Neo Finance Special: USDT0 & DC Blockchain Join Us, Maple, Ether Fi, Chuk, Jacquelyn & Frank

Transcript

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

[music] You said it. You finally said it. So, I'm bullish. More bullish. [music] Heat. Heat. [music] [music] >> [music] >> I'm about [music] [music] to die.

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[music] >> [music] [music] >> The rollup is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're going to be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon boys. [applause] >> Yo, >> finance.

finance. >> Hey, happy aloha Friday, Rob, man. Happy Aloha Friday. >> Friday. The waves are out. Neo >> Aloha Friday, >> right? >> It's 9:35 a.m. Friday. >> How'd you sleep last night? [laughter] >> Yeah, I didn't really sleep much. Um, that was on your mind. [snorts] >> Neop on your mind. >> What a fun what a fun way to end the week. Um, guys, we have an insane lineup today. >> Yeah. the best of the best industry experts to talk about what's on the map, what's coming. Rob, break us down. Give us the lineup. Get us the guest. Get us fire.

>> Let me let me tell you who we got on the docket here, guys, because this is an incredible lineup. Uh you're going to want to stick around for the whole show. We're going to continue to build and build and build and build. And there's going to be uh there's you're not uh there's you're not going to want to leave. Uh there's going to be our friend Lorenzo is going to be joining us. Uh and Lorenzo crossed a significant milestone in terms of volume. They are absolutely crushing it.

uh USDT0 obviously part of the Tether stack and so it is uh it is a pleasure to have Lorenzo on the show because Tether is a primary player in the world of NEO finance and we're going to be hearing from their CEO and co-founder Lorenzo. Uh after Lorenzo we are going to go straight into our recap of what happened with Clarity Act. We're going to get word from DC. We're going to get Cody Carbone on the show and he's going to be talking to us about everything that happened in DC as of the last week.

Obviously, the Clarity Act has been a very contentious uh uh piece of regulation that, you know, we've seen support and we've seen uh resistance to this bill. Coinbase is Brian Armstrong came out against this bill. Cody Carbone is thinking this should go through. So, you guys have obviously seen why Coinbase is against this. We're going to get word on why uh this should go through from the leader of the digital chamber of commerce, someone that has been in DC lobbying for uh blockchain regulations for several years. We are uh good friends with those at the digital chamber.

After Cody, we're going to have Sid from Maple. Uh, Maple Finance has been in the DeFi game since we got in the game and they are now tackling onchain credit. They are doing this at the absolute highest level. They are up there. I think they just crossed 17 billion dollars in loans originated, which is an incredible figure. Obviously coming from DeFi. Only few uh DeFi companies have eclipsed such a number. A Morpho uh are in that camp. And Maple is an extremely interesting project. This is uh the winner of believe we gave them best in credit uh for 2025 and so we are going to hear from Sid why that is such an

honor to the Maple Finance team and how they plan on continuing the success in 2026 and beyond uh at the heart art of Neo Finance. Following uh Sid, we're going to go to the other side of the Neoinance stack. We're gonna go and hear from Mike Siligaz from uh EtherFi. That is a rollup uh portfolio company. So, make sure you get your disclosures there. And they're building the number one DeFi Neo Bank. They're building Ether Fi. And that is uh the newest competitor to American Express. The crypto American Express is Ether 5. We're going to hear from Mike Siligaz, the founder and CEO of Ether, about what Neoinance means to him. Obviously, NEO banks are at the

heart of Neoinance as well as lending, credit, stable coins, and tokenization. And this is what rounds out the entire Neo Finance stack. So, we're going to be hearing from the leaders of industry from all across this stack on what Neo Finance means to them, why it's significant to you guys watching at home. Next, after Mike, we're going to get Chuck, someone who is re >> the man, the myth. >> The man, the myth. We're gonna get Chuck on and uh Chuck is newer to the the rollup world, but you guys are going to love him. He is very very deep in his knowledge around NEO finance. He's going to be our guest this week for our stable coin segment, Stabled Up, sponsored by Fracks, one of the leading stable coin

issuers and probably the biggest snub from the payments infrastructure section. Uh that was that was just an honest mistake by us to to leave them off of that. They belong in both stable coin issuers as well as payments infrastructure. We want to make that clear. We're going to be hearing from Chuck on Neoance and in particular stable coins. Andy, I know you're itching. >> And then we got Jacquine, >> but just couple more. We've got Jacqueline talking Neoance is going to reach mass adoption. And I know Lorenzo's itching behind the scenes to get up. Our last guest of the day after Jacquine, last but certainly not least, the New York Neo finance neocon Frank Chaparro, the man, the myth, the

mustache, the legend, Frank Chaparo on Markets, Media, and of course, Neo Finance. Guys, don't go anywhere. We've got an incredible show for you today. Andy, how are you feeling? [laughter] >> Happy Aloha Friday, man. Happy Aloha Friday. Thank you for the epic intro. Without further ado, we've got to get into it. Lorenzo's behind the scenes. This guy wants to share how they've been able to [laughter] eclipse a significant milestone. Lorenzo, I hope you caught that intro. I I hope you caught the part where we talked about how Tether is critical to the Neoinance stack. Please tell us what does Neoinance mean to you? How have you

been able to succeed at USDT? welcome to the show. >> First of all, thank you for for me having me, boys. Pleasure to be back. And >> I'll tell my grandkids that I open this one because it's it's a [ __ ] mental. It's one of the coolest stream I've I've seen in a while. So, thank you for having me and it's a pleasure. Um, >> good to see you, man. >> How How are you doing? All good. Good Friday. >> Happy Friday. I'm in Hawaii. It's a beautiful day. Rob's in Florida. There's no It's endless summer for the roll up over here. That's that's the vibe, man. So, good to have you.

>> Switzerland is I'm in Switzerland. It's rainy and it's terrible. [laughter] So, I'm definitely not jealous of you being in [ __ ] Hawaii. Like, >> hey man, go get some slopes in, man. Go get some runs in. All right. >> I did. I did. I did. I did my best. So, yeah. I mean, >> yeah, man. Cheers. >> Fun fun fun fun year, I guess. Last time we spoke, it was during the USDH craziness and right >> all the stuff that was happening around the liquid ecosystem. Now it's it's actually pretty fortunate in terms of timing because just yesterday we announced our one year anniversary with USD0 exactly one year ago exactly actually because that the first transaction was minted on on the 16th of Jan uh is actually the time that we launched this whole thing and now looking back at it 12 months and more

than 64 billion in volume later it's been it's been quite a ride and it just began right so it's it's something that we focus quite a lot on and we were definitely not expecting the amount of support from the wider uh community in general, all of those different ecosystems that basically rolled behind our product and and helped us get to the to the point where we are. So, it's it's been a fun ride and I'm very very excited to be able to to share something about it. >> Yeah, man. I mean, I if you if you look, we're going to pull up the map or if you have it on your computer, you can see how we kind of categorize this stable coin stack and 64 billion in such a short amount of time. It it it's really nothing to scoff at. I mean, you guys

are a unique uh like part of the stable coin stack, right? Not necessarily an issuer, kind of like a stable coin application, stablecoin infrastructure. We're going to pull the map up. Talk us through where USDT0 really fits in the stable coin equation. What does that look like? Because people understand issuers. They kind of understand issuers of record, if you will, but they don't quite understand. I don't know where USDT0 fits. Talk to us about that. Where do you guys fit here? >> We are an infrastructure effectively. We only have one job and sounds easy. It's really not. But our job is to basically create a unified liquidity network for tether based assets. Um the real issuer

behind the scene is always Tether itself. The asset that we're bringing to the other chains is USDT as a token. Uh but we bring it with our own twist effectively. Uh we basically took something that is already great which is USDT itself. largest stable coin in the world, most used stable coin in the world, one of the very probably the most important financial innovation for developing countries in the last 30 years at least. Um, and all we're trying to do is make it 1% better by adding the interperability aspect towards it. Um, Tether has historically been one somewhat less used in DeFi and in onchain applications compared to Circle.

And one of our main thesis was that it was very very hard to move Tether tokens between chains. So what we did is that we took this amazing product that Paulo and the rest of the ter created and we basically integrated it deeply within the layer zero stack of product specifically making it an OFT asset and then we took that and we started pitching it to chains and be like hey how about you start using this as your canonical USD USDT version how would how would that look like uh we started one year ago with our initial deployment on inc Krakens chain everybody is very familiar with and by the way our two launch part partners were bear chain and mega which is pretty funny because mega is actually about to to ship. So we're very very excited to be able to to go full cycle on that. Um we came up with

this idea, we launched it and then we just gave it to the users and we were like okay now you can move any sides of USDT between Ethereum and Inca uh completely for free without limitation of sides and in a fully permissionless and transparent way. Do what you will. Um and slowly slowly we started seeing the first 100 200 300k a day being moved between those two chains and then we started adding more and more ecosystem on top of it. anything else that we're seeing to give access to our users to the best stable in the world. Great. So, we started adding on top of them. Arbitum came to the flock. The tether team gave us ownership of the contracts on arbitum which was an amazing uh things because we could basically upgrade the USDT

contract on arbitum to USDT zero without changing the token contract itself. Uh did the same thing on Polygon then launched on plasma which has been wildly successful to this day. our biggest uh our biggest um ecosystem. And then slowly slowly we managed to thanks our partners grow that 200 300k a day to basically half a billion a day in the last week. In the last three days actually we moved more than 900 million USD tokens between our supported chains. >> 100 million USDT0 moved in the last three days.

>> Uh no no 800 million. So today, yeah, today we have >> it's the German, Italian, Swiss accent that people >> and and Lorenzo where where most of those are most of those flows onchain or is this centralized uh exchanges that are settling stable coins or using USDT0 to settle. It's not all DeFi onchain. It's it's a lot of the the NEO finance stack that is using stable coins as a settlement layer and they're using US0. >> Yeah. So this is the crazy thing. We we looked into who's actually using our products, right? Because one of the most important thing for me was actually understanding who was using and who was creating all of these volumes, right? I mean, when you have 500 million a day, you really want to see who's the people

that have own are owning those USDT and who and why they're moving them around. Um, and what what we found is that it's it's extremely diversified. You have the large hedge funds that are maybe moving their capital around to try to source for the best deals. You have centralized exchanges that are rebalancing their own supply of USDT tokens because uh just to just to explain it, USDT zero tokens are accepted by all the major centralized exchanges as a onetoone equivalent to USDT. So you can deposit USDT zero tokens on like eight chains on Kraken and get USDT in your Kraken account. Uh but those centralized exchanges they are actually having to then rebalance their own supply and they have to rebalance their own uh their own inventories on all of those chains. So what do they do?

They tap into our contracts and then they move clips of like 100, 200, 500, sometimes a billion and a half a day if they have to um totally permissionlessly without any fees whatsoever and in their full control. So this is one part, one part is the hedge funds, one part of the centralized exchanges, another part is just normal users, you know, like you have 200 300k USDT that you have on one chain, you want to bring it somewhere else, you can either deposit it on Binance and then withdraw it on another chain or you can do it fully permissionless via via via our infrastructure. Um you have payment providers uh a lot of payment providers are accepting USD zero tokens on a bunch of networks and then converging them all into one single balance on coded plasma for example uh and so on and so forth.

So it's an extremely diversified diversified uh ecosystem. The one that I like personally the most are the arbitrageers. Uh, which is super funny to see because you see those extremely large capitals that are buying clips of like 50, 60, 70, 80 million USDT in one clip, sending it back to T mainet and then sending selling them immediately or the other way around. Uh, because we run infrastructure is totally free to use. you can use you can if you have large capitals you can arr the price of USDT around chains without any frictions and generating a lot of volume with that. So it's very interesting to see how how it's shaping out.

>> Could could you help us understand the difference and the distinction between USD plain vanilla USDT and then USDT0 is all of you know 64 billion is a lot of volume. 800 million in the last few days is a lot of volume. Is that all USDT and USDT zero like is a subset of that or is it is it one and the same? So USDT itself currently works in a very straightforward and safe way, right? When you're the when you're the backbone of the industry, you need to play it conservatively conservatively and and humble >> very very humble.

>> That's that's not me, right? That's Paulo and the rest of the team. So that's why I'm I'm very happy to to to give them praise because it's it's all they're doing and it's all their their results. So they are the backbone of the industry and they need to play it safe. So what they do is that when you want to mint new USDT tokens, you have to process multic transactions every single time. And if you want to mint USDT tokens, you need to be a verified TED customer, which is something not exactly easy to do, right? There's only few entities in the world that can mint or burn USDT directly. Um on USD zero, we took a completely different approach.

Our approach was you have 97% of all of the USD in existence sitting on two chains, Tron and Ethereum. Let's see what happens if we add the interperability aspect to those USDT tokens living on Ethereum mainet. So our system works in a very elegant way. We have one single contract which is our USDT0 lockbox which is the place where all of the USDT zero in the world are backed with ERC20 USDT on Ethereum mainet. That contract itself is the third largest holder of USDT tokens in the world. So if you if you go into the into Ether scan, you're going to be able to see that the only entity on Ethereum mainet that has more USDT tokens than USDT0 is Binance itself. And if you broaden the scope and you look at what

are the other entities, there's only two others uh on top of us, which are as I said, Binance and another centralized exchange. Um and yeah, that that's basically how the whole system works. So USD0 is basically a representation of USDT sitting on a different network, but not sitting on a single network, sitting on multiple different networks. Right now we're supporting more than 18 chains and you can move those USD0 in and out of those chains via the FFT standard uh powered by the uh the layer zero guys and that we manage completely. We do all the risk assessment so on and so forth. uh and we just took this concept and gave it to the to the users and told them how about you use this as your USDT when you launch monad or when you launch bar chain or when you launch plasma and

that option has just been absolutely massive and that's all thanks to our to our ecosystems and to the to the chains that basically believed in us and decided to trust us. It's incredible honestly because you're right, Tether has been a backbone for the space for so long. And now you didn't come in and say, "Hey, we're going to build another stable coin issuer like so many other companies have done. I mean, if you look at the market map, you'll see there's dozens of stable coin issuers and we didn't even get all of them." Uh, and and so you guys came in and you built a complimentary layer.

Now, you know, given that you've got originally was 90% of USDT was on Ethereum and on Tron, now you've got some other payment chains that are popping up. The OFT standard, I imagine, is going to continue to get uh reallocated, if you will, from some of the current DeFi chains into some more of the payment chains. What is your take on the plasmas and the stables and the tempos and the arcs? How do you see these progressing and how do you see them competing with the traditional DeFi blockchains? >> It's a very very good question. Uh I wish I knew the answer, right? If I if I knew the answer, I would know how to allocate my whole portfolio way better than I'm currently doing. Um so the way I've always seen it is that

we as as USD or or an asset issuer should somewhat be agnostic, right? Like the idea is let's give the tools to each of those players that are building their own idea of what a chain should be like and let them play with it with it and whoever is best is going to come up on top and you're seeing it very clearly now a team like plasma which is one of the most talented and and and exe well executing team that I have ever personally met in my life has taken this technology and propelled it into one of the fastest growing USDT chains in general without even talking about USD zero um And a lot of our volume is generated from into plasma because all of their users are in need of something that they can use on whatever chain they would like to be. Uh on another side as

you said you have you have D5 chains like like I mean I don't want to call D5 chain something that maybe doesn't want to focus on that but something like bar chain something like Inca which is extremely been focusing on growing their D5 stack right now that are still getting massive success. Uh Inca I think it has more than 230 million USDT living there. um bar chain is just above the 120 million and our our mission has always been the same. We want to give everyone the same tools and then what you do with your with the tools that we give you will basically define how easy or how how hard it is for us to support you even more. So it's it's been really exciting and I have to say that obviously there's been some chains that have been focusing only on DeFi. HyperVM

is the perfect example. uh but all of the all of the others have kind of been focusing on on just integrating the whole stack of of stable coins in their in their in their system. Uh Polygon, I don't know if you saw an announcement coming a couple of days ago from Polygon where they are basically trying to completely revolutionize the stack of Polygon POS to be purely focused on stable coin payments and yeah, >> I think it's a I think it's a good choice. >> The open money stack um which actually followed with them announc like the block put out a piece that they also restructured a lot of their companies. So, an interesting big bet it seemed for them. Um, Lorenzo, you've done such an incredible job just explaining how USDT zero fits into this stable coin category between interoperability between

extending the belief and resilience of USDT and Tether that company as well as just being a an important part of their distribution strategy. We're we're gonna pull the map up here and what you can see on the map is you can see we've got stable coins and uh under them stable coin issuers as well as stable coin builders. So we we put USDT0 and stable coin builders as it's quite a bit different than the typical right of tether right you guys are one degree of separation from tether uh ex explain to us kind of how you think about this the the split between stable coin issuers and builders if you will

and kind of why why this uh for like formatting is like about it talk to us about kind of what you think about the key the key terminology differences in stable coin issuers versus builders. >> Yeah. So I another very good question I have to say. Um if you're an issuer you are basically the thing upon which everything is built upon right like ter itself is probably one of the company that has done the best job in in history in managing their own reserves. You probably see how they're splitting most of the reserves how they're always betting on what they call stable assets.

assets that are effectively going to be inflation resistant, assets that are going to be able to to to basically be insurance if if something was to go wrong on the traditional financial system as well as uh the idea of of T bills and the amazing amount of revenue that revenues that those generate. Um that is that for me is an issue. The issuer for me is the is the backbone of the whole system and it's a company that is battle tested is battle tested enough to basically be built upon. Um ecosystem projects on the other hand should take the risks. That's how that's how I've always seen it. And that's how we took the risks in the in the beginning with USD zero on on trying to innovate and trying to make something better and something that that was used. Obviously, now we have to be infinitely more

conservative because when you have all of those USDT sitting in your contracts, you literally cannot um I don't know how to say it nicely, but you cannot [ __ ] up. It's something that we we have to to take care of and it's something we have to focus on. So that's the way I've always seen it. You have stable cocoin issuers, especially the large ones that need to be slow, need to be very very um detail oriented and and and regulated and working with exchanges to try to push and with the regulators to push the industry forward. And then you have existing projects and and community project that should try to innovate. And then if one of those innovation ends up having some market adoption like like USDT zero did now it's time for us to actually sit down and rather than focusing on speed and growth, focusing

on consolidation and and helping out the ecosystem that we built on. And that's what we're going to do in 2026. We're going to try to focus as much as we can on the ecosystem that we have already live. We have obviously a couple of pretty exciting launches coming up in the next few weeks. Um, but our main goal is basically to consolidate and make this infrastructure we built this this unified liquidity network for USDT as easy to tap into as a single chain transaction. And that's basically what we've been what we're going to have to try to do for the whole 2026. >> Yep. Lorenzo, as we were thinking through this this Neoinance thesis and we were unpacking where we think some of the categories that are poised for a lot of growth in 26 and beyond, we were thinking about futurep proofing this thesis. Right? We know DeFi from DeFi

summer 2020. We know how these things progressed all the way through to, you know, the centralized DeFi, the the Celsius and blockfolios that have came and went. And so we were thinking, how do we not repeat those same mistakes? There's a lot of things that we think are going to continue to do well going forward like the Anchorage, the Galaxy Digitals, the Franklin Templeton, some of these RWA and tokenization products. you know, it's maybe outside of your domain a little bit as we go from the stable coin part of the map over to the tokenization part, but how can USDT zero service the RWA and the tokenization category within this industry?

>> Very very good question. So, one of the things that we've always tried to do is try to be specific to Tether assets. And I don't know if you guys are familiar, but Tether has a tokenization platform that is currently live and it's being rolled up to more rolled rolled rolled out to more and more clients, which is called Hadron. Hadron is an amazing piece of technology. It's something that basically takes all of the experience that Tether got in its seven, six, seven years of existence and condensate into a simple form for any kind of of of entity to actually tap into and and and develop. We're going to be working very very closely with the Hadron team. I think it's it's very important that RWAs and and tokenization stands a big role in the upcoming years of this industry. Uh and we're going to

do kind of everything we can to to help the tether the tether team to actually execute that in an interoperable way. One thing I should say though on RWA which is that one of the things that I I personally believe is going to be massive in the next few years is tokenized gold. Um Tether has something that is called Tether Gold. Uh I'm I sound like a broken record because every time somebody asks me what is the thing that excites you the most in this industry I keep screaming to everyone Ted Gold is going to be absolutely massive. Um Ted Gold is something that launched in 2020 if I remember correctly. It was right before COVID and it's to me one of the best products that I've been able to see in the six plus years that I've been in the in the industry. I can tap into physical gold

effectively stored in a vault in Switzerland by in 25 seconds through my Ethereum wallet and paying a fraction of a fee that I would need to pay if I had to use my UBS bank account. For example, I tried to buy gold with my UBS bank account and I was losing something like 150 bips and I I I was I went crazy. I just could go on unis swap and and buy some ter gold right now and lose I think 20 bips in in price impact or something like that. So when you talk about RWA and tokenization, I I really think we should all focus a lot on on Ted Gold and the amount of work, attention and passion that the tero and the rest and the rest of the people working on it have put into it is is absolutely massive. And I I also think

that nothing is more deficientric than a tokenized gold token, >> right? >> Incredible. There there's arguably nothing that could be used as better collateral as XAT. there's nothing that could be used better as as a currency on which build defy protocols and so on and so forth. >> You know, I think you're absolutely right. I think uh the only other other argument there is Bitcoin uh [laughter] the better for >> any crypto the boomer >> I would go so far as crypto >> once they start mining the asteroids and they start finding gold and other things up there. Who knows? Who knows?

>> Rob's a big math guy. >> Until that happens, I think you're absolutely right. I think the precious metals, the debasement trade, we believe in all of these as great forms of collateral beyond fiat. Um, man, Lorenzo, thank you so much for coming on. It was an absolute pleasure. Um, congrats on all the success, tons of volume. You guys are poised uh for a tremendous 2026 and uh we really appreciate you coming on the Neo Finance special and uh talking Neo Finance with here with us here today. >> Thank you guys. Thank you guys for having me. It's always a pleasure to to speak with you, Robin Andy, and anytime.

I'm I'm always here for you guys and keep up the amazing work. It's it's really kickass. >> Absolutely. Cheers, brother. We'll see you again soon, >> buddy. >> Have a great weekend. Cheers. >> Bye. Bye, >> man. I love to see it. Yeah, we're going to keep things rolling here. Um Lorenzo is uh is great. USZ uh USDT0. You know, he mentioned Tether uh but also obviously Tether Gold is is firmly within the RWA tokenization category uh on the NEO finance market map. Guys, without further ado, we're going to pick up on our uh political coverage that we have had this entire week. The Clarity Act's been a roller coaster. Um so,

we're going to send in our next guest is Cody Carbone. Uh he is the leader of the digital chamber of commerce. This one hits home for us. Uh we've been uh the digital chamber has been good friends of the show for a long long time. Um and so uh back in 2018, Andy and I actually took a trip up to Washington DC. It was one of the first crypto conferences that we had ever gone to. At the time, Perryanne Boring, who's the previous lead of the digital chamber, welcomed us. She was a University of Florida alumni. She said, "Come on up.

There's amazing things happening in DC. This was this is way back in 2017 or 2018. And it really got the ideas flowing. Even back then, there was a cohort of politicians and legislators that were in DC at the time already starting to think about what the possibilities for this technology are. They they realize that there's problems with our fiat currency and they realize that, you know, there is there is a way out. It's Bitcoin and it's blockchain. And Cody Carbone has been a leader in uh DC on the hill for a long long time. Uh so we're gonna hear from him in just a few minutes. Let's check in and make sure that he is uh he's coming in. We're going to get him in. Uh we're going to

get him in any moment here. So guys, obviously we're talking Neo Finance today, but a good bit of this Neoinance thesis rests on this regulation. Um we've seen how fintech traditionally has been uh apprehensive to enter this industry now >> to say the least. >> Absolutely. To say uh you know the Genius Act uh and now with a little bit more friendliness coming with the Clarity Act. We we'll see how it progresses. They're finally getting into this industry. So >> yeah, the market structure bill was supposed to be restarted today. I I I I'm not sure what happened.

>> It was post it was postponed and we don't talk. Yeah. But >> we don't know when the talks are going. >> Hey, we predicted that though, Rob. I we we were both like, "Yep, this is we're our goal is to get this in through by the midterm." So, >> yeah. >> Um, look, we'll talk to Cody about it. Let's get him in. Uh, we are going to get started with Cody. Talking more on the policy side, as you said, Rob, this is an important part of the American dynamism kind of expansionary efforts of our country here in America that I think is a very important part for the global crypto scene as well. I think you make a great point here and this is something this was my main takeaway from Arthur's last article where he explains how he explains how the US uh and the current

administration has unilaterally chosen certain categories that we need to win right we we've heard Trump say we need to win >> we need to win the war on crypto and right now that is what is propelling a lot of this forward and and obviously he's talking to the politicians when he says we need to win the war on crypto and unilaterally decides hey this is an industry that we need to be pouring investment into he's not just talking to politicians and pouring resources government resources into making regulations here he's also talking about hey we need to be pouring greater investment into this industry and that is what has opened up a lot of these

companies to finally make their fora into stable coins which they had been apprehensive to do for so long. I think it's a multiaceted thing here. It's a combination of both of these uh both both of these perspectives getting opened up and more clarity uh coming to the industry. >> We're so fired up about Neo Finance today, man. We're we're bulling we are bulling compliance efforts. [laughter] Literally bulling compliance efforts right now. Cody Carbone is ready to come on. Let's bring him on. >> Guys, welcome up our friend Cody Carbone.

What's up, guys? Hey, man. How are you? >> Pleasure to have you. Welcome to the show, man. It's good to see you again. >> It's good to see you, fellas. Thanks for having me. >> Busy week in DC. A messy week, one could say. >> It was chaos. I'm tired. I'm glad it's Friday. Yeah, it's been uh it's been busy. That's safe to say. >> Yeah. Um man, we've heard uh we've heard opinions from really all over the place. We've heard support. We've heard resistance. Give us how like give us a temperature check of how people feel in Washington because I think a lot of times we see Twitter, people are chiming in from all over the world. They don't really have a sense of what's going on.

You're in Washington DC on the hill talking to the people that are making decisions. How are they feeling about the current state of affairs? >> Disappointed. It it's it's tough. We have been spending years now on this bill. This is not just something that came up this Congress. This Congress is the first opportunity we've actually had to pass something really substantive that can make a difference and set the US regulatory framework for crypto. We were close and we're still close. I'm not giving up. Uh we are fired up. We're still going to push this through, but we needed this markup to happen. I think what's so disappointing is that if there's issues with the bill, I've got issues with the bill. I've got a lot of issues with the bill. I share a lot of the issues that Brian Armstrong has with

the bill. our member companies that we represent have issues with the bill, but if you're going to fix them, you've got to be at the table and you've got to continue to negotiate. I think a lot of the misconceptions that have been out there is that, hey, what was supposed to happen yesterday, this markup of the Senate Banking Committee, that means the bill is final. That means there's no more text. That was a final vote. That's just not the case. Everyone's got to go back and watch like that Schoolhouse Rock, how a bill becomes a law video. We're like a It's a three minute video. We're like a minute and a half in. This is just part of the process to start the negotiating in a public forum. It was going to be an opportunity for the Senate Banking Committee that has jurisdiction over just half of the text

to say, "Okay, here's the things we like. Here are the things that we disagree on. Industry, where are you going to offer amendments? Where are you going to try to offer to improve this bill?" It was not that the bill was final and it was going to become law. And that's a lot of the anger I saw on crypto Twitter when I put out a statement like, "Hey, we're still going to try to put this thing forward and get this bill done." People are like, "How could you?" the bill's not great. I'm like, we're going to make it better. We're going to make it great. Um, this is just part of the process. So, I'm disappointed. I'm hoping that this is just a small bump in the road and that we'll get back to a markup shortly and continue to move this thing to President

Trump's desk. But, it's it's a disappointing and almost like deflating feeling because everyone was hyped up to get this markup done. >> Let's hammer that point home. So, and we can really use uh the the number one most contentious point in this bill has been banks paying interest uh you know stable coin issuers paying interest on stable coins and how you know that could potentially lead to a capital flight. But it also means you know we're not uh vendor locked into you know the quarter basis point that we get in our savings account. You know we could actually experience some real yield on our savings.

You're saying that, you know, if we had done the markup, we still could have changed that later on down the road. >> What what's the thought process here? How should we be thinking about this particular point within the Clarity Act on whether or not, you know, stable coin issuers should be paying yield or should we, you know, listen to the big banks? They've been in this space for a long time. They shouldn't, you know, we should kind of think about this more carefully. Where where do you stand on on this point in particular? >> This is the number one point right now that is being negotiated. This is the reason that the markup was delayed is that there wasn't consensus on this issue. My perspective is that we must allow for stable coin rewards. It is a

part of innovation and is a part of competition that we should not hurt retail consumers who are putting their money into stable coins by prohibiting these rewards to be able to be issued all of a sudden. And I don't know where this came from, but if we allowed rewards, the narrative that is that we're being hit over the head with from the community banks out there is that community banks would fail. I don't understand how that's the case. They are terrified of rewards. They think to your point, Robbie, this will cause a deposit flight. There is nothing in the Genius Act that prohibits banks from offering rewards and prohibits bank from offering a yield that is more than 0.001%.

They can compete, but they don't want to compete. And so we are actively trying to allow these rewards to continue. The banks have said we're going to tank this bill if rewards aren't addressed in this bill. I don't understand that because if they tank this bill, then the Genius Act stays at law as law where rewards are allowed. So we have to meet in the middle. The problem and why this markup was delayed is that there is not consensus on the Republican side as well to keep the rewards. There are Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee who are also concerned about what rewards would mean for their community banks. We have to come to an agreement. We're not at a point where we can ignore this issue anymore. It is going to be addressed. Rewards, stable

coin yield will be addressed in this bill no matter what. It's gotten to that point. Everyone understands that. So, what is the compromise? We have to find one. But for me, our red line is that there still needs to be rewards. >> Okay? There has to be rewards offered to consumers >> and and Cody, just to clarify, you agree with Brian Armstrong on this point, right? >> Yes, 100%. But where I and I don't even know if I disagree because I saw Brian Armstrong on Capitol Hill the last two days is that it's not the time to disengage and to step away from the table. If we do that, then we are just allowing the banks to win the day and say, "Great, crypto has stepped out.

Crypto has disagreements within their own industry." then we will be on Capitol Hill every day telling the banks, okay, or telling the senators, let's just prohibit rewards. So my point of view is that yes, we disagree right now with the banks. We want stable coin rewards to exist. So that's why we need to be even more engaged, more active working with the Senate offices to find language that still allows that to work. >> Yeah, man. And I mean the banking lobbies, they just have such a significant amount of capital. >> Strong, >> right? they will just lobby until there is no more lobbying to be done in this world. And so I I I firmly agree with your stance there. I want to throw you something on that note separate from the stablecoin issue around the tokenized

equity issue. So what's happening right now is there are actually some firms that have the necessary regulatory licensing to be able to offer tokenized equities on chain and others that do not. A and this is seen as like a distribution advantage as a market advantage when it comes to issuing tokenized assets as well as just generally being a um you know tokenization agent. When it comes to this specific issue of tokenized equity, I noticed Brian Armstrong was was specifically uh he mentioned that def is a basically a de facto ban on tokenized equity as the bill stands today.

However, uh the CEO of Securitize, Carlos Domingo, he made a very strong point that well, if you tokenize an equity, it is still a security whether it's tokenized or not. An equity is a security and this is why we've been building our structure in the way that we have for so long. What's your take here on the Brian versus Carlos dynamic? Talk to us about what matters when it comes to tokenized equities and securities on chain from the perspective of being on DC. >> I agree with Carlos. I think that the way that Brian was reading this bill is or his lawyers were telling him of how this bill would impact or ban tokenized equities is just false. Um I think it's just a it is a

maybe it's just a disagreement in how we interpret it. But I know from our conversations with the Senate Banking Committee staff that this was not their intention, that they have no intention of prohibiting this and that they are offering to even strike that language. So I imagine in the next iteration of this build that will be one of the first things addressed and I've seen a lot of people come out like Carlos and say that to Brian. So I'm not sure I'm not sure you know where Coinbase was getting that. Um you know the SEC has been very clear I think it was Commissioner Pur several months ago that say just because you tokenize something doesn't change the regulatory treatment. Um but that there needs to be paths and there needs to be guidance on how to tokenize

things. tokenization is going to be the biggest explosion of activity in the digital finance space over the next six months and the last thing that anyone on the Senate side, anyone from the Trump administration side, from the regulatory size wants to do anything to prohibit that. So, I I think this was a a misunderstanding that'll be easily fixed, and I wouldn't be surprised if section 505, that language that Brian was pointing out in his tweet, is completely removed or completely different in the next iteration because this seems just to be a misunderstanding. >> And and so take us through the path to get to the next iteration because at at this point, I think we're left with confusion, right? It was postponed. We don't know. We we don't know how long

it's postponed for. Is it next week? Is it next month? Is it next Congress? What is the path to at least get back to the drawing board? >> It's a great question and I wish I wish it I wish I knew. Um, we Robbie, we don't know. And I keep telling every Senate office that I talked to today, there needs to be clarity. Right now, we've now gone two days since we postponed the markup. The longer we go, the more questions people are going to ask and the more pessimistic people are going to get on pushing this bill forward. We need to get this resolved. We need a firm date of when there's going to be the next markup. My hope going into this when I first heard about the postponement was

that it was going to be the last week of January. Uh some like January 27th, 28th when the Senate ad committee is scheduled to have their markup. I'm seeing some uh statements from some of the senators on Senate banking that they think it could be even later. It could be February, but that'll get done this quarter. I'm not going to allow that. We're going to fight very very hard to avoid that. >> A lot of the a lot of the crypto industry is uh putting a lot of faith and belief in you and and we uh we wish you, you know, great great luck in in fighting the good fight. I I'm just curious, you know, because now I I think a lot of people, you came on, you said you're tired. I think a lot of people are saying that, you know, they're fatigued and now it feels like we've got

opponents on both ends. It feels like not only are we fighting the Legacy Banks, we're also fighting, you know, Brian Armstrong's on his villain arc. So, where like are is this a three-headed beast now or or you know where are the uh where are the um the affiliations starting to fall in these different camps? How how do we parse through kind of the pieces that are that are that are falling out of this? >> It it's not going to work and we're not going to be successful if this is a three-headed beast. The crypto industry has to be aligned. The people who are jumping for joy when the crypto industry is not aligned on this bill are the banks and some of the fiercest opponents on the Senate side from the Senate on

the Senate Democratic side. We have to be aligned. We have to spend the next two weeks really galvanizing behind the points where we want clarity and say, "Hey, we all agree that we need a bill." That is what I'm hoping for and that's why I like that's been my rallying cry since this was postponed is everyone and all of our members, all of the industry leaders leaders say, "Hey, we're not walking away from the table that while this may be a bump in the road, we all want a bill. There can't be any cracks in the armor. We want a bill and we need it this year. It there's no a delay crushes this. We're getting into a political season. This is the midterms that are coming up in November. People start to leave Washington. People go home to campaign. Who knows what's going to be the outcomes of the election? Who

knows what's going to be the outcomes of the election in 2028 when there might not be as friendly of a regulatory environment? This is our one moment. We have never been so close to getting that clear regulatory framework. If we let this moment slip, we will regret it for a long time. So, the entire industry has to be aligned here or we will fail. >> Cody, last thing. Yeah, go ahead. >> Just just one or two more things here. What is is there anyone else on Brian's side here that is also in actually someone in DC, right? You know, we've got the banks and we've got what seems to be an aligned cohort of crypto, you know, companies and and policies. And then Brian's kind of off doing his own thing. Is anyone and the the narrative is that Brian and Coinbase have so much

influence that they're able to basically forestall this all by themselves individually? Is there anyone else from the crypto world that is on Brian's side? I I have seen Brian and the Coinbase team um I was just watching an interview with them a few hours ago. I have seen them say, "Hey, we want a bill." And they're they're saying all of the right things right now. So, I I actually think we're on the same side even though, you know, his tweets said yesterday, "Hey, we can't oppose the bill as is." There was a follow-up tweet just under that like, "Oh, but we want a bill and we're optimistic." So, I actually do think we're all on the same side. Maybe different tactics and maybe different messaging. and I wanted to see the markup go forward because I thought it was an opportunity to continue negotiate and move this forward. So, we

disagreed on that, but I think right now we're all saying the same thing. We need a bill. We want it to be better than the where the bill was. The only way that we can make it better is by sitting at the table. So, I do think we're all somewhat on the same side. The next two weeks are going to show how close-knit we are. Um, if we can really build a coalition here, I think we can. I'm optimistic from talking to our member companies. We need to show that united front to the Senate and I'm confident we can do that. >> Cody Carbo, man, we really appreciate your work uh on Capitol Hill in in DC and just generally pushing this space forward. Um it's it's it's Yeah, Rob >> and and before you go, I think it's important like we're going to be in DC

with you guys at so we want something to happen, you know, before twiddling our thumbs, you know, while we're on our way there. So, uh, we've got a code that we're going to share with our community. We'll we'll blast it out after the show and, uh, we hope a lot of people that are watching, uh, come check it out in person with us together and and come to the summit with us in DC in >> that was the first conference Rob and I went to in 2018 when we realized this idea of >> decentralized governance was going to be big. We had no idea how to implement it, what it was going to be, but we were like, whoa, if we can just like decentralize the way that these decisions are made, there could be all and it was just like this funny breakthrough. And now looking forward

here, we're literally trying to push some of the most important crypto market structure bills in this year. Cody, we're we're going to be pushing Neo Finance at the at the blockchain summit in March on Capitol Hill. We're looking forward to it, man. Thanks for joining us. >> I can't wait. Thanks, guys. See you in DC. DC dclockchainsummit.com. Over 30 members of Congress, tons of members from the Trump administration. Hope to see all of your listeners there. >> Thank you, man. Keep fighting a good fight. We'll see you next time. >> See you soon, buddy. >> See you, >> man. You get you you got to love that the states is just full American dynamism. Full on. We're going to get this done. We're going to lead regulation in the world for others to follow. I mean, you got to love it, man.

>> Look, you mentioned we were there in 2018 going to this DC blockchain conference. They've been working on this bill for >> how long is that? Eight years. >> I know, man. >> Crazy. A lot of the same ideas and principles were the same that were were back then. We're still trying. >> So much fighting. So much fighting. >> Swimming up upstream, walking against the treadmill for like six years with the administrations. Guys, we've got Sid, the CEO and co-founder of Maple talking about the me the neoinance credit stack. one of the biggest success stories in credit and onchain lending of the last two years. An epic turnaround uh from the previous bare market has led SID and co to be one of the most coveted DeFi neo finance applications in the

world today. We'll get Sid up right now. Get fired up. Keep going on our lovely Neo finance special. Sid, the man with the amazing accent. Welcome back to the show. [laughter] >> Hey guys, good to be back. Thanks for having me. >> It's been a while, man. I I feel like we haven't had you on the show since might have been DeFi summer 2020 or 2021 or something like that. >> No, no, no. It's been it's been more recent that than that, but these guys have been so upon I might have missed hard to forget. >> You guys have been I mean front and center. Um and and we've just been watching. We've just been watching. It's been incredible to see. Congrats on all the success.

>> No, thank you. 20 2025 was a good year. I mean, it's a grind. I feel like we paid a lot of dues in 2023 and 2024, so it was nice to have a bit of a bit of a tailwind in 2025, but here we are back to do it again. >> What the We're gonna >> What was the cat I I'm just curious what what was the catalyst? How did you guys go from that, you know, that trough in 23 and 24 and ultimately spurred the growth in 25? >> Well, I I I think the seeds we planted in 2023 and 2024 [clears throat] kind of set the stage for the growth that we saw in 2025. 2023 was when we made the the shift to do over collateralized lending and launched the business that's now, you know, got billions of dollars of aumum today. And

then middle of 2024 was when we launched syrup syrup USDC. And that's the product that really uh saw most of our growth in 2025. So really, it was like, you know, was planting a lot of seeds and opportunities in those two years that that really paid dividends in 2025. >> Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah, man. And I mean in in addition to that, we just had Cody Carbone from DC calling in. You know, it it it'd be hardressed to say that this new admin as well as the regulatory change is not just going to help you guys, but this broader NEO finance category at large. Sid, break us down.

Do we have the right idea here? Are we missing something? The convergence between DeFi and legacy finance is happening at light speed. It's not fintech. It's not DeFi with seed phrases. It's not fintech with custodians. It's non-custodial, great UX, better than banks, and extremely streamlined stable coinbased RWA based product issuance onchain at scale and and it's happening right now with such physics and gravity that it's just become so unignorable. >> Sid, do we have the right idea here with Neoance? What is your Neo finance thesis and vision as it pertains to onchain lending and what you guys are doing in the credit sector?

Yeah, for sure. It's it's it's uh it's a great question. I think the way I see Neo finance is it's it's not quite fully DeFi, it's not quite CFI, it's uh it's better and faster and more transparent than TRDFI and it kind of brings the best, you know, the best of all three of those categories. So I think uh our you know our vision of where we want to be is we see ourselves as an onchain asset manager with a very distinct focus on on lending yield and credit and you know the player in Tradfire that I always liken us to is Apollo. They've got 650 billion AUM and that's really what we want to strive for. We think that the Pi is going to continue to grow in terms of onchain lending and this is really going to be powered by stable coins. Last year

we had the Genius Act. this year where we're hoping we get the market structure bill and I think that's going to you know that's going to lead to a real explosion of activity as a lot of tradi money comes in and powers the growth of this sector and I think lending is going to benefit most of all >> how how will you know when when we're thinking about this we've obviously seen you know the the onchain lending stack for so long you guys have been a leader in this a's been a leader in this and now we're starting to see those get integrated into not quite the legacy finance stack, but we're seeing it get integrated centralized exchanges and and brought more to the Wall Street, you know, financial institutions of the world. How do you see this integration playing out as, you know, what we're

calling legacy finance, the current, you know, banking infrastructure as it merges with DeFi? How what do you think this looks like for the end consumer? I think uh I think it's going to take a long time to play out, but I think what you'll see for the end consumer is they're they're going to ultimately end up with more transparency and more options for yield in particular. Like I think if we just focus on what does this mean for uh what does the integration of tradi mean for uh users of of uh lending products and fixed income products? I think it's going to mean that you get more portability of your funds. You're able to switch and choose the best uh asset managers or vault managers who get

the best return on capital for you because the friction and the uh the cost of swapping between products and managers is going to be so tremendously low with stable coins. And I think you're going to see a lot of partnerships. You won't necessarily be a user of one protocol or platform or another. You'll see a lot of crossover between platforms. We already do a lot with Ave. We have a great partnership with them. Folks who hold Syrup USDC or Syrup USDT can put it in a as collateral and then loop it, earn a higher yield. You've seen crossover with Apollo and Morpho. So they had Acred got tokenized and then you were able to loop it on Morpho. So I think you're going to see a lot of that cross-pollination of

products, but ultimately the consumer is going to benefit. They'll get a higher yield. They'll get more competitive phase from asset managers and they'll just get more utility out of this. >> And give us a sense of the the Maple Finance product stacked as it is today. You mentioned Syrup USDC, Syrup USDT. These are the things that are native and composable with all of the onchain, you know, bells and whistles that you know that we know and love. And then you've also got this uh Maple institutional secured lending product. What maybe you could unpack that for us. How does it, you know, compare and differ from uh from from the onchain syrup uh stable coin products?

>> Yeah, definitely. I think look, having the DeFi integrations was really one of the major things that powered our growth in 2025. So, if you look, you've got syrup USDC and syrup USDT, you can uh trade them on a secondary market, unis swaps, you can get in and out of those exposures pretty quickly. You can use them in lending protocols to lever up whether it's Jupiter, Camino, uh, Ave, Oiler, Morpho. Um, and then you could or you could put it in something like Pendle and fix the interest rate. So I think the utility of the DeFi based products is uh is you know is is a tremendous selling point for us. We have those they are our largest products and then we have as you pointed out Robbie the high yield secured pool. This is for accredited investors. And how we think

of that product is it's a bit of a longer duration. So it pays a higher yield, but that's because we're we're able to term loans out longer. So instead of doing, you know, open term with the ability to recall in a few weeks or or 30 days, we can do loans for six months plus. And that means that we can charge more for those loans. And we can we can give our users the benefit of that by paying them out a higher yield. And that's exactly how the product works today. You get a higher yield in that product than if you go into syrup USDC. But the advantage of syrup USDC is more liquidity and more utility in DeFi. So that's how we think of the trade-off.

But I think uh we expect growth in both, you know, in both of those product set uh product sets this year. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Sid, I think one of the categories that people are pretty much sleeping on in RWAs, if you will, is this is this private credit category. Obviously, you guys are not. Um, I I think last I checked it was around the 15 to 20 billion mark. I think this thing has potential to do 100% year-over-year growth, if not more. Probably one of the the the categories with most upside. I mean, dude, if if you guys are going to do 100% year-over-year growth and half the categories is going to do it. So, I mean, if if we get some help here, we can get to 200 300%. What's your take on what's driving private credit? People are saying there's cracks. People are

saying that look, the Russell's breaking out. Small caps are running. Private credit market might be shakier than than people think in the macro sense. What's your take on the drivers for the private credit bull run of 26 and beyond onchain? Well, I think uh I think private credit has uh you know a tremendous tremendous amount of runway ahead ahead of it in 2026 and I think it was private credit was the natural evolution after stable coins right like 2023 2024 we all saw tokenized money market funds and that was the lowest risk you could get. So you had stable coins then you had tokenized money market funds and as people get more and more familiar with these products they want to explore

higher yields. So you saw Apollo's ACRED, we've seen things like the Hamilton Lane fund and now you're seeing more players in that NEO finance stack who are doing tokeniz effectively tokenized private credit whether it's a daylight or it's a USDA. Uh so I think there's a lot of appetite for yield and particularly if we if we look at the macro conditions if Bitcoin goes on a run and and and prices go on a run then I think people and investors want beta. But when things are kind of flat, everybody wants yield. And I think that that hunger for yield is going to drive a lot of inflows into tokenized private credit and you're starting to see you get more utility out of it because you can loop it on lending protocols. You could lever it up. So I I think that's uh I think that's going to

see a ton of growth this year. >> Yeah, I love it. Yeah, man. I mean that is probably the the the sector I mean that and stable coins I is where we're expecting stable coins being the most actual notional growth in terms of dollar size and then private credit in terms of percentage growth we're kind of looking at right now and expecting those maybe it's a super consensus take maybe not Sid I have a question about the market map and the way that we structured it so in lending we have Maple but there's also a a pretty let's say nuanced take as to this lending category Maybe you could help us understand a bit of the differences in the lending category, right? Because there's underclutterized lending, overclutterized lending, then there's basically RWA based lending. There's

there there's crypto assetbased lending. You mentioned looping leverage. Break down this lending, you know, category for us here. We did it broad. How how would you think about if you're looking at the map or if you're looking at the lending category, we'll pull it up on the screen. How would you break down the crypto uh neo finance lending category more in a more you know um specific way? >> Good question. Uh so I I do have the map up in front of me. Uh so I've got uh and I think one of the things that that uh stuck out to me is I think there is there's a lot of crossover and overlap between the categories of stable coins lending and tokenization particularly

between lending and tokenization but uh you know I see some names that you could arguably you know arguably straddle categories but if I just commented at a high level what I would say is where you see lending that category you know it's dominated by the likes of a morpho spar we're in that category. Um, and I think what they have in common is typically these are are primarily protocol based and there's a heavy emphasis on uh it being algorithmic uh not really driven by people and it's very focused on lending against uh large cap crypto tokens. folks like us, we're we're a little bit in a hybrid like we're we're

also kind of straddling the tokenization because we do offchain loan agreements similar to some of the folks in the tokenization uh bucket where you have Figure uh who does uh tokenized HELOCs, so home equity lines of credit, you have Onondo who's doing tokenized equities. Uh you have Centrifuge who does tokenized bonds. And so I'd say we we kind of straddle those two categories. But the one of the other interesting comments I would make is as I look in in stable coins, I can see USDA is in there who who has an emphasis on GPU backed financing. And then they're not too dissimilar to somebody like Daylight who's looking at solar energy backed financing. So I think uh but broadly I'd

say the lending category is really dominated by protocols. Tokenization is very much people who are doing off-chain lending agreements or off-chain asset agreements. And then stable coins are folks who are focused on, you know, effectively very low volatility. >> Yeah. S and I think you could have been in the uh in the stable coin builder category there with some of the yield coins as well. this these these maps become subjective and opinionated at a certain point and and it's uh it we are trying in V1 here to kind of really understand how people are are thinking about this because frankly s there's a lot of misinformation about tokenization and a lot of lack of understanding similar to when we were defi slate enrolled into being the roll up to

really study infrastructure and really understand like blockchain design there was a a massive gap there in understanding how blockchains really work how this industry actually functions from a deep kind of like low level and it was hard for us like we're not technical right so moving into this this is kind of like the logical step for I think the industry to really start thinking and like the more that I've spoken to um you know founders entrepreneurs like yourselves and others some with a lot of uh stratifi experience others with not it's been a consistent like yeah we really had to like learn this part of the market to be able to actually build successfully Sid as we close out talk us a bit of your learnings, how you've kind of used your experience, your team, you know, what

what what types of ways you've really been able to actually grasp these concepts and really execute them well on chain due to a deep finance knowledge, not just blockchain, not just web 3. Talk to us about that progression for for you and for the industry at large. >> Yeah, for sure. Uh I think uh you know one of the things we kind of commented on at the start of at the start of this discussion was the convergence. So the convergence of traditional finance with onchain asset management and and neo finance. And I would say where we're where my tradi experience has come in handy is that we're we're a little bit of a hybrid at Maple. So if you look at us we do we gather capital

on chain. We manage all of our loans on chain but we have off-chain loan agreements with our institutional clients. This can include custody accounts. We have to negotiate legal agreements uh so that we have a strong you know strong security and legal position there and uh and then we have to negotiate deals for you know for financing or new structures. Maple Maple this year is working on one of the first crypto loanbacked securitizations. So that would be onchain loans, off-chain investors through a traditional structure and uh and I think one of the things that's been most important for my Trafy experience was uh legal like legal document negotiation structuring and

credit risk management. Like if you look at what we have to do, it's not dissimilar to what you do in traditional banking or at a traditional credit fund. Many of the guys on the Maple team come with capital markets experience from having worked at credit funds or worked at um at traditional trading desks. And so that really that assessment of counterparty credit risk and how you price it and how you mitigate it is probably the single most important aspect that everyone on the Maple team has taken from their traditional finance experience. And uh I think it's only I think any founders or builders who can combine that skill set are going to be in a very goodstead as we head into this new paradigm where the two worlds are converging.

>> Yeah, it's very aligned with with how we think this is going to play out. Um S the last thing from my end here is you know you guys have uh the syrup token uh and and my understanding you are doing buybacks on this token and this has been something the zeitgeist as of recently. Are buybacks good? Are they not so good? Is there a better way, you know, or or allocation or or way to manage this capital? Uh tell us a little bit about syrup and and what the role is that it plays in the in the entire maple ecosystem and and just give us you know your your quick two cents on buybacks as it relates to syrup.

>> Yeah, for sure. I think it's I think it's a very topical question at the moment. So the thing to know about Maple is we have the syrup token. We have one token. It cover it governs the entire eco, you know, our entire ecosystem and the way that the protocol works and we have never raised equity into another entity. So there's no conflict. There's no equity investors who have distinct and opposing interest to the token holders. Everyone's a token holder. All the funds are token holders. And so uh we have committed because Maple's profitable. So we make about 30 million annual recurring revenue. uh and uh we've been cash flow positive and profitable since about April of of 2025.

So we've committed to do 25% towards buybacks and uh buybacks and allocations to the reserve. So that means we could buy the syrup token, we could buy Bitcoin. Uh but the way I think about it is token holder communities want to see some buybacks because they want to know that there's some consideration for token holders and some return of economics to the token holders. That being said, if you're a startup, I don't think it's the best use of capital to spend all your money on effectively a synthetic dividend. If Microsoft had been doing that in their first 10 years, you would have had a very different outcome for shareholders. I think if you if you have a business that's capable of absorbing capital, of growing where you can generate high returns on capital, I think you should put your revenues

mostly into that. That's why we have, you know, that's why we've only allocated 25% to buybacks. We think the best use of capital for us is reinvesting in the growth of the business. But we want to acknowledge our token holders are important stakeholders and so we do some buybacks but we keep it balanced and we think the best thing the northstar for us is earnings per token. How much you know how much revenue and earnings are we generating per token and we can either do that by reinvesting in the business or reducing the number of tokens outstanding. Uh, and so that's that's how I think any founder should kind of evaluate how they use capital.

>> I like it, man. Yeah. I mean, we had a great conversation with Jordy Alexander about this. And Sid, one thing I'll bounce off you is not just buying your your um, you know, your token syrup or Bitcoin, but also the timing of the buys and the sizing. >> Yeah. almost operating your revenue into like a mini kind of fund vehicle or like a mini kind of like speculative you know trading and or investing entity for for the betterment of your equity token holders as they are one right that's like the unification thesis that you're pushing here that you know you guys have worked hard to build and I think a lot of the industry is going to go through that we'll see how it kind of actually works whether they assign equity to to shareholders or to token holders figure

out a way to kind of do it in a legal structure We've kind of yet to see that. I I imagine this year and next we will. But I'm curious on the point of kind of timing. How how important is timing of your investments from the uh revenue that you generate and on in in the treasury? Do you ascribe to more of like a DCA strategy? Is it uh more kind of proprietary? How do you guys think about that aspect of the business? >> It's a good question. I think you can absolutely generate outsized returns if if you time the purchases correctly. Uh, how I would think about it is the default should be a DCA, like you're just applying a portion kind of per month and purchasing periodically.

You're not necessarily trying to time the market. That being said, I think you should be sensible in that you shouldn't be applying a bunch of buybacks at the top of the market. Like if your token's trading at a 52- week high and the entire market is ripping, probably you shouldn't be buying as much then because it's probably overvalued. Whereas, if if your token's trading at a 52- week low, but your business fundamentals are strong and the market just seems depressed, that's the time, I think, to to kind of back up the truck or at least, you know, prudently apply your reserves. You should always consider you should always consider the opportunity cost of of the return you can get just reinvesting in in the growth of the business. Um, but I always look to the model of Henry Singleton. This guy, you

know, Warren Buffett really loved him. But you know in a few a few decades back uh when his token was trading at a high multiple he spent it on acquiring businesses and growing the business when his token was was dirt cheap or rather when his when his equity and his stock I should say not token was uh was dirt cheap he piled in on the buybacks and he generated immense returns for for his shareholders through just sensible timing of of the purchases. I think it's a I think it's a takeaway that a lot of founders and companies in in this particular space can probably learn quite a bit from. Uh Sid, man, thank you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure. Would love to increase the frequency of your appearances on the show. It feels we've got we've got a lot to learn. I think

others do as well. And uh you guys are at the heart of this neo finance thesis. So uh congrats on all the success and we we appreciate your hard work. >> No, thanks for having me on guys. I'd love to come on come on more often. Sid, we're going to NYC in the biggest way possible. You I think you're going to be pretty impressed with what we're about to pull off end of Q1. So, just stay tuned man. >> Mahalo, brother. >> Thanks, guys. >> We'll see you soon, buddy. >> Thanks, Sid. >> Bye, Sid. >> All righty, man. >> Pretty fun uh pretty fun segment there. I mean, Sid's uh answer about the Tradfi experience is really what I was trying to dig at, right? Like, this is a whole new world for us. Feels like we are entering the uh era of the rollup infra

uh learning experience where it was like two guys in a desire to learn how blockchain functions at a deep low stack infra level. >> Yeah. Now I can tell you all about interrupt sequencing, execution, data availability, uh the rise of how sequencing works, block, how blocks work how >> pipeline >> inter like times work, about how slot times work, about how the like just all of this stuff about the UX functions and and so it was like we parlayed the DeFi DGEN onchain experience into the infra how this works, why this works.

How exactly at a low level do blockchains function? Why are they such amazing consensus machines? And now it's like, "All right, boys, pack it up. You're in Hawaii now. We got a couple ski trips ahead." And then we're in New York and it's going to be fullon learning how the financial system works. Uh, which feels silly to say out loud, but I'm humble enough to just be like, I don't really understand the financial the the world of finance at a deep level. You know, I took two finance classes. I took economics classes and then I got the hell out of there. [laughter] >> You got exactly what you needed. Once they stopped giving you what you needed, you went and you talked to the smarter people, the smarter people that are actually doing it out in the real world because that's where you have something

to learn. And and man, I mean, this this hits home for me because, you know, one of my core philosophies and missions when it comes to this entire company is I want to continue to learn day in and day out. I feel like we've built one of the greatest machines for acquiring knowledge that exists anywhere. Um, and especially with regards to this particular domain. And you're absolutely right. It it feels like you know we started off with kind of this like very rudimentary you know over like Bitcoin ETH like what is really possible and then once we figured out like okay there is a lot that's possible we went and we got a little bit more esoteric. We said okay there's a lot happening underneath the hood. Let's go understand a deeper level how this blockchain thing works.

Then we kind of we kind of abstracted away because we know most people don't want to deal with that. They want to know what is the best value proposition of this technology. We're realizing and Vitalic is voicing this as well. It's lowrisk DeFi. So, it's like we're returning to our roots and we're, you know, revisiting our roots with a deeper fundamental understanding of what is possible and how things should be done. And so, we're much more opinionated about it. And it feels like we're going to take this one step further and and I mean you're >> and learn, man. I mean, like you and I don't have finance degrees. You have math and philosophy. I've got to I'm I've dropped out. Like, we it's it's time to really strap in and just kind of learn here. With that in mind, Rob, let's actually flip over to the market

map. Sure. And let's take some time and just kind of go through what's in front of us as we get Mike, the CEO of Etherfy on the show next. Um, let's get into the market map and really just kind of like break down what we had today. Right. So, we released this market map and right, we have stable coins and and tokenization as like the big buckets and blockchains pay play a a pivotal part here. We're going to have Chuck on in about 30 minutes or so, 20 minutes, and we're really going to dive deep into what this is. But from a high level, from an investment point of view, right, Rob, like I I think a lot of this is interesting from the understanding point of view, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested in Neoance because I

don't think it's going to be generating a, you know, sensible ROI over the next three years. Like when I look at this map I put out in my tweet, I see Deca Unicorn companies. So hundred billion dollar companies and higher >> becoming a part of this stack and I think they're in there. I I am about 90% confidence interval that there are deca unicorns in there. >> I I think uh the definition of a deca unicorn is 10 billion dollar valuation and you know that tether is already at a $500 billion. So there's certainly we already know that there are deca billionaires in here. How many remains to be seen depends on on your time

horizon. Um I I I will say you know just on your previous point that one of the things that my degree did teach me is I I love the idea of reduction right essentially how many how many bird excuse the analogy how many birds can I kill with the least amount of stones right and so you know the thing that cures apathy in my mind is when I'm excited to learn about something if I can if I can reduce down not just being excited to learn about something but pair that with something that I'm able to make money in I can reduce that into the same vertical and I can hype hyperfocus on that one thing. To me, that is where compounding value takes hold. And so, >> yeah, I totally Yeah.

>> And it feels like that's what we've done here. Um, I am looking forward to having Chuck on the show because, you know, Chuck was instrumental. He was very helpful in in helping define, you know, kind of once we got over the initial hurdles, putting some some tweaks and final touches on and and even in the last hour, I did make, you know, some changes here with regards to the tokenization category because, you know, there was some debate. Are we gonna clump all of tokenization into one big category or are we gonna separate out the product and the asset issuers from the platforms themselves? And so, in my opinion, I think we did it the right way. I'm curious to hear what Chuck's perspective is on this. I also think Sid makes great points on how you could parse out, you know, the the stable coin

yield credit lending facilities and and look, RWAS are the underpinning of a lot of these yield coins and and the way in which you know lending rates are generated. A lot of that comes from like you said private credit underneath. It comes from lending out to GPUs, lending out to solar powered companies. You know, a lot of these things are very very interconnected. But I think again unbundling this, >> taking a look at the parts, >> that's how we can come to a deeper understanding of this and and one of the questions that I'm looking forward to asking Chuck is where does value acrue because

>> who who's making money here and who's making the most money and then how do we invest in them? A lot of them are private companies. Yeah. >> Who's making money? How do we get exposure? How does our community get upside here? Who's making money? >> And and just to to draw on our previous learnings from the whole uh infrastructure um you know deep look into blockchain technology, we understood, okay, there's a pipeline here of how blocks are created, how they're they're verified and validated and ultimately settled on the chain. And we came to understand that there are certain gaps and if you can fill those gaps, you're going to make money, right? And a lot of times this is very fluid as teams try to

commoditize their compliments. You know, this is a very everchanging and fluid topography. But if you understand the stack, you can identify where there's gaps in the market and where teams are greatly positioned to benefit from those gaps. And so that's that's one question that I'm I'm particularly curious about is where value will occur. And and I I think Chuck is going to have some great takes on this. >> Yeah, man. I mean, look, again, it comes down to it for me again, like, all right, so as an investor, as a allocator of capital, how can I get the best possible upside of this trend in a public fashion for our community, in a private fashion for longer term angel

investing type of opportunities? How does one how does one capitalize on this trend right now? I mean if you look at tokenization man this category is is massive and it's expanding in this tokenization category there is trillions of dollars of value literally already created and and so when you think about like how do I how do I get upside even just something as simple as buying tether gold six months ago because you could right like that is a way to get upside it you know figure has a public stock Canton does too like are these at the right time in the market like with anything are these long-term holds like is Figure and

Canton the the token canton and figure the stock are these 10-year holds if you believe in this thesis and why like this is really what I'm trying to understand from a portfolio excuse me allocation perspective here >> I um I've got some stats on um the market capitalization of uh some of these categories. >> Yeah. >> And I think that can help us parse through just just to get a sense of where we're at on the adoption of NEO Finance. And so right now, if you look at the total fully diluted market cap, that is public. A lot of these teams are private, but if you look at the market cap of this entire map,

>> Yep. >> it's going on two and a half trillion. >> Wow. Um, a lot of that is obviously dominated by, you know, some of the legacy financial players that are getting into NEO finance. But nonetheless, there is significant adoption here. And, and that's not to discount, you know, the adoption of Neo Finance. The fact that trillion dollar players are adopting stable coins, going into tokenization, and serving and issuing these kinds of products. I think that only speaks to how inevitable this this uh trend really is. The other the other metric that I want to point out here and then we'll break it down by category is total fundraising amount from the teams in in this entire map $122

billion. $122 billion of fundraised capital uh from teams in this map. >> Yeah, that's what I mean. These teams are highly capitalized and their team structures are absolutely like they're absolutely skilled like >> and they're experienced. Exactly. Sid is talking about the the you know legacy finance folks on their team. Yep. >> You know you you you ought to think these people are you know well above 30 or 25 to 55. They've spent a decade in Tradfi, five years in Tradfi and and and they have a ton of capital to allocate and to make this thing work. Um, that's the Yeah, >> they're they're talking about I'm going to run through uh quickly the breakdown

by category and then they're talking about uh something in the chat about when credit card rates are capped at 10%. I I think that will have interesting knock-on effects first. Uh and and you know, why don't we start there? The the market cap by category. The greatest market cap in this entire uh map is stable coins and payments. uh if you bundle up that entire stablecoin infrastructure uh and stablecoin issuer category it's a 1.25 25 trillion. Uh that's followed that's followed by RWA's tokenization and issuers 680 billion. Uh NEO banks uh come in at 320 billion.

Obviously we expect this to grow significantly. >> Oh yeah. >> Wallet infrastructure 45 billion. This is something that gosh >> I I I think again you know because these are newer companies. These this again is going to continue to grow especially as they go and converge with some legacy financial infrastructure lending protocols 12 a.5 billion and then oracles obviously dominated by our friends at chain link 18.2 2 billion. Um, so tons of market cap across this entire in across this entire landscape, but you know, we've got stable coins, tokenization, um, followed by neo banks, wallets lending and >> Yeah, I appreciate that, man. It's helpful to understand like a actual uh

kind of financial depiction of how much value is created here. >> Um, what's the best payment protocol in your opinion? I want to use a card. I have the EtherFi one. It is great. Um, I have we are also an investor in Etherfy. Um, I I do not have the pay card. Um, I do have a Cryptocom card. It's okay. Um, I would suggest EtherFI for the immediate use case for now. Uh, they're they're just great and they're battle tested and we know the team. Uh, actually, we're supposed to have Mike on. Um, not sure it's going to happen, but yeah, I I I don't know a better team to to look at for a card than Ether Fi.

And I think this category of like I call it like a restructuring of the personal financial habitual traits. So like think about how your personal finance is ran today and think about the the big point of fintech being the super app thesis, right? Fintech is all about super apps. Chuck will come on and tell us that now. Um you know he like the the fintech thesis is all about super apps. So yeah, guys, I mean that is that is why I think this NEO bank category, earn, spend, save, transfer, is going to keep growing. Um guys, we're actually gonna get Mike up. He's he's behind the scenes. He's ready to go. We're going to get him up. Um and we we're gonna have a quick segment with him after I'm showing

the Ether Fry card in the Neo Bank segment after we're talking about the most growth expected in this single category. Get him up here. Start ripping. >> He's gonna pick up right where you left off. Uh Leo, feel free to flip uh and get Mike up here whenever you're ready. Um and you know, he's listening behind the scenes. And so we were just going over how uh the NEO bank category currently makes up $320 billion of market capitalization out of about two and a half trillion in this entire market map. And so that that is a significant amount here. And so Mike is going to talk to us about what it takes to build a neo bank because again we believe neo bankank is this is a category that's primed for an explosion.

We believe to credit uh uh Mike Novagrats made this tweet um wallets we believe are going to transform into neoank platforms. We also believe the Venmos, the Cash Apps, the the um the Revolutes, a lot of these guys are also going to into the Neo Bank platform as they expand their service offering. So Mike, welcome to the show. We've only got you for a few minutes here. >> Mike's on Canada time today. He's on Canadian time. [laughter] >> Mike, welcome. Yeah, please tell us.

>> Hey, how's it going, guys? Yeah, great great to be here. Um, yeah, they it's an exciting time. You know, we're uh uh we continue to grow. We're we're annualizing just around a billion in uh uh payment uh volume through the you know, the the card product. Um you know, TV is actually alltime high right around 10 billion. Uh and yeah, it's it's it's going great. We're uh we think this is going to be >> Yeah, man. I think so. Uh Mike, we're going to pull you right back up in just a sec. Um, we actually want to show the market map and talk about the neo bank category. So, we're going to pull that up. I'd like to get your take, Mike, on the market map on the neo bank category and how we separated in fintech and neo

bank. So, let's go ahead and get that on the screen. You should see it up here in the back end or if you have it up. I just want to kind of walk through what we're seeing here as far as how this neoank category looks. uh because we wanted to separate neo banks from fintexs that are large and and kind of show the cryptonnative neoank. However, we also firmly believe that it's kind of a race for distribution across the board. How do you how do you kind of think about the neoank incumbents versus the cryptonative uh neo banks and kind of how that is going to keep uh playing out going forward?

Uh, so I don't see the the market map in case I'm supposed to be >> Yeah, it should be coming up here. >> Um, but um, uh, >> there you go. >> Yeah. Uh, well, still nothing, but that's okay. I mean, the there's a couple big differences, I guess, between the crypto, you know, players that are coming up versus the incumbents. Um, the uh, one big difference is just much lower fees. So because cryptonia banks just you know fundamentally uh are much more cost-effective to uh uh to operate uh they tend to just have much lower fees and higher rewards for users than the tradfi their trady counterparts. Uh and that ultimately just means that you

know users will uh will prefer that assuming sort of trust and everything else is uh uh is equivalent. Um the second huge advantage that I think the crypto players like like ourselves have is that um because it's non-custodial um it allows crypto players to operate globally. You know if you look at our users I mean we span basically you know every continent except Antarctica. um uh like you know we have users uh everywhere and it's that that's something that's very hard to to compete with that allows us to uh sort of pick and choose uh regions to really double down on and you know develop network effects. Um so um that's I mean that's the reason I think crypto players are

are going to be I think really dominant over the next um uh you know coming years. >> And Mike one more question for you. We had um we had uh Mike Kagny from Figure Helock and and Providence Blockchain and and he was you know he was somewhat against the financial super app thesis but very much for the Neoang thesis kind of describing how he believes this this uh will look like a wallet with a browser where you can interact with a lot of D apps. I I'm curious as you're building out Ether Fi and you're you're integrating yield sources, you're building out cards and all these things, how much are you thinking about exposing the end user to DAPs and and to onchain applications? You want to abstract that

away completely? tell tell us a little bit about about the >> uh yeah it's just like imagine I mean I think in the crypto world we live in obviously a bubble and you know it's it's actually pretty rare that we interact with with normal people but you know some of us do and like just imagine trying to get a normal person to like you know explain freaking like a looping and pendo and you know whatever unis swap to them um it's just a like nobody wants to do that nobody enjoys that it's scary it's confusing um uh like people just want simple products um that uh you know that that let them live their their lives. So um so yeah, we we fully want to abstract that away. I mean you don't

when you put money in in your bank, you're not like trying to figure out like uh uh you know what what bonds uh you know they're deploying capital into or who they're writing loans to or uh you know mixing and matching any of that stuff yourself. like you just you just want a bank that holds your money, doesn't scam you too hard, uh lets you spend, invest, and live your life. That's it. That it really just needs to be that simple. >> The bank that doesn't scam you too hard. >> Never heard of one. No, I'm just kidding, man. But I I do think part of this this NEO finance thesis is that look guys, your checking account gives you the tiny bit of of uh yield. you can put that money into stable coins on Etherfy and get, you know, I mean, a

magnitude of difference yield even if it's still nominally small as rates come down. And that also applies to FinTech. It applies to putting your money in Robin Hood Gold and getting their yield or putting your money on Coinbase. And so that's kind of like part of the bigger transition. I do believe the the key distinction between fintech and neo banks, at least the way that we're describing it, is the custodial nature. But Mike, we'll have to get you uh on a hourong conversation about uh neo bankanks. I'd like to do a debate or a conversation with somebody from the more fintech side and really try to like uh see what the what the key differences in strategy, distribution, users, etc. are.

I know we've talked quite a bit about it. Um we we're going to stay on track here. Mike, thanks for joining us. Much love and h happy Friday and hope you enjoyed the the map. We put a lot of effort into it. It's uh it's been a long night. [laughter] >> Yeah, it looks good. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, happy to chat anytime. Thanks, Mike. Speak soon, man. >> See you. Okay, Mike. Bye, buddy. >> All right, we got our boy Chuck, the host of Money Code, coming up. We're gonna take a quick pause, quick commercial break. Thanks for being here for the Neo Finance special. This is going to be a banger. We got Chuck for a good 40 minutes. We're going to break down every which way part of the market map on our stabled up episode. So guys, be right back. See you soon.

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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. Chuck, I think you saw we released the Neoinance 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 cryptonative 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. 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 like no uh qums about you know DGEN and we've all done it. We trade, we have

fun, 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 arc 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. A 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's the best business models? who's doing it well and how are you thinking about the actual onchain business models and off-chain 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 in the brand value uh and depending on the particular product there 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 a 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 end user add. And this is the playbook you've seen Revolute uh 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 revolutes 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. crossber 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 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 Airwall is the world, the wisest of the world who figured out workarounds. uh and so uh when thinking about you 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 a card like if you're Rain you acquire your customers through a card 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 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 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 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 we really know 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 are 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 it 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 stablecoin 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 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, it 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 the 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. >> 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 has also Tether's profitability led to so many uh teams wanting to just, you know, tether an anter wanting to be an issuer. Um because there's just this massive opportunity. This has 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, >> yeah, I'll I 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 one. 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 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 can 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 uh avoiding or escaping volatile currency, volatile economies, uh capital controls or unscrupulous behavior, the list is long. It is very hard to unseat Tether in that in that world. And now their liquidity, the network effects,

the distribution is hard to overcome. Circle is really dominant in DeFi. They're on 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 PUSDs 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 clana 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 APU 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 opo 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. uh 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 is 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 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 onetoone and whether you than whether you can support the redemption and minting demand. And so it's all liquidity problem. And so the 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 the

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 great name for for a product. Uh but there are uh 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 well. And so I think before there was the skill of managing your reserves and the 247 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 rule making. 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. 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 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, but there 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 Tedra 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 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 diff 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 clients from different issuers. Uh and there are firms who are out there who are working to solve that problem. Um that it's uh it's one that folks need to think about and particularly if you're an investor you you may see okay 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 that 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. The role 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 dollarike 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 let's just split the bill. What's your tag? Boom. % 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 that 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 applications we'll get the market map up

again we separated fintech and neoank 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 cryptonative 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 tr 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 banks who 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 where is the place where you home all of your finance and we mentioned you know earn spend uh 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 they was talking about wallets at the kind of crypto layer and we've seen MetaMask and Phantom generate an incredible amount revenue from swap fees. Uh connecting folks to Hyperlquid.

So you've got a wallet interface and you connect it to DeFi and a lot of other things in the back. That's the kind of thing that is possible and easier to do on onchain. And so you start with yes earn spend 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 back, 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's huge. 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, folks have to figure out their own branding, their own positioning. Uh, and it's a user acquisition game really at the beginning.

>> Yeah, man. It is. is and and we had such a good podcast with um electric capital Acha Garg 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 Revolutes 1 million because if they're 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 the 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 gonna have stable coin yield, everyone's gonna 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 and 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, closing thoughts. I think I echoes a lot of the excitement of everyone in the space. It's finally happening. This convergence of Trafy 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 if you are looking for a a moment, it's now. My my only closing thought is I 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 sooner than you think. >> Yeah. >> Wait, did they really or was that Wait, is that is that confirmed? >> I'm not sure if I confirmed. I saw enough uh detail that I'm like, okay, it seems seems to be going through, but let's wait until the official story. >> That's where we're headed. That's where >> we are headed there. Anthropic 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. >> [music] >> 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. [music] 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 [music] treasure at treasure.io.

[music] Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays following his real upgrade. >> All righty, Jacqueline. Um, great to see you. Are you back home? Are you in DC still? >> I am back in New York. Yes, I am not in DC. I I did a quick trip out there. Um, fruitful, but I guess I I didn't have any impact on the market structure markup, so it fell through. [laughter] your hope. We thought you were going to

be like a special like government employee like they do for a couple days [laughter] and just push it push it through Congress herself. >> Well, Eleanor was definitely on the ground doing all that, but uh at the end of the day, I think it's a kind of Coinbase's game. So, >> apparently. So, yeah. I mean, Jackie, I think like the super relevant thing here for you is just being there the the last couple days, you've seen how serious like it's being taken at the highest level of government and obviously we're pushing this neo finance idea, right? the convergence of legacy finance and DeFi kind of coming together like all these things from tokenized equities to stable coin yield. It's all kind of part of what I guess is this next era of crypto, right? Like you've been around for the last what four or five years.

You've seen like this I guess like the previous era. Uh give us some uh light and insight into what you took what your takeaways were from DC as it pertains to like this new era, this neo finance, this convergence point. How do you see this from your perspective? >> I love it. I mean, I looked at the NEO finance map, market map that you guys put together, and obviously it shows a ton of categories across like chains, stable coins, tokenization, lendings, oracles, etc. Um, and a lot of what I cover and do is around all those topics. But to answer your question about the thoughts on what's going on in DC, I mean, listen, we've talked to a lot of people, heads of policies that are way more uh in the weeds on this front and going in day in and day out. And I think

you know if we get clarity through DC and stable coin yields and reg or stablecoin yield and rewards are approved then it opens up the door for competition that has historically been null. You know it squeezes banks, it squeezes these money market funds they provide and it squeezes just like a lot of different things and ultimately it's about benefiting the consumer. Um and in my opinion arguing against that is just not a good business model. Um, and I think, you know, I think I saw today that the Bank of America CEO was warning against interestbearing stable coins, saying it could pull up to $6 trillion from US banks, reducing lending capacity, all this other stuff. And essentially, the way I interpret that is like they're trying to scare the market

out of this because they don't want to update their business models. They don't want other people to earn money through stable coin yields and they essentially will not pay the interest on deposits that we put in banks today. Right? So, you know, I think the policy makers on the crypto side are fighting the good fight. Um, I think there's, you know, the occasional differing of opinion of whether or not uh Coinbase's Brian Armstrong went too far by pulling out or whether or not he made the right choice. >> Um, but >> did he, Jackie? Did did he go too far? >> Um, no. I think I agreed with the bullet points that he put out. Um, but I do think that one major exchange should not have a say over everything. That's my take. So, there's two sides of the coin.

>> Man, I I I think finally it feels like there was so much kumbaya in the industry. Everyone was just patting each other on the back for so long, especially while the tokens were going up that it it finally feels like we've got a valid adversary again. like finally like it's us against the banks again, >> but but we're also merging and integrating with with you know the the legacy financial system just like you know we had it wasn't mainstream news anymore was the legacy media now we've got you know it's not mainstream finance it's legacy finance and and ultimately we're going to integrate and I I do think overcome a lot of the roadblocks they've put up in front of us not just in DC but you know broadly but before we dive in too deep give us a sense of the takeaways and the learnings that you had

you spent the whole week in DC, you had some fantastic interviews. What were the takeaways? Give us like a temperature check of of the feeling in the room. You know, maybe it was a roller coaster going through the entire week, but was there anything that stood out to you while you were there, >> Robbie? I don't want to lie on air. I only spent like a day in DC. [laughter] >> I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I wasn't there. I was only there three podcasts in one day. It was all Eleanor. >> No, Elanor did one with Senator Lamez that went on Crypted America. He's just riding the coattails.

>> That's [laughter] what's going on. She's just like, >> "Take me to the Bahala, please, Elanor." >> Yeah. I mean, the general take though is uh people are still optimistic. I think they're bummed out that the markup did not go through on Thursday. But I mean, I've spoken to people and I said, "Oh, when do you think this will actually happen?" Like, I'm an optimistic person by nature, but I was like, "Oh, three to six months because I know how slow the government moves." And they're all like, "No, like we should see a new markup within a month. And maybe that's just them drinking the Kool-Aid because I remember they used to say this would happen in June and then it would happen in September and now it's January and so like I'll believe it when I see it and even on Thursday even with everything

that we thought was in place Wednesday afternoon cut. So >> yeah, >> I think that's just kind of maybe I'm being a little pessimistic on this front, but I I do believe we will get actually something and it should be a good bill. And I agree with Brian Armstrong take on this that it should be a good bill rather than uh or no bill rather than a bad bill is how he phrased it, I believe. And >> and we're looking for before the midterms. Like that would be great. I mean, that's like how pessimistic we're kind of at. So um Jackie, you have an amazing company, Token Relations. you've been covering token relationships with shareholders for a long time. Uh our best friends at Blockworks just announced their investor relations uh profile, namely dubbed investor relations. I know that's your favorite

thing ever. >> Talk to us about how this how this unification of token equity in this kind of uh you know let's say as Rob says not so kumbaya world that we're entering in. Why is shareholder uh communication so important? talk to us about just kind of how how things are going from your perspective as far as the changes that token holders are expecting, right? Like we want rights. We we want to know what we're buying. We don't want useless governance tokens anymore. Part of this NEO finance tokenization campaign is to really get to the bottom of what it is that we're investing in in this industry. And I think the legacy financial world's institutional capital allocators are forcing us to do that.

How do you kind of see it from your interesting >> and Jackie [clears throat] be before you answer that I I I think it's just ironic that you know I think it was Morpho uh deprecated their discord which had traditionally been the venue that a lot of token holder relations and token holder communications had that's where it had occurred and so I think it's it it it we're seeing it from multiple angles >> but yeah please tell you know what what does the investor relations entail and how do you handle the set token relations >> yeah I think there's a lot of we could cover here and I believe block works uh investor relations platform is focused on Salana whereas like with us token relations derives from exactly what it is investor relations and ecosystem relations and the way we think about it

is this like new age model where a lot of institutions want to get up to date on what's happening within these ecosystems but they have day jobs they are not deep in the trenches they're not in the crypto bubble maybe they're on CT in an anonymous account but odds are they're not and so how do we kind of connect with them and And then how do we connect with retail and the community that has been so loyal to so many of these teams for so long? You guys talk about Discord, but then it's like, okay, they check Discord, they check Telegram, they check Twitter, maybe they check the company website, and all of a sudden you're sending them to like five different avenues. And so what we try to do here is be the streamlined way to get continuous investor updates. We do it on

a reoccurring basis with most of the major L1's, L2s, and some protocols like Salana, Polygon, Avalanche, Chain Link, Ripple, so on and so forth. And essentially like what we have heard and feedback from the traditional asset management firms is that they want to see what the actual use cases are. They want to see what the utility is. They don't understand the jargon nor do they really care to talk about the jargon. They want to understand what this can actually enable. And so then in turn ideally that's when you start to get more token holders. It's like okay I see this project doing XYZ therefore I think that's valuable. I'm going to go buy the token. Notice how I didn't give a company name because I'm not going to give financial advice. However, our job trained media person. [laughter]

>> Our job is to be this like neutral third party that covers everything that's happening and then let investors decide what they want to do, whether they want to, you know, sell the token, be more long-term thinking, buy the token, or even just look into an ecosystem. Um, and I think it's kind of, you know, akin to like what the public markets have perfected, and it goes to like the maturation of this industry. like this did not exist to my knowledge before we launched the company like a year and a half, two years ago at this point. Um, and now we're starting to see, you know, a need and a desire for this token relations model.

>> Absolutely. >> Well, thank you for showing your company to us on our podcast. >> Thank you so [laughter] much for that. No, no, that I I learned a lot there. >> Um, [gasps] >> I Yeah. So, as I I've got a followup as you're as you're running this company, um coming from media, it must be a it was probably a natural transition into this role as you're communicating to investors and to token holders. H how does it scale? Does it scale like a normal media company when you're when you're running this or are are you thinking about this a different way? Is it generally just growing, you know, your newsletter? That way you can grow the token holder base and the people that are thinking about this particular protocol or or is there some other way you're thinking about scale and growth because it's an

investor relations company and not a traditional media business. >> Yeah, I think you're right Robbie on that front about like the distribution side is so important and so we have a bunch of subscribers like 130,000 and then over 8 million views to the site. But the thing that like sure we could put out these big metrics and numbers but if we don't know who these people are it's just a number. And so for a lot of people they care about who are these subscribers, who are these people actually reading the things. And sometimes you could say 50 seuite people reading this newsletter is way more valuable than a massive number of anonymous accounts. And for some people they see like you know the retail side as the way more important one and they care about the bigger number. Um but what we've seen is like there's two

categories of institution and then there's retail and community. And I personally think they're both extremely important and a lot of teams are just like laser eye focused on institutional and I understand you want to get these big allocators buying your token or you know investing in your space and using your products but retail is kind of like the the iron horse or the Trojan horse or whatever you want to call it. And these are like the people that will go to bat for you which we've seen with like Hideera, Ripple, Chain Link. Like they have their armies and like they should not be overlooked in any capacity.

Yeah, Jackie. Um, kind of getting out of the actual kind of way that you guys are running your company and more into how you're personally thinking about this, like what is your opinion on the whole kind of token, you know, model right now, let's just say like I know it's very broad and and very open-ended, but just kind of how do you how do you see the shifting, right? Like the Dow stuff that Rob's talking about, the governance tokens, the uh, you know, I coin this revenue meta term, right? There's all these things that like hyperlquid, Trump's administration, Genius Act, clarity act, all these things are forcing change. I don't know. How do you think about this from your perspective?

Like what is the what is these significant changes in tokens you expect uh to happen this year? I expect you'd have a great answer being the founder of token relations. >> Yeah. Um while you were talking it made me think about a conversation I actually had with Anamoka Brands is Yatsu. And what he said is that he thinks al this is the year of altcoins. Um, and it's the year of altcoins for those with utility. And I think a lot of times people joke around and they drag these utility tokens, but it's like at the end of the day when you think of the public markets, the companies that are doing well cause the stocks to go up more or less, right? And so if you are building a chain or protocol or a project and you

guys are actually delivering back value, it should follow what the public markets do and we should see the same results with these utility tokens. There's actual use cases behind these things. As history has shown, that has not been the case. But as this industry becomes more serious, I think we're going to start to see that as a result. And I mean, you could see this with some of the teams already when they announced major partnerships with like traditional financial firms or things like that. Like you start to see the ripple effects of this coming through almost immediately. Um, and historically that hasn't been the case. We've seen, you know, memecoins just like pump and dump because it was funny. And like listen, I I understand the memecoin mania. I think it's funny and I I think it's kind of died down, but as more serious players

come into the space, we're going to start to see serious capital moving in as well. >> Yeah. I mean, I I think it's ironic the utility point because Rob, back in 2017, 2018, all we were doing is buying utility tokens that like dentists are going to use this token and like this one's going to solve the the uh legal contracting space and like this is going to be the token for energy. You will be spending all of your credits on this token in the future. Every time you go to, you know, pay your water bill, you're going to be using the water token. And then we completely got away from that because it was like guys all this is is white papers and ICO mania.

Then we moved into like the regulatory arbitrage phase which was like oh Andre Cronier is going to write a medium article saying that this is a valueless governance token. Don't buy it. But if you do get in on the first minute of the yield farm you're you're going to hit a 10,000x. So like of course you're going to do this experimental finance. And then now kind of the trigger here for this NEO finance category is this new administration, the industry being fed up and really just this shift back to utilities. So Jackie, I think that's a it's a good answer from the founder of token relations there. >> Thank you. I appreciate that. I think it's also like everyone doesn't agree with that and I would argue differently.

So >> yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, >> tokens with chain link, right, as an example, they they have link reserve >> and so that is a very good example of a utility token, but people are still questioning in the market like we had Jordi Alexander on. He's like, look, like chain link has great fundamentals, but it's it's it's hard to know what you're buying and it's hard to know what you're buying with some of these other utility tokens still. And so, there's kind of a mix here. Robin, I don't know if you have an opinion on kind of >> I think there's I think there's some real innovation that the blockchain enables. And so there are things that you can just use cash like you should probably just pay your dentist cash.

That is like that's fine for your dentist. But then there's other things when it comes to enabling credit and democratizing access to capital like we're seeing in this yieldcoin space and a lot of this neo finance space where these are net new inventions or realizations of things that you can do whether it's financial engineering or it's greater technology. there are net new things that you can do with blockchain and tokenization and I think that's unlocking a lot of use cases and and there are use cases there that work well with utility tokens and those weren't there before so it doesn't it's not like this broad you know one solution to solve them all thing but I think there are sectors of the market that you know you you you can apply this this thinking too and I also I wouldn't bet

against yacht too so I think he's betting on this specific sector of the market but this is not one catch all like we thought it was in 2017. >> Yeah. Yeah. I agree with you on that. I also just think about like when we start having uh I mean not start having we've been having conversations around tokenization and I know you guys have brought on plenty of amazing guests on this front but I've had discussions around this recently and it's like the tokenized equity market is continuing to grow and what does that really mean is that it's going to be bringing in new emerging asset classes. categories like securities lending or RWA looping are bringing crypto towards that institutional side. Yes, but it's still appealing to the mass market of retail.

And so the opportunity today exists, but then it's opening up the door in the near and long term to more products like credit and then you'll start to see like more sophisticated uh players kind of borrowing and using platforms that provide these products and that we're not seeing in these traditional markets and to your point will be in that neo finance category. >> [snorts] >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, one example here and I'm not, this is not financial advice. I don't have a bag, but Pendle is one of these things where like you couldn't have done that any other way. Split up the yield in the principle in the way that they've done it. I expect more and more of those sorts of things come up as more institutional use cases come online.

And and this is something that Andy and I were talking about this earlier in the show, like we're particularly curious about this sector of where the market is headed. Um, early on um you know, we were curious about DeFi. We got into DeFi, we started to learn about that. Then it was like more, okay, how does the underlying technology work? Got deeper into blockchain. Had a lot of blockchain architects and and technology people come on the show. We got ed educated on that. I'm curious from from your perspective, what are you most interested in learning about as this market evolves 2026 and beyond? Is there a sector of whether it be neo finance or broadly things that you know you're curious about you you're, you know, going to have on your own shows and and kind of go investigate in your own research?

It's a good question. Um, I think for me it's kind of about making all of this accessible to the broader markets. I think historically the little guys have been left out of the equation and it's been held to high network or high netw worth individuals, all these massive funds institutions and it's like why can't we participate in these things? You know, the average people should be able to earn the same yield. They should be able to, you know, buy the same types of funds and things that have historically been private. Um, and I think making these things that were private less private and opening up the doors is like a fair game. And the game has not been fair historically. And so if these different types of crypto products and apps and uh DeFi protocols, whatever it may be, um opens up the door

to that, then like those are the people that I want to talk to and I kind of want to help, you know, tell their stories because it's like in the crypto space, as you guys know, everyone kind of, you know, beats the same drum and we all hear the same things, but it's like people on the outside don't know what's possible in here. And so how can we kind of tell that story and bring it to them and then hopefully, you know, give them something in return? That's what I'm really excited about is the ability to create such, I guess, closed off products into a more open market. >> And Jackie, are you going to be doing that on the conference circuit in Q1, Q2? What's your travel plans? [laughter] >> I am. I'll be at a few. Um, I'm always trying to limit the the travel and then

I end up traveling, but I'll be at Hong Kong Consensus in East Denver. So, if you're on the ground there, would love to see you guys. >> Defensive to Denver. >> I can't do it. >> I can't do it. consensus to Denver travel is insane. >> It's going to be >> It's going to be crazy. Yeah, >> I'm not jealous. I did it last year >> or something. Yeah, >> I literally had an IV in my arm after I got off the flight from Hong Kong in Denver. Was totally cooked. It was rough. So, Jackie, enjoy your weekend. We'll see. >> Denver. Yes. >> Yeah. I mean, listen, I I I have my expectations for for East Denver. We'll see where we get, but we'll see you in New York. We're uh we're about to blow your mind with the with the New York uh

splash coming March, April. So, we we're going to get you up there. Get you involved. I'm stoked for it and uh we'll be hanging soon. >> Should be a lot of fun. >> Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. >> Looks like a good nice sunset behind you. >> Enjoy it. >> Enjoy the weekend. Have a good one. >> Bye, guys. >> Bye. We'll see you next time. >> Cheers. >> All righty. Bada bing, bada boom. We've got our last guest, >> our guy Frank Shaparro, head of content at GSR, the man, the myth, >> the guy behind your mustache. >> I have a feeling this guy is I have a feeling Frank is responsible for Wazy for Inverse Bro. I don't know why that thesis I don't know why I have that thesis, but I truly think that Frank might be Frank's alt might be inverse

bra. I'm not >> Are you gonna ask him? >> I'm not sure. I I I I don't know. This is a unconfirmed rumor, but there there is a chance that Frank is an inverse, bro. >> Um, I'm curious. I mean, >> no, I'm kidding. I >> takes quite the personality and the sense of humor to be inverse, bro. But, uh, Frank Frank's a great guy. This is our last segment of the Neo Finance special, Rob. It's been absolutely great coming on noon here in Hawaii. >> And, uh, >> it's been a lot of fun. Honestly, I I feel like these have been some of the greatest segments that we've had in a long time. The one with Chuck was phenomenal. Jackie is always great.

Obviously, we had, you know, Cody from DC and we started off Lorenzo and they're doing tremendous. So, I I hope I'm not leaving anyone out there. I just I I think um Oh, and Sid, obviously Sid is is, you know, core to the Neo Finance thesis. Um and there's so much going on here. Um, you know, I I could talk about this all day and just once again, I know you felt it. I felt it too, man. Like there was apathy not just in Twitter, but like we feel it, right? like we're a reflection of this space and um it really really does feel like very re-energizing and rejuvenating to uh to to find something particularly interesting, find something that we're in, you know, very curious about

learning more so that when people come on feel like I'm more into the conversations, I ask questions, we get better answers. >> It makes for better content for >> it's just like learning, man. And that's it. It's the process of learning publicly is is appealing to people. And when you're not learning, it's it's obvious that you're just kind of not learning. So, Frank, we got him up. We'll get him in the back. He's calling in from New York, from the ground. Guys been covering all of the Wall Street uh tokenization coverage in the Big Apple. Frank, happy evening. Happy Friday. >> Mahalo, my friend.

>> Mahalo, brother. [laughter] >> Cheers. >> Aloha, brother. Man, I was opening you up saying I think your your alt account might be inverse, bro. But I'm realizing that that's probably going to be too much work for you. You're a busy guy. >> I mean that I wish I could take the credit for his genius. Uh the other good account is the one that keeps the uh historical track record of all the copy pasta. I think okay that's big den or something like that. There's a lot of lore in this industry. You know, you can't just you really can't just, you know, get into crypto. You need to you need to really dive into the to the history, right? And the >> Frank, we were we were just talking

theatics. >> Yes, we were we were just talking about this pertaining to Monero and you know today it comes out that maybe you know there was $250 million hack that really propelled Monero. But the reason I kind of knew there was a lot there's so much lore there like the IRS backdoored this thing. It got 51% attacked. It just it didn't make any kind of sense why this thing was ballooning the way that it was because people either weren't looking into like the real privacy aspects of it or they didn't care. If you're going in deep into something, it makes sense to look into the lore.

>> Totally. I mean, that's part of, you know, when you're thinking about an investment, I think there's there's there's fundamentals and mimetics. And in this industry, >> mimemetics are very important. But you can't go too full meme. You don't want to go full >> because then you'll Yeah, you have to balance, right? You know, there's certain projects out there. I'm not going to name any names, but that went too far in the meme direction and maybe decided to pull back. >> Yeah. Frank, are you planning on on hosting any uh Neo finance happy hours?

Any talk about let's talk about New York or what Neoance thing? I mean, this is this is incredible. This is I mean, here's where we are. This is the perfect time for you guys to do this because we're entering a a shift in this industry right now >> where for over four years and even before that, you had regulators and the political glitterati doing everything they can or could to hold this space back. Visav, chokepoint, 1.0, 2.0. Maybe we're going to see a 3.0. know and once the bidding was done on behalf of the banks and we got a new regime change, new SEC regulators that understand the potential of this space,

now the banks have to do the dirty work themselves. And so we spent half decade following the fighting the policy makers and now we've got to take on a new battle which is that of the banks. And so they know that neo finance is coming and they're gonna and and they know it. I mean, if they look at that map, they're gonna they're gonna [ __ ] their pants because they that map shows every single element that crypto wants to take apart within the hollow halls of these banks. And they've had one of the most profitable quarters. Q4 was amazing for the big banks. So, you have the banks resting on their laurels, ready to attack. But thankfully, we have a lot of very strong, interesting, powerful, bald men on our side in the cryptosphere

that's going to give them a run for their proverbial money. But this is what's happening, guys. They don't want to give it up. They want to continue to fleece customers, spend as little as possible to keep them within their coffers, and crypto is the biggest threat that they faced um in decades. That's what's happening. and and their arguments make no sense. You know, it's almost like, >> okay, so you're telling me that >> this industry, hundreds of billion dollars worth of stable coins are going to topple a multi-t trillion dollar deposit business?

>> That's your problem, bro. You You're telling me that you don't have enough time to figure that out on yourselves? >> Man, how does that make you feel, Frank? >> How does this How does the situation >> It's just laziness. It's laziness. It's it's it's just so myopic and and distorted. >> You know, a wise man once said, uh, "May God have mercy on my enemies." And it feel finally feels like we have a worthy adversary again. Like we were all singing Kumbaya. It felt like we were going to merge and work with the big banks and now finally it feels like we have an adversary where where we can compete. And right now that competition is playing out in DC where crypto banks

are talking about, you know, resisting this $6 trillion capital flight out of big banks if stable coins are allowed to pay on rewards. Do you think this is inevitable where ultimately they're going to have to bend the knee and innovate themselves? It's just a matter of time. They're building up their research and development teams internally until they are ready to launch stable coins. Then they're going to open the floodgates. Or do you think, you know, there's a real chance that, you know, if regulation doesn't go through, if the banks get their way, we may never see the outcome of onchain money like we all are are hoping.

>> It's a really good question and and you painted the picture very well. I mean, at the end of the day, they they really have no choice. For a long time they had they had the benefit of being able to rest on their laurels with the uncertainty of of regulation and sort of you know they didn't have to innovate because they could just point to the fact that this wasn't something that the government or the Fed or the Treasury was comfortable with. You know, you think back, rewind the clock to uh the the Libra days, right, when effectively Meta got a call in the middle of the night from US Treasury saying, "If you do this, we're going to be very pissed off." And now that that environment has changed, they can't just blame

um regulation and and and policy makers for not offering this type of stuff for their clients. So, they need some other way to preserve the moat. They need more time because here's the problem with these banks. Every time crypto goes up, you know, every time it has a bull cycle, they hire, they bring in all these consultants, all these advisors, Deote, KPMG, they get a new head of blockchain, and then once it goes down because something happens and they're all afraid of getting fired because they don't want, you know, they're afraid of reputational risk, they unravel the entire division. And this has happened time and time again. And so they're back at square one trying to figure out how

to build this out. These banks should have built stable coin rails a half decade ago, >> but they were too busy going on CNBC and Fox Business saying that Bitcoin was worthless. >> Now they're getting it. They get it right. You know, Larry Frink, he gets it. So, we don't want to paint a broad stroke and say that, >> you know, most of Wall Street is just a bunch of uh >> what's the what's the uh expression? uh you know just putting their heads in the sand so to speak. >> They see it and so yeah of course these banks are going to want to you know preserve preserve their moat but ultimately when you think about the ease that stable coin rails bring the ease that decentralized lending

brings to the consumer experience it's just inevitable. I mean, it's it's so much more simple and the capital markets are rewarding these companies. I mean, obviously, we saw a big boom in in in the summer uh going into, you know, Q3, let's call it. >> Um, every I mean, the the IPOs that went to market during that time, right, it was it was phenomenal. Uh, Circle had a 6x first day trade relative to the price at which they originally wanted to go public. I think uh figure was uh up 20 something percent bullish was 1.5x so that that sort of kind of um you know the heat kind of fizzled a

little bit towards the end there but it just showed how much demand there was for access to um these these markets and these capabilities and it's it's just the beginning. Yeah, Frank, I I can tell you I can tell we have you in a bit of a crash out Friday evening mood, which I'm loving because banks suck and I'm all for it. So, >> they're good. They're good, too. >> Let's go to the other side. The other part of this kind of idea is also the uh proliferation of infra slop uh eight figureure founder exits with no product market fit. Uh VC funding rounds on beta chasing trends for teu incumbents. The idea of retail extraction from centralized exchanges. The endless token

creation from pumpf fun. the way that Hyperlid came onto the market and figuratively showed everyone and quite literally how to actually run a business onchain. Combine that with the Trump administration for allowing better flows for for uh revenue for token holders and we've got ourselves a a nasty, one could say concoction on a Friday night in West Village that will get you absolutely spun up. And Frank, I just curious if you were to crash out a bit on the old era of of crypto and why neo finance I is an important message not just to the legacy finance side but to the old era of doing things in support of the new from your perspective. You've seen it all the last eight nine years but

specifically this last two years has felt really really rough with the crime cycle that has been plaguing the industry. What does this next era look like for the NEO finance push? >> 100%. I mean, it's time for folks within our own industry to finally be more be be more grown up than the folks whom we're we're seeking to usurp. I mean, the endless sort of nonsense needs to come to an end. Maybe we need to be we need to meet this. I mean, what you guys are doing is great, right? you know, coming to New York and and having these types of conversations, shining a light on the projects that are

really adding value and that are changing the way that consumers engage with their financial services. That's what this industry is all about. And so, you know, it's it's it's these but but let's be clear here, right? Because this isn't a crypto problem. Everything that you described, yes, happened within crypto. But if we take a look at the market, generally speaking, it's all moving in that direction. Leverage ETFs have increased by $40 billion in AUM since October. 2x leverage instruments.

You look at the number of um options trading and stock punting that's going on. This is the move to 247 trading. The markets are becoming a casino. They're becoming a gamified casino where all everyone cares about is the thing that's going to help them turn $1 into $3. And so this provides us an opportunity to Yes. Okay. Yeah, you can you can point fund at us for DATs and for and for Melaniacoin, but how's that any better than what you're doing over there? we're actually changing the way financial services operate. What the hell are you doing? So, I think you need to juxtapose

it, right? Because it's all part of this same story, which is we are I mean we we we are entering a time where people have because of the affordability crisis and and you know, the average age to buy a house is now 42 years old. um the average new hire is in their 40s, they they need wins and it's not just crypto that's facilitating that. It's the entire markets um running in that direction. And you know, it's incumbent upon us to keep doing what we're doing, which is shining light on the firms that actually are going to revolutionize

financial services. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think I think you painted a incredibly good picture of kind of the two sides here of what what the kind of common goal is for this campaign for this idea of neo finance also the kind of two parallel track uh enemies if you will but kind of turning into a more positive sum here is >> well I'm curious Andy so what sort of m what was your wakeup call what sort of made you realize there's too much >> there's too much for cocktail in this crypto industry >> man it started with it started with Um, and I keep coming back to it started with Hyperlquid. Like we I, you know, I bought I bought it day one, saw that thing go on an insane run while a lot of altcoins completely slumbered. That

trade saved my entire 2025 like by a long shot. Um so that was like number one following the Trump administration obviously in that same time period where you started to realize like okay um the rules of the road are are are going to shift in such a way that the regulatory arbitrage that we've been doing which is effectively highly inefficient behaviors due to perverse incentives of coming from the highest form of power has caused this industry to do things kind of like in an inefficient way. So those two things really flip the script. And then you start to really look at like where the activity is in in in New York.

So every trip in New York this past year has felt like it's been like this Wolf of Wall Street's institutional tokenization bull run. And then on crypto Twitter, the sentiment's been really really bad. In addition to that, a lot of our fund portfolio companies are looking really really rough right now. Um, and it's part of that kind of category of that like that like lack of product market fit, revenue generating activity. A lot of kind of messy in the middle. They don't really touch the consumers as much and they're not like the base layer L1 kind of like applications. They're this messy middleware stack. And so it it's a combination of these in addition to just man when when I entered like you it was 2017ish. I read the book the truth the truth machine. I read, you know, then uh

Chris's book came out and and these like inspired us to have this ethos of the space and it felt like we lost it, man. Felt like we lost it over the last year or two. I mean, even since the 2021 cycle, but really over the last year or two. So, it's just been like this culmination and all of a sudden Rob just comes up with this idea that there's this new category forming about two months ago and he's like, I don't know how to how to like uh explain this thing, but it's happening. And so that's a bit of like the the lore for >> it's explaining that dichotomy that you described.

>> Yeah. >> It's explaining the fact that you have part of this industry that is just >> that's honestly falling victim to the state of broader markets to this this cinification of markets and then this other part of the industry that's actually working to change ship. >> I agree. Yeah. I I'd be remiss if we didn't mention the the framework guys as well who have helped us understand that there is this category of yield coins that are going out into what they call exogenous sources of yield which was extremely important to this thesis because as I was thinking about you know what what are we parsing through here you know I kind of realized before I was a

decentralization maximalist I'm no longer that actually people do want forgot password buttons self-custody isn't important to everyone And so, you know, it if if we follow that to the natural conclusion, it's like, don't we repeat the CD5 of 2022, the Blockfolio and Celsius and Nexus and FTX reign? And >> a lot of the guys th those guys ended up in jail. We don't want to repeat that. And so what the difference between this neo finance thesis and what happened back then is back then all of the yield sources that were paying you know uh Celsius is 8 n 10% and teruna's you know 10% on ankor it was all intrinsic sources of yield uh it was all emissions

it was all new inflation none of it was sustainable the neoinance yield coin thesis is going out into exogenous sources of yield for two great great uh examples of this are USD AI going and giving credit to AI GPU companies and then passing interest and yield back to token holders. Another one is daylight real solar power energy company going and lending credit to real energy companies in that space bringing and and driving real revenue and real interest and then passing that revenue back in the form of yield to token holders. And so it's not intrinsic and spinning this rehypothecation spring so tight that it breaks. It's actually going and and and doing this

credit sourcing in a much healthier sustainable >> and these things are going to blend together. I mean there's countless examples right of you know the Coinbase through Coinbase you know leveraging Morpho and uh you know a lot of HELOC loans that are offered from traditional banks are actually powered by something like Figure which does um home equity line of credit loans and so the direction we're moving in is one that's it's it's going to be sort of that classic CFI on the front DeFi in the back but in a Hey, Robbie, where it it it's not in a black box. If you remember back to that FTX interview that Sam uh Sam did with uh OddLots, right,

where he talked about DeFi being just this back black box of risk that you'll never really know what's inside of it. And you know, it's kind of just making up the yield. We need to know where the yield's coming from. >> I think that's a big part of it. Frank, Frank, just closing here, man. Your your uh podcast has been epic lately. Um you you you had Robert Lesner on, you had Tom Lee, you >> Yeah, man. I mean, they've been great. I I've enjoyed them and I I I hope to be on one day. Um what is some of the biggest, I guess, trends that you're kind of drawing a through line into, you know, your conversation with Robert, with Tom, with other institutional allocators, right? From the GSR

perspective, you have a privileged kind of spot here of like really understanding a deeper level than most as far as like what's happening like in the market as far as allocation of capital. What are some of the biggest through lines that you've drawn over the last couple months? And close us out here. >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I mean, I would say like the biggest theme of Q4 was just the fatigue of retail. And I think it's because they got caught up in a lot of the things that you described, whether it's anything from Melaniacoin to to DATs to um just chasing that yield. And so, it's going to take a pretty big catalyst. It's going to create I mean, one thing that Rob said, right, it's going to take a net new thing in crypto to re-energize um the ecosystem. The other thing I've

noticed is just like you know different trends right you know a lot of Q4 was defined by any bid that we saw you know we have this global market now any bid in the US was sold by Asia and any bid in Asia was sold by the US so that'd be something to watch I think that we also don't pay enough attention in market to the miners and to the publicly traded miners I mean there's a wealth of information in those earnings that point to what's happening in this industry And one thing that I think was very not talked about enough was how tied we are to global markets in general, specifically AI, and the extent to which that might suck oxygen out from our

room. So I would watch those things going into the first quarter and I wouldn't pay I wouldn't pay too much attention to the ongoing I mean like the obviously like I think if we have clarity pass in this you know next six six weeks or so that will make for good headlines and be positive but still going to be a lot of unanswered questions going to be a lot of questions that get punted um to decision makers outside of of of that bill itself. So, >> lot to stay tuned on.

>> Enjoy your weekend, man. See you in New York soon. And thanks for thanks for joining. >> Cheers, Frank. >> Thanks for coming up, Frank. Pleasure. >> Neo Finance, baby. >> All righty, guys. >> Finance. >> Closing out. Neo Finance Friday. >> Guys, I've been so dialed on health. Like, absolutely insane. This This market map wrecked me. Set me back two days. I'm looking at a cold plunge in my in my apartment. I got a massage table in my apartment. I've got an insane disco light. Like I'm throwing a rager of a health party Saturday night. So I need to rest up. I got two days to rest up big time.

>> We have coal plunge in the place. We got water, surfing, sleep. Rob, I'm dialed right now, man. I'm dialed. >> We're not going to hold you back. We're not going to hold you back. What's your first thing that you're going to do when you Is it Is it sleep? Is it cold plunge? Sauna, massage? >> I'm going in the ocean. I'm going in the ocean for sure. 100% wait in the sun for like 10 15 minutes and just go in the ocean for a sec. 100% need that and then >> from there the whole world opens up. It's crazy what a dip in the ocean can do to a man. >> What what a show today. >> Enjoy. Great show. Absolute pleasure. I feel like I feel like we're back. The industry is back and I feel like >> Wait, we never left. Rob, you might have

left. >> We never left, but Neo Finance is here and it feels like a whole new era. >> Welcome to a new era, guys. Welcome to the Neo Finance era. We will see you guys Monday, fresh, fresh, and fresh for a lovely stream. We're going to be talking about Neo Finance. And then Tuesday, we're gonna have another stream and then we'll talk about Neo finance. And then chances are Wednesday, Thursday, >> we're gonna be talking about Neoance. >> Thursday, we have a near intense special. You guys are not gonna want that. We've got private, we've got neo privacy finance, we've got no we we can't neo finance.

>> Guys, have a neo finance weekend is ours. Much love. Mahalo. >> [music]