The Rollup 2025 Awards Ceremony & 2026 Market Predictions

Transcript

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[music] Corola 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. >> Cheers to 2025 being over >> 2025 awards ceremony. >> Oh yeah, baby. It's uh 2:16 p.m. We're in >> We're in Florida, man. It's warm. >> Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. >> Freaking new year.

>> Freaking new year. >> It's been quite a year. If somebody told you that we would have had uh Trump launching his own coin this year along with Robin Hood announcing a chain >> announcing announcing a chain, >> Stripe announcing a chain. >> Um ETFs for >> ETFs for altcoins. >> Yeah. >> I mean there's just a lot happened this year. >> I mean we >> the biggest thing that we can talk about is really just like the shift in the space. But man, so much happened this year. >> I think there was so much excitement. remember uh November of 2024 is when Trump got elected and there was so much anticipation and so much excitement.

>> Yeah. >> And then he came in January got inaugurated >> and the beginning of February >> he we liberated us. He liberated us from the trade imbalance world >> with the poster the liberation day and then we got tariffs and we got absolutely nuked on. And so that was how we started off >> the year. >> And if that feels like eternity ago, but that is how we started off the year. >> The run up to alltime highs coincided with the run up in the election as soon as he was inaugurated.

Trump coin launched, Melaniacoin launched, and the market got whacked, and that was the top. And we've we've been in a we've been in a bare market ever since. >> Well, that's what people are saying. We've been in a bare market since uh January. But I don't know. We we definitely got um the adoption that we were looking for this year from >> institutional like the regulution like the regulations. >> We got the G act passed. >> Um we I know that market structure bill is very close to being passed. That was exciting. Um we had so much so much happened this year. Soulja Boy launched a coin.

>> Jesse's the number one holder boy coin. >> Yeah, Jesse just launched his creator coin. Oh, let's talk about what happened. >> Zcash Revival. >> Zcash Revival powered by Near Intense >> Hyperlquid Goddent. >> Let's talk about what happened very recently with this Nick Shipley character. >> Yeah. >> Going gigafiral. 10 million views. >> I don't know. 75 million, 80 million, 80 million. >> Maybe it was closer to 100 million. 75 80 million views on Twitter for this video that he did exposing the fraud in Minnesota and the taxpayer uh corruption and how he ended up monetizing more on Zora and base than he did from any other social media

platform. >> Yeah. which has w wildly shifted the landscape because now you have a real feasible opportunity for creators to go and monetize on platforms outside of traditional social media like creator coins. >> I mean I think I mean he was exposing some fraud, right? Yeah, there was uh I think it was upwards of hundred million dollars in taxpayer money that was uh collected from taxpayers in Minnesota and then was allocated to uh like shell companies like fake daycarees, fake learning centers. Uh it was misappropriated to uh different

departments within the Minnesota government and it was essentially it was an extension of Doge like what Elon was doing at the federal government level. He was uncovering some of this, you know, what do they call it? Waste, fraud, and corruption. Uh, waste, fraud, and abuse at the state level in Minnesota. And he went on this documentary and kind of went on this tour exposing this. And this is like real journalism like which I think people got fired up. >> He launched the creator coin on Zora and he was uh very vocal about this on Twitter. And it was strange because I think Bass and Zora, they didn't want to come out and publicly support this because it is politicized. And so this has been the biggest use case of their

platform, but you didn't have Zora tweeting about it from main channels. You had Jacob from Zora, the founder of Zora, talking about it, but you didn't have public endorsement of this character despite his creator coin being the biggest creator coin and the largest social media viral uh post that has coincided with creator capital markets >> when you're talking your micro. Yeah, man. I mean, it was absolutely kind of a trippy um trippy video that went viral. I was shocked to see that he was on Zoro. That was another thing that happened this year.

There was so many new things that happened this year as far as like uh different types of like I got my zeners in guys zins to win it to win it all. Um uh creator coins, streamer coins on pump um creator coins posts that were creating let's kind of talk about the bigger trends of the year. Um, obviously I think like big four tokenization, stable coins. Um, >> real quick, feel feel this sweater.

>> AI soft. >> This feels like J Crew. >> That's cashmre. >> It's cashmop's been doing well, guys. >> Um, >> tokenization, AI, stable coins, payments. >> Um, >> um, >> yeah, I mean, I I have a lot ofrends. I have a lot to say about this. Um, and so I think this started when we were in New York >> for SmartCon. >> Um, and you know what happened was we uh we were invited by the Chainlink team to go out there and to live stream from SmartCon. And this was a very different conference for us, right? Because what happened, >> you know, we we started off in DeFi. We started off learning about a lot of cryptonnative applications. And for as long as you and I can remember, I'm sure

it's always been about decentralization. It's always been about this cryptonative ethos and we almost resented larger you know what what would have been called tradfi in previous cycles. We resented these companies from coming in because this was the old guard. We didn't want to endorse these people. >> Like I mean I've had my funds on chain only in hardware wallet seven years. >> And so it it was almost like yeah these people have this institutional capital but we'd almost it's like keep that over there like we don't need you guys. We don't want you guys gunking up uh this good thing that we have going. But we went to New York and we realized, wait, they are actually bringing this to the masses. The masses trust the institutions. They trust the

safety, the sturdiness, the longevity and sustainability of the companies that have been around for hundreds of years. And those are the brands that have a lot of trust. And we're not going to change consumer trust. And so we realize that we're ultimately we ultimately have a very similar mission to the Black Rocks and the DTCC's and the stock exchanges and these these players because ultimately we want mass adoption. We want to bring financial access and democrat democratization of capital to the globe. And that is a is a very similar mission. Stable coins bringing dollar homogenary homogyny across the world. And so what what I think we realized was wait the large companies that already have the consumer trust we don't need to convince people

that crypto is the answer. We can let these institutions carry the flag of crypto to the masses and they are really the shepherds of mass adoption for this technology. And that is when I think you and I started to realize there's this new category for this category of institutional front-end or institutional um brokers with decentralized and cryptonative uh backends and and decentralized financial applications. And so you and I have been workshopping this a lot. Um, we're calling this neo finance and we have a lot of conviction in this category as one that's sustainable and bridges the gap, crosses the chasm, if you will, between DeFi and Tradfi,

which we're no longer even calling Tradfi and DeFi. We're just calling this finance, but what we're calling the cross-section of these two worlds as it evolves, we're calling that neo finance. >> Neo finance. Before Rob gives away all the alpha, we're going to take a quick standby. I'm going to refill my champagne and we're just minutes away from starting the awards ceremony, guys. We'll be right back, guys. We'll be right back. >> Ye 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 [music] missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollar transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains [music] for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. >> [music] >> Colshi is the world's [music] largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. [music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience.

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Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz [music] XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. [music] FRA is building the next generation of stable coin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. 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. [music] Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge

your assets now. >> [music] >> Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] Ki is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today.

[music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. >> [music] >> Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today.

Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that [music] is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. [music] Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again.

>> [music] >> Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance [music] era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. [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 [music] are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. [music] Money shouldn't wait for Mondays.

Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] Khi is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. [music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

[music] Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia [music] underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

[music] Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for [music] the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today.

>> [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 [music] entire point. Secure your coins. Get a 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. >> [music] >> Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains [music] for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] Khi is the world's [music] largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today.

[music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. [music] Havachi is fast [music] and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start [music] trading today.

Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that [music] is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. [music] Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of

stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. [music] Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have [music] with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next. All right. All right. All right. We're back. All right, guys. It's time to get the awards ceremony started. Um, we put a lot of effort into the internal committee here. I'm just going to read some of our how we kind of ranked uh these teams that we selected. Um, you know, we did a focus on core categories that we think are going to be very, very strong for 2026. Guys, if you're watching here on YouTube or X, there is

a chat on both. Feel free to send in some stuff, whatever you guys like. Happy holidays. Um so guys, basically the way that we selected these awards was around data adoption and community. Uh our our internal committee used a combination of benchmarks such as revenue, volume, open interest, other onchain metrics to decide the winners adoption. We're really focused on this new category of NEOance and institutional adoption. So for this we use institutional backing, ecosystem partnerships and real world integration across the digital asset landscape.

[snorts] And last but not least, community. Uh the committee evaluates social presence, engagement metrics, overall sentiment, campaign participation and support mobilization ability. All very very important for this campaign. >> Cheers to the winners. >> So >> to be announced shortly. Without further ado, let's get into the first winner of the best in tokenization. >> Well, first before we before we talk about the winner, I think we have to talk about the category. >> All right, let's break us down here. So, um I've actually had people reach out to me that are not particularly crypto native asking about tokenization. So, I think that shows that this is breaking into the mainstream. So, what what is

tokenization? Let's break it down, right? I think the best way to think about tokenization is an evolution of what we're seeing in finance. So early on and and we [clears throat] talked about this on the show, so I'll just do a quick run through here. For 200 years, you had physical stock trading. You had slips of paper. You can picture the guys on Wall Street shouting. You have to call your broker and they physically have to walk the slip of paper to the other side of the stock trading floor and trade it. Physically trade a piece of paper for some cash. And that is how you buy and you sell stocks for 250 years since d since since uh Dutch East India company first uh invented you know stocks. Then we had digitization right and so that's when things came online

you know late 1990s we had mainframes then we had early 2000s we had the internet and up you get interactive brokers you get schwab you get online brokerages and that culminates in high frequency trading which was essentially the pinnacle of the digitization of finance enter this third era finance 3.0 0 if you will, which is tokenization. We went from physical to digital to tokenized. Now tokenization allows us to become composable between multiple digital sources of liquidity. I think this is massively uh uh impactful for the amount of liquidity that we're going to unleash and how we're going to democratize

financial access around the world. We we have blockchains that are going to coordinate. A blockchain is essentially like a synchronized clock. And so now you're gonna get uh the stock exchange synchronous with uh futures markets, synchronous with global markets. You're going to have 247 markets. You're going to have unlimited financial access, instant settlement. All of that is a result of tokenization, not possible before. So we have a few key companies that are really pioneering this particular category and they're doing the hard work of going into the real financial world, real world assets, stocks bonds equities physical commodities, and they're taking what was physical products and then digital

products and now they're making them tokenized products. And so um why don't why don't we talk about some of the key companies in this category? >> Yeah. Um for sure. I think it's important to understand also just the a bit of the restrictions that a lot of the you know traditional markets have had. You've had these T plus2 settlement times. You've got just a lot of inefficiency happening because of the lack of ability to have this global 247 democratized access. Um, you know, you've got teams like Tether, Securitize, Paxos, Ripple, Wisdom Tree, Plume Ono Coinbase Superstate Janice Henderson Centrafuge Canton Figure, Pacted, Franklin Templeton, and many more leading the charge. But the winner, the winner is the largest

platform by assets, 4 billion in tokenized assets under management. The they have top institutional partnerships from tokenized funds, Apollo, Black Rockck, Hamilton Lane, Vanack, KKR, BNY, Melon. No competitor matches this breadth of Tradfi players and expertise. >> Drum roll, please. >> They have a unique regulatory edge. The only company with fully licensed digital securities infrastructure in both the US SEC registered and EU with the DT pilot regime approval now for trading and settlement with revenue projected to be $70 million in 2025, profitable for a long, long time, and an upcoming $1.25 $25 billion spa valuation. Planning

fully onchain trading for real public stocks in 2026 with build having paid out over hund00 million in lifetime dividends. The industry recognition is clear often ranked number one for in the leading platform in reports. The best in tokenization winner is securitize. Let's go securityize. Congratulations to Carlos, Tom, and many of the other other winners of this category. Let's get the camera here so they can really see the winners of Securitize [cheering] here, right [screaming] here, right now.

Securitize is the winner of the best in tokenization category. Leo, can we get a camera flip for you, please? >> Look at this beautiful thing. Absolutely amazing. Best in tokenization. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank. So, cheers to Securitize, guys. The these guys, um, we've had Carlos Domingo, uh, the founder of Securitize. We've had him on the show several times. Uh, we've also, uh, had a few other members of their team come out to some of our events. We've co-hosted events with these guys. Uh, so I I think this is welld deserved. Shout out to Tom, shout out to, uh, Graham, shout out to Carlos. These guys are doing phenomenal work. It takes a lot of guts to go into the Black Rockck office and talk to them

about crypto. I they were the ones to tokenize Bittle, the number one RWA product, the number one uh tokenized product of 2025. I think uh I think securityiz is the clear winner. >> I agree. Um they've been doing I I I just you know back in 2018 they had these uh STOs, security token offerings back when nobody wanted to, you know, nobody cared about what was happening. And um these guys were doing it and they've been in the trenches for so so long. Um it was it was it was a really close close fight. As we said, Super Stage, Franklin Templeton, Janice Henderson, Coinbase, so many more are coming out and they have their work cut

out for them in 2026. Securitize does >> they they do, but none of the uh you know a lot of great companies in this category like you mentioned a lot of them are tokenizing different sorts of asset classes. You got Tether tokenizing cash. You've got Janice Henderson tokenizing CLOS's. You've got tokenized bond markets. Tether's also doing things in in gold tokenization. But none of that would have been possible if it wasn't for Securitize leading the way. And I think Securityitize really showed the path to bring uh established incumbent financial institutions into the space and it showed a path of how to do these things the right way. And and you see Carlos talking about this all the time. You've got this very

complicated pipeline of tokenization where you know you have the physical asset uh and and the equity and it lives offchain. That's really the the register that is the actual security is offchain and then you've got the other way and then they just have this you know tokenized representation of it. Then you have what Carlos and Securize would argue is the correct way to tokenize, which is the the the real asset is on the blockchain. That's where it lives. That is the uh it's got the stamp of approval from the settlement agencies and the regulatory agencies. And I think you, you know, to your point, they do have their work cut out for them because a lot of other tokenization companies are doing this uh, you know, one-to-one representation where it's just sort of

this paper that's traded on the blockchain. But uh shout out to Carlos, shout out to Securize Eiz doing things in tokenization the right way. Congrats. Cheers on a successful 2025 and uh >> best of luck 20 26 guys. Um guys, we'll be right back with the next winner. Take a quick pause. Congrats to Secure Ties. Do a quick quick break. 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. 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 [music] entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. [music] Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

>> [music] >> Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] KHI is the world's [music] largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kgshi.com to trade [music] today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a

fully private chat experience. >> [music] >> Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with [music] Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. [music] Looking for yield that stands out? Infinifi gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more.

>> Cheers to securitize. [cheering] Congratulations on a big win, the first nomination of the [cheering] world awards ceremony in 2025. Up next, we've got stable coins, one of the largest categorical growth this year, hitting 300 billion plus in 2025. I believe there's over a 10x this year in stable coin supply growth. Um if not closer to five to 10x. Absolutely insane. Uh this category has been huge. Rob, bring us down what happened in 2025. stable coins. Why was this such a massive year?

Genus act passed institutional adoption, tempo, arc, plasma, stable, you know, insert new chain here. All of it is happening. Stable coins are hot and then we can reveal the winner. But I think what we're seeing is part of a larger trend where we talked about how we believe this space is going to evolve as financial institutions move more of their assets, move more of their products onchain.

First, it starts with tokenization. You need to tokenize these asset classes before they can come on chain. Before we get complex complex structured products on chain, you need the basic building blocks. You need cash on chain and that's what stable coins are. And so I think what is really exciting is the potential once we have growth in stable coins. Obviously we had Genius Act that gave regulatory approval for a lot of these coins stable coins to come on chain. Uh we now have uh 30 300 billion like you mentioned. uh and there's a push by the powers that be those in control of the money printer themselves to bring this number of 300 billion up to trillions. And so what I think is

most exciting about this isn't just the sheer growth of stable coins. It's what comes as a result of a growth in stable coins. I'm talking about yield coins, interestbearing stable coins. I'm talking about structured products. Talking about real world assets that depend on stable coin growth. And I think that is only the tip of the iceberg once we have stable coin. But again, you know, our industry tends to get ahead of itself. A lot of times we get really in the weeds of financial experimentation. And I love it because it's a lot of creativity and a lot of imagination that goes into these products, but it takes really prudent business mentality to stay patient, take a step back, and focus on the

fundamentals. And we'll we'll have a return to fundamentals award later in the show, but I I do think tokenization, stable coins, these are the basics and the building blocks of which a lot of the the creative and and very imaginative financial product will be born. So we have stable coin category. Now there's been a ton of growth in this category over >> this probably the hardest one. >> This was a really difficult category to choose from. >> It it was I mean there's the obvious there's the obvious answer here. Tether. I mean, we've got Athena, Tether, MZ, Jupiter, State of Wyoming, even Forax, Sky Dollar, USDA, Falcon Finance, Circle, Paxos, Plasma. So many good companies here pushing the agenda. And again, it's Tether was is the easy

answer if you look at just their pure sheer growth. But we kind of got creative here with regards to our data adoption and community metrics here. And the winner for the stable coin category is what we believe believe to be the biggest winner going for 2026. They had a massive year this year, taking over the number three spot in stable coins. They're the largest decentralized yield bearing stable coin. They had the fastest growth by percentages. They grew by 86% in 2025, outpacing broader stable coin market growth of about 50%. They had extremely high risk adjusted yield consistently around four and a half to 5% with a projection to maintain about 60 or 70 basis points over benchmarks

like the uh you know treasury rate or the Treasury yield rate. They have extreme protocol strength $168 million of annualized profits plus 24% year-over-year. operating expenses down 61 and a half% massive buybacks and ecosystem dominance like the recently announced OEX incubator. The best in stable coins winner is Sky Dollar guys. Congratulations to Sky. Sky Dollar is the winner of best in stable coins. Man, congrats to Rune. Congrats to uh the entire team, Grove, to many of the other players who really made this happen for Sky. Uh it's been a long

journey with through the Maker Dow uh uh experience into what is now Sky Dollar and USDS. [applause] Um what a win for the guys. >> This is uh this may be a controversial pick. Um I I think obviously we have incumbents uh like Tether, like Circle, but um you know, they went out on a limb. They changed what was one of the more fundamental brands in crypto, one of the first DeFi blue chips in Maker, and they sunset die, which is an incredible move. They move into Sky Dollar, which I think was the correct branding choice. You could qual about how much it costs them, but like you said, operating expenses, even despite

the brand change, are down, profits are up. You can't argue with the fundamentals. And I do think they are going about things a very very different way than Tether and Circle. And look, you you could say, look, their reserves are made up of, you know, some RWAs, which are which are, you know, centralized. But look, I still think of Maker and Sky Dollar as a decentralized stable coin. I think they are the only remaining decentralized decentralized stable coin that deserves this category. Um, and shout out to keeping the crypto ethos alive. I think that is going to be extremely important as we we continue to uh >> cheers to that y'all.

>> Yeah. Cheers to Sky Dollar. Cheers to keeping the crypto ethos uh alive and well because uh we're moving into a direction where it will become very easily to get commandeered by the financial institutions. We don't want to sacrifice uh the um the spirit that crypto was born with. And I think uh Maker and Sky are doing things the right way. They are certainly moving in the direction of uh a more robust uh uh and and trustworthy and and sturdy financial product, but they're not sacrificing on the ethos and the spirit that drives a lot of uh financial experimentation and and and frankly got crypto off the ground. Man, I mean, if you guys needed the sky thesis, Rob just laid it out

perfectly for you. Uh, Vance and Michael from Framework, shout out to those guys. They've really skypilled us here. I think we'll be tracking them quite a bit closely more next year. Also have been allocating in the public markets. We think it's one of the better positions to track for 2026. They are the most transparent uh when it comes to their their numbers. Um they're really thinking about things from a uh e expenditure revenue perspective and absolutely crushing it guys. So shout out to Sky Dollar. Um guys, we're take a quick break and we'll be right back for for the next one. And congrats again to Sky.

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>> [music] >> talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or all right the next award I mean I I am very fond of this award um it is a term that I have coined back in uh June of 2025 this year it is a it is a term that the entire crypto ecosystem has started to use on Twitter >> can can I I want to ask you about the inspiration behind and the tweet of this category. Yeah. So, let let's unveil the category.

>> So, is the Revenue Meadow Award. Uh we had uh quite a few great teams in it. I'll read you guys out >> before we get into the the the teams in this category. You put out a poll, right? Was the original uh the the origin of this meta, right? Um and if I'm not mistaken, the poll was how long will the revenue meta be a thing? Was that generally the gist? Yeah, it was like how long is the revenue meta going to last? And it triggered people so hard because it was like bro you're literally asking about how long will business model development last in the world.

It's like it's such a stupid question because it's like dude what do you mean how long is the revenue meta going to last? Like it's going to last forever. And so the answers were like one to three months, three to six months, one year plus, two year plus. And like if like everything in life I've come to learn is it was barbell. It was like the majority was in two plus years which is signaling that it was going to last forever and then the second you know the second highest percentage was the was the shortest one to three months and lo and behold it is uh December 30th 2025 and that revenue meta is hitting hard.

Um everyone knows that the the winners of the of the market are going to be large revenue winners. In fact, lighter had their token launch today and their revenue is down 90% since 1010. Um and it is uh people are really concerned about it. Uh a year ago this would not be the case. Nobody cared about revenue. We just announced Sky Dollar is the winner because well they generated $168 million of annualized revenue and I think that's based on like like the last two quarters of growth. Um and you know we had teams in this category like Axiom uh pumpf fun making what millions of dollars a day. Axiom hundred thousands of dollars a day. Etherfi absolutely on a generational run with Etherfi card.

Sport.Fund has already $10 million of revenue. It's been live for like three months. Edge X also another purp of course with their Hyperlquid plugin. Crushing. Hyperlquid of course. Aerad Drrome also another big name. So the revenue meta award goes to the highest revenue amongst all perexes in all D5 protocols. $844 million in revenue for 2025. uh making it the most profitable onchain trading venue and blockchain just actually just behind Salana in terms of REV or L1 revenue. It kind of depends where you get your sources.

Shout out to Block Works. Massive scale, $2.95 trillion of cumulative trading volume, an average of about 8 billion a day, about 200 billion transactions, 610,000 new users, and peak open interest records throughout the year, upwards of$15 billion. outperformed all competitors, captured up to 70 or 80% of market share in per market at peaks, deepest liquidity, centralized exchange level execution, 200,000 orders a second, over 15k TPS, 99% of fees, funding, buybacks, industry impact, broke the industry, broke the entire industry's mental model for how to create a protocol and how to value these

things. The winner of the revenue meta award is Hyperlquid. Shout out to Hyperlquid. [cheering] >> This also happened to be the most profitable investment of the rollup portfolio in 2025. Thank you, Jeff, for all your contributions, for rugging us on the uh terms and conditions on the airdrop, uh to not receiving the airdrop, to buying this damn thing the minute it launched in a Hong Kong airport after a dinner with some junior level liquid fund guys telling us that they're going to ape eight to nine figures on this thing if it launches below five billion just for some little little

plebeians like us to throw our little bag at it and hit a nice 25x 20x tax on her. So, shout out to Hyperlquid. >> Yeah, this should come as no surprise. Um, Hyperlid uh was the largest revenue producing uh app. Uh you could call an app chain. Uh they're up there with all of the chains in terms of the amount of money that they were able to produce. Um, and you're right, they absolutely did break the mental model of crypto because up until then you, you know, basically put that you were an L1 in a pitch deck and VCs would give you trillions of dollars and it didn't matter if you ever had revenue, >> trillions, >> trillions,

>> trillions of dollars, >> trillions of dollars. That that goes to the last category of stable coins. We're getting to trillions. So is Hyperlid getting to trillions as well. A lot of the the stats that you brought up, they sound like a financial institution. They sound like the New York Stock Exchange or the CME when you talk about billions of transactions, uh, billions of dollars of open interest and volume. These are the numbers that a decentralized exchange is running. Now, granted, they have four validators, so how decentralized are they? But it doesn't really matter because we're getting into the category of it doesn't matter uh the amount of uh decentralization you have as long as you have the right checks and balances in place. And so I think we're going to see a lot more of this blend

between centralized and decentralized finance uh moving forward and and I I think hyperlquid is square in the neo financial category uh as far as finding that that balance. Now, Annie, I got a question for you because a lot, you know, the the two winners that we've selected so far, Sky Dollar and stable coins, securitize in tokenization, and a lot of the categories that we have coming up, these are teams and winners that we believe will continue to win in 2026. That was part of the criteria that we used uh to determine our winners for 2025. Now, I'm curious about the stickiness and the sustainability of Hyperlid going into 2020. Obviously a remarkable year from Hyperlid in 2025,

but when you're looking ahead to 2026 and you're looking at the per category, how sustainable do you think Hyperlid success is? I mean, I think that uh PERPS got wrecked on 1010 and um Hyperlid OI hasn't even it got cut in half 50% or so from 15 bill to seven and a half bill. Um the entire market got is if you look at the charts all the volume and and revenue has just been down since 1010. Um look I think lighter is the main competitor here. I think they are something to watch for.

Man this fire is kicking by the way guys you don't feel it but it is >> it's it's to you would not know that it's Florida where we are. >> It is very warm. It is very warm. Um and um you know so look I think Hyperliquid and Lighter Light Lighter have firmly secured the number one and two spots. Um and I think Hyperl is going to win and and I think they'll win and I think they will win big. I think Lighter will win 10%, Hyperlink will win 80 and then the rest of the 10 will get distributed against another 20 or 30 perexes. >> I think that's generally right. I I have a little bit of a different perspective.

Um I I think within the crypto perexes, you're absolutely right. hyperlquid 80% lighter 10 and and a long tale of perplexes. Beyond that, I do think that we're going to see uh centralized exchanges. Uh we're going to see uh stock brokerages. We're going to see regulatory approval of perpetuals as an asset class and a financial product. And that is going to uh bring about um large uh uh institutional companies and in institutional um brokerages into the space to compete with what has traditionally been a cryptonative product. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we see Robin Hood, if we saw Coinbase, I think already has a

perpetual product, if we saw other centralized exchanges and and really incumbent financial institutions, Interactive Brokers, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, I would be surprised if these players don't bring about a perpetual product sometime in 2026. And I think Hyperlid is going to do great within the crypto uh dynamic of purpose exchanges. But I think when it comes to the large swath of financial institutions that are going to enter the perpetual space, Hyperlid has got to step their game up if they want to to compete with the likes of Charles Schwab and Fidel and Interactive Brokers.

>> I mean, the thing is they're going to swallow those markets, right? Like they're going to do tokenized equity per they're going to do um commodities there. It's it's it's already kind of happening. And so, um, >> it's the it's the tried, um, it's the same phrase as what we've seen a lot of these early innovators. It's, um, you know, the Schwabs, Fidelities. These have massive distribution, but Hyperlquid's got an advantage in the tech right now. And so, it's can the incumbents, uh, innovate on the tech faster than the innovators can reach distribution.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Guys, that's the Revenue Meet Award. Awesome. Shout out to Hyperlid. Um, absolutely crushing it. and um they they will just firmly take security's spot. Shout out to Tom. Um all right, guys. Um >> we're gonna keep it moving along. >> The next category is best in privacy. So, privacy has had the biggest narrative comeback of any narrative I've seen in crypto for a while. Um it it completely soared this year. It really took the entire space by storm. Um, I mean, we are seeing privacy absolutely dominate the landscape. Zcash looks great on the chart. Monero looks ready to go out of a seven-year pattern and

break to all-time highs even though it's got 51% attack this year. You've got all these different teams that have just absolutely uh really stepped up and now it seems like privacy is going to be making a huge comeback. We have coming on for 2026 market predictions next. I believe he will probably have some takes on privacy. He's definitely a big invest in investor in this category. Uh you got teams like Zama, Succinct, Boundless, ZKYNC, uh Near, Aztec, Alio, uh Miden, and many more leading this category. This is one of the musthaves for this next wave of adoption. Uh these these companies that are coming on chain, they do not want to operate in a public only blockchain

sense. Privacy is needed. We have the bre best in privacy category up next. >> So obviously there there is uh a very strong barbell of uh things that are happening in the industry coming from multiple different uh swim lanes. And so yes, we are getting this move towards tokenized products. What is that going to do? Well, it's going to connect a lot of currently fragmented brokerages and pools of liquidity. Uh these are going to become composable with one another. But one of the reasons that they're fragmented right now is because they don't want um public information flows between the two. And so we want privacy with composability. Um and so one of the ways that this has been done in crypto has been ZK. And ZK was, you know,

earlier in the year we were talking quite a bit about technology. This has been one of our bread and butter. We've talked a lot about ZK in the past couple of years, not just in 2025, but in 2025 is when we really saw performance improvements across the board. We saw ZK proving really become uh valid and and and uh uh you know pragmatic where now there are apps that are actually using ZK because it's become affordable, it's become performant. Uh we're also seeing privacy in a sense, you know, not just private stable coins, but also uh private transactions and and this is this is a a broad uh trend that we believe is going to continue to occur because we're seeing more institutional adoption and

it's extremely important that we don't recreate an existing financial system. Shout out to Hester Pierce, this regulatory commissioner that isn't just looking at regulatory approval and trying to enrich the incumbents that have been around for for the longest time. She is talking about privacy. She's talking about maintaining some of the things that are very very core to the crypto ethos but doing it in a way and bringing that to the masses. And I think that is extremely important so that we don't recreate a broken financial system. I agree and I mean today actually Zma created a the first private stable coin transaction on Ethereum with uh USDT.

That was really cool. This has been a category that is a a a burgeoning category. So guys, let's get a drum roll, please. Without further ado, we've got the best in privacy. >> Without further ado, the leading verifiable privacy for AI. They launched a cloud product. They launched a private chat with hardwarebacked confidential computing. Intel TDX and Nvidia, the best in the industry, providing cryptographic attestations for every inference. Inference is one of the main components of AI, ensuring end-to-end data privacy unmatched in mainstream AI platforms. Chacht has nothing like this.

Privacy as a core priority. They're positioned as the blockchain for privacy first intelligence and DeFi, integrating AI with DeFi, which we believe is going to be a trend that continues to develop, serving 100 million plus users. Talk a lot about revenue and bringing revenue to the masses. We're also bringing this technology to the masses via partners like Brave, Openmind, and Fala Network. Scalable privacy infrastructure like Nightshade first blockchain to do sharding and to do it correctly. Uh they have stateless validation enable massive scale with ZK integrations. They have uh ZK bridges in the pipeline. They support privacy enabled crosschain DeFi and intense ding ding ding intense across 25

plus chains. Ecosystem momentum high user growth 46 million monthly activives in Q2. We're way up from that. Defvl around 430 million 5x year-over-year. We're looking at billions and billions of dollars going through their INTENSE PRODUCT. LET'S GO. >> They have a userowned AI where privacy is non-negotiable. No decentralized leaks. Industry recognition. Frequently highlight highlighted and he's chugging champagne for bridging privacy with AI open web. They're going to be hosting the go-to AI conference in 2026. We're going to be there live streaming in February immediately after ETH Denver.

It is near the winner of privacy. Zcash would not be on the generational tear if it wasn't for near intense helping to unlock all of the shielded value at stake in Zcash. >> The Zcash trade would not have happened without Near Intense. >> The Zcash trade powered by Near Intense. Shout out to Ilia. Shout out to Near for being an incredible partner, not just bringing one of the most impactful AI products to crypto AI. Also being the main sponsor of AI super cycle, they are helping bring crypto [cheering] closer

to AI and they're doing it in a very very sustainable and private way. The industry would not be where it is today without Near. >> I mean, the private AI product has been sick. It's been cool to watch that thing uh get used. Um, you know, I I've tried it out. I've used it. Feels great. The intense product that they've built has been crushing. Um, the revenue on that is really good. Um, and they've actually like I think the reason if you look at the the again data adoption community, they've they really hit all three. Um, right. So from a data perspective, they've got some insane numbers from intents from users um as well as just like generally their their recent work with the Zcash team um

and Starknet as well. Uh and they also have this incredible uh track record for adoption as well as community globally. And [snorts] so you know this was perhaps a a bit of a sleeper pick in the privacy category, but but I think uh is has they've done an incredible job. Shout out to to the near team and I am as as a longtime crypto activist and user and buyer and investor and now as you know as it's kind of like changed the trajectory of our careers and lives and financial well-being. I I'm very glad to see that privacy is coming back.

I think this whole like Zcash narrative for um uh you know the Swiss bank account in your pocket that's kind of what people think about when they hear about crypto like oh so it's like anonymous like not traceable. But it's actually ironic because like it's actually all so traceable and so >> so much more traceable than cash. >> It's so not an anonymous and so it's just like it's so funny that people's first reaction is like oh so it's like that anonymous like you can't try you can't track it stuff and it's like well no you can actually track everything. So I'm glad to have privacy back on chain.

I think the correct way to think about uh near and and and I wish we could have given this award to multiple people in the category because you know you could say um you know just as uh impactful and influential as Ilia has been in this space uh with you know helping to create the transformer one of the most uh integral personalities in not just crypto but also AI um he certainly you know has been a pioneer in the space also Ellie Ben Assan from Starknet and Zcash, founder of Zcash, also founder of one of the leading privacy L2s in Starknet. I I wish we could have given it to this three-headed beast of Zcash, Starknet, and Near, but ultimately I I

don't think you would have the proliferation of Zcash to where it is today if it wasn't for Near. Near intense helped unleash this this infinite guardian of Zcash. Um and and you know I think the right way to think about this is basically like Zcash is private money. >> It's like Bitcoin and in that sense near is like Ethereum and it and it helps programmatically enable the utility of the money right and so Zcash is the money near is the platform to enable the programmability of the money. And these two are a match made in heaven. really uh you couldn't draw it up better than that. So,

>> love it. Absolutely love it, man. Um huge category win here for the New York team. And guys, we're going to keep this thing rolling. Up next, we've got DeFi excellence. So, this category is absolutely stacked this year. I mean, this year, DeFi had a renaissance um in terms of its revival, right? So, if you guys remember Djen Spartan, his whole thing was um three-year DeFi bare market following uh 2020. And it and and it happened, right? Like we had this terrible pool [snorts] two farming realization that, you know, impermanent loss is real and that you can't just give people value those governance tokens. And we had all this

regulatory battling and and this year a lot of that a lot of that kind of calmed down. the the the regulatory agencies calmed down. The overall uh vibe with within DeFi has accelerated, gotten way better. Um so I'm stoked to have Defi excellence as an award. Um we've got a Athena, Maple Sky, Poly Market, Ono, Secure Eyes, Pendle, Curve Finance, Morpho Uniswap Lido Hyperliquid Fluid, Geto, and Jupiter. But the the winner is the largest D5 protocol by TVL surpassing over 30 30 to 40 billion dollars in TVL uh with over $70 million or 70 billion in deposits dominating 60% of the entire

lending market. Record revenue and growth generated over $und00 million in annualized revenue with more DAO treasury inflows than the prior three years combined. Cumulative fees over 1.5 billion. multi-chain dominance, 17 plus chains, $1 billion TDL across four separate networks. Um, massive stable coin growth for their stablecoin as well. Really strong V4 launch. RWA horizon product as well. Institutional and ecosystem strength. Flight to quality. Zero major exploits. Resiliency powers high utilization borrowing is one of the pioneers of flash loans with over $2 billion of volume and integr

integrations attracting billions in institutional flows with very little to no incentives. Guys, drum roll, please. If it's not obvious by now, the winner of Defi excellence goes to a >> just use A. Just use A. >> The winner of Defi excellence goes to A. Let's [cheering] go A. >> Let's go. >> Let's go. A just a >> congrats to Stan. Congrats to Colton Mark. Amidst the a drama which we must talk about, we have given you all the DeFi excellence award for pioneering this category, bringing us to new institutional heights, bringing us new adoption, more more capital onchain and doing things the sustainable and the

right way. We believe the market will catch up to tokens and protocols who are doing things like a is doing them. And actually, funnily enough, A was our first ever media partner on the rollup, formerly known as Defi Slate, back in June 2020. They wanted to support our Substack. And from there, we've grown from, you know, two, three people to, you know, a dozen plus. Uh, our our revenue story is looks like the hockey stick.

three years of really low. The last two years have been exponential growth in all categories for the for our brand. And it all started with um it all started with getting a nice nice bag of a 2020 >> lend with lend before it was even. So um the the the marketing people who supported us, they're not even there anymore, I don't think. Um but guys, that's us. This isn't about us. This is about a this is about DeFi excellence. And I don't know if there's a single other team that represents DeFi as well as a >> Ave a holds a special place in our heart because of uh the role that they they played uh in the the rollup story. Uh like Andy said, I mean they they were our first sponsor. And I think it's important to call out why they sponsored

uh the roll up back then, DeFi Slate, which was that they wanted to help educate the masses about what DeFi was and is. And I if you know you look at the bet that they made on us back in the day and you look at the bet that we made on them, it was an immensely valuable partnership for both of us. Uh the category of DeFi has grown substantially. Um I like to think that we've educated um lots and lots of people. We've made a significant impact on the space. Helped people learn about how they can deploy funds in DeFi.

Helped educate the market broadly about what DeFi is and how to do it the right way. Go ahead. >> Yeah, I'm just I I mean like I totally agree and I think just to kind of hammer in on the DeFi excellence part here. Excellence to me in DeFi is kind of a new part of this neo finance and it's it's what it's what Vitalix uh has kind of put about lowrisk DeFi. I think that's [snorts] where a shines. You're not going to get you know the most insane yields and these crazy I can take your a position you can loop it on things like Pendle and others. Um, DeFi excellence is providing sustainability, long-term resiliency, and building for multi-deades. And I truly think we should celebrate that more in the industry.

>> That's a great call out. Um, also, uh, what a is doing and where I think this is headed is very fundamentally within this neoinance category. I've said it on a couple streams, but we're really starting to put together this thesis where you're going to have this new DeFi mullet that is forming and you're going to have this consumer trust and brand trust in the likes of the the institutional incumbents, the Black Rockcks, the Fidelities, the Charles Schwabs. They're the ones that are going to be using A in the back end and they're going to be using the rest of DeFi in the back end. And we're already starting to see this. The first edition of this is things like Coinbase using Morpho, but that's not where it's it's not going to stop there. Centralized

exchanges using DeFi in the back end. We're going to end up getting the institutional adoption of DeFi integrated into their financial products and served with trust and security to the masses. >> Yeah, I agree. I think um if you're a DeFi team watching this right now and you're still only thinking about getting users from DeFi to use your app directly, I think that that's a uh a missing strategy and I think that that the big thing here is distribution via these fintech applications. So, shout out to >> Abe.

All right. >> All right, guys. Um next one is >> we're moving right along. the year of the regulatory improvement here. We've got the best on Capitol Hill award. And this one was really tough because there's so many incredible players who have shaped the industry this year. I mean from uh people in the White House themselves, from the SEC Commissioner Hester Pur to Paul Atkins to many many other organizations, the digital chamber of commerce stand with crypto um the blockchain association. So many strong names in the in in the capital of of the greatest country in the world. And here we are sitting in Florida and it's winter. It's 55 degrees out. we've got

our fire on and we're celebrating the fact that crypto has had a major successful year in 2025 with regards to the to regulatory clarity. Um it this I I think honestly this is a watershed moment for um like our company our personal uh capacity because for and and the industry as a whole because for so long uh crypto entrepreneurs were forced to go outside of America. We were we were uh targeted. There was lawsuits. There was uh regulation by enforcement. There was the villain of Gary Gendler. There there was um Foundation and Labs separation which was just an absolute,

you know, silly, ridiculous song and dance that the industry had to play. So much inefficiency. So much resources and money that was spent on on what on separating this thing for for some facade. One thing I didn't I didn't uh I didn't mention was shout out to a for winning and getting their SEC case dismissed. Uh they they spent a lot of Stan's personal capital he wrote as well as the business capital on that. So that was a huge win. And yeah, I mean you're you're you're spot on. There was all this it's hard to overstate how bad Gendler was for the industry in terms of like actually allowing us to make progress.

>> Yeah. And and I I'm as an American I feel rejuvenated. It feels like we're entering this new era that we've never been in before. We're seeing more companies come on shore. This is this was the goal. They're trying to reshore a lot of American business, a lot of American entrepreneurship. And as an American, I feel like this is really positive. I I feel like, you know, this is this is something that um now finally, you know, my country is recognizing my career and my industry and it and it and it feels really really good. Um and, you know, we're seeing that a lot with the conference schedule.

You look ahead to next year, >> obviously there's a lot of international conferences, but a lot more conferences are happening in America. Feels good. We're going to be touring, you know, basically all of America, uh, and talking about crypto and continuing the mission that we've had since the very beginning to educate people, to empower people to take finance into their own hands and enrich their lives through knowledge, through their own finances. And uh, I I think there's no better place for it. So the winner of the best on Capitol Hill award is the pre is a premier crypto advocacy group. They're the world's oldest and leading blockchain trade organization founded in 2014 headquartered in DC. They released a comprehensive US blockchain roadmap for leadership in innovation and national security. Launched a state

network initiative with micro grants and tours to educate and support pro crypto state lawmakers ahead of the 2026 elections and integrated crypto UK for transatlantic advocacy. alignment. They had key policy wins such as pushing the market structure legislation with fit 21 advancements as well as Senate progress, co-signed letters, urgent competition and payments, frequent Capitol Hill briefings, roundts and more. They have a new CEO, Cody Carbone, and have had a massive, massive advocates for Bitcoin reserves in the states. The industry recognition has been incredible for this company. Nominated for best on Capitol Hill 2025 rollup awards season is the

Digital Chamber of Commerce. >> Digital Chamber Digital Chamber of Commerce is the winner for the best on Capitol Hill. >> Boom. Uh this one also holds a special place in our heart because this team was formidable in our uh early days as uh collegiate students uh members of the university blockchain group and uh and founders of a crypto company. Um we Andy and I went to DC uh in 2018 and we were hosted by Perryanne Boring uh the former uh leader of the digital chamber of commerce and that was my first crypto conference. We went there. Uh there was a hackathon. Uh there was lawmakers and

there was an early group of crypto advocates that the digital chamber was able to bring together and start the early part the early discussions of what culminated in the genius act and now the clarity act and ultimately got us to where we are today in terms of the regulatory support that we're seeing across the entire administration would not be possible without the digital chamber of commerce Perry and Boring and Cody Carbone. And I'm particularly excited for March of this upcoming year because we're going to be live streaming from the DC Blockchain Summit. Uh uh and uh I'm really excited about it.

>> Me, too. Shout out to Digital Chamber. Shout out to Cody and the entire team. It was great to meet them over at SmartCon. Um and yeah, congratulations Digital Chamber of Commerce. Bang >> bang bang bang. >> I think back to uh to that conference quite a bit. Um, you know, we uh we go to quite a few conferences these days, but some of my early some of my early uh like realizations of what was possible with crypto and >> blockchain came as a result of that conference. Um I that's when you know it was 2018, Ethereum had only come out a year or two earlier until we were starting to get the early ICO boom and like you know we had all of this crazy experimentation in mind, all this all this imagination, dentacoin, you could

put anything on the blockchain, right? And so it it helped me realize what was really possible with Ethereum with smart contracts and tokenization. And you know I I had a lot of crazy ideas. Some of those came to fruition. Some of those are still uh getting developed. But a a lot of that would not have been possible without the help of Perry and Boring the digital chamber of commerce and the early work that they did to develop crypto advocacy on Capitol Hill. >> So the next award is also a a very near and dear one to my heart. It is the return of fundamentals award. Uh this is the other term that I've coined this year that has really struck a nerve in the excuse me in the crypto landscape on on Twitter and and outside. Uh [snorts] this this is um this is an award that

signifies teams that are building something real teams that are understanding what the value proposition of the space is and building for and really accelerating the growth of of the space. And I mean the funny thing here guys is that on on our nominations list I I believe there was only five five players. Um I I I believe we yeah we had Tether USDT USDC huge huge this year without stable coin growth it would have been absolutely nothing. Hyperlid have changed the entire course of defi of per of the way people think about uh assets onchain lighter right behind them. chain link. I mean, say less, right?

Institutional DeFi, kind of like the the bridge between the gap. And so, this award is probably the most um impactful award of the entire show because it it has such a deep deepseated emotional just tie to what we what we all came here for, why this industry matters, why we're building. We topped this year on apathy. The market top is behind us. I'm sorry if that upsets you. We're We'll go higher sooner rather than later, but we topped on apathy. The whole vibes for the last Q3, Q4 has been apathetic. Um, but return to fun return of fundamentals is the opposite of that. It it gives you inspiration for why we're building here,

for what we're doing here. And so this team has unmatched institutional adoption, partner with Swift, Swift, UBS with over six trillion in AUM in their tokenized fund workflow. DTCC, Euroclear Mastercard Coinbase A&Z and more. They have core infrastructure dominance with their interop uh uh uh program live on 60 plus chains. They've enabled 27 trillion in transaction volume. Proof of reserve is is highlighted in Imperial College reports for stable coin transparency. Their total value secured is over hundred billion. They have ISO 20 271 and SOC, SOC2 certifications. They have amazing DTA standards for tokenized

funds, data link for institutions, CCTP adopted by major uh major players, chains and institutions, and they have the industry recognition. Guys, the return to fundamentals winner is Chain Link. >> This one might come as a surprise. congression to some people. But if you've been around and you've seen how chain link has developed uh not just when they started and they started pioneering the interop space and and bringing uh you know the real world closer to the blockchain world with an oracle service, >> you've seen what they've done on Capitol Hill as well. You've seen Sergey uh up there at the White House dinners. You've seen Chainlink make uh not just a push in the regulatory space but also in the

technical space. And I think the fundamental uh uh paradigm is bringing the worlds together. It is about mass adoption. It's about taking what we've known to be the right way to build the financial system and bringing it to the masses. And so what Chainlink has done is they've gone out and they've gone to the institutional world and they've gone to the financial incumbents and they've said look we're going to help you tokenize. We're going to bring you guys onchain. They've also worked with the likes of AB and the DeFi blue chips and they said, "Look, we're going to bring you closer to the the financial institutions and the incumbents." And so what they're doing is they're approaching the the pinnacle, this convergence point. They're approaching it from both sides. And I think that

takes a lot of foresight and a lot of conviction in vision. And what did we what what you know, we talked to Sergey and what did he say? Well, it's a lot easier to be convicted and have confidence and belief now than it was in 2017. And so I think Sergey has had this vision for a long long time going on 10 years now. He knew where the space was headed. He did not falter in his vision and he continued to build steadfast toward this toward this vision. And so kudos to him for having the conviction and the belief in the fundamental vision of where we all wanted the space to go. He did not stop until he got there. And we're uh we're we're uh closer now than we ever have been before.

>> Shout out to Chain Link. Shout out to Return of Fundamentals. everyone who loves that saying, it's it's one of my favorites this year. Shout out to uh Sergey, Chris, Will, and the rest of the 700 person chain link team, the winner of the return of fundamentals award. Guys, we're going to take a quick standby, quick pause, quick break. Be right back. Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

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>> The behind the 2025 rollup predictions episode back for 2026. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Happy New Year, man. >> Merry Christmas. Always going to be celebrating Christmas on the 30th. Uh glad to be doing it with you boys. >> Did you have a nice holiday? >> I did. I did. It was very lovely. Um, but uh, yeah, I can see you guys are very in the Christmas cheer. I respect that. >> We are. >> Doesn't doesn't want to let doesn't want to let go of holiday. I I feel that. I feel that. >> We're going to run it all the way through to uh through the new year 2026.

Um, >> yeah, we should just go till like February. Just keep doing Christmas stuff. >> We're We're going to go We're going to be live all the way until uh till ETH Denver. Um, >> nice. >> Um, see, man, you came on. You gave us some great predictions last year. It feels like a natural place to start from a a reflection and start with how things went last year and uh what went right, what went wrong. >> Yeah. Well, um if you zoom out on 2025, I technically still still 2025, so we can still get our asses kicked in the last couple days, but I'd say overall um it's been a very mixed year. You know, we went into the year with enormous amounts of optimism. We had, you know, presidential election. we kind of got

everything that we wanted in the wish list of regulation. Um, and yet prices, you know, Bitcoin is like down slightly on the year. Uh, alt really got kicked pretty hard. Everything besides, you know, if you actually if you look at ETH, you look at XRP, they had pretty good years. Uh, BNB had a pretty good year, but almost everything else in the alt complex really just got kicked in the teeth. Um, so it's it's a mixed year. It depends on really what you owned. Uh, the more that you own the majors, the less you have to complain about. Uh but of course this year has been the year of like everything else rallying. You know NASDAQ is up something like 25 30%. AI stocks have done incredible. Gold has rallied like crazy. Um and yet crypto kind of seems to have been left behind. So that makes

it a tough year from what everybody was expecting going into the year. >> People were definitely market. >> Yeah. That's right. That's right. So at the end of 25 or sorry at the beginning of 25 I wrote uh a set of predictions last year that that got a lot of attention and um at the end of every year I try to do both going back and seeing what did I get right what did I get wrong about my previous year's predictions and then making predictions for the next year to try to keep myself honest and try to improve as an investor. uh because so much of investing is actually being able to separate out what's the narrative that everyone's telling, what's the hype that everyone's excited about and what part of it is real and what part of it is going to end up being transient. So if

you remember like beginning of this year, everybody was excited about AI agents. That was the meta, right? It was like virtual taking off. There was AI XPTt. There was all like that was what everybody was talking about. Uh, and we were still in the era of like Zerro and um what was the uh what was what was the word? Goat. Um and uh all all that stuff was going crazy. And so a actually most of my posts and most of the stuff that I got engagement about was talking about how I think this stuff is going to flame out pretty quickly. Um now some of the specific predictions that I made turned out to be a little bit actually too generous to the AI meme coins. So, I claimed that I thought the the memecoins

were going to lose market share to the AI Asian coins. That really didn't happen. Um, AI agent coins kind of collapsed like I think like end of Q1. Basically, they they kind of just totally got destroyed. Um, I I thought that it was going to continue through most of 2025. That was wrong. But I did say that they were going to die off by the end of the year. That was true. I also said that these chat bots, these agents would become so ubiquitous that people would get annoyed by them. And that >> that one is certainly true. >> Twitter became true extremely quickly.

Like it went from cute to I remember I had this analogy of it's like seeing an elephant paint that like the first time you see an elephant paint you're like oh my god that like that's amazing. You see that elephant just made that painting. And then the thousandth painting you see by elephant you're like this [ __ ] these paintings [ __ ] suck. Like I hate I don't want to see any more elephant art. Um, and that's kind of where we're at now is that like every nobody is amazed anymore at what LLMs can do. We all just hate them. Everybody hates them and they're all like people are now looking for signs that this was, you know, painted by an elephant when they see anything posted that has an M dash in it. Um, so I I a few other claims that I made. I thought that um

this idea that everyone's going to have their own trading agent or miniature hedge fund from AI, that's not going to happen. That was correct. uh there was going to be a ton of scams that are going to be automated by all these chatbots. That that uh was correct. Um and I I claimed that software engineering agents were going to be the most impactful uh of anything. And so far that seems to be true is that the you know software automation you see how much money anthropics making and uh claude code and all of this stuff that's where the most product market fit is for everything in AI. Um and uh and I said the memecoin stuff is going to be superseded by more serious decentralized AI players like you know Near Jensen uh prime intellect news research that seems

to be happening. I don't know that it's like huge but that seems to be the case that most of the mind share and what people are talking about these days is is there >> some other predictions I've made. Oh sorry go ahead. No, I was gonna say I think the the only positive development that we saw from the any of the uh kind of agent meta was just uh a realization that that wasn't actual agents and that whatever is going to h come next to get people interested has to be way better than whatever that was. So, so maybe that'll be a 2027 or or late 2026. Well, so what I what I suspect will happen is that any time that people see a new phase transition in abilities, right? So like that was really the first moment

that you could have a fully autonomous agent interacting with people online. And that was so exciting the first time that you saw that that crypto has a way that when it sees something that's genuinely new to just go all in and be like great, let's like make tokens around it and let's sell in a retail and let's like find a way to play a game around this thing. Um, so it's been a while since we've seen another phase transition, right? There's no, you know, people have talked about, oh, what about agents paying each other? What about, you know, some kind of agents becoming economic actors? That hasn't really happened yet. Um, I suspect that once that does happen that we'll see another speculative mania. Um, it might be smaller because people have already gotten burned by the chatbot stuff and they kind of know, okay, maybe that

wasn't where it's going. But when they see agents actually being economic actors, uh, that's when I think we'll see another little mini mania, um, doesn't necessarily mean that's where the long-term value is going to be. Uh, but we're not there yet. We're probably more than a year away from from getting to agents actually being economic actors. >> Yeah. Yep. Um, I think the the another one that was kind of interesting, I don't want to kind of steal your thunder here, but this EVM market share kind of dominance one was interesting because we had all this hype around SVM L2s and move L2s and L1's >> and I mean,

>> you know, we don't need to throw anyone under the bus, but not many of them actually, you know, amounted to much. But but in this prediction, so so so you counted that as as definitely right. >> Yeah. So I mean I think the reasons why I was right were not the reasons that I originally anticipated. So I thought it's going to be this new generation of EVM chains, the monads, the mega ees. Uh the um uh bar chain of course also launched this year and I thought okay all these new EVM chains and hypervm all these new chains are going to increase the adoption for the EVM at large. Um, that was not really the story. The story was more that like we were at in December of last year, that was the local top for Salana dominance, right?

If you remember, it was right when the Trump memecoin launched that Salana hit all highs >> of 300 something. I think it it it touched 300. Um, and where the Salana transaction volume was alltime high. I think that was the day that Trump launched his memecoin was that we saw record-breaking volumes on Salana. And people thought like, okay, it's over. Salana is just going to eat everything. Salana is just gonna be absolutely dominant and it's only a one-way ratchet from here. And um actually that was the that was the top for SVM dominance. So if you look over time the market share of transaction volume, market share of TVL, market share of like uh uh REV fees, MEV, everything has declined from that point. Not not linearly, but it's almost like mean reversion, you know, is

that that was kind of a you know, Salana had a hot hand. Salana is still good. It's still very big. It's still very important, but it's no longer really seeming like Salana is going to eat everything. So, um, you know, maybe we see another resurgence, but at least right now, it's pretty clear EVM remains the dominant architecture for blockchains. Um, and so I think that was why that one ended up being wrong. I also thought that maybe LM are going to have something to do with it is that LM just know so much more about the EVM that maybe they're just going to make it so much easier to write uh programs and contracts than the EVM. uh that turned out to not really be part of the story, but I think it may end up mattering more going forward.

So, um but I think one of the claims I made was that L1's and L2s are overcrowded. They're due for a shakeout and that people are going to stop caring about the distinction between L1's and L2s. And this felt like the year of that, you know, it felt like the year of there's too many of these market is no longer giving credit for just having a L1 or N L2 that's lying in weight and doesn't have traction. Um, and this this whole idea that like yeah, users don't really care. Like Robin Hood was an L2, uh, Tempo was an L1. And maybe some CT people argued about it or some Ethereum maxis care about it, but most people don't care. Most people are like, "Oh, okay, fine. Corpo chain is this.

corporate chain is that who really cares? Um, and so I think that uh that that that that does feel like the year of these kind of tribal fights just mattering less and less as corporate interests start to matter a lot more than our kind of regional crypto battles, you know, like what um Freud called this the narcissism of small differences is like the closer you are to each other, you know, like Ethereum has more in common with Salana than we have with the rest of finance. And so, but the the fights between Ethereum and Salana are like the most fierce fights when really it should be like us against them. But that's the narcissism of small differences.

Um, so you would say that this uh this technological uh indifference would extend also to EVM and SVM. It's not just L1, L2, it's also like EVM, SVM. These are minute differences that we as crypto people care about within the industry, but broadly these are not things that differentiate successful companies from unsuccessful. >> Uh yes and no. I think it it does matter in terms of a choice like the choice between L1 and L2. I think if you're a corporate, I don't think like you need to be explained why you should care about this, right? If I explain to you like, well, if you're an L2 as opposed to an L1, like, well, there's going to take longer for you to become progressively decentralized. You're using Ethereum security as you're not using it here. You don't have your own

validator. It's like pretty it's okay. Well, I just wanted to put stable coins and get my C. You know, I don't know about any of that. I don't I don't why are you talking to me? Um whereas if you tell them like, okay, if you use SVM, you need to hire Rust engineers and you can't use these contracts. You need to write your own. um they'll say, "Oh, okay. Well, I'll use the other one." You know, like that's that's that that is actually a business decision that I think a lot of these enterprises do care about. Um and that's part of the reason why almost all the corporate chains are EVM. Like EVM is less performant than the SVM, right? So these are not performance decisions that they're making. It's interrupt and ease of adoption questions that they're answering. So I do think that question

matters from a business perspective. But L1, L2, and you know, like to to which chain or community do you swear allegiance? I don't think these corporations really care. Um, unless they're being yelled at really really loudly. And the thing is like we're we're not as loud as we think we are. >> Yeah. And I also think the a broader shift, you know, I've got this whole return to fundamentals thing, the the argument about L1, L2 or whatever it is and even like some of the revenue meta stuff that we just kind of like, you know, joked about permissionless, it it's all causing such a I don't know, you know, for lack of a better term, reality check in the space.

And so these kind of minute differences in technical architecture have seemingly gone to the wayside in exchange of like okay who's actually making money or like who's using this or like you know who's who which institution is adopting your technology etc etc. >> Yeah. No I I agree with that and and the other thing I I didn't touch on it in my predictions but this was also the year of the Ethereum revival right? I mean at at the time you remember Ethereum was just down in the dumps. people were talking about L2s being parasitic to Ethereum. Um, and I think that in a way that like that is part of the revenue meta is this idea that L2s are pulling the life force away from Ethereum and Ethereum needs to like you know kind of pull these barnacles off of itself and like you know emerge from from the

depths and it kind of did that right with the the whole Ethereum pivot which you know now uh we can talk about it without it being so politicized but at the time it was like very contentious to say is it a pivot is it not a pivot blah blah blah. In retrospect it was totally a pivot and it was good. It was successful. They did the right thing by refocusing their marketing, their storytelling as well as the focus on scaling the L1 and supporting developers directly on top of the the uh the base chain. So that was probably one of the big stories of this year. >> Yeah, we we called this a bullish reversal. Uh and this was particularly by the by the EF uh where they they did change their story. they've refocused uh on core priorities, improve the UX, uh scale the L1 and improve blobs. Um and

so I I think as we look forward like okay well Ethereum is still the home of stable coins, most stable coins around Ethereum. Uh the most PWA and most DeFi all of these things that we're we're saying are going to be the key components uh for a successful project in 2026. Ethereum has most of those. Um, and as we're talking about what institutions and companies don't care about, they don't care about L1, L2. They don't really care about EVM, SVM for maybe, you know, some resource allocation decisions. Um, it it, you know, you mentioned stable coins are one of the things that's like, okay, I just want to deploy my stable coins somewhere.

What do you think the institutions, the companies that were previously on the outskirts looking at crypto, kind of testing the waters, dipping their toes in, and they hadn't previously gone in, now they it seems like they're getting in. What are the things that stick out to them? It seems like Ethereum has checked all the right boxes. They just want to deploy their stable coins. What do you think is the what are the things that matter the most to those companies that are now coming in? I I think the the things that they care about are pretty straightforward, which is one, I want access to customers, right? Where are the people who hold stable coins? I want to get my stable coin into their hands. Second, I want it to be easy to launch, build, interop, you know, everything. I want everything to be easy. I don't want have to build a bunch

of stuff myself because like that's not my expertise. That's you. You guys are good at that. I'm not good at that. Um, and then third, they want it to be really easy to keep track of. So, they want easy indexing. They want easy accounting. They want to be able to like, you know, just have some ETL pipeline that they know exactly what's happening on the chain at any given time. So, um, you know, Salana for quite a while had a lot of indexing issues. Now, those have improved significantly this year. Um, and so it makes it a lot more viable place for for people to be launching stable coins. But on the whole, I think the easiest out of the box solutions are all for EVM chains because they've just existed the longest. They just have the most tooling and the most kind of robust ecosystem.

And that's why most of these people are choosing EVM. It's not because they love Ethereum or because they want to, you know, be Ealigned or whatever. It's it's purely a pragmatic business decisions that they see. That's where all the stable coins are. So, I should probably go there if I want to be the next big stable coin. >> Yep. Yep. Um hiba another interesting one that I think that we also thought would have accelerated more but maybe you know didn't in in the same way that we thought you marked it as a wash was uh more applications following hyperlquid and creating specialized chains. Um you know we thought kind of like this app chain this kind of modular thesis app chain thesis every apple launch it own chain we're hearing rumblings about poly market maybe doing

so due to some congestion on polygon or just other kind of reasons. uh you probably have insight that is not able to be shared and then others like lighter edex um you know even pumpf fun there was rumblings about you know are they going to leave salana but none of these really materialized in the way that I think a lot of the kind of thought um but of course you know lighter hyperlid these are all on the so yeah I mean I just thought that one I thought progress more by now as well >> yeah yeah no it's it's a good point and And I think part of that is the the reality that like a lot of these this infrastructure has scaled. So, you know, if you're on Salana and you're pump, you

know, maybe maybe if if you're looking at January when Trump Bemecoin launched and like Salana basically fell over, you're like, "Shit, we got to get off of here because, you know, I can't have the single biggest day of crypto trading on this chain in history have my users be unable to use my platform, right?" But, you know, after January, a bunch of people fixed a bunch of stuff. RPCs became more robust. Um like you know there's just like a lot of improvements that happen when people see these scaling bottlenecks. Um and then it's like okay look is this the biggest priority? Is the biggest priority for us to create a whole new infra create whole new indexing create bridges create you know all this stuff like launching a new chain is hard. It's really difficult especially if you're not doing it from

day one. If you're migrating an existing application to a new chain that is brutally hard right? And if you look at the examples of people who tried to migrate almost entirely failures right so if you look at uni chain if you remember unis swap launching uni chain people were so excited this is one of the things that you know I predicted on our own podcast that uni chain was going to underperform here we are uni chain is basically a nothing burger you know there's absolutely nothing going on on uni chain unis swap was still dominant on the primary chains where it trades but yeah trying to move the liquidity and move the demand and move move everything over into a new platform it's just too hard and it's kind of not worth doing when the core business is working. So I I suspect for a lot of these, you know, if

you're pumped up fun, maybe even if you're if you're Poly Market, like launching your own chain, it's like, yeah, maybe I'll get around to it when I get around to it. Uh but I have so many other things that are more important to just improve the product experience, get more users in the door, you know, regulation, like all this other stuff that is existential and moving chains is just very seldom existential. Yep. Couple more on 25 here. Um, airdrops move to a two-track world for project clear KPIs like dexes and lending while L1's L2s move to crowd sales. You said you nailed it. I mean I I I think we don't, you know, say less, right? Monad huge launch. Um, Legion blew up. Uh,

Echko got acquired by Coinbase. Like what do you hear for uh that? And then also, if you guys remember in the end of our in the end of 24 when we did our 2025 predictions about a year ago, points was everything. Hyperl had just done their airdrop, the biggest airdrop in history, points were like that like 2024 was the year of points and that is also seemingly completely I mean not completely lighter lighter just dropped there. Yeah, exactly. So points for KPIs like DEX's points still rule the roost, but for everything else, yeah, points are points are done.

>> And crowd sales, I mean, Mega ETH, one of the largest uh ICO raises this year, Monad, and the list just goes on and on and on. I mean, Yield Basis, uh the Curve Curve Curve Michaels project had 200 million uh subscribed for $5 million raise on Legion with Kraken. Um and so you just had a lot of these big big launches. Yep, totally agreed. >> Another one I thought was cool was uh more optimistic UIs, you know, onboarding in browser wallets. I mean, if if if people were around in 2020 2021 using DeFi compared to now, it is like it is mindblowing.

It is mind-blowingly better and it's still got a long way to go, but that I think I think yeah, I agree that one was definitely nailed. Uh stable coin build passes 2025, market structure doesn't. That's crazy [laughter] call because we're so close. We're so close. >> That's true. >> Oh, so close. >> And just a couple other final ones before we get to 2026. Fortune Fortune 100 companies offer more crypto project products to consumers under Trump admin. >> Um, totally right. I mean, altcoin ETFs, Salana ETFs, Chain Link, Dogecoin, all these bills. Um, and all these >> all the big all the big fintech companies and a bunch of banks now offering >> stable coins, Vanguard, all these things.

>> Yeah. Um, yeah, man. I mean, close us out on 2025. I I think you were about you were over 50% for sure. I'll give you closer to 75% here. Accuracy. Maybe you could argue 80%. What do you think? >> Yeah, it depends on how you count the washes. Um, so if you if you count the washes, 15 out of 24 is like, you know, slightly below 70%. Which I think is pretty good. I think it's pretty good. Uh, if you don't count the washes, then it's like 15 out of 18, which is even better. >> That's like my free throw percentage. That's a pretty good thing.

>> It's like 80 something. Um, so, uh, I I think I I think I did pretty well. I think the ones I got wrong were giving a little bit too much credit to the AI agent stuff. Um, those are those are my main misses, but most everything else I I was able to get right. Um, so I think it was a good year um, for a lot of tech. It was a bad year for prices. >> Yeah. And so I think like you know at the end of the day it's one of these years where the industry is forced to grow up. People are forced to look in the eye of what they're doing with respect to memecoins, respect to these you know AI agent slop coins and all this other stuff and be like hey what really has staying power here and what's just you know kind of a game of musical

chairs that we're playing. Uh the music stopped this year. There's no more there's no more there's no more music playing for the game of musical chairs. Um and so you got to actually do something productive. And I think that's the theme going into 2026 is like let's let's build some real [ __ ] >> I love it. >> The the musical chairs will come back. The music always comes back on. It's crypto. You know, people uh people get bored when there's no music playing for too long. But um at least for right now, that seems to be the defining vibe. >> Well, you started us off with Bitcoin over 150k by year end.

>> Yep. >> But Bitcoin dominance decreases in 2026. >> Yeah. Yeah. So my my view here, I mean, look, it's going to be clearly a year of financial stimulus. Uh you've got rates coming down. You've also got a lot of the um a lot of the Trump policies actually kicking into gear next year that are going to be fiscally stimulative and I think he probably is going to end up doing even more to stimulate going into the midterms uh just to try to win some votes and you know kind of curry favor with voters. So uh I think all of that is going to end up uh creating a good environment for digital assets. I think also there's just some mean reversion, you know, is that like Bitcoin dominance at a local high and if you just kind of chart Bitcoin dominance over a long enough

time horizon, that thing is just a, you know, it's a sine wave. It goes up and it goes down and a lot of it is just sinosoidal around uh sentiment, reactions, um, you know, vibes. Uh, I don't think it's so much that like, well, you know, this was the year that we discovered that altered worthless. Uh, I don't think that we discovered anything this year. I think it's more just, you know, macro kind of conspired, uh, and the fact that the AI bid was pulling away so much capital from retail out of the crypto markets. Um, but especially if there's an AI correction and you start to see less and less frenzy around, okay, the idea that AI is this up only category. Um, then I think the crypto bit will come back. It's

going to be rocky. It's going to be ups and downs. Um but I think you know and and there's also to some degree just a catch trade with with with gold right and uh one of the things I was thinking about is you know gold has had a massive rally this year crazy performance for gold um and at the same time SpaceX is going to be going public soon and of course SpaceX one of the things that they have said is that part of their monetization strategy is to do asteroid mining. And of course, if they successfully do asteroid mining, the big hall for asteroid mining is like an asteroid that has a bunch of gold on it.

And I I I I read somewhere that I believe uh all the world's gold, all the gold in existence could fit in a 16 yard by 16 yard cube. That is how much gold there is in the world. Like that is currently been already been mined. Um, if you find one asteroid cache that has enough gold in it, now this is very unlikely, but you know, this is this is literally one of the bulk cases for asteroid mining is that like asteroids have very rare minerals inside them. If you get like a crazy event with asteroid mining, or we even just discover asteroids that have like, oh, this one has a bunch of uh, you know, platinum in it. Interesting.

Uh, or a bunch of aluminum. Wow. Huh. I I bet there's probably asteroids with gold in them, too. And one indication that the like the world's supply of gold might double from one asteroid uh would send Bitcoin skyrocketing. >> Wow. >> That's incredible because obviously there would be a capital flight out of gold and into Bitcoin. People see it as a very similar asset class, but with a fixed supply. You can't go mine an asteroid for more Bitcoin. >> Yeah. So there's there's like weird asteroid risk to gold that people don't talk about a ton but like all of the all the the conditions are conspiring to make it happen which is that Bitcoin is becoming more and more ubiquitous and SpaceX is becoming you know one of the most val it's right now it's one of the

most valuable private companies in the world and going to be going public soon and u you know as they increase the space uh the the velocity of uh these kind of asteroid mining missions before you know it might be on people's radars. Wow man. >> See, do you do you do anything like this on the dragonfly side or personal angel side going into uh you know investing in in space or any >> I do not I do not look my my my rule is very simple is that uh I leave it to the experts when I don't know what the [ __ ] I'm talking about. I know I know enough to be dangerous but uh not so much that I should be underwriting investments. So yeah um I I think in anything outside of crypto I am the dumb money. So,

>> I try to stay I try to keep it simple. >> Well, before we go too deep into into your predictions for 2026, I am curious about some of your your biggest wins and maybe your biggest losses in 2025 for Dragonfly, if you can speak to any of them. You know, where where you are the expert uh in your in your um you talked about your personal predictions 2025, what went right, what went wrong, but yeah, as far as Dragonfly is concerned, can you talk about anything that went exceptionally well or things that you know fell by the wayside? Yeah, I mean we've had we've had a number of projects that we invested in that have done very well. So we're you know we led the seed run of Athena, we did the seed led the se of monad. So we've done a bunch of

stuff that's done really well, but probably the standout for the year is poly market. So I mean last year was just like if you remember uh so the the 2024 election um people thought that poly market was basically done. It's like, okay, you know, yeah, you got all this volume for the election, but obviously everything's going to fall off and like no one's gonna be talking about poly market anymore. That was the story at the end of last year. The story was that flash in the pan. It's one and done. We're not going to talk about this again. You know, come see us in four years. And prediction markets have gone from that to becoming just this meteoric category. And we actually put more money into Poly Market. Um I think it was like February that we committed more money.

And this was against the chorus of people saying that like, hey, I think it's I think, you know, there's no there's nowhere there there. Uh and that turned out to be hugely preient. We first invested into Poly Market beginning of 24 before the big election runup. Um and so we're we're big we're big holders in Poly Market. Incredibly proud of what they've done because they basically created the category and kind of willed it into existence. Um so that one is probably biggest win of the year. Um, in terms of biggest loss, I mean, it's venture, so you kind of lose stuff all the time. And the nature of venture is that wins and losses are, um, they're asymmetric in the sense that like you can only lose a 1x, but you can win arbitrarily big. So, in that sense,

like, you know, as as a VC, we really don't spend that much time thinking about our losses because they just kind of don't matter. What really matter are the wins. Uh, but if I had to say biggest loss, I mean the one that's definitely recent is Axelr. So I'm sure everybody saw the story about Circle acquiring the Devco of Axelr and um, you know, Axelar we invested at um, I think it was like beginning of 22 so it was you know near the top of the market and uh, we invested at a billion dollar valuation. They went out you know it kind of fluctuated around there but then since then you know all the bridging and interoperability platforms have just gotten crushed. Um, AxelR of course is one of them. So down a lot in that investment. Um wasn't a huge loss. It's unfortunate and obviously you know the

team ended up getting acquired by circle and that created a lot of drama around this tokens versus equity uh discussion that's been increasingly happening and now now is happening around a as well. Um but um that's probably the one that's most recent that that comes mind. >> Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate that. No, I mean yeah that was that was an interesting moment. People are now asking whether or not app tokens are even investable or not. we have to do a whole new episode on that or something. Um >> I mean I think a lot of that is overblown but I >> we can we can we can talk about that separately.

>> Um next prediction for you. Despite the excitement around the recent crop of fintech chains their metrics will underwhelm. Um daily active addresses stable coin flows and RWAs Tempo Arc and Robin Hood chain will underdel while Ethereum and Salana will overd deliver. Best developers will continue to build on neutral infra chains. Yeah. So, this one, um, this might be one of the more controversial ones. Um, I'd say that I think people have a lot of magical thinking about tech companies launching products. Um, if you've ever actually worked at a big tech company or if you're a close watcher of big tech companies, you will know that they launch new products all the time and

they flop all the time and nobody cares because it's just like, oh, you know, we got a team, we tried a thing, didn't work. Who cares? Um, so like I don't know how many people remember Facebook Pay still exists. You can pay people in Messenger. Uh, almost nobody does it. I don't think I I only have one person I know who like pays me in Messenger. Um, but like they have this feature. So does Google. Google also has a Google Pay uh that like you can play pay people peerto-peer using like their messaging ser. I don't know if people remember their messaging service. Google has like you know like all these companies launch products all the time and they don't go all in on them because like why would you go all in on like Google messaging?

Like who cares? Let's try it. see if it works. If it doesn't work, whatever. Just kill it. Why not? Um, so I think if you look at these three products, uh, uh, Robin Hood chain, Tempo, and Arc, I have not seen from any of these three a commitment that looks like they're going all in on these products. It doesn't look to me like Stripe is going all in on Tempo. It doesn't look to me like Robin Hood's going all in on Robin Hood chain and ARC. I mean, I think it'd be crazy if Circle Works try to go all in on ARC, meaning like they tried to move all USDC onto ARC and said, "If you want to use USDC, go here." right? That's what it means to go all in. Um there are times when companies do go all in on a play like this and if they did, I would

be a lot more like, "Oh [ __ ] maybe it's going to happen." Um even Libra was more of a big commitment from Meta than any of these three chains are. Um but I don't think any of these three are are big commitments. I think they're basically flyer bets. I think if they work out, great. If they don't work out, uh whatever, boohoo. You know, if you look at Stripe, Stripe is going to support payments on every chain. They are not going to say, "Oh, if you want if as a merchant you want to take stable coins, you have to use Tempo." They're going to say like, "Oh, you know, if you use Tempo, maybe you get like a little, you know, whatever little reduced fee or something." But like, where are your customers? Where's retail? Where are the people who are actually buying stuff at

the point of sale? Do they have stable coins on Tempo? No. Then, okay. Well, if if at the point of sale, they're going to have to buy stable coins on Tempo to then send them to you. Why would you do that? Why would you just be like, oh, you know, settle with a credit card, you know, like that's obviously what what consumers would do. And so, I think for them, it's kind of a free option. They see this as a cheap way to like see like, yeah, maybe this crypto thing, maybe we have a blockchain and maybe it takes off, but if it doesn't, it's fine. We might as well launch it and see if it works. I think same thing with Robin Hood. Robin Hood, I don't even know what Robin Hood chain is supposed to be used for.

>> Um, we heard about it. Haven't heard anything since. We just know it's going to exist. you know, it's like it's Adele 2 and then later they'll some something, you know, I don't know. So, all this stuff feels to me like these are flyer bets. And I think crypto Twitter as well as crypto commentators generally, they they they I think their theory of mind is just totally wrong about how these companies view chains. We're excited because, oh, they're doing our thing and if they're doing our thing, they're so big and they have so much distribution, they're going to kill us. But their distribution, they're not trying to move their distribution into crypto. They're just trying to make money. And if crypto helps them make money, they'll use crypto. If they make money other ways, they'll do it other ways. They will all accept stables. They will all, you know,

they'll all take crypto rails. But will they go all in on having their own crypto rails become dominant? I I don't believe it. >> Yeah. I'm I'm going to lump two together here. A big tech company launches or acquires a crypto wallet in 2026 and many more Fortune 100s launch blockchains. Although increasingly concentrated among banking and fintech players, expect Avalanche expect my bags to be a standout here along OP stack orbit and ZK stack. >> Yep. Um so on the first point uh which is uh sorry [ __ ] what was the first one?

>> Uh it was a big tech company launches big company. Yeah yeah yeah. So this is the unique window when a big tech company can actually get into the game. Uh if they wait a year, maybe even two years, it's probably too late and they will launch whatever they're going to launch into an unfriendly administration potentially, right? It's a gamble. Um now is the critical window where you know I predict that uh clarity uh is going to go into law and that's going to give them some certainty that like hey we can actually do this and there's some there's some real regulatory safeguards around how this is supposed to work. Um I think you're going to also see a lot more aggressive uh um rulemaking and guidance given by the SEC and CFTC about how you can get into this game without

running a foul of of of those rules and regulations. Um, and people are going to see the numbers on stable coin penetration growing like crazy. And all of these big tech companies want a piece of that because they just see this is an increasing part of the digital landscape that we do not own. And as it's getting bigger, it's getting real and it's becoming legal. Well, [ __ ] I want a piece of that and I want to be able to connect it to everything else that I own. So, I think that you're going to see a big tech company come into this game. Um, I think Apple's probably unlikely. I would guess either Google or Facebook. Um, but you know, maybe Apple.

I just think they're too riskaverse. Um, I think Google or Facebook are probably more likely players to enter into here. Um, and very good chance they go through acquisition rather than building. Uh, just because it's easier to just get something that kind of works off the shelf. Um, in terms of Fortune 100 blockchains, yeah, there I I think there are going to be more of those, especially among fintech and banking players because they just all have the perception that if they do a blockchain, good things happen. Um and like there's this kind of sense that like hey you should have one have a digital strategy announce it to the world and in case that there is a big push in tokenization or uh more and more RWAs coming on chain uh you want to have your own walled garden with your own controls and uh

compliance regimes and maybe even some privacy about how all that works. So I do think avalanche is the best positioned among the fintech and banking players because they have the most customizability around privacy controlling the validator set etc. Um but all these guys are making inroads with you know these kind of big uh financial players wanting to launch their own chains and get their own block space. >> I got one one comment on the on the first point about a a big tech company acquiring a a wallet. I think if this happens it's going to have a a lot to do with AI agents as more of that technology where agents tend to pay one another. uh this is a AI is becoming more and more integrated into these big

tech companies. I I think uh Google and are are probably two of the leaders in that category, but I could also see someone like an open AI acquiring a wallet provider to then help facilitate a lot of the agentto agent coordination. So we'll we'll see how that plays out. It might take more than just one year, might not happen in 26, but as this prediction plays out, I I I could see that uh becoming a part of it. So, one of my predictions within AI was that there's not going to be any agent agent payments in 2026. That basically agent agent payments are still too early and it's not going to happen this year. Um, that being said, open AI is a very interesting idea. Actually, I I feel like I could see that especially with

Sam having a piece of WorldCoin and you know, having these kind of broader world ambitions with the free tier of Open AI. Um, that would actually be very interesting. I had not considered that. Yeah, I think you saw the World Coin and Tinder uh news. I'm not sure if you did. So, Worldcoin is with Tinder. >> So, so you can verify that you're a human on Tinder dating app and uh no longer become catfished by AI. >> Hold on. That but they only know that you're a human, right? They don't know that you're not catfishing.

>> Right. Right. That that >> because they only see your iris, right? They all they know is that your eye is not catfished. Yeah. Yeah, >> the rest of you could be, you know, an extra 200 pound. >> The catfishing is just is up to the eye of the beholder on the first date. It's it's it's, you know, >> um all right, let's let's move into into DeFi. Um Perpex market share consolidates to like big or sorry, three big venues. Allah, HBO, something like 40 30 20 uh followed by a long tale of smaller players who compete over the leftovers. Earlier on the show today, I said something more like 80% 10% 10%.

You seem to be kind of a bit more of a distributed prediction here as well as equity per taking off and becoming 20% of total DeFi per volume by the end of the year. Um, and also significant growth in RFQS versus clubs. Um, and some crazy insider trading scandal hits the mainstream. So quite the interesting DeFi predictions there. Yeah, I think um for those for you know people who have been trading for a while they might remember HBO. HBO was the acronym for Huabi, Binance, OKX. Uh and so those were the three big venues back in the day before you know Bybit kind of came with the big ones. Hobby fell out you know blah blah blah but so people used to call it HBO and the the market share

at that time was roughly something like 40 3020. Um, and I think there's there's a there's a famous article I think by BCG, the consulting firm, um, that was written, it must have been written like in the 60s or something, and it describes this equilibrium for markets is that markets almost always end up with three big players. And usually the distribution is something like 40 30 20 or 40 2020. Um and the like there's something about unless there is a runaway network effect to a business you end up getting this kind of consolidation into a few players it's very seldom like five or six players right think of think like credit unions

right uh or credit u whatever you know like Experian and these guys like there's three you know there's very often three and there's something special about that number that all sorts of businesses end up evolving into having these three big players And even right now if you look at per right like we've got the three what's the three it's hyperlquid aster and lighter if you just look at volumes even today after lighter airdrop um you see those are the those are the big three that are doing meaningful volumes so um now that being said lot of game left to be played and obviously incentives end up warping a lot of these numbers in the long term so we got to see it shake out once there's you know some steady state with respect to incentives um but I I think that's where we're going to land

because at the end of the day exchanges are not a kind of dominance type business, right? Like if you look at Binance, Binance like they topped out at like 50% market share and and you think like, okay, well there's like network effects, you know, like the liquidity blah blah blah. Yeah, but it's not it's not a network effects business. It's not one of these things where like one guy's dominant and just crushes everybody else. Um even with something like Binance and Pers, there's split market share. So, I think we should expect that in DeFi. It once upon a time, Hyperlid was so much better than every other product that was out there. But give it time, right? Like there's never one of anything. There's always competitors.

There's always people playing catch-up. There's always people learning from what your innovations and advantages were, copying the best things, innovating at the margins, and playing for for the market. Um, and so I don't think anyone's going to be able to say, "Yeah, the market's all mine. There's nobody else who can really compete." Yeah, we thought poly market was a runaway train and then there comes call chain. Now there's very clearly two in the market. Um and the principle of three is interesting to think about when it comes to prediction markets because it we we've you know first we said oh there's only one. Now it's like okay the two are so far ahead that there's no third that could come in but >> there is a third. There is a third and that third is Robin Hood >> right remember Robin Hood is going to be

adding their own backend clear outside of Kalshi that they're doing in partnership with Saskuana >> which means that there will be three it'll be poly market Robin Hood and KCI >> yeah and as you said it's lighter aster and hyperlid right now or in in order it's hyperlquid by oi hyperlid aster lighter as of current but that'll okay >> that'll [clears throat] change equity per uh also set to to take off significant growth in RFQ uh compared to clubbs. But I think more most interestingly, I mean those are both, you know, very good takes. I think the insider trading scandal that is just out of a whim is is I ought to think that's got to be prediction market related, but it seems

like it's not. I think um I think there will be something because of the growth of um equity pers that is likely to trigger much more kind of mainstream type news. Um like for prediction markets it's kind of like oh somebody traded on a prediction market like okay yeah who first I got to explain to you what a prediction market is and then I got you know like that that I think is is kind of a tougher punt for mainstream news to give a [ __ ] Um, and then you know, oh, somebody there's a Bitcoin whale and they knew that Trump was going to, you know, okay, that's kind of another complicated story. Like, is somebody going to read that and be like, yeah, clearly somebody insider traded Bitcoin. Yeah. Right. Um,

but when somebody's like, oh, here's the NASDAQ index or, "Oh, here's Tesla stock." And somebody traded right before an announcement, that is going to >> Yeah. like on the weekend or something, some some whale buys like $25 million of Tesla on Hyperlid and then Monday, you know, 9:00 am newswire drops and they've just they've just found gold in an asteroid. >> Simple story. >> It's like holy [ __ ] how do they know? >> Very very straightforward story and that's something that somebody in Congress is going to care about. >> And so you so part of your like so equity per you're this has been tried and tried but it seems like it's it's it's it's the right time now and it's happening better now.

>> Right. If you look at trade XYZ, trade XYZ has been going up like crazy. Osteium obviously has been doing this for a while. They but but trade XYZ seems to have really cracked it open with respect to open interest volume and just like the the attention that's building around it. And so I I think you're going to see more and more growth. um especially as RFQ combines with um equity equity purpose because like if you look at Osium today so AIM right now is the is the dominant one that's doing it RFQ style and when you do it RFQ style the problem with trade XYZ is that the funding rates are very volatile especially you go into a weekend where there's just not a lot of liquidity and you know the the funding rates are just moving around like crazy and so you want to hold a position for a

long time you have no idea how much it's going to cost you right I mean But, you know, the NASDAQ goes up, you know, 10% a year on average, right? Something like that. And for an asset that's going up 10% a year on average, if you're eating 15% a year negative funding, then it's like, okay, well, you don't want to hold the NASDAQ for the year, right? No, you might have positive funding, but who knows? Like, it's just volatile, right? And you have to really be monitoring it to have a position open for a long time. Uh whereas for uh if you have RFQ, then you don't have to balance the order book in order to get a funding rate, right?

your funding rate gets quoted to you by your counterparty and they're getting their funding rate from just their cost of capital of filling the other leg of the trade on, you know, CME or whatever it is that they're that they're, you know, doing the trade. Um, and so they're kind of just a pass through, right? It's like it's like, you know, it's like an OTC desk basically. Um, and so I think that is going to be increasingly how especially for longtail stuff like, you know, RWA per going to go. If you're trading Bitcoin, ETH, you can do a collab, you can get the liquidity and it can be good enough liquidity to match Binance, right? Because that's the prim like you know the primary venue is Binance. You can get close enough to the primary venue in terms of the liquidity, but for longtail stuff, you cannot replicate the

liquidity of Binance in Hyperlquid or Lighter or whatever. You're just never going to do it for, you know, 500 pairs, especially when you're talking about RWA because then it's really long tail. It's kind of like um when you buy, you know, let's say 3x leverage gold junior minor token because you're bullish on gold and you hold it for two weeks and you don't understand how the instrument works and you're like, "Gold's up 25%. This asset's up 35%." But I'm I'm somehow down 6% on my holding and you're like, "Oh, I didn't read the fine print about the decay of of the rate of this instrument." It's kind of similar here with with the CLAB model with the funding rates are so variable. you could be so right on something, but the platform that you chose to do it the

instrument was just so wrong. And so that that is just not gonna be that's not going to work for people who want to do these types of things. >> It depends like if you look, if you're a day trader and you're trading around funding rates, great, you know, have at it. But if you're imagining that people are going to be taking longdated exposure to an index or to some stocks, you know, I want to hold Apple stock for the year, but I want to hold it synthetically because I'm not American. Uh, and I, you know, I have stable coins, you know, I I I if I get on Hyperlquid and I go on on trade XYZ, then okay, I'm taking a lot of funding rate risk and I have no idea how that's going to shake out by the end of the year. I've got to

monitor it, you know. U, but ideally, if you can get to the right RFQ type setup, basically somebody can lock in a funding rate and just say, I guarantee you this funding rate for the course of the year. >> Love it. Stable coins. Stable coins supply expands by 60% in 2026 and USD remains 99% plus. USDT dominance declines moderately to 55% um and stable coin back cards grow a thousand% in 2026. Insanely fast growth becomes the dominant way stable coins land and expand in emerging markets. Rain is the biggest winner here. We're calling this new kind of category neo finance, neo banking. Um, stable coins are set to

grow by at least 60%. I think that is um on the conservative side. >> Uh, is that on the conservative side? I mean, stable coins I think grew by 50 something this year. Um, so 60% is like a slight increase in the growth rate. In principle, it should be harder to grow the more you've already grown, right? In principle, the growth rate should be decreasing. But I think actually we're going to get a stimulus of growth because of the amount of companies that now see the Genius Act getting implemented. So the Genius Act passed, but it's not actually in effect yet, right? There's like a grace period uh where you know everything gets into shape and like they kind of decide how to interpret the law into actual

regulations and licenses and so on. Um so I think once the Genius Act is implemented that's going to be a sort of positive impulse for the dollar. Uh the other thing of course that the dollar has declined this year. It's been a bad year for the dollar. Um and that should be a drag on demand for dollars globally. If next year we see the opposite and the dollar strengthening or you know mean reverting against some other currencies then that should potentially be a buoy for stable coin supply expanding. Um I think also just the expansion of like you said these sort of neo banks these these crypto neo banks uh that should also be a further distribution channel for stable coins but I think especially for stable coin cards. So, you know, we're we're big investors in Rain. So, again, talking my bags here, but Rain is the biggest

stable coin card issuer in existence today. Um, and they are growing like crazy. >> We're investors in Ether. They're a bit smaller than Rain, but the the chart looks like just parabolic hockey stick in terms of spend, new users. >> Ether uses Rain on the back end. So, Ether, so Rain is B2B TOC, right? So like they they work with companies like Etherfy that then issue their own card programs, but they're doing the customer acquisition, not Rain. Rain doesn't acquire customers, they acquire businesses. Um so uh like there are so many companies like Ether that are going out there building their neoank offerings and they have cards that allow you to spend stable coins. And that last mile problem is like, okay, I get the stable coin. That's great. I wanted dollars, but what do I do with it? The

answer is like, oh, you use just a normal card, you put it into, you know, e-commerce site, you go swipe it at a thing, you do your tap to pay thing, and you can pay with your stable coins now. And that simple change has changed stable coins from like, yeah, in theory, I guess I should use these to like this is the easiest way. Like, you know, for many people, they don't even know they have stable coins. They just know they have dollars in a fintech app that they can spend with a card. The end >> reinforcing one of the most primitive use cases of crypto, which has been democratizing financial access. And it it starts with cash, which is stable coins. It's tokenized cash. And then it goes is what can I do with my stable coins? Well, if I just want to spend it,

I use one of these NEO bank cards. But then there's this plethora of financial apps, DeFi, that I can go and I can deploy stable coins beyond just using it for payments. So th this is the stimulus for the entire industry. >> That's right. That's right. So, and I think this is again like how stable coins continue to get into more people's hands, which is also ties into what we were just talking about with like RWAS when you hold stables like right now what can you buy with your stables if you want to invest your USD? The answer is almost all these neo banks they offer some kind of yield product which is you know okay maybe I put it in a or maybe I like buy some tokenized treasuries or something. Um, so that's a really easy way I can integrate yield and then maybe

I let you buy Bitcoin, right? And that's like the investable universe that's available to you. If you're some guy in Nigeria or you're in Argentina or whatever and you've got one of these NEO banks and you're like, great, I've got two options. Either Treasury yield or I can, you know, buy some Bitcoin. Um, and I think for a lot of those people, they're like, well, I kind of want, you know, like, can I buy an index, maybe? Can I buy, you know, the S&P? Can I buy the Nikk? Can I, you know, can I buy something else, please? and RWA per how that happens. And so the distribution channel for these kind of long-term investors, these people are not day traders. They're not speculators.

They're not here to speculate. They're here to grow their capital and then to spend it, you know, responsibly. Um, so I think that is going to be again another way in which you see these things get distributed last mile to more and more customers who have a different profile than the current set of users in DeFi who are mostly trading. >> Yeah. I mean globally as well, right? Not just in the, you know, like in the big trading hubs or the big finance hubs in the more emerging markets and that's right. Just the very basic need of holding dollars um globally is is is now happening. Um moving to regulation, clarity law against signed into law in 2026 after some significant markups and in horse trading. A bit of buyers

remorse from crypto insiders. Um let's start there. Buyers remorse in which way? Yeah, I think um the Democrats know that they have a strong hand. They know that they're going to take the midterms very likely. And as a result, I don't think they feel a lot of pressure to have to give into a deal that they don't like. So, I think there's going to there's there's going to be some pressure from the administration to pass clarity before the midterms. And if you want to pass clarity before the midterms, the Democrats are going to have their say. And I think there's going to be some concessions that are made that that u crypto industry doesn't like. Now that being said, better to have clarity the clarity act than not to

have the clarity act because it does mean that look even if you go into a much less friendly administration and you imagine president AOC in 2028. Um that's not going to be a very friendly administration to crypto. But if you have Clarity Act, it's kind of baked into the bread, right? You can't you can't uh undo it. But if you just have rulemaking and regulators and like you know informal guidance that can very easily be reversed by a new administration. So there's a lot of pressure to pass something but in that pressure to pass something my guess is that there's going to be some buyers remorse. Not a ton. No, people will not say like, oh, it was a total mistake.

But if you remember like back when SPF people remember their history back when SPF his first like the beginning of the end for SPF's like public profile was this big fight he had over regulation was that he wanted to pass um uh uh Fit 21 and was willing to trade in Fit 21 DeFi regulation and allow frontends to get regulated in DeFi. And I like I remember there was this big fight between him, Eric Vorhees and the Bankless guys where they were jumping down his throat saying like, "Oh, how could you sell us out like this? We thought you believed in crypto." Um, at that time it was unconscionable.

I think we are in a very different place today as an industry. Um, and my guess is that we might see a similar set of trades on the table. >> Yikes. Yeah, that now I Yeah, that makes that example makes uh makes makes it feel much more real than just, oh, we didn't get exactly what we wanted out of this. It's like, oh, no, no, we kind of we kind of shot ourselves in the foot here a little bit. Hopefully hopefully the Dems are um worried about consumer protection in in the ways that also uh embrace the crypto ideals. >> Yeah, exactly. The civil liberties. I think this um this next one here, the final one of regulation about uh there's a parade of hearings about anything in crypto that tr touched a Trump memecoin

or world liberty finance. Dems win the house. The underlying deals get sub subened and Trump insists he was never involved. Didn't know anything about it and thus these deals are not protected by executive privilege. Anyone who signed a stupid deal, which I promise you guys these were signed, gets publicly embarrassed. something of of of the sort of like give us $10 million and you will get a logo on our these types. Um >> that's right. Yeah, >> that's right. >> Yeah, there were a bunch of those. There were a bunch of those. Um and uh I'm sure there are some that I don't know about for my portfolio companies that I'm going to be embarrassed to learn about. Um but uh yeah, there there was it's very clear that that the right now

the most animating issue for Democrats is corruption, right? There's this narrative about the corruption in the Trump administration and once they have the house that means that they can hold hearings. Now these hearings are kind of toothless, right? They can't really do anything. They can just drag you in front of Congress and but they can subpoena you and they and that the subpoena has the force of law and so you have to tell them the truth because they will subpoena you to to testify under oath. Um so when you go in front of Congress and you testify, you got to tell them what happened and the whole world gets to laugh at you. Now, will the Justice Department do anything about it? Probably not. You know, because yeah, it's Trump's it's Trump's Justice Department. They're not going to do they're not going to do anything. But it

does open the door for again 2028 if you know things turn over, there could be some potential corruption probes that take place so long as they don't, you know, subscribe past the statute of limitations. So, there's a there's a lot going on here, but I would expect there to be a lot of stuff around cryptocrumption going into uh 2026, 2027. >> Yeah. I mean, especially around just the general like Trump's enriching himself to uh Trump is enriching himself off of crypto and this is why it's the biggest issue uh kind of in the in the Yeah, that's that's the issue. It's it's look at Trump's net worth before he got in office. Look at it now and look at how much of it is crypto. Also, if you've

been in crypto for any, you know, time longer than a handful of years or even just a handful of years, you can look at World Liberty Fi and you can smell something something stinks over there. So, um, prediction markets, prediction markets grow like crazy. Big legal fights over sports betting regulation. >> We got we got we got to speedrun the rest of this because I got I got to hop soon. >> Yep. Yep. Uh big legal fights over sports betting regulation and federal preeemption but nothing major gets resolved next year status quo through 2026. Poly market continues to steamroll culture. It starts winning more and more domestic market share from Robin Hood and other sports books and the expo explosion of other platforms tacking on prediction markets mostly flop. Kind of a similar thesis with regards to why arc

Robin Hood chain and tempo may not do as well as as as many think. um B2B partnership driven distribution underperforms direct to consumer outperforms all of almost all the man26 is sourced from poly market Robin Hood and Kchie frontends as well as traditional sports books. Let's speedrun prediction markets go through AI and let's wrap it up. >> Yeah. So prediction markets um I think everybody sees the momentum now like it's really everyone feels it is that they're just winning. They're just steamrolling everything and I think that's going to continue going 2026. Um, I think the biggest thing is that everybody kind of thinks that they now can do prediction markets is they're like, "Oh, wow. Now that there's so much energy around this, like we're just

going to build our own. We're going to launch it. We're going to see how it does." And I think what you will find, it's a little bit like, you know, when when when Coinbase really started taking off and people were like, "Wow, crypto is a really big thing." You had all these other applications that decided, "We're going to add crypto buys." And now you can buy crypto on PayPal. You can buy crypto on Schwab. You can buy crypto on blah blah blah. And what you find is that actually most of these products are kind of nothing burgers. Now that doesn't mean that people don't want to buy crypto, but it means that like when they do want to buy crypto, they know where to go. They don't actually want to buy crypto on a whim in like some unrelated app. They want to buy crypto in the crypto buying app

which is Coinbase, right? And so in the same way like when you think prediction market is like, oh, you know, I yeah, I guess I want to bet on Taylor Swift, you know, getting married or you know, whatever. like you will be like, "Oh, I want to go on Poly Market and see what the predictions are and there I will do my betting, but I'm not just going to like on a whim be like, "Yeah, you know what? I guess I do want to bet on this thing now that I saw it in like my, you know, whatever unrelated fantasy sports app, you know?" Um, so so that that's my guess is that it's going to feel like crypto buy crypto buy and sell, right? The lesson that Coinbase learned from crypto buy and sell is that even if other people add this, even if they have

more distribution than us, right? Schwab and Fidelity have way more users than Coinbase, but Coinbase is the one that people associate with buying and selling crypto. So when you buy and sell crypto, you want to do it through Coinbase. Um people sort of they want to keep the apps separate in terms of the brands and what they use them for. And I think the same thing will be true for prediction markets. >> Beautiful. Maybe just speed on us through AI um and just kind of the high level here for your takes and then we can wrap this up. It's been absolutely awesome. >> Yeah. So AI um we alluded to a little bit earlier. I think that the main use case for AI is going to continue to be just software engineering. Um that's going to be the big uh you know it's continued to be a theme already with

anthropic making tons and tons of money. Um I think it's going to continue uh this year security is going to be the main thing that touches crypto is that this is the year that that um these agents are getting good enough at cyber security to be used for both attack and defense. I think we're going to see more hacks in 2026, but they're going to be smaller hacks because more and more of these big hacks are going to get caught by people using defensive agents to scan their own code and scan their own software for potential vulnerabilities and white hats being able to use uh this kind of scanning at scale to be able to uh look for vulnerabilities as well. Um so I think you're going to see a lot more of this uh integration into everything. But I think wmation is going to be minimal. Agents won't be paying

each other. like you're not going to I think most of these things will still remain prototypes. Uh it's going to take a lot longer for these models to get good at a lot more of a general swath of things. Something we've just generally learned from AI is that actually they're getting really good but at narrower and narrower tasks, right? They're getting really really good at programming but they suck at Excel. They're getting really really good at, you know, uh, writing essays, but, you know, they're terrible at, um, you know, I don't know, like, uh, designing things, you know, I don't know, things like this. Man, thank you for joining us. Um, 2026 is set to be, as you said, a highly uh, liquidity friendly environment for the space. Although it feels very

apathetic right now, I think the sentiment is not exactly representative of the accomplishments of 2025, but mostly based on the price action. Um, and I think the year my take is that like of all the predictions and of all the takes is just I think just it's going to I'm more optimistic than most about price action and just general growth for the industry next year than I think what the sentiment represents. Um, now that would be my 2026 prediction. So, I'm I'm with you on the 150k by the end of the year. There's probably a poly market for that. Um, and uh, see you on the other side, man.

>> Always a pleasure. Good to see you guys. Merry Christmas. >> Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Him. >> Happy New Year. See you guys. >> See you. Cheers. >> All right, guys. We'll take a quick break and finish up the rest of these um awards. >> Awards. >> 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. [music] From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, [music] if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure [music] at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your [music] assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and [music] payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and [music] private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. [music] Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than >> All right. All right. All right. We're back with the awards ceremony in a beautiful day in Florida, >> man. All right, we got best in yield. We got maple here. The best in yield. We're going to take a quick one more quick

break, guys, and we're gonna bring you the best in yield category. >> [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. Not your keys, not your coins. [music] From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if [music] you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at

treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets [music] now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and [music] payments.

Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to cshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and [music] private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz [music] to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital [music] finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. 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. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, [music] if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. [music] Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to

bridge your [music] assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and [music] payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. >> All righty, guys. We're back. 2025 award ceremony live on Rob TV. We've just got a couple more left. We're going to do the best in yield. We have some insane nominees. 3J, Maple, Spark, Lido, Babylon Morpho Pendle Camino Daylight, and a crazy lineup for best in yield. So obviously they already won DeFi excellence. So

they can't win again. They can't win again. >> They they've already won uh they are you know one of the leaders in DeFi of course but best in yield is again part of this category that we think is going to outperform in 2026. It is this category of yield coins. Once you have stable coins you need yield on your stable coins. And there's a lot of companies in this category that we think are going to do quite well. But the one that we think is going to outperform in 2026 is the largest onchain asset manager. Grew AUM from 500 million to 5 billion. 10x growth in 2025, surpass surpassing Black Rockck's onchain products, becoming the number one in institutional defi yield onchain. Top yield performance with their USDC and USDT yield coins consistently delivered

the highest sustainable yields targeting/outperforming 10 to 15% in periods backed by overcolateralized institutional loans. is the comeback of the year. Massive scale in revenue, $25 million plus of annual recurring revenue, originated 8.5 billion in loans and paid $60 million out in real interest to lenders. Zero losses through market draw downs. They also had product dominance. Syrup USDC became one of the top yield bearing stable coins in the market and has an institutional bridge trusted by Bitwise, Canor Fitzger, Sherald, Spark, and many more. They have transparent risk systems. They've got an awesome team.

The winner of the best in yield category goes to Maple Finance. Congrats to Maple. Bada bing, bada boom. Shout out to Sid. Been on the podcast a few times. Another OG. You know, they they had a very, very exciting launch. Uh they went through the trough of disillusionment, but they continued to build through a lot of ups and downs in the market conditions, and now finally the market is catching up to what Maple has been building for a really long time. Shout out to Maple. Shout out to Sid and congrats. >> Love it. Got to love it. >> Best in yield.

>> All right, guys. Next, we've got best new DeFi. One of my favorite awards of the entire ceremony of the campaign. Fire light unit lighter daylight kinetic infinifi flare euphoria and yield basis. Guys, the winner has breakthrough innovation launched as the first AMM protocol to fully eliminate impermanent loss for liquidity providers using 2x leverage via curve USD borrowing and auto rebalancing. The founder pedigree and backing is immaculate. The curve finance founder they had the one of the biggest legion out sub over subscription sales of the year rapid adoption. They secured a $60 million CRV USD credit line from Curve. The cat fools filled

quickly. Tokenized positions enable deep deeper DeFi composability and they back they back tested and now have now successfully executed a really high Bitcoin yield. Its positions Bitcoin and Ethereum holders for sustainable onchain yield without impermanent loss. The fee switch has been activated this month routing admin fees to VB holders and there is a roadmap for multi-chain RWA tokenization. New entrant dominance emerges a standout solving a core DeFi painoint many of us have had drum roll please the winner is >> yield basis >> basis yield basis the winner of the new defi category obviously I mean there's

tons of new defi tons of great projects tons of good candidates but I mean look this has been a category that we think is going to not it it's a category that a lot of people have tried no No one's really done it successfully and it's something that we think is going to continue to acrue value in 2026. People have tried to bring yield to Bitcoin for so so long. It's traditionally been done offchain in a very centralized way. Yield basis is doing it. They have a proven track record with Michael from Curve and uh they're they're friends of the show and uh we figure that it was uh there was no no uh no better protocol that deserved this this best in new DeFi award. Yeah, I mean it's probably my favorite award of the whole show, guys.

If I if I'm being honest, uh been a lot of really cool in innovations this I mean I think like the revenue man return fundamentals probably my favorite, but there's been a lot of cool innovations and so we're excited to have them have them part of it. Shout out to yield basis. Congrats. Up next we got best in payments. Another absolutely stacked roster. Salana, Polygon Plasma Arbitrum Etherfry Aptos, Kexus, Ripple, Ton Network, Tron, Fireblocks, Nosis. I mean, what a lineup. Um, but as Hib said, a thousand% growth in stable coin back cards this year.

>> Yeah. >> Leading cryptonative payment card became the number one ranked crypto card for rewards and low fees in major 2025 reviews. The block quick note non-custodial allows spending and borrowing against yield bearing assets without selling. Daily spend hit over$2 to3 million and on track for a billion dollars of annualized volume crossed historic weeks with over 430,000 430,000 new ETH deposits while the cash cash usage went parabolic. Absolutely parabolic. Top rewards and perks up to 4% cash back often in ETH during promos.

No spending limits. Apple, Google Pay, support, metal cards, lounge access, integrated with D5 vaults, used globally, supports direct stable coin spend or collateralized credit using uh you know, you can basically borrow against your ETH, use the stable coins, pay it. We are nominating the best in payments, the fastest growing neo crypto card that is non-custodial, also a port call of our fund. Drum roll, please. Etherfi, shout out to Mike. Shout out to Rock. Shout out to the entire EtherFi team for being the winner of best in payments. Guys, keep crushing. Volume is going to 10x. Hib is saying a,000%

growth in 2026 for crypto linked cards. We think Etheri is going to be one of the winners. They deserve best in payments for their growth in 2025. One of the one of the aspects of this neo finance category that I I believe in and and we've been talking about a lot is this resurgence of what I'm calling like neo- regional banks. So, you know, obviously we have like Main Street and the Trump administration prioritizing these regional banks, but they're not going out into Malaysia and and you know, the global countries and saying, "Here are some stable coins, use our card." you know, your your main street uh credit union is not going into, you know, South America and trying to spread US dollar homogyny. The Trump administration is pushing stable coins

and they're going to be using this neo- regional bank, this neo this neo bank that is go they're the ones that are going to take this and spread it worldwide. And so I think there's a lot of confluence in this particular area of the category and and we're going to see uh neo bankanks like Ether continue to proliferate stable coins worldwide. Got to love it. Up next guys, we got best in VC. This one's incredibly tough. Dragonfly, Framework, Archetype, 1KX, one confirmation, sixman ventures, borderless robot Panta Cosmos Polychain, Paradigm. What a category, guys. Drum roll, please. The best in VC is Paradigm.

Not not much to add here. I mean, they they're just honestly they crush and they're one of the most technical and research driven uh firms. Uh Tempo, in my opinion, set them over the edge. A lot of great names. You know, obviously a lot of those teams have been on the show. We're friends with a lot of these guys. We had his CE bond just a few minutes ago giving his predictions, but I the way Paradigm was able to um poach Ethereum Foundation talent and ultimately go in terms of intellectual capital go toe-to-toe with some of the biggest companies, blockchains, projects that are out there. Um I think you know there's the saying the casino funds the research lab and uh Paradigm's got got a hell of a research lab. Koshi as well.

They hit it big on. Shout out to Shout out to Paradigm. Guys, up next we've got the biggest crypto power player. This one's incredibly tough as well. Hester Pur, Paul Atkins, Senator Bill Hirey, Brad Garlinghouse, Sergey Nazerov, Donald Trump, Vitalic Bddherin, Josh Sweetheart, Joe Luben, Novagratz, Carlos Domingo, Robert Lesner, Chairman Tim Scott, Senator Cynthia Lumis. This one is Coindesk's most influential 2025. named one of the top figures in crypto by CoinDesk for singularly driving the entire global financial system on chain institutional build bridge builder led partnerships with swift DTCC UBS Mastercard and many more enabled 27 trillion in onchain transaction value powers 80% of DeFi and

sorry 70% of DeFi 80% on top of Ethereum described by Gayscale as essential infrastructure for tokenization this guy is a visionary leader he's fra frame 2025 as the final stage of blockchain adoption with keynotes at at at major conferences globally like SIBOS, consensus, digital asset week called the brightest mind in crypto by many many many. Drum roll please. The biggest crypto power player is none other than Sergey Nazerov. Sergey and guy was working on smart contracts before Ethereum was working was working on chain link from a Swift hackathon

back before crypto was a thing before blockchains were a thing. Um yeah I you know I think obviously there's tons of great names on that list. Uh you know you had Vitalik and Trump on that list and so people are going to think you know how can how can Sergey possibly win this award? I Trump's doing a lot of things outside crypto. Even Vitalik's doing a lot of things outside crypto now. You got one guy that is continuing to push the needle. He's in Capitol Hill. He's in DC. Um, you know, we had other other companies that won. Carlos Domingo was uh on that list. Securitize won best in tokenization.

These guys are very uh very significantly impacting their particular niche. I think Sergey uh is one of the few names on that list that impacted the and brought the entire industry as a whole. You don't just see him advocating for uh Oracle services. You don't just see him advocating for DeFi. You see him advocating for crypto as a whole, the industry as a whole and practicing what he preaches. This guy's not a hypocrite. Like you sit in you sit in and we've interviewed him like he means what he says. He is not going to stop until the mission is complete. And uh I I really do firmly believe that they're just getting started. Job's not done. Shout out to Sergey. Shout out to the entire

chain link organization. >> The last couple that we have in the honorary mention category, best in research is Nansen. Nansen is the best in research. They have our leading onchain analytics platform. Over 500 million and labeled wallets, 30 chains, premier research output, high impact quarterly halfyear reports. They launched the Nansen AI mobile app, the embedded trading wallet. They've got token god mode, smart money tracking, institutional buyin trust. Best in research is Nansen. Shout out to them.

Best in data, RWAXYZ. Shout out to RWAXYZ. Industry standard analytics platform for RWAs. Trusted by top institutions. It's been cited and used by JP Morgan, SP Global, IMF, Moody's, DTCC, US Treasury, Fidelity, BCG, WEF, City Bank, Galaxy, McKenzie, Bloomberg, Visa, regulators and power players globally and insights for governments and large corporations worldwide. They support asset reserve verification and they are the universal reference point for RWAs. They are the sources source of truth for tokenization. Shout out shout out to RWAXYZ.

>> Shout out to Adam. Very funny guy. Great sense of humor and uh yeah, really impressive platform that that he's built and and they've built over at RWAXYZ. Um again, you know, this is a a category that we believe in. We think is going to continue to grow. RWAXYZ is the leading data provider in this particular category. I anticipate they will have continued success in 26. Ladies and gentlemen, as you can tell from the speedrun of this last couple categories, the boys are cooked. It has been a hell of a holiday week. We've got a lot of work to do in front of us. It's going to be an amazing 2026. That wraps up our 2025 holiday awards show and ceremony. What a awesome episode with.

Awesome to recognize some of the great work that we've done in this industry and the team's pioneering a lot of it. Next time we're we're gonna print way more posters. The posters are coming back. The posters will be back in 2026 because these things are a hit. I mean, let's just go through these one more time. All right. Return to fundamentals. Chain link. How can you argue that? DeFi excellence. A I mean, come on. Those guys are two P's in a pod. Hyperlid revenue meta winner. Done deal. The curize best in tokenization. I mean guys, these posters are money. These posters are absolutely money. Best in

Capitol Hill digital chamber of commerce. You'll see us in DC in March. Uh best in privacy near powered Zcash to new heights. >> Come on. >> And the best in stable coins. One of the core pillars of the NEO finance category, Sky Dollar. Shout out to the Sky Cabal. >> Wow. I mean, this feels like I just went to I I have new Pokemon cards for Christmas guys. >> This is lit. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll see you in the new year. We got a huge year ahead. Big plans. We're going to the Big Apple. We'll see you all there.

Best audience in crypto goes to you guys. Couldn't do it without you. Shout out to the entire team in the back. You guys are uh are uh the you guys make it all possible. The >> 100th episode of Rollup TV this year has concluded. Leo, Nero, Alex, Marcelo, Zack, >> Megan, >> Kate, Aliona, you guys make it happen. Much love. Mahalo. I'm in Hawaii on on the next stream. I'll see you guys there. >> Merry Christmas. Happy New Year, guys. Bye. >> Peace. [music]