabling this you've got bridge uh BVNK conduit uh moon pay now with their

acquisition of iron uh hi-fi and so on. they each have a different call it menu uh of uh integrations to the rail and so no one really has a full to the metal setup in call it 10 or 15 countries um but that's being built right now and as they acquire customers uh they'll acquire uh them on the on a stable coin issuance product and then do orchestration or acquire them on card like if you're rain you acquire your customers through the hard product and then add orchestration on top. And so the bassel isn't one, but this is the kind of the bare metal end that I'm talking about.

>> Got it. >> Yeah. And then just to put this all together then, Chuck, yesterday you kind of laid out this three-part stack, right? And so, uh, if you could just tie that three-part stack that you laid in as far as the smart contract layer, I believe it was like the issuer layer and then one other, and then how that pertains to this barbell thesis, I think that would be a really really good closing point as as far as this investor outlook on how to think about the stack. And so we were yesterday we were talking looking at the map and passing out the players and you look at the stable coin issuance section and there's a lot of folks in there and they all do a range of different things and it's because the you have folks who uh only one part of the stack and folks who do the entire

stack. So let's talk about the stack. At the end of the day you are tokenizing some assets. It just so happens that for stable coins they're highly liquid typically treasuries and cash. uh and therefore you have a a fairly easy way to maintain the peg. Okay, I'm skipping over a lot of detail, but at the bottom of the stack you have reserve management. Okay. And then you you represent those reserves as a token or something on a blockchain across different blockchains. That's the smart contract layer. And then beyond the smart contract layer is then the the end token that people see. Uh you can call that the application layer. You can call it many different things. But let's take circle for for example. Circle manage their own reserves or they use a a black rockck a managed fund for reserves. They

manage their smart contracts and the USDC is a circle branded stable coin. That is an entire stack. Then you you can look at Paxos uh where Paxos is a white label stable coin issuer. Uh they do their own stable coins but the one I'm going to talk about right now is PYUSD. So Paxos manages the reserves. Paxos also manages the smart contract but the stable coin is branded with PYUSD. So that's another different set of combinations for the stack. And then you can think about uh uh M0 as a protocol.

So M0 is kind of like the smart contract layer. And I'm simplifying for those who are revealing knowing the details, but M0 is the smart contract layer and they work with different reserve managers to issue this middle layer token called M and then brands can come and issue their own token from M. So they've separated it out into a a modular way and therefore you have like folks like Noble uh and MetaMask USD who are built on top of M. And so when you look at the announcements that are happening say Western Union uh issuing a stable coin working with Anchorage or uh Kana are issuing Kana USD working with bridge it's hard to say okay who is the issuer

who owns the smart contract who owns the the reserve you look at through their stack and you see how it splits but I think what's clear is that the technology to issue is not challenging it's not that hard. The reserve management is takes some scale but it's becoming easier and easier and that will eventually be commoditized and so the value gets pushed to the brand the stable coin itself as a brand as PayPal as cler uh as Western Union as any kind of fintech or any platform do you have distribution do you either have captive audiences cap captive customers if you're a marketplace do you manage the the the process processing of money in

between your customers. Uh do you have influence over potentially your suppliers or your vendors? Uh do you have your own blockchain where you can invite developers to create applications? This is for example Robin Hood uh and uh and Coinbase with base. So the distribution layer is where value occurs and it really comes down to how much leverage and how much uh influence they have on their uh their customers and essentially when issuing a stable coin becomes really easy. Used to take months now it takes days and with Braille and and others it takes seconds.

You can just go on the platform click a couple of buttons and before you you know you you know it you've got a stable coin. The effort the value the the the complexity moves to distribution. And so I think that's where the battle will be won. Um and at the end of the day, you don't need if you own a world garden, you don't necessarily need to compete with other people's stable coins. It's just an extra tool for you to grow another revenue item, get a greater share of wallet. And I'm sure we'll talk about it today, but everybody wants to build a super app. If you have users, how do you monetize those users? And blockchain technology is another way of enabling folks to do that. is essentially doing for finance what cloud cloud and open source did for software.

>> Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable defy platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.x XYZ. >> Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

>> Yeah, man. I mean, couple quick points. One, the USDH hyperlquid event showed clearly that issuers have this desperate desperate need for for distribution. It was almost like it was almost off-putting how how crazy these these issuers went for hyperlquids distribution. It was almost scary. too. On that note, this is also Tether's profitability led to so many uh teams wanting to just, you know, tether an answer wanting to be an issuer. Um because there's just this massive opportunity. This kind of led to an oversaturation that you that you've mentioned, which then if you look at the stack, you get down to reserve management and the application layer and you start to think, oh, there's more value in that part of the stack now than than there is just in the pure issuers

stack. Now, that's a broad take and there's still tons of value to be captured by Tether Circle and the likes of Sky and others in that top top tier of issuers, but it seems like if you're not in that top top tier of issuers, rates coming down, competition going up. We'll see where the Clarity Act lands, you know, there's there's there's value to be had in those other parts of the stack. Um, Rob, >> yeah, I'll I'll build on top of that because I think when you're we're thinking about value acrruel, it's really forwardlooking is what we're concerned with. And so the market for issuance and the market for reserve management has largely been won. And so I think there is room to grow those businesses that are the winners, but I'm not investing in the long tale of stable

coin issuers, nor the long tale of reserve management for these stable coins. I do think there is a breadth in the market for the distribution and the apps. these these companies that may launch stable coins and I think you can cherrypick a long tale of winners could be all the way to the Walmarts of the world and the major retailers that do have some major distribution. I think those are the companies where you can think that there is a broad market where there's a lot of horizontal room and a lot of these different players. uh we could see a lot of winners in that part of this stable coin stack, but you know, you might not see a long list of winners in the other two parts, but you will still see Circle, Tether, and the reserve managers that are already

leading the space continue to lead those segments of the stable coin market. >> You agree with that, Chuck, or No, >> I'll build on that and and I agree. I think Circle and Tether are in a different place uh just by timing and path dependency. uh the the fact that tether could make so much money people don't understand it and then they think oh I I can do the same thing and it's a it's a function of where they how they got started where who holds the token and what their alternative is and if it is avoiding or escaping volatile currency volatile economies uh capital controls or unscrupulous behavior the list is long but it's very hard to unsee in that in that world and now their

liquidity, the network effects, the distribution is hard to overcome. Circle is really dominant in DeFi. There aren't many exchanges. The partnership with Coinbase has led to huge amounts of distribution. You know, Circle have an incredible onofframp network across the world. The partnerships with banks, you know, again, that's another thing that they're built up over time. Very, very hard to challenge. Now, will the USDGs of the world, the PYUSDs of the world, the other kind of major stable coins, uh, be able to tackle this? Never say never uh but you're going up going up against network effects. Now for the folks who are issuing you know branded stable coins for their own networks I think clan has sufficient ecosystem that as I mentioned earlier you're monetizing

your existing distribution. It's always going to make sense. Now will that grow outside of their ecosystem? Maybe not. Probably not. But that doesn't matter. They've already won. They've already managed to be more efficient within their existing ecosystem. uh develop much faster, create new financial applications and their average revenue per user, their RPU is increasing. And so it's a complicated uh answer, but as a investor, I'm looking at companies who have network effects, who have captive audiences and saying, okay, well, what if they increase their APO from, you know, what by 20% by 30%. Not because they issued a stable coin, but because they added lending, they added trading,

they added all these other financial services. So, I think of stable coins as as infrastructure. It's a it's embedded. It's embedded finance. I I I guess is a way to kind of tie it back to existing fintech. Uber uh any marketplace, Airbnb, folks who have strong brands, strong network effects, you're now essentially saying, okay, what if I became a bank? What if I lent uh what if I enable crossber payments? All that's becoming possible. expanding to different countries it's now possible. Uh and so the you if you take it one level beyond the issuance stack itself and see okay what will this company do now that they can expand globally rapidly and launch new financial products easily. Okay well it's how good can they leverage their distribution to

increase like the app for each user. These are I think these are all great examples, Chuck. I think CLA, Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, all of these guys are there's a broad swath of of brands out there with distribution that could launch stable coins and enhance their arpoon and and therefore enhance their business. I I want to turn maybe to the other side of the stack. talk about reserve management for a little bit because this is where the the the lines start to blur between what is a stable coin, what is RWA and we have this whole tokenization part of the map and and my understanding is that a lot of these when we talk about reserve management you know where does the interest come from? Well, it is yield on treasuries and sometimes those treasuries are

tokenized or it's yield on bidd and you know these other these other RWA style products that ultimately feeds into the stable coin stack. So give us a sense of of the reserve management landscape as it relates to the current stable coin dynamics. How deep does that go in RWAs? And maybe help untangle some of some of this, you know, web for us, >> right? And so if we think about the reserve management of a of a stable coin issuer, you know, you've got uh you got a couple of things to manage. You've got from a steady state of reserves, how much are you deploying into treasuries, into repurchase agreements, repos? How much cash do you maintain so that you

can move them around? Uh, okay. What banks are you using? What banks are you how much redundancy do you have? Do you have banks in multiple locations in order to enable folks to on offramp in multiple locations? How do you manage the liquidity between those? And so there's a maintaining the peg is less about matching your reserves one to one and whether you than whether you can support the redemption and minting demand. And so it's all a liquidity problem. And so liquidity problems really end up happening on the weekends because that's when you can't sell your treasuries. And so the evolution of reserve management is going to go to tokenized reserves. I think every issuer you want to have a 24/7 treasury management uh system and you know Bidd

were first out the gate no sorry that's not right they weren't first out the gate they were definitely loudest um and a great name for for a product uh but there are that's the beginnings of a kind of institutionalbacked asset that can be used across across issuers Fidelity have one uh stay street JP Morgan uh announced one as And so I think before there was the skill of managing your reserves and the 24/7 nature and multiple bank accounts and then the cash level so that you can do quick redemption management that does require skill over time. That will become more programmable uh and but you need the laws to update uh so that folks

can start to use tokenized treasuries. Genius does allow that but we got to wait for rulemaking. And so if you if you uh once you you start to see that the reserve like the investing in yield part of reserve management becomes easier and potentially more standardized. But the cash management piece, that's an issue by issuer game. And that's still very challenging if you want to be able to move from, you know, issuing, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions for retail applications to hundred million dollar redemptions, billion dollar redemptions. Uh, and that's the scale that one needs to be.

That's where that's where circle tether Paxos are. Uh, when having to deal with like BUSD for example, uh, you need to have that kind of infrastructure. And so I think that's still an area where issuers and reserve managers given that we broke up the stack earlier can differentiate and say hey guys we're well capitalized. We have great banking relationships. We have credit lines with banks. So if you want to issue 100 million in in 5 minutes and less I got you like that is a differentiation but you can imagine that is important for an enterprise uh customer and less important if you're managing a kind of consumer in your bank.

>> Yeah. And I could easily see how anything like a 10-10 or a flash crash or a a even FOMO inducing of events where an institution wants to or needs to redeem can can cause these issues and you you want to have the reserve management, you know, company that you're working with or service to be apt. And so you can start to see how the settlement times of of legacy finance are now a moat for for different teams those who are able to kind of capitalize on that which you know as you said for the neo bank for the fintex for me you know moving $10,000 from here to there maybe not a big deal but for you know black rockck who's trying to you know move money on weekends if needed or move or yeah as you say issue very very

quickly large sums this kind of this kind of elevates when you're like like the importance of these of these uh aspects elevates in in terms of uh their their customer needs. Last thing on rever on reserves before we kind of move into the super app and the and the neo banks is when you're thinking about the um importance of actually having reserve management be verticalized, right? So like sticking with one provider who's trusted and I think you know you you can kind of walk us through who those are and what they do specifically versus like having a multiaceted reserve management approach meaning having business lines with multiple of these.

How do you think about the best way for these or what's the best way that you've seen some of these teams utilize reserve reserve management teams um to get the you know best liquidity preferences for their in institutional clients etc. What's the kind of strategy here? Is it multiaceted? Is it just one trusted? How verticalized is it? Kind of g give us a bit of detail there. >> The the jury is still out there because not that many stable coins have really scaled. And when I say stable coins, I don't mean uh like for example, Athena is obviously scaled. It's a different strategy. And so, you know, outside of I think PYUSD is 34 billion. USDG is like two billion. Obviously, circle and tether are huge.

um uh RLUSD is about a billion dollars. USD1 is $2 billion. So there's only so many that have got to that stage, but it's not necessarily just the size and the scale. It's is redemptions and minting volume, which not not everybody reports on. And so if you're connected to an exchange, it's really when the stress that happens that really tests how quickly uh people can get in and out of your your stable coin. And so um there is no kind of right answer right now. All we can say is so far if you look at history we've only had we've only seen the verticalized players get tested and all of them have worked out so far. Now that's not to say that the new models uh won't work. I think we're I'm personally very excited to see the

M0 model work and and for those those who don't know M0 enables multiple reserve managers who want to manage their reserves in a different in their own way to then mint the M token and then applications can mint their own stable coin on the M token. So that will enable different reserve uh approaches uh and you know as that grows and scales we'll see how that uh has benefits uh and we'll see you know what the limitations are but I think that is a way to improve uh liquidity and enable uh reserve specialized reserve managers to compete at that at that layer. Uh one thing we haven't discussed but uh is important as we talk about the

proliferation of stable coins is interoperability. And so you have interoperability between any stable client that's issued by the same issuer. Great. Then you got to figure out interoperability between stable coins from different issuers. Uh and there are firms who are out there who are working to solve that problem. Um but it's uh it's one that folks need to think about and particularly if you're an investor you you may see okay if I believe stable coins are going to grow and proliferate you know what's the role of orchestration in clearing and settlement across different stable coins. There's probably a potential opportunity there. I I'd imagine the interoperability of stable coins that are issued on the same chain becomes much easier, right? And if we have a world where tether is you know proliferating across all chains maybe uh

you know plasma is is you know one home of tether and then we have uh arc is maybe the home of USDC. Is the interoperability question as simple as solving interoperability between these two chains, say ARC and plasma, or are there deeper levels as you get into the reserves and redemptions that stretch? It's not just blockchain composability that we're looking for. We're looking for something that's much deeper into the financial underpinnings of these two issuing companies, >> right? Yeah. It's it's the second it's deeper and it's crosschain, cross asset.

Uh and there are firms who do this. If you know any any two points, any two stable coins across any different as uh uh blockchain, there will be someone who will offer you a price. There are protocols that do this as well. And it's all about size, speed, essentially liquidity. And that's still not quite solved yet. And I think for stable coins to really be money, the there's a concept of singleness of money. You want to be able to have a dollar and it's a dollar everywhere. uh especially if the credit risk of the issuer is all essentially the same. They're all genius regulated. It should be a dollar. Uh I think people are thinking about how do we really make it neo banks mainstream.

How do you get neo finance to be mainstream? These all need to be abstracted away. And so the experience for the end user needs to just be well I've got some dollar-like thing in my wallet. I went to spend it. It's spent. Oh, you want some money from after we just had dinner and we want to go and split the bill. What's your tag? Boom. sent doesn't matter that your wallet is a neo bank that's on plasma or mine is a neo bank that's on one money or tempo. It should just work. Now actually making that work in the background with all the things that you mentioned and the reserves and the different levels of the stack of stable kind issuers and so on is not going to be easy but this is the world we live in and we will have to solve it.

>> Yeah. Yeah man. No, I think that that's a really good example because it is like this payment processing, payment networking flow, blockchain flow, asset issuance flow. Um, you know, goes all the way down to ERC20s versus the uh uh T what is it? TIP for for for Tempo, I think, or TIP20 or something. Um, there's token standards. It it's very deep. Um, and again, probably an edge for the um reserve managers, probably an edge for the applications. if you can figure this out, if you can if you can solve this problem. Let's talk about the the applications. We'll get the market map up. Again, we separated fintech and neo bank specifically kind of operating under the lens of these more licensed

regulatory compliant custodial fintech giants with large distribution. Revolute, Venmo, uh Cash App and and the likes. And then crypto native neo banks more non-custodial more kind of crypto spend your your crypto with a Visa card earn spend save kind of all in one app but with a more let's say new feeling a not so you know established brand what what it feels like Chuck is that they're both fighting the same fight how do I provide the best financial experience for my customers at scale get the most customers offer them the best product suite in a very safe uh and sustainable manner kind of I'm thinking about this as a shift in the personal finance habits of people meaning that I I I

think that people will especially our age will start to shift in how they manage money how they view money talk to us about the fintech super app quest that it seems like everyone is on with as it pertains to the crypto native neo bankanks almost seem like it's kind of a David and Goliath here uh talk to us about how this works >> yeah it it's the holy grail right I think the the super app idea of okay where is the place where you home all of your finance and we mentioned you know earn spend and send like transfer and but part of earn is is saving then part of earn is also trading and so you know there's I think Robbie Peterson from Dragonfly wrote like an article you should all go read it the fat wallet thesis like last year and it's still

true that was talking about wallets at the kind of crypto layer and we've seen MetaMask and Phantom generate an incredible amount of revenue from swap fees uh connecting folks to Hyperlid so you've got a wallet interface case and you connect it to DeFi and lots of other things in the back. That's the kind of thing that is possible and easier to do on on chain. And so you start with yes earn spend uh and send and transfer. You add in trading, you add in lending and borrowing and DeFi. And so the the magic the opportunity of of creating this financial hub uh we we haven't seen it yet, but someone will nail uh AI personal financial management AI financial advisor. I think I saw it

actually on one of these apps. It's all happening. And because the blockchain and stable coins and DeFi and this, you know, open source element I mentioned earlier is reducing the cost to build these things, it just blows open the competitive landscape. It's fantastic. And so if you're Revolute, you're like, okay, well, we're in the business of continuing to bundle amazing products onto our users. Uh, and now you've got to compete not only with Monzo and not only with like N26, but all these new neo banks that are finding all these niches uh with customers. And I say that because when I say niches with customers, all the products are going to converge to the same thing eventually. And so what combination of those products do you use to go after what set of users?

That's the game. And you know, privacy is coming in as well. Some users will prefer privacy. So if you put privacy at the top of your road map and put hyperlquid trading at the buck, you're going to get certain types of users versus somebody who puts hyperlquid trading first. >> And so it's going to be an interesting uh competitive landscape to watch. But the market is massive. It is huge. And so everyone's going to just find their own positioning and say, "Okay, well, I'm the app for this type of person who looks like this and I'm the app for this kind of person." And they're all going to grow to like millions of users and still be small. And so excited to watch it. uh and uh yeah, expect convergence in certain areas, but until we get there, uh folks have to figure out their

own branding, their own positioning. Uh and it's it's a user acquisition game really at the beginning. >> Yeah, man. It is. And and we had such a good podcast with um Electric uh Capital, Acha, and Mike from Etherfi just speaking about how their entire strategy is simply to capture the crypto wealthy. like they're they don't even care if they have 10,000 customers compared to Revolutees 1 million because if their average spend is 100x what Revolutes is, they could they could care less if Bitcoin is going to a million. They just want these customers for the next 10 years because these are the next millionaires multi-millionaires six figure, you know, etc., etc., spenders.

And I mean, you know, we can get all bowled up all we want, but it's just like that is exactly what you're saying. And so it's like the edge in the application game in the in the application part of the stack to kind of tie this all together as we come to a close here seems to be more relevant as far as your specific customer acquisition strategy. As you say, everyone's going to have a lending app, everyone's going to have stable coin yield, everyone's going to have payments, everyone's going to have some AI uh personal assistant. All these apps are converging on a very similar user experience as well as look. I mean look, they all have different brand colors. That's what it's going to come down to is like, you know, one is purple, pink, green, blue, and yellow, but they all offer you kind of the same thing, but

these teams have to make strategic brand decisions, strategic go to market, customer acquisition decisions with regards to a very specific niche. I think you rais a great point, guys. Maybe close us out here. Chuck, Rob, been absolutely great stabled up episode. Um, Chuck, we'll go to you. Closing thoughts on Neo Finance on the market map. Thanks for being a part of this. Um, and yes, it's been a great it's been a great show. >> Yeah. Uh, quotes and thoughts. I think I it echoes a lot of the excitement of everyone in the space. It's finally happening. This convergence of Trafi and DeFi. Uh, there's a real potential to build some very very useful but also exciting and innovative financial products. Uh, and so now is the best time to build. If you're not building,

there's many folks who are in traditional finance in really good jobs who are considering it. Now is the time. I can't think if the if you are looking for a a moment, it's now. >> Khi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.

Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. My only closing thought is I I'm particularly excited for when Tesla, Nvidia, Grock all launch their financial super apps because they have the best AI and that is going to make our finances that much better, too. So, I uh I I think that's probably at least a half to a decade away. But um we'll we'll see whether or not they they're able >> Anthropic Anthropic acquired Coin Gecko. It may be seen when you think.

>> Yeah. >> Wait, did they really or was that Wait, is that is that confirmed? >> I'm not sure if it's confirmed. I saw enough uh detail that I'm like, okay, it seems uh seems to be going through, but let's wait until the official story. >> That's where we're headed. That's where >> we headed there. >> Antic stable coin coming out any time now, Chuck. Man, >> we can't let these AI companies get control of the financial world, too, man. This is just this is getting out of hand. >> Just accept it. They're going to control everything. Chuck, man, fantastic episode. Thank you so much for coming on and for all of your assistance on on the market map. Uh we'd love to do it again sometime.

>> Cheers, man. >> Great to be here. Thanks for having me. See you. >> We'll see you. >> All right. Bada bing, bada boom. We've got Jacqueline Melanic up next, the founder of token relations. We are going to talk about her journey in the DC landscape the last week and what she's seeing on the tokenization side of things as it pertains to NEO finance. So excited to have Jackie on. Um do a quick commercial break and then we'll have Jackie on the show.

>> Yeah, great great frack segment. Thanks guys. Yet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.