Rollup TV: DeFi Dev Corp, Decypher, Money Moves Fast EP 5, AvaLabs

Transcript

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[Music] The rollup is back. We are here. We're live. Shout out the team behind the scenes. Absolutely killing it on a dayto-day. Um it'll just be me hosting today. Uh Andy's out. He's got some important family business to attend to. Um, but the show must go on. So, we will we will rock and roll on. Uh, markets are continuing their V-shaped recovery.

Little bit of a slowdown today. We're seeing some turbulence in the Trump tariff, China trade war. Trump tariff trade war. That's a mouthful. Uh, we've got a great show today. We're going to get started with a few banger guests. We've got DK from the DeFi Dev Corp. This is a Solana digital asset treasury company designed to accumulate and compound Salana. Uh not only are they buying uh Salana and keeping it in their treasury, they're also going to deploy it on chain. Uh so we've got all kinds of fun that is going to be taking place on the rollup today. Uh we're also going to be discussing uh the Decipher podcast with my friend Jack Nwald. You guys

might see a bit more from Jack here coming up soon. Uh we're going to have him be a more regularly appearing guest on the show. So stay tuned for Jack. He also has a nice bird's eye view of the space uh because he talks to quite a few smart people uh on his Decipher podcast. Then we've got money moves fast presented by Polygon with none other than John Eaggan. Uh he's a recent uh hire from Polygon. He's now the chief product officer over there. Still getting settled in. Uh he's only been there about three or four weeks uh from Stripe is where he was at previously. So very interesting story. Obviously Stripe

has big things that they're cooking in the crypto space now, but John decided to leave Stripe and join Polygon and endeavor on their stable coin and payments focus for Polygon moving forward. Then we've got rumor mill. You guys love rumor mill. We've got a couple of items hot off the block. So, we're going to be talking about those on rumor mill. And then to close up, we've got uh Ava Labs uh chief business officer, John. Uh Avac also has a digital asset treasury company. So, these dats are continuing to print. And we're going to get into all of that and more on today's show.

Lots to talk about. Uh so we're going to get started in just a few moments. We're going to get uh DK from D5 Dev Corp up in a little while. In the meantime, we're going to cook. We're going to get some uh some some love happening on Twitter. We're going to boost the stream. make sure that everyone knows that we are going live and we're going to continue to cook. So, let's blast this far and wide.

We've got DK behind the scenes now. So, we're going to bring him up uh once the team has him up. We're gonna be talking about Salana and the digital asset treasury company wave. uh Multicoin and Kyle Sani have certainly uh made themselves known in this space, but we're going to be talking about uh what all of the possibilities when it comes to these digital asset treasury companies are. Defi DevCorp is also leading the way. They were the first ones to pioneer uh and move Solana into a digital asset treasury company and also leverage it onchain. I think there's all kinds of uh very interesting onchain strategies that they can embark on to compound their Salana holdings.

So, let's get DK up. Let's get him on the show. DK, there you are. Welcome to the show. It's good to have you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. It's a pleasure. Um man, I think first off, what a wild weekend. It's good to see that you've survived. Um for there for a little while there, it was a little shaky. He was like, "Well, what's going on here? It's kind >> of the whole team has operated in crypto for far too long when we didn't have too visceral a reaction to it. I mean, yes, our thoughts are with everyone who was negatively impacted, but for the most part, like we stayed fairly calm and measured and most of our discussions over the weekend were, you know, how aggressively should we be buying?"

>> Exactly. And that's what I think people when you have a more long-term mindset and you've been around in the space for a little while, you can kind of understand, okay, these are some of the things that tend to happen and you can really flip the mindset and become a buyer when others are fearful. And and you know, people were certainly fearful. You saw that in in you know, the crypto sentiment online. But those who have been here before, those who are thoughtful decided to buy during that time frame and and you know look where even just after a few few days look how that panned out. So what was the what was the the feeling in the room amongst your team when that kind of thing happens? What what were some of the outcomes of the conversations that you guys had in in the heat of the moment?

>> Yeah, it's a good question. I mean um the first step was we just had to figure out what it is that actually happened, right? And there were of course a number of um initial theories, hypotheses out there, but the first thing we did as a team is just try to connect the dots as plain and simply as possible. So um obviously ultimately the conclusion we came to was you had BTC at historically low volatility levels. People grew leverage in that kind of environment. There's very clearly um more cross collateralization today versus 5 years ago. um Trump goes and tweets and you know the cross collateral gets nuked and uh the markets aren't very deep there right so when I look at something like that um that is again unfortunate but

still more of a technical issue rather than reflective of the whole cycle's due to roll over there's something problematic with macro uh it sort of felt like a good time for us to uh for us to step in >> and when you talk about uh the cross uh margin right uh and the cross collateralization just could you just expand on that like what you know this is something that I think we saw offchain FTX kind of had their tentacles in so many of the different companies uh we saw you know three arrows capital all of these guys were kind of backing one another it was just this merrygoround of credit is that all now you're you're suggesting that that is also happening with respect to these exchanges but what is there similarities and differences that you

can >> No I I would say the differences uh point blank are like when you think about all the leverage crossover that happened a few years ago. I mean, it was like a domino effect. One ship falls and then everybody else falls and then all the skeletons come out of the closet. And again, we viewed this as just more technical obviously impacting a whole swath of traders across uh you know, mostly retail. It was interesting to see the um I'm going to say the takeaways on the dexes versus the centralized exchanges coming out of the weekend. But um again our job as a digital asset treasury company is to um just be very thoughtful and careful with how we manage our balance sheet. So um you know once we got to that diagnosis we felt uh fairly comfortable with the situation.

>> Love it. Um maybe you could tell us I mean you guys are obviously in the soul world. You've been been here for a long time coming from Tradfi. You guys are veterans in the space. What was it about Salana in particular that you know we'll start high level. Why did you choose Salana? And then I'd love to get into some of the strategies that you guys are employing to to then go and compound the Salana that you have in your treasury and maximize value per share. >> Yeah, great question. So the simplistic answer here is that we think Salana is going to 50x from here to $10,000. Um and we can walk you through that price target and that math a little bit here if you like. Salana to 50,000. Let me just

>> Salana to 10,000. >> 10,000 roughly a 50x from I see. Okay. >> And of course at the time that we started buying it would have been somewhere uh you know closer to like 75 or 80x right because we initiated the strategy come early April as you noted we were the first um Salana treasury company in the United States. We were actually the first nonBTC treasury company. And I think there were again two primary reasons we chose Salana. one, we're obviously bullish on uh the underlying asset soul, but two, we often got asked the question, why wouldn't you choose uh BTC, right? Uh obviously, Michael Sailor has done a phenomenal job over the last few years um familiarizing institutions with BTC as the apex asset

and as um you know, a sound treasury asset. The issue, of course, is that launching a BTC Treasury vehicle in the United States is kind of like me handing you a football and asking you to run it down a field, but there's an NFL lineman standing in front of you, right? And that NFL lineman is Michael Sailor and Micro Strategy. So, we had, I'm going to say, no desire to go up and directly compete against them. Um, so we were sort of left with the option of launch a BTC vehicle somewhere overseas where maybe the competitive field was less crowded or choose a different treasury asset. And in this case, we chose Soul, which has, as you know, we indicated a lot of upside, but also it's a productive asset that kind of helps you evolve the micro strategy model a bit

more. >> Love it. Love it. Um, yeah, I mean, Mailor certainly cleared the way. I think, you know, you you can think of him as a linebacker, like he's trying to tackle you if you you going up against him, but in in the same way, he's also he's also blocking for you guys, right? like you know he's kind of clear in the way he he established the original digital asset treasury and Micro Strategy accumulated all this Bitcoin. I I think this is where we can move a little bit more uh quickly. uh Micro Strategy, you know, they've got a complicated way of kind of compounding their Bitcoin, but they Bitcoin just doesn't have the same uh capacity for onchain uh compounding and onchain DeFi

mechanisms that of Salana, right? And so this is where I think really the secret sauce of DeFi dev corp could come in and just generally uh non Bitcoin asset and digital asset treasury companies could could enhance their strategies. And so I'm curious when you're thinking about the the DeFi landscape that exists on Salana today, what are you guys currently doing and and where do you think you're going to end up when it comes to deploying some of the capital that you guys have in the treasury? >> Yeah, it's a great question and maybe even just taking a step back, one of the hypotheses we had fairly early on was this idea that the micro strategy model was a necessary but insufficient condition for success. Right? you had to

be able to tap the capital markets playbook in some capacity to get the flywheel going. But if you were just relying on that or just trying to copy paste Michael Sailor, it wasn't exactly going to get you very far. And sure enough, here we are um six months after we kicked off our treasury strategy. MNAVs across the space have materially collapsed versus where they were sort of in mid July. And for those who follow the digital asset treasury space, M&A is sort of the lifeblood or fuel by which a treasury company can tap the capital markets to keep acquiring more of the underlying asset. So this brings us to our activity on chain. We had this just very simple view back in April that if we could put our treasury to work in

some capacity and take advantage of Salana's native yield, then we would actually have some organic way to keep acquiring more of the underlying asset over time. Uh, and we sort of like to stack rank and think about um layers of yield um in a few different tiers. So you can think of tier zero as you're a Salana Treasury company. you follow the Micro Strategy playbook, but you're not staking, right? And that wouldn't really be a great value proposal. Obviously, um you know, users who are uh into crypto, uh you know, can find it fairly simple um to go onto Coinbase and purchase Salana and and stake it themselves, right? So, you're not really doing anything value additive if you just did that. Uh tier two or sorry, tier one

might be um you're a Salana Treasury company and you do decide to go stake on Coinbase, but you're paying thirdparty costs. you don't own the infrastructure yourself obviously uh and if you're not engaging in opportunities on chain you're not maximizing the uh potential yield that you could get on your treasury. So then you start to get to more interesting areas which is what happens if you own your own validator infrastructure. Well now you're not paying costs to a third party provider. In our case we actually generate roughly 20 to 30% higher average block rewards. Um, shout out to Parker, our COO, who's been operating Salana validators for several years. He runs a a modified client, not the standard client. Uh, so we can, in addition to not paying the

third party cost, we can squeeze out a little bit more yield that way. And then of course there's um what you started this question with, which is how do we deploy our treasury onchain to take advantage of various yield opportunities across Salana DeFi. Today we have roughly call it 10% of our uh Salana treasury on chain today. Um our hope is actually to be able to increase that in the future that we haven't indicated uh just how aggressive will be. >> Beautiful. I mean that that is really what I think unlocks a lot of the uh a lot of the capital formation power that is enabled by these treasury companies.

Buying is one thing but actually putting your money where your mouth is going and staking or going and using the applications that live on these chains are then going to make the more the ecosystem itself more valuable and and whether it's you know without shouting out too many you know Salana projects the ecosystem more valuable is then going to create this flywheel effect and value acrruel back to the base layer and and make Salana itself more valuable. >> Correct. So the way we viewed it was in addition to this being a yield or revenue generating opportunity again on an organic basis which will become increasingly important over time particularly as M&As have collapsed and as we get closer to an eventual bare market um deploying our treasury on chain gives us a way to control our own

destiny right if the ecosystem thrives we thrive because Salana will thrive so it sort of felt like a very uh uh simple conclusion to draw to and again our hope is to be able to deploy more aggressively in the months to come. >> Love it. Um what's the you know you guys have a a thesis and there's other treasury companies and other companies out there that have a similar thesis sold to a thou to 10,000. What's the relationship like with these other Salana treasury companies? You know ultimately they're they're helping kind of steward Solana in in this direction. Um but the you know the capital uh ultimately finds it its way into you know some or one or of these venues. So so what is the dynamic

between uh treasury companies? >> I would say that we've actually had nothing but positive interactions with the other Salana Treasury companies that um you know we've had active conversations with. uh our view is simply there's obviously additional um buying demand with these treasury companies coming to market and again that is a net positive for the ecosystem. It is a net positive to have some of these treasury companies deploying their assets on chain, right? It speaks to the crypto ethos. It again helps the ecosystem thrive. But more importantly, you get different flavors for everyone telling the story just a little bit differently. And I think that's particularly important because Wall Street's level of understanding is, let's just say, not quite there. Um, I

remember the first pitch that I gave uh early on in the D5 DevCore days and it was a conversation much like the one we're having right now where I said, "Hey, you know, Salana is this productive asset? It's the fastest and cheapest layer one. We can stake our treasury to our own validators. This is going to be awesome." And the questions I got back were, "What's a layer one? What's a validator? Uh, I don't even know how staking works. Can you tell me how staking is different on Salarium versus Ether?" And I was like, okay, well, this is uh that right there is all you needed to know in terms of Wall Street, general Wall Street's level of understanding. And there are varying degrees, right? There are certainly some folks who have done their homework and are asking more in-depth questions, but my experience for the most part has been

you have to meet people where they are on their level of understanding. So having more soul treasury companies out there is undoubtedly a good thing. Uh because everyone will have their own unique style and way of telling the story. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I'm I'm curious when you're going through and you're having these conversations with some investors on Wall Street and you're you know kind of educating them on the on the opportunity here. Have they started to come around? What are what are some of the things that click in their mind? Is it internet capital markets? What you know what like what is it that really when you see that that you know glow in their eyes that light bulb moment? What is it that that gets them there?

>> Yeah, it's a great question. Uh, I actually would say internet capital markets is more of a confusing term for most of the folks that I chat with. Uh, if you just throw that at them initially, um, couple things. One, if they don't even know what an L1 is, they're sort of left scratching their heads. But two, I find that people generally just focus in on the capital markets component of that piece. So then they're automatically just focused on trading applications, per things like that, right? And what I've tried to migrate people towards is this idea of Salana as infrastructure for all of global value transfer. So this is of course capital markets. This could be live streaming. It could be agentic AI.

It could be video game transactions. And when you start to frame Salana as infrastructure, I almost tell them it's like being able to invest in the internet itself, right? But I have to explain it in terms of the outcomes that Salana actually drives rather than diving deep into the architecture and what makes it better than Ethereum and trying to explain like why Alpenlow is a big deal or why multiple concurrent leaders is a big deal and things like that because the moment you get into that you've again mostly lost the plot versus if I tell people hey this is really fast. It's incredibly cheap right you need to only look at this last weekend as proof points for um you know for both of those points. uh anyone with an internet connection can access it and it's really really scalable. Then I

would say the gears start turning a little bit and they start asking some questions about okay what are the types of applications that are out there? Can you give me the proof points on why this thing is really fast or really cheap and we can start talking about TPS and average fees and things like that but again you have to frame it as these are the outcomes that it helps drive. It is an infrastructure layer and then peel back the onion from there. >> Yeah. And what we're realizing that each of these uh people companies on Wall Street, they they each have their own entrance vector. Um you guys are going out and you're doing some of the education and that's really beneficial for the entire industry whether it's Bitcoin, ETH or Solana or any anyone else. Um you guys are doing some of that

preliminary education that again we we try to do on this show as well. Um another entrance vector that is kind of taking the world by storm. A lot of people have heard about it by now is stable coins. Um, and I'm just looking at the news wire coming in now. Uh, Tether linked UST to, uh, their gold peg launch on Salana via layer zero. Um, generally, what do you think this means for the Salana industry as we're continuing to get more stable coins? We're getting more real world asset pegged assets. How do you think this is going to unlock a new group of capital to enter uh, the Solana ecosystem in particular? Yeah, great question. Um, whether you like it or hate it, the

whole mantra of stable coins or the chat GPT of crypto obviously really stuck and clung in investors minds this summers and, you know, we can thank um Tom Lee for that quotation, right? Uh and I know that a lot of people cringe at you know Tom Lee's arguments and I saw the uh I saw Andrew Kong's post about uh Tom Lee's e thesis is and things like that but one of the great things that he has done again has been able he's been able to distill outcomes down for the average investor and when I think of stable coins I mean that is probably I remember when circle um went public I was getting like crazy numbers of texts from all my former buyside

buddies. I used to work uh uh in a hedge fund for about eight years and it was the first time I sort of found main street Wall Street very genuinely interested in crypto outside of Bitcoin. Was this as like an application or a use case? So, um when people sort of point to stable coins as you know is this a positive catalyst I tell them of course it's a positive catalyst. And uh the little add-on that I've been using is if if stable coins are the chat GPT of crypto, then Salana is Nvidia. And then again, the gears start turning for people. And they're like, "Oh, that starts to make sense." And they say, you know, can you point me to some some proof points for that? And you need only look at stable coin TVL on Salana, which has grown somewhere north of a 200%

kager over the course of the last five years, and it's clearly been the number one share gainer uh over the course of the last few years. Yeah, I it's it's funny to hear these analogies, but it makes sense. Salana is the infrastructure for these the global transfer of money. Um and and so uh if stable coins are the chatpt moment for crypto, uh Nvidia is powering a lot of chat GPT obviously providing compute these data centers. Uh they are the infrastructure for chat GPT. you need something like a Salana or an L1 in order in order to uh support and power stable coins uh which is the onchain uh version of chat GPT effectively right so >> yeah yeah that's absolutely right and

then um of course the other area folks have been um chatting about a lot has been tokenized equities and um you know you need only look at the amount of volume done on tokenized equities by Salana year to date I want to say it's somewhere around like uh 800 million uh in magnitude give or take, which is more than all the other L1. So again, some very early positive proof points on some I'm going to say very powerful thematic areas that investors are closely watching. >> Could you could you expand on that? Like what where do you see a lot of the growth happening that you're that you're talking about there?

Um I mean we obviously just pointed to uh you know equities as as this example but um again this is where I think it comes back to do you have a chain that can handle the throughput for a world that is going to tokenize all of its assets eventually. >> Um you know we were looking at some estimates recently don't quote me on this but over the course of the next five six years the uh forecasted growth of tokenized assets is set to um literally explode. Uh so there's just um you know whether you are a one chain to rule them all type of person or not it's just hard to envision a world where Salana isn't going to materially capture a lot of that share.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I I'm seeing um more and more companies tokenization companies obviously securitize is doing quite well. We had superstate on the other day. These guys are ultimately accelerating price discovery. And I think you know people have some some different terminologies for this. generally, you know, people refer to as hyper financialization. I think in finance, it makes a ton of sense. You know, I'm not saying that we want to be, you know, gambling on, you know, what fruit in our refrigerator is going to go bad next, but, you know, when it comes to opening up more liquid markets for private companies, opening up price discovery for creator markets, these are the sorts of things that I I think make

a ton of sense, particularly in this industry. And you know, we're going to see uh 247 Monday, you know, potentially 247 markets come to equities like you're talking about. Um how do you think finance evolves generally like the the more liquid market here? We're removing intermediaries. We're bringing costs down and it's going to open up new opportunities and new use cases. Does this ultimately where where does the value acrue I think is is my question here. Is it is it at the asset prices? Does it acrue back to the users?

You know, you've been in the the industry a while. You know, fat application thesis, fat protocol thesis. These are kind of like the the the different venues people have theorized are going to acrue the value. Where where do you see value acrew in your >> Yeah, one of the things that I'm really paying attention to, you hit on a lot of the key points, right? There's accessibility. Um, you know, imagine 247 access to DFTBX, our tokenized stock, which, you know, folks do have 24/7 access to, but imagine a world where that just becomes uh sort of the the deacto, the norm, right? That's obviously very powerful. But one of the areas that I'm actually most interested is really composability >> um between I'm going to say like uh onchain markets and um and trai markets.

So um I come from Kraken. Before I was at Defi Dev Corp, I was there for about three years. And one of the things that we were very focused on is giving people the ability to express views or trades like however speculative it may be, but to get like really creative around the ways that they can express their um their views via um uh you know a centralized exchange. And when I think of composability, imagine a world where you are able to um you know place a bet on Nvidia earnings, but you want to slightly hedge your bet. So you're betting that the data se data segment uh data center segment revenues are going to come in light even though Nvidia parent company is going to beat

earnings. Or imagine you can layer on parlay bets. um you know there are three prints in a given night and you say I think Netflix, Snapchat and Amazon are all going to beat and then you're able to you know uh express a trade that way. So for me like composability is this really huge unlock um that I want to see folks talking about a lot more and where I think there's going to be a lot of value acrruel. I'm >> I'm glad you bring that up. I was just having a conversation this morning with someone and we were talking about the convergence between these two markets, these two worlds and different companies are approaching this in different ways.

For instance, you have you mentioned Kraken. I I can foresee a world where uh Kraken goes public. Um they also now have their L2 and they have inc right and and you know that may or may not have a token. Then you've got something like a Coinbase. Coinbase is already public. they have bass and bass is starting to explore a token and then you've got you know companies that could do both like a kshi or a poly market are are kind of starting from scratch I can imagine both of these companies you know wish to go public also wish to have a token and have composability between the two and so you know when you're doing one and then you want to bring the other up that actually seems more difficult than starting from scratch and doing

both at the same time >> right >> how how would you recommend a company go about go about this convergence when you know maybe they're considering a public launch an IPO maybe they're also considering an ICO do you suggest you know doing one and then the other do you suggest doing both of them at the same time what what would be you know your ideal format if you were to it let's take Salana for example Salana's got a token right how would you uh how would you go about maybe taking Salana public and then building out some composability effects between the Salana token and the Salana equity.

>> Yeah, we joke that we took Salana public a few weeks ago when we did our NASDAQ bell ring at the end of August. Uh you know, we said the public ticker is DFTV. But um no, look, all kidding aside, we've had this vision of being the bridge between Tradfi and DeFi since day one. If you actually look at our logo, it is quite literally a bridge. And the vision was uh simply to take tradi capital and bring it into DeFi, but bring DeFi innovation and returns into tradi. And I would advise folks to probably just find um the easiest lowhanging fruit, but don't be afraid to experiment. It was one of the things that we did fairly early on um in the month of May. And it's funny because

looking back at when we were setting up all of our onchain integrations in MA, there were a lot of people who were asking like what the hell are these guys doing? Like why aren't they just doing the micro strategy thing? Like just go and focus on the capital raising and we sort of viewed all the various uh foundations that we set in May as being really integral components to this idea of becoming the bridge. So to give a concrete example behind that, we go and we you know raise money, we use that money to purchase Salana. uh we then deploy uh the Salana onchain stake to our own validators. All of that deployment then flows back to our uh traditional finance ordinary equity investors via sole per share growth. So there's a literal connective tissue that

we are serving uh between bringing um as I mentioned tradi capital onchain and bringing those onchain returns um back into uh into tradi. The most concrete example that I've been giving folks is um we have a liquid staking token DFTV Saul issued by Sanctum and we are able to mint DFD Saul right uh to retain liquidity across DeFi stake to our validator. In our case we can mint DFD Saul >> borrow on chamino against DFD Saul take the salt that we're borrowing and then go and like rest it. So we've got a looped staking strategy and you know for quite some time the nim that we were able to generate on that is somewhere around call it one to two% right and when this becomes a game of squeezing

out yields and trying to grow your organic base as much as possible that can make a very big difference and is I think speaks to uh the crypto expertise of the company um the desire to um want to experiment with things on chain see what works you know we may uh not may we already have deployed uh stable across DeFi as well and see what else that we can sort of get out there. >> DK, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Um, I only got one last question for you and that is how much sold did you buy over the weekend? >> Uh, I cannot disclose how much uh we actually purchased over the weekend. Um, you may uh speculate and I will say stay tuned.

>> Okay. But but given that you guys are on the NASDAQ, do you do you is there public filings or disclosures like we'll we'll find out later. we announce our soul buys. Um, and we do it very I'm going to say like Michael Sailor style. So, um, yeah, that's all I'll say is stay tuned. >> Purple Dots. Awesome. DK, thanks so much, man. It was a really fun chat. I would love to have you back on sometime soon. >> Take care, Robbie. Thanks for having me. >> Sold at 10,000. Cheers, buddy. >> Wow. Sold 10,000. He said that's a 50x. Makes sense. I mean, sold is right around 200 bucks right here.

Wow. We had uh we've had quite a few Solana bulls. Mert is now a Zcash bull. Uh Benjamin Con is now an ETH bull. Salana kind of seems uh non-conensus. We'll let you guys make draw your own conclusions on that one. Um obviously Solanus is uh is poised for massive success. Uh us here at the rollup, we are uh nonm maximalists. We believe in the best technology to win. Um and there is different strokes for different folks. Salana employs a very different strategy than Bitcoin, ETH and Hyperlid and several other L1s that are out

there. Um taking a much more financialized and corporate route. Um they went and sponsored the all-in summit which I think was a great move. That's not really something that we would see Ethereum do. But I think again Solana is pioneering and forging into um the traditional financial world, which ultimately makes a really really uh strong benefit um a really really uh strong argument for Salana to continue to be a steward. So uh we're going to get our next guest up in just a moment. We're going to get Jack up. Not sure if Jack is a Salana

Bull, an ETH bull or some something in between, but uh we're gonna we're gonna bring up a fellow podcaster and friend of the show. Let's bring up Jack and uh have some fun. >> Back. There he is. Welcome. >> Thank you. Awesome to be here. I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, man. Thanks for coming on. A little bit of short notice, but um yeah, I really do appreciate you coming on, man. And and I'm hoping that uh you know, we can make this a more regular thing. Um, it's just me today, so I'm glad that I could have a fellow uh a fellow podcaster in the room.

>> Excellent. Yeah, that should make things easier. >> And uh the team got you set up behind the scenes. It wasn't wasn't too tricky. You had a nice smooth onboarding. >> No, I just had to lift up my laptop a little bit. Had to had to center. Had to >> Cool, man. Well, I am curious to learn a little bit about about more about your takes because you like us have have had you know several experiences talking with you know the the best and brightest uh in the space. um we you know as content creators and hosts tend to see things from a higher level view which I think is a blessing and a curse right you know we don't get so zoomed in and so deep on one particular topic unless we choose to but we're also we're able to draw these connections between

different parts of the space whereas traditionally these things are so tribalistic and so closed off they don't really see the connections between the space and generally where it's headed. So where do you find yourself kind of mostly sitting? Do do you find yourself in Salana camp? Do you find yourself in ETH camp? Where has been, you know, kind of the majority of the conversations that you've had? >> Well, I think it's always interesting to kind of chase the the trends, chase the narratives, right? So, an example of that would be, you know, recently kind of AI where I I don't personally have any expertise in AI, but you know, listeners and the space moved towards AI. So I found myself, you know, pulling on more kind of AI threads and moving in that direction just because that's where

the attention, that's where the capital is flowing, right? So, um, I guess kind of the the market to some extent tells us kind of podcasters where we have to end up, right? Um, so so that's a a clear signal, you know, if if the audience is asking, if people are reaching out, if people want to be on the show um around a specific kind of vertical, then then that's a signal that we need to be there. And it, you know, it enables me to cover and learn about those topics as well, which is is is rewarding and and interesting. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, crypto AI, I think, is still there. Someone said it's like the the biggest like pool of grift that you can possibly tap into. It really it really feels like

underdeveloped at this point, >> but I mean, generally, this is this is where emerging technologies are going, and I I think we're going to see a lot more of it. Is there any any projects in particular that you've seen that like really stick out to you? These are guys that are doing it the right way. They're not just, you know, being buzzword capitalists. They're they're actually, you know, employing this to the to the best of its abilities. >> Yeah, there there's definitely some interesting themes I've seen that really feel like they apply well to crypto, right? So I mean you look at like the G the GPU space I think that for that to exist on decentralized rails makes a lot of sense. I think that uh a lot of applications of fully homamorphic

encryption FHE makes sense to you know as a big unlock for crypto rails um specifically as they kind of pertain to agents. Um however I think we're in a really early stage where it remains to be seen. I think what happens probably is, you know, the first to market tend to be the people who have the less developed products, right? So they're eager to launch a token because they want to capitalize more on narrative than um you know actually building and developing businesses. So I think that's why we kind of tend to see early grift and uh a little more evolution later in the space. Um, but I do see a lot of potential in the technology, you know,

as it's as it's as it's relevant to crypto. >> We call those guys bull market warriors. >> Exactly. >> Those are the guys. They come in, it's a bull market, they can put together a couple buzzwords and a pitch deck, and the next thing you know, their token, you know, is launching at a $4 billion FDV. um you know whether those guys stick around and and their investors stick around with short vesting usually uh usually uh we see how that plays out. Um but then you know you also and I think we had like crypto had that era early on too and now I I like to I like to see a lot of the founders that are coming in now and it really feels like we filtered out a lot of the noise. the people who are coming in now um they're higher

quality founders and we're we're seeing that on our fund on our fund side where you know a lot of these guys coming across they have experience either in tradi or traditional tech maybe experience in SF when it comes to AI and they're now employing that experience in crypto because like their filtering mechanism has just taken place here. Um, >> yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> To be fair, you know, I think I think some of these founders are are well-intentioned and then realize that, you know, the space isn't ready or or there's technological hurdles. I think that it's possible that founders need to see the early wave of adoption and then, you know, base their their kind of strategy and product on what

has kind of worked and what has kind of failed. So, I do think it's it's kind of necessary creative expansion and destruction. I I don't think it's all bad. Obviously, there's some poorly intentioned people and extractors that that mix in, but you know, to me, it's all part of the the beauty of this like chaos of crypto that we experience, right? Is these people coming in trying ideas on permissionless rails, and some of it works, some of it doesn't, and sometimes people get burned, and sometimes there's massive opportunity. So, I kind of love it. >> Yeah. Um, you also were in Asia. We were out there. We had a good meeting. Um, we were both doing a bunch of podcasts. I'm curious who who did you get a chance to speak with and and what were some some of the key takeaways that you had?

>> Man, I I did 14 podcasts, so it's hard to remember. Uh, a couple notable ones. It was fun. Uh, interviewing OSF of uh Wrecked Drinks. That was a a novel a really novel concept that, you know, they're doing some interesting stuff around marketing and branding and cryptos distribution. Um, obviously the perpex thing is huge. >> Cheers to Parodex. Um, those guys came on the show, you know, this market making transition into, you know, participating in the per DEX wars. Too many to count. Reserve protocol is another interesting one where they're kind of trying to solve index uh, you know, these index like they call them DTS problems and and expand into this world reserve currency. So, this

plot arc of reserve has has been quite interesting. As far as takeaways, like I see these founders, I'm not sure maybe you see this as well, but these founders just kind of like beating their head against their wall trying to achieve park product market fit. And and for me, that's actually a very bullish signal, right? Where previously, you know, you walked into a room and a founder would be like, "Oh yeah, you know, I got this multi-billion dollar FDV. You know, we made it. I'm a unicorn founder." Now we're seeing founders who just look beat up, worn down, and you see them kind of chasing product market fit. And I see that as bullish for the space kind of on net, right? It's people in the trenches working every day to solve customer needs to to work towards product market

fit and to build real businesses. And and I think some of them are going to fail, but I think on the other side, it's it's, you know, it's diamonds, right? once these people do reach these these kind of more traditional business benchmarks that crypto is kind of not seen entrepreneurs work towards >> once we see that is like the the zero to one moment for crypto. So so I'm bullish on on founders that are just fighting every day and and I I saw it in Asia. >> Yeah, dude. I and like the Asia market is just a completely different world. I I like to think it's like really it was really vertically integrated out there especially in Korea they had cacao like maps and and you know you couldn't use

Uber you had to use like their system and I think we're seeing this trend play out as well these vertically integrated ecosystems that are now just building out a more well-rounded experience and if they have one thing that you know has product market fit now they're adding these auxiliary products on top of these things to just just milk the LTV out of their customers once they have distribution They just keep feeding these guys more and more products and and we see the winners win as a result of this. They're compounding the same distribution that they have. >> Absolutely. I think Grab, you know, like the the taxi and food delivery app in in Singapore and Southeast Asia has crypto integrated in some capacity. We see this all over the place. I think you can probably pay, you know, to ride the bus

with crypto tapping your phone. And I don't know, for some reason, payment rails are a bit more entrenched in in the US. I think I tend to see that. But um you know there's a massive opportunity for just simplifying payments. It's it's huge. Um and and it seems like the the East is a bit more willing or a bit more quick to adapt to that opportunity. >> Yeah, man. Um I I I'd love to get your takes on some of the the institutional things. Um I think we're going to we're going to work on the screen share, see if we can put it up and get get your take. Um but in the meantime, yeah, I think I think what you're describing is like it's it's another trend that we're seeing as we kind of recover from this weekend crash. You know, people are kind

of picking up the pieces and seeing what's left. Um I I I kind of think that we're seeing this divergence. We're seeing some of the more sophisticated players in the industry uh kind of understand like, okay, we we survived. Uh we're making things happen. Um, and we're going to, you know, maybe tone down the risk a little bit and and maintain sophistication. And then on the other side, we're going to see people try to make it all back in one trade. Um, like we're going to see like pure alt season on like really esoteric ecosystems a as a result of this. So, I I I I'm just curious where you think this shakes out. like, you know, what are some of the ecosystems that you

think are maybe flying under the radar right now, but could get quite a pump as as we kind of get this return of the meme? >> Sure. I I do want to pick up on one part of this question that I found interesting in in kind of the the Asia tour, right? But it's kind of like the cultural variation around what people are doing in specific, you know, geographies. So, I didn't really know this, but you know, like the Koreans are massive leverage traders and, you know, they're they're trading these like they're scalping on 40x leverage, these little swings on D5 projects or L1's you've never heard of. And, you know, I know they have like a DGEN reputation.

Singapore seems to be a little more risk averse, trading these kind of major alts. I know Hyperlid is tremendously popular in Singapore. um you know, Singapore seems to be more locked in on like kind of the pre-sale token meta. They seem to know a lot more about plasma, stuff like that. So, it's interesting to see different phenomenon play out in different geographies. You know, to be fair, I think kind of the memecoin thing is actually very US focused if I if I had to guess. And and for some reason, it resonates more with with US players. You know, the trenches tend to be US-based for for whatever reason. So, so that's really interesting.

>> As far as narratives, I do think we see the shift to kind of, you know, more quality alts. Um, >> I think the perex narrative has definitely kicked that off, right? Tokens that are biddable after we've seen just like, you know, altcoin market cap be decimated over the last two years. And really, I think that's kind of what crypto is, right? Bitcoin, Ethereum, obviously giants in the space obviously represent a majority of kind of the value created or or the value, you know, of of assets in the space.

However, most of what we talk about on crypto Twitter, for example, are alts, right? So, I think when alts go down, crypto feels like it's in a bare market, even if Bitcoin and ETH are pumping, just because most of what we debate about and talk about tends to be DeFi, tends to be AI, tends to be memes or, you know, the narrative of the week. >> Yeah, I think so, too. Um, that's what the sentiment holds and that's especially what we saw uh over the weekend. Bitcoin and ETH pretty much held up for the most part. Uh, but alts got decimated. Let's see if we can uh if we can get some uh some of the recent happenings up on the screen here and I want to I want to get your takes on a couple things that are a little bit more institutional focused. Um so if you

click uh on uh that in the show, you should be able to see what we've got up. >> Superstate we had on the show yesterday. Um and these guys are doing some really cool tokenization things. uh partnered with Backpack to bring onchain equities uh eligible non US investors will soon be able to trade real SEC registered public company shares. What do you what do you make of this convergence like once we get equities that are available on chain? Do you think there's going to be a possibility where we have more and more of this move onchain or do you think like who who are these products for do you think? It's a good question. Um, I

think people I I I've lived abroad for the last four years. So, um, you know, in Europe, in Mexico, spend a lot of time in Asia as well. I think high netw worth individuals do tend to have access to to US equities. Um, I think it's the middle class that probably is are curious about investing in in these types of products where they don't have access. Um, and I think the market is probably a little smaller than people tend to think. However, I think there's obviously like a regar of opportunity. I mean, there's a billion Chinese

investors that I think don't have access to these products. So, I would say I'm I'm in massive support of just access to financial products. I think anyone should be able to buy the S&P 500 or for that matter to be to be be able to buy Chinese equities, right? So, I think uh that's a huge unlock for the space. However, I do think most investors, you know, maybe 80% of the size of the market does have access to the the kind of equities that they want to have access to. Um, still 20%'s a big unlock and I think there will be some winners in the space. Kind of like, you know, we talk about the onchain Robin Hood, right? That that's kind of the the theme that people are going after for for capturing these kind of retail

investors who want to buy equities but don't have access via traditional rails. >> Exactly. Retail investors abroad feel it that I think is a demographic and I I think you're right. Um, you know, it's it's a natural next step after the stable coin. uh proliferation which we're we're seeing play out. This administration has been really hellbent on issuing more stable coins and getting that circulating stable coin number up into the trillions. uh Besson has said, you know, three trillion by 2027 or 2028.

And once we have the US dollar in the hands of people worldwide, that's when it feels like, okay, there's going to be some some second order effects that take place as a result of more people having stable coins. And it feels like, well, what's the next best after the US dollar? What's the next next best US export? like we import everything in the in into the US, right? We we get it from China or we get it from India and we bring it into the US in terms of like these these uh commodities and these consumer products and all the only export that we have for the most part is the US dollar and financial products.

That's kind of where I'm going with this is the next best US export is the S&P. And so once people get the their hands on the US dollar, then they're going to want their hands on the next, you know, the next best financial product coming out of the US. That is our main export. And I think we're going to start exporting the S the S&P. We're going to start exporting more financial products. Maybe it's indices. Maybe it's American tech stocks. And these are the things that the the broad retail uh market abroad is looking to get their hands on. That's where the demand is.

>> Right. I think there's an interesting note here is is you know I interviewed Morad the the memecoin king um last year and uh in token 249 and I think that the S&P 500 is actually one of his kind of cultlike assets that he talks about right it's it's grown this following really right where you go on Reddit or whatever you go on Twitter and it's what what do I buy what do I invest in and people say the S&P 500 not everyone has access to that product Right. And I think Americans underestimate how popular that product could be worldwide because in Mexico people tend to invest in Mexican assets. In Europe, it's it's

a meme. You know, Europe creates, you know, one hundth of the unicorns that the US does. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. But um you know, the it's just a fact that US stock market returns are much higher than than other geographies. Um, so you know, it's reasonable to think that people want access to those products and and once they're tokenized permissionlessly and I can buy it in my crypto wallet that that those products will become much more popular. I think it's attractive to us, you know, issuers as well, right? They want to tap into those markets even, you know, marginal growth in those markets is pretty meaningful for them. So, uh, I think it it's it could be a slam dunk in

in certain geographies. >> Oh, yeah. Um, man, one thing uh that we're just getting in the newswire now is Coinbase to list BNB. And so, >> wow, >> this was something that I don't think we had on the docket, but I definitely want to make sure that we talk about because I'm sure you've seen. So, Leo, let's go back to just uh the speaker uh frame here. Um, and I want to pull this up so that we can get some some commentary from you on it. Obviously, I'm sure you saw CJ from Limitless. He was absolutely slamming uh CZ. Um they ba he went full whistleblower and basically doxed um the Binance listing criteria. Uh this is how much in supply you need. This is how

much in in cash you need to pay in order to get listed on Binance. Coinbase was like just just list something cool on base. Just just build on base and that's it. >> And so CZ, you know, attacked CJ. CJ attacked uh CZ. Um, and one of the things was like, you know, on Coinbase they were getting attacked because why don't you just list BNB if you're so, you know, high and mighty about your listing criteria? It's the third largest cryptocurrency. Well, bang, they just listed BNB. What's your take, Jack? >> Well, and I think we're seeing a lot more kind of boldness, right, from the US side. I think there's a bunch of implications. This is kind of a crazy uh uh event to happen um you know while while I'm on stream. But um you know the

first one is is we see Coinbase being willing to list the asset, right? So I think previously Coinbase would have been much more hesitant to to to list an exchange, you know, a foreign exchange asset, but we're seeing, you know, I guess the meme is kind of like crime season. um you know people being players being emboldened to to do things that they wouldn't have done under other regulatory environments right so so that's kind of part one I think part two is actually you know the the demand for the BNB ecosystem the the play that BNB is making for the west and um I think this might play into these kind of seiz

pardon rumors right I think you know if we check poly market it's like 43% probably much higher just based off of this news. But the the idea that CZ has transitioned from criminal in a you know Long Beach prison to uh you know someone who's you know who could potentially get pardoned by the by the Trump administration? Pretty crazy to me. Um I guess what do you do you think BNB was going to be listed on Coinbase? I mean the competitor the fact that they're competitor is pretty crazy as well that they're willing to list a competitor. I mean, respect to Coinbase, honestly, for for democratizing assets to these assets, right? They're saying, "Hey, yep."

>> You know, people should be able to buy what what they want. We're just a conduit for that. So, so cool to see Coinbase do that as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have a I have a similar take. Um I just on your CZ pardon thing, and I think we will get a uh a prediction market up from KHI here in just a moment. Um, I I also earlier was saying that I thought uh CZ getting pardoned was the biggest threat to Hyperlid because CZ's got it out for Hyperlid. >> Uhhuh. >> And now CZ is getting attacked from all angles. Hyperlid had no downtime.

Binance had downtime during the flash graph. Uh Coinbase is now attacking Binance and they're getting attacked for their listing process and Coinbase looks like the golden child. So, I think this is going to potentially be a kill shot for Binance. We're going to see how it plays out. Um, I think we have uh some more things here that we can put up on the show. Uh, yeah, let's get let's get um let's get our uh our screen going again so we can get some more more uh accurate reactions here. Coinbase has added BNB to the listing road map. Huge.

Next, I mean, this just opens the door. next they're going to add Hyperlid. I I think this is like it it's it's given now. It's inevitable. Um and I just think look, this is a win for Coinbase. People might say, "Look, this is a win for Binance. You're going to get listed on Coinbase." No, this is a list. This is a win for Coinbase because they're showing how flexible their strategy is and how they're not going to just uh just bend the knee to the CT drama. >> Um >> Yeah. >> Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, really, I mean, it's a bet on the fact that ultimately it's going to be all assets available to all people, right? Like the the original, you know, promise of crypto really. I think the the influence of exchange listings, you know, where

previously we saw, you know, the exchange listing pump, I think that is kind of going to approach zero. I think that's not going to be as important in a couple of years because the average Coinbase user is going to have uh access to pretty much any asset. And this is just kind of the maybe the, you know, one of the early dominoes that's falling, right? Is is Coinbase just kind of taking a position that, yeah, you can buy anything on Coinbase and and we're not going to be a gatekeeper for that. >> And and I, this is sending the signal to all the new projects and all the builders out there. Like, we're not going to to gatekeep our exchange. Any asset that's available on chain, they're going to put in front of Coinbase's uh users, which I think is Yeah. I I don't

know the exact number of users, but I know it's several million that have accounts on Coinbase. >> And actually, you know, kind of uh you know, with this timing as as you're mentioning around Binance drama around listing, they're kind of t taking the exact opposite approach where Binance says, you know, I need X percent of supply to list. I'm going to be very very exclusive about who I list. Coinbase is choosing to be open. So kind of, you know, a gauntlet thrown towards towards CZ and Binance saying like, hey, you know, we're we're taking a different approach and and I think it's one that's that's more cryptonative that focuses on crypto ideals and and that ultimately will play out across the space.

>> And now and now Binance is taking it from all angles. Mike Dudos confirmed with double digit teams that they've received the same Binance token supply proposal for listing in TGE. Binance wants to take nearly 10% from every innovator in the crypto space who launches a token. 10x worse experience than Tradfi. Enough is enough. We think Tradfi is extractive. Meanwhile, Binance is out here taking 10% of everyone's outstanding shares. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, I think recently there's also been kind of drama about IPOs in the Trady space and that IPOs don't make sense and we're we're gifting value to a set of insiders. you know, this this IPO pump. Um, I have some takes on this, but I don't know. Is it

possible that we see Tradfi companies that have nothing to do with crypto eventually kind of doing something more akin to an ICO or, you know, listing on chain that that, you know, people will not tokenize equities, but people might list directly as tokens. Is that possible in in a one year, five year, 10 year horizon? I I hope so. >> Well, man, I I really I was just having this conversation this morning. I really think companies are headed in this direction. Um, Calli and Poly Market I think are both going to take this approach and I think they're actually in a more advantageous position because they haven't yet gone public and they haven't yet launched a token. Take take Coinbase as an alternative for example.

Coinbase has already gone public. They already have this outstanding public equity that's out there on publicly traded markets. But now they want to go and list they they want to go and launch a base token. And so now if I'm a Coinbase shareholder, I'm thinking to myself, I want my base to like if I'm a Coinbase shareholder, I essentially own Bass. I own a stake in Base. They're going to go and launch this token. I'm going to get I better get my base airdrop, right? I better get, you know, the equivalent stake in Bass uh for owning the Coinbase stock. the the companies that haven't yet done either, I think, can take a much more holistic view and they can essentially create this fungeable experience between equity and token. I I think this is

going to be the holy grail and anyone who has yet to launch on, you know, a publicly traded market or, you know, do an ICO or an IPO, I think they're going to be in a uh a much more advantageous position. And we're going to see tokenization companies I think start to do ICOs and IPOs like in a combination format and and list these these publicly composable products which ultimately I think is just going to blur the lines between crypto and tradi even more >> right I mean look at poly market right with the NYSC investment insane what does that mean I think poly market has kind of confirmed a rum rumored to token I know there's airdrop markets around poly market I don't know what what if

that compliment or complicates matters around you know whether they're going to issue a stock or a token. I also think Koshi is a great example where it's kind of more coming from the trady side but maybe will issue a token maybe prefers to issue a token but yeah it's just kind of this this blending thing. >> Yeah. Well, here's uh here's KHI uh on the market for will President Trump pardon someone this year. Obviously CZ is leading the charge that about it's a 50-50 shot. Um has come down a little bit uh since the the peak. It looked like maybe it was just about 50%. Now it's down to 47.

I really think that this is going to just make waves. Like we're seeing Binance and CZ take shots, but President Trump is still a 50-50 chance of pardoning this guy. How I mean maybe we'll we'll wrap on this question. How do you think a CZ pardon could affect the Binance market share of centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges? Maybe Binance right now, you know, has I don't know what their their market share is when it comes to the trading volume, but do you think their market share rises or falls as a result of CZ's pardon?

>> It's a great question. I mean, the the easy answer is that Binance market share rises upon a pardon, but it looks like it's more complicated. You know, with with the falling odds of uh of CZ's pardon on maybe a Binance listing, it's hard to tell kind of what time frame that's on. I think the bigger question is, I mean, look, we've got CZ number one and then Raj big crypto bitcoiner a second. It just underlines the importance of crypto to the Trump administration and and thematically how much I think crypto is going to be a part of tradi you know we Trump token world liberty finance right like it's

all blending it's all accelerating it's all combining just the fact that these markets exist right you know on crypto rails like we're we're experiencing the crypto singularity right it's taking off in the way that that we always anticipated but maybe never never expected and uh I don't know it's exciting for the space. We're seeing institutions we're seeing the president adopt these technologies. It's inevitable ultimately and uh it's an exciting day to be part of the space. >> Yeah, it's pretty insane. Uh we we saw uh Ross Olrich uh was obviously a big Bitcoin pioneer early in early days. Uh he got pardoned. uh President Trump is just doing things to appease um you know

uh crypto voting base. Binance for the most part, you know, kind of exists, you know, on the periphery. And so if he does pardon CZ, I'd be curious to hear what his rationale is. You know, why is he why would he do this? Ultimately, I think you're right. I think it would be to somewhat benefit um the the market landscape for centralized exchanges. But if this is going to allow Binance to come and take more market share in the US, it would take it away from Coinbase and Kraken and these companies that were homegrown in the US. So really, really tricky to see whether or not this is going to shake out, but I I think uh if anything, it's it's uh exciting to

watch. Jack, thanks for coming on, man. It's been an absolute pleasure and uh you know I I really do uh would would love to have you back on here sometime soon and maybe uh continue to trade some takes on uh on all of the things that are unfolding because uh there's certainly a lot happening and it's a lot a lot to unpack. >> Excellent. Thanks Rob. Been an absolute pleasure. >> Cheers buddy. See you soon. All right. I mean, Coinbase listing BNB. Pretty insane, guys. Check out Jack uh Jack's Pods if you haven't already. Um, we had his handle up on the show. Uh, it's Jack Newwald. Um, and he's got he's got a

bunch of great content out there. You guys may be, uh, seeing more from him, uh, coming up soon. All right, we're going to keep things rolling. Our next guest is going to be our guest for Money Moves Fast. Uh we're gonna go stand up here uh just for a quick moment and then we're going to flip over to Money Moves Fast and get John from Polygon, the new recent hire from Stripe. We're going to be talking about why he left Stripe to decide uh and why he decided to join Polygon and embark on a RWA and payments focus for Polygon coming up next on Money Moves Fast. We'll see you guys soon.

Welcome back to Money Moves Fast. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with John Egan, one of the recently hired uh people over at Polygon as the chief product officer. A long storied history in the space. uh also coming from Stripe, some experience at Y Cominator. We're gonna get through all of that. It is an absolute pleasure to welcome John to the show. Thanks so much for coming on John. >> Thanks for having me, Rob. >> Absolutely. Um John, it's your first time on the show. Uh this was there was there was quite a bit of noise when when Polygon hired you because Stripe kind of has their uh inner dealings in the in the crypto space with payments as well.

The rise of stable chains and stable coins certainly hot right now. Um, I'd love to start with a little bit on your background. Maybe you could just tell us tell us your story, where you came from, how you ended up uh at Polygon, and why you chose Polygon to bring your talents. >> My background is is primarily in, you know, tooling, enterprise tooling, consumer tooling, product building. Um, I had a Y Combinator startup that was doing high-speed data transport. Um, that got acquired by Facebook. I ran a lot of the internal uh information tooling at Facebook, ultimately building the workplace product out in London. I ran news for a little while over there from a local standpoint here in New York while Trump was getting elected, which is pretty wild. Um, and uh, and I left and I came into the crypto space for a

little while with a startup of my own that was doing uh, wallets and NFTts early on. Um, you really learned about it from a from a developer on my team at Facebook who was just super excited about Ethereum and got me really excited about it. Um and then uh then ultimately got to Stripe because after that startup I wanted to stay really close to crypto and the ecosystem, but I really felt like there was a gap between, you know, sort of tradi and merchants and payments and like what all this amazing stuff that was happening in the crypto ecosystem. And Stripe just felt like the right place to go. Um it felt like an organization that had like a long list of uh of merchant relationships. It's a technology company that's building into payments as opposed to just sort of a

payments company that's trying to add technology. Um, and you know, I showed up there probably at the at the bottom of crypto sentiment inside of the organization. This was just after the FTX collapse. And you know, at the time we weren't really sure inside of Stripe like what we were going to do with crypto, you know, whether or not it was going to have much of a future. and you know put together a really great team over there and we just took kind of crypto and we made it as close to Stripe's native vision as we could. Um and we ultimately built out the the crypto payments capabilities, the payouts capabilities. Um you know ultimately stable uh coin storage accounts which started to allow Stripe to be available globally. Um and then you know all of this sort of topped off as sentiment started to increase and as

as usage started to skyrocket with the acquisitions of um Bridge and Privy which were quite recent. Um and I think everything after that's actually pretty pretty good public record. You know up until then I think it's it's it's a little bit of a hidden story and we can dig more into it. And so, listen, with all of this happening and everything going, you know, super well, you know, Stripe really leaning into the space, the whole world really leaning in, you know, I just wanted to get as close to the metal as I could. And Polygon was the first stable coin chain that we ever integrated at Stripe. And so, always knew the team. And when I sort of did my own due diligence around the space and like, okay, where can I go personally really allin on this? Um, you know, I talked to a number of chains, I'll be

honest about it. And uh and with Polygon, it's felt like a very strong brand, the right technology stack. Um the right placement uh and iteration and progress in the payment space seemed to have a wonderful right to win, which I believe really strongly in. Um got to know Sandeep and Mark and Mudet and all of the players over there. And it was just a I have to tell you the truth, it was a natural fit. >> Um and so, you know, kind of capped off this this this rocket ship of a of a run at Stripe. Um, and now over here at Polygon and feel like I'm doing a little bit of the inverse. You know, at Stripe, we were kind of taking a non-crypto organization and mapping it towards the crypto future. Here we're taking a very cryptonative organization and mapping it onto, you know, payments, which is one

of the most traditional, you know, ecosystems in the world. So really, really excited to be here. I feel the same way I did the day that I joined Stripe, which is there's a great right to win, a great brand, um, and the the future just feels bright. It it's incredible consistency because I think you're right. This is two very different paths of ultimately arriving at a similar place and and maybe you can you can attest to this going back to uh one of the early startups that you had. You you got into crypto very early like you said 2011 and and so there was always that vision of what crypto could be and what you envisioned for the future of payments. And I'm sure you you held that vision when you were at Stripe and you

were working towards that. And now coming from a different angle, you're still working towards what that future for payments involving crypto, what that looks like. So maybe just starting broad level and then we'll dig in. Could you just describe to us what is that vision that you have that that endgame for payments with crypto? What what are some some of the characteristics of that of that system that you envision? and then we'll talk maybe about how how it es and flows depending on the perspective that you're coming at it from. >> Yeah, for sure. Um, if I back it up just a little bit, you know, to when I was originally attracted, you know, into into programmable money, you know, if we want to kind of call it that space, I was really excited about this idea of an

open access global network, right, for moving money around and for transacting and and frankly at very deep down just connecting people. If you want to map back to kind of life at Facebook, right, we were building this graph of interconnectivity and uh crypto networks felt like doing that but out in the open. And what that really meant is it meant not just kind of creating these connectivity layers that would let people move value between each other, but ultimately um making access to that network as low barrier as possible. Um I've had an opportunity in my life to live in a couple of different countries.

Um you move quite often with my family. you know, the the the practical challenges of accessing money. You know, even in the first world as you jump between countries is incredibly high. You find yourself, you know, sitting in in these kind of dark and scary rooms and banks justifying your right to open an account. Um, you know, I remember when I was I was in the UK, the cheapest way to move money from the US was to walk up to an ATM, take money out of my US account, take two steps to the right to the depository, you know, at the local HSBC, put the put the cash back in. And that was like the best FX rate that I could get, you know, just the silliness of like what it took to just move money from point to point. Um, and I guess the the the opportunity to a fix

that problem for myself, you know, and make make it easier as I live my life to move around and b in doing so fix this problem for the world, which is that everyone should have access to interconnectivity through finance. And if you want to send money to, you know, Africa or you want to send money, you know, to Asia, it shouldn't be any more difficult than making a payment at your local convenience store. And that's just I think too if you if you approach the whole space from first principles, you know, if we were building the money system today, that's exactly what we would do. And it would sound a bit absurd for it to be anything but that.

But because we've we've absorbed so much like long-term technical debt, the world isn't like that. So when I think about like my vision for the future, I'm really excited about this idea of a consistent complexity network that stretches globally, that allows individuals to transact with each other at will um at whatever volumes and needs they desire. And the intermediary players, you know, within the smart contracts and sort of the merchants are all able to compete on a very what I'd call fair playing field of um value that they can then offer. And I I think I think that very sort of simple future changes everything about the way that we interact, you know, not just with the convenience store, but the way we interact with global markets and frankly

the way we interact with each other. Um, and so, you know, I think I think that world is probably closer than I think a lot of folks in traditional finance realize. Um, and I'm excited about trying to make it happen faster. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I I think about this concept as we continue to improve the technology and we we continue to learn more about markets in general. I I I have this description for it. I call it this market entropy. Maybe there's a better term for it, but it's this tendency that markets have to get more efficient. It's almost like this liquidity is bottled up and you know if you if you kind of unleash it, it flows just naturally. it'll it'll kind of break its container and free form to

whatever you know it its shape is and that's kind of where where I feel like markets are headed where we've kind of kept them bottled up in this Monday through Friday 9 to5 container and now we're opening up that to a much much broader and bigger place and we're going to see liquidity just just spread out amongst all of these markets and and as these things get more efficient we're going to remove intermediaries we're going to end up passing a lot of cost savings back to the consumer and unlocking a lot more value. When you think about the capital efficiency at scale here and you think about the value that you're providing, the ease of access and the convenience and and I think you called it this fair this fair playing field and and this

consistent complexity amongst these different markets. What do you think are some of the the things that are unlocked? Is it is it just greater financial access? Is it more more job opportunities? Maybe maybe you could just sound off on on on where you see these these this this thing going and the knock-on effects as a result of these >> money access and and money movement is at the root of most things that we do in our lives, right? So when we talk about what it unlocks, it's very easy to just sort of take a take a purist view and say, well, it unlocks just about everything. But I think maybe backing up a little bit and thinking about, you know, what it sort of means for this technology layer to really take hold will kind of help us get to the get to the answer to that story. You know, I

actually like this metaphor of thinking about like early days of email, right? In the early days of email, it was obvious why email was better to try to get a message from, you know, your home maybe in in the states to someone in India. It was clearly faster, right? But for a pretty long time, it wasn't actually clear that it was faster to send uh get a message to your neighbor that way, right? And so as these technologies consistently improve, we start to get the more cl clear like access to this like early stage visibility of technology. I think we're kind of there right now with uh with stable coins. And I think what it unlocks is very similar you know in the early days of um of email right like international crossber like messaging got a lot easier. Um, but I think that's

like that's sort of one of the interesting things about the trends around this is we'll have an effect at all layers of the stack of money movement and that is like largecale sort of global institutional money movement that's everyday human like to human money movement and then that's ultimately going to be like programmatic small scale pay as you go money streaming right that needs to happen at the like percent per subset layer. I think all of those spaces get affected by a singular technology layer that can cover each one as opposed to us having to abstract each one into sort of a product set that makes it make sense to normal people like you and me. And what this creates is a need for fast, lightweight blockchains and and not just things that

can scale when it when times are tough, but always because if we're going to put the financial system, it's all composable with one another. That is all one big unified system and and it works in tandem with things happening currently onchain, offchain. These are currently fragmented systems across, you know, several industries globally. I I want to get into one of the biggest upgrades for Polygon when it comes to payments. They've been investing a lot in this area. They hired you. They're making upgrades to their tech and so they're they're approaching the scale of hundreds of thousands of TPS. I guess my first question is maybe you could you could illuminate what Rio is and what it means for this system in general, but

then also 100k TPS or more. is that what is enough to really take the existing system that is inefficient and put it into a con a world that makes a lot more sense for modern finance. >> Yep. Um so Rio is super exciting just to get started. Uh and you know I I I wish I could take credit for Rio. I haven't been at Polygon long enough to be able to do that. Um, I think that Polygon or that Rio is the most kind of exciting payments upgrade that we've seen because it does two things. It brings this sort of immediate upside of lighter weight nodes, higher reliability, faster finality, you know, uh, uh, lower cost and and increased TPS, right? Just just

out of the box, those things are there. But under the hood, these technology upgrades also lay the groundwork for the scaling that it's going to take. You you were just saying it to get to like a 100,000 TPS and be beyond. And you know, it's it's it's hard to imagine just how much volume we're going to ultimately have to fit on chain in the in the future. And you know, is 100,000 enough? You probably in the medium term. you know, it's it's it's unlikely we're going to go saturate that in the next year. Um, but when we really think about moving, you know, information and the payments related to that information movement birectionally on chain, you know,

this will be when we look back in 10 years, this will be step one. Um, because we're going to start to see, you know, as as cost drops, it's hard to call these gashes, right? We'll fill the space rapidly fill the space. developers are so good at this. You give them a platform that's cap more capable and they will come up with reasons to fill it and it will be reasons that we didn't expect. You know, we we'll talk a lot about real uh real world payments, you know, sort of everyday payments, which which I care a lot about right now. A lot of great human stories behind remittances, you know, how you move money back home to family when you've moved overseas or like local payments.

How do you make a payment in a stable currency in a country that isn't otherwise stable? like these are very real immediate needs we need to go and solve today with the expanded um transaction c transaction capacity but when we look around the corner and we start to think about you know AI and agentic and programmatic payments you know today I think we're still thinking about the world as I make a payment you deliver me a service I make a payment you deliver me a service I think it's pretty clear what's coming around the corner is that it's going to be pay as you go for almost everything right So you deliver me service and I pay you as you deliver it to me, right? And not only that, but a birectional pipe where you might also be returning value back

to me for the way that I'm interacting with the service. Um, great example of this is I will pay for access to data, right, when I'm searching or trying to discover things or whoever my broker is might pay for that, the agent. Um, but then on the flip side of that, you know, sellers will pay for access to me, right? or like pay rewards back to me for interacting with them. And if you take this down, you can initially say, well, you know, he's $5 here, $10 there, $20 there. But like the more exciting way to think about it is, you know, per bit, right? Movement of data, you know, payments. And we've never really gotten to think of the world that way. If anyone who's run a business and has had to wait for their AWS bill, like knows how like how much of a sort of delayed

shock you get with kind of interaction with these types of services. And AI today is that times 100 because the way tokens work if you're building a startup is you're pre- buying these tokens and you're spending them down and then you're pre- buying and you're spending them down. Um and even even what we've built so far for Agentic feels that way. So I think we're we're clearly going to eventually get to a world where that's not how it works, right? where it is my degree of interaction with a business or a data broker or an agent will just stream you know value out of my wallet or stream value back to me as I produce it and and that that's going to require you know clearly a capacity you know that starts to approach this whole gigas

vision of like hundreds of thousands of transactions per second so you know it's like bandwidth how much bandwidth is enough right for I think this is going to cover us for a for a pretty long time but there's there's more to go Someone made the analogy just the other day about how uh the the equivalent of this would be, you know, like a a YouTube video. Imagine you're paying uh upfront for the amount of bandwidth that you're going to uh use when you consume this YouTube video. It just the mechanics of the system don't currently make sense.

And so streaming, especially as you described the the AI agentic economy, this is where it really comes into play. And this is where we can connect a lot of these services so that they're a lot more predictable. And I think this goes all the way to the top of the way that money is is created and then flowing through the economy. I can just imagine, you know, the the the interest rate environment, the the way that money is flowing between regional banks and large banks. this all becomes more efficient and and therefore more predictable as we're able to uh lower settlement times and and open up access. And so, um, a little bit more on the technical side,

I'm just curious when when you think about like oneb block finality, subsecond settlement, I is this are these some of the technical things that you're aiming for? And and another framing here, and this was based off a conversation we had just earlier in today's live stream, is this idea that some of the large incumbent payment networks, they may have distribution. Large banks have have lots of uh networks that they've tapped into and they have that distribution. But the the cryptonative teams that have seen where this is headed and they've skated to where the puck is going, they may have uh the advantage when it comes to the tech. So when when you're looking at Polygon stack and and you kind of see

the the sub-second finality, the one block uh um finality, what are where do you think the advantage really lies? Do you think distribution is going to be the key differentiator here? Or do you think payment networks that have been in blockchain for a while like Polygon, is their tech advantage that substantial where they can now they can now reach similar levels of distribution like you know the incumbent too big to fail banks? >> Right? So maybe I'll work backwards through those questions. Um there's a lot there to unpack but like I actually think a lot of the networks of existing financial like movement the these are not these are not really things to

always be proud of right if you think about how a lot of large organizations move money around the world they're leaning on these correspondent bank networks and these correspondent bank networks are complicated you know there sort of these human relationships backing them and these Swiss cheese of risk tolerances that you're trying to force money through and very like low predictability and cost as well as you do it. Um, if you've ever done an international wire transfer to sort of an unusual country, you've probably ran into run into this problem where the amount of fees being pulled out aren't quite what you thought they were going to be. You know, your bank even will struggle to predict it successfully. Um, personal story. I had to move some money, this wasn't even unusual country, but to Duvendorf a long time ago. And I, it was

a small amount. It was like six or seven, you know, dollars I had to get across and it kept showing up with like three cents too few. And I ultimately had to just like push a $20 transaction through. I was so frustrated about it. Um, and the, uh, the Swiss government, I think, is still holding like a debt to me of like, you know, $10 that I'm sure they're furious about. I'm worried if I ever enter Switzerland on like another flight, they're going to put me in the penalty box at like Border Patrol and write me a check and be like, "Take this back." But like that sort of stuff, I I I don't I don't really believe the statement that these like existing financial networks are so great that they're an advantage long term. Um I would actually argue my experience with them has been that they're high risk and

the more we can get away from them the better. Uh so that's that's one take on it. Um, another take which is maybe related has to do with you know the sort of subsecond finality like you know rapid settlement. Um, a similar problem you get is the delay in settlement. And settlement delay is risk, right? Let's like just take it for what it is. Settlement delay is risk that tends to be solved with credit. That's what you do. If you're getting something instantly, even in the US, if you've ever gotten an instant a payment, someone in that stack is issuing you credit and taking great risk on the fact that you were able to receive it because the bank sure isn't moving the money that fast, right? That really doesn't land for three to four days. Um, and we face this daily, right, with this like idea. And what that's

doing is it's not just causing complexity in the middle of the system, which is show showing up as cost to everyone who's interacting with it. Um, but it's actually just like reducing the ceilings of value that can be moved. If you've ever run into sort of an instant a payout system, there's always a ceiling. We see it in crypto actually all the time. If you go to an exchange and you do an a transfer, right, there's always this kind of value ceiling in terms of what you can move in. It's directly related to the settlement time that you're suffering against. Um, and so you remove that settlement risk and all of a sudden those value limits go away. And if you want to move $100,000 now, you can do it. No one on either side has to take great risk. It also does this really amazing thing

which is it opens up the rest of the global consumer base. One of the big things I sort of ran into at Stripe is you can you can kind of slice the world up into like high-risisk, lowrisk, mid-risisk, you know, consumer bases. And in a place like um you know a lot of in the US right we generally consider the U the consumer base pretty pretty low risk right so there's a lot of consumer protection to protect you against bad acting businesses but there's also a lot of American companies that want to reach parts of the world where the consumer base is high risk right and the way you do that way you fix that problem is you just remove the settlement risk which is generally where all of the sort of fraud and scams happen is between the moment of I've sent you you know virtual money you've

delivered me real service and if we can like I've sent you real money, you've delivered me real service. You can inject a lot of like additional really trust into the system. And in all of these markets, it's always terrible to talk about a market as high risk. They're filled with low-risk people. I think there's a pretty good argument that the entire loan industry in the high-risisk geos is actually much lower risk than it's priced at, right? And the exposure to that and the delta between those prices has everything to do with taking advantage of the market dynamics in between the kind of first world actor that's maybe issuing a loan and on the other side the person taking that loan out who's more likely to be honest than we think. So now maybe this is like a very long way of saying you know subsecond finality rapid rapid

settlement is really closely related to this idea of what is this like network we think is working today and why do the edges of it exist and so I think it's a huge step function for us with Rio to be able to start really pulling that number down you know to like seconds which is which is reasonable you can click a button online wait for something to happen it can take one second and that's that's an acceptable user experience um and just get us away from this like risk management in the middle and all the middlemen that come with that. >> As the the head of product, you you're you're now onboarding, you're getting more familiar with the tech stack, but you you're also at this this crossroads between uh sales, product, innovation, feedback

and and implementing the things that you're hearing from the market and and so that the you know the engineering team can ultimately implement those into the product. And and so the when you talk about the price dislocation with a lot of these loan markets when it comes to the first world lender, third world borrower and and that could actually be a lot more efficient than you than than we may realize. Where do you start? You know it it you guys are making strides in in the product and improving the things so that the technology is ready. Maybe maybe if that's the start, what's the next step to ultimately get these things implemented?

>> For sure. So we look we have an obligation as an ecosystem builder to deliver the technology that enables creativity from our developer ecosystem first and foremost we have that responsibility um and I think real for example is very related to that these are obvious necessary narrative driven solutions that if they're not there you know in fact when we launch things like this my my hope would be some subset of developers are a bit surprised it wasn't already present, right? Like that's that's like often the nature of like a good technology upgrade. It's like, oh no, I was like acting under the assumption that was already there, you know, we can keep moving. Um, you know, on the other side of that, there's

there's a lot of work to be done, you know, in terms of exemplifying how that technology is meant to be used. And you know we we at Polygon we have a pretty cool history of um incubating the types of teams that go and make that sort of innovation. Um you know Polymarket is the the really popular one to talk about today. Uh you know Katana is a recent one on the DeFi space that are that that are coming and uh and you know certainly as we interconnect people into like the A layer and interop layers there's there's more and more to dig into. H how excited are you for some of the non and I know your specialties payments so we won't spend too long on this but just coming from your history at Facebook being there during a really interesting

time with content moderation and you know now now coming to this censorship resistant world how excited are you for non-financial use cases like even even polyarket and prediction markets could be considered almost like this truth news sort of media new new paradigm and there's plenty more beyond prediction markets. So, you know, are are are you excited about any of those potential applications? >> Oh, yeah. I mean, look, there there's there's a reason I'm at I'm at Polygon, which is, you know, a general purpose chain kind of behind the scenes powering payments. Um, and what I love about the duality of that is it means the payments can have purpose, >> right? It's not just I'm moving money and then we're going to do something in

the physical world with that. It is I'm moving money and that money gets put to work. In many cases, you know, as we go more closer and closer towards digital services, DeFi, and you know, frankly, the almost unlimited space of other interesting ideas people are going to come up with in terms of what you do. We talk about like RWAs and tokenized assets, you know, how we collateralize, you know, ourselves in our financial, you know, lives as well as how we sort of collateral collateralize our like assets in ways that give us access to capital for like growing businesses. Um, you know, that's the obvious stuff from a from a kind of connectivity enablement standpoint. I think maybe some of the less obvious stuff is um, you know, if you take take this kind of Facebook

background and kind of the open concept of the graph is also just the interconnectivity of all of the people who are participating. Um I was talking to a friend recently about who does does an awful lot of philanthropy in in Europe and he said you know a lot of the reason that you'll you'll make a donation to specific foundations you know or or historical societies you're actually also getting yourself sort of access to all of the other people who really value that same like topic or area or you know piece of architecture whatever it is that you're funding. And in the past, you really relied on the, you know, f the the the like charitable organization to help you stay connected to those individuals. But with uh with with blockchain, you know, we've we've

we've found that that's just inherent, right? And and we maybe we touched on this. I really don't want to go down the NFT rat hole here, but maybe we touched on this just a little bit when like when those markets were growing on this idea of this community through like shared action of payment and ownership. And I think that that community, you know, this is where finance moves, right? Finance moves tightly within communities, right? And then more broadly across the world. And you know, we've we've lost a little bit of some of these financial communities by losing the physical space. And we've allowed more intermediaries to show up and control our access to the communities that we are financially a part of. And I think like I'm really excited to see more creativity you know from the market

in terms of what am I buying you know where am I participating what markets am I in who are the other people who are doing this with me >> and it becomes kind of a journey together and you know I think journeys together ultimately just become more complex and interesting and deep and financially you would expect to have evolving financial relationships with the people who are in those close-knit communities with you. So I'm I'm actually really excited about that whole concept, right, which is connectivity with the other people who share sort of either financial goals, interest, excitement, or investment decisions. A >> absolutely. And the name of the segment is money moves fast. And it's really cool to hear you talk about how money moves with community and and how you're

right, shared interests, shared economic activity ultimately builds a community around those practices. and and we you know there's like-minded people there's like interest and behavioral uh characteristics of that group and ultimately our economic activity will follow and I think you you mentioned NFTTS kind of got you know into that world a little bit I think prediction markets are are kind of on the verge of that as well as we sort of rally and coalesce around certain sectors maybe it's you know farmers that are sharing information about how they were able to hedge their soybean tariffs against some prediction market and and you know they're able to sort uh learn from one another but then apply those skills in the market. Um and I and I think blockchains are great tools for

this especially when you know if we think further out into the network state and and sort of that concept as well. Um and and maybe just to bring us home here in the last few minutes, stable coins are going to be a staple of of of this new progression. And as we continue to just really remove the line between blockchain based finance and and the off-chain world of finance, um more and more cash in the form of stable coins is moving on chains and then sequentially from there RWAS. And I think flying under the radar for most people is that Polygon is the third uh blockchain uh as it comes to uh RWAS. Ethereum has, you know, uh, 11 billion, uh, from what I'm

seeing on RWAXYZ. Um, but Polygon is right there, uh, with over a billion in, uh, RWAs itself. And so when you look at the stable coin landscape and you look at the RWA landscape, we're we're getting friendlier regulation. Obviously, Circle, Tether, these are kind of the incumbents, but we've got publicly issued stable coins, we've got privately issued. this Cambrian explosion of stable coins is happening. H how do you think about the strategy that Polygon is employing to ultimately bring a lot of liquidity and and and be the hub and the home for a lot of these stable coins?

What is what is the strategy for Polygon? >> Well, look, what we're fortunate about is the fact that it's kind of happening anyway. >> Um if you go look at uh emerging market local coins, which is a whole category of stable coin that I think is a bit ignored. you know, we're really focused on the dollar right now, but if we want to start thinking about things like onchain FX and what really kind of breaks down the margins in that space, it's going to be a lot of these local issued coins. Like Polygon's number one right now for the issuance of these new coins. If you're creating a stable coin today, like the likelihood that you're going to create it on Polygon is incredibly high, which is always a good sign, right? Um, so first and foremost, like that is already happening. Second of all, I think this payments focus that

we have in the organization has an awful lot to do with the idea that like we we are home to a large portion of the stable coin supply and we would prefer to be home clearly to more of it. And I think um these changes that we're making, these updates that we're making to the chain, you know, what we're starting to see in the global markets and adoption, these are all tailwinds alongside regulation, which uh which we shouldn't get into here, but it's just for once we have tailwinds of regulation in this industry. And stable coins won't go anywhere. And the greatest thing that stable coins do for us in my opinion is they just keep us on chain. Right? If we think about crypto as an electric car, the worst thing we can do is every time we've got to like switch back into

hybrid mode and charge the thing back up with like the the the inefficient gas engine that like doesn't, you know, work well at all. Um, you know, we want the Tesla of this space. We want everything to stay on chain, rapid movement, rapid finality. Um, and I will say that Polygon, we have kind of two really fascinating stories here. One is sort of POS and the capabilities of that chain as we build them out. And then the other is ag layer and the interoperability story which kind of interlees with this idea that we have around vault bridge which is kind of the wrapping of these stable coins as you bring them onto your own chain so that you realize the appropriate yield value that you're delivering from a chain standpoint. Like all of these things sort of add up to

clearly stable coins have a home on Polygon and across like the Polygon family of products. And I think we're only going to see that increase uh both through the technology changes we make and I think through some of the direct product efforts that we employ. I I'd love to hear more about Ag Larry because I when I first heard about it and it's been in development I it's continued to progress but it it still seems like a really uh ambitious and and and compelling technical solution for interoperability. Could you just say more about how you see a layer helping to unify this landscape of of stable coins especially in localized environments?

>> Yep. So first and foremost just this idea of interoperability across chains is critical right there's going to be more chains you know as easy as it would be in my life to just say there will be polygon and nothing else the reality is and we're seeing this more and more over the last you know six months or so I think polygon is very early with the ag layer technology work to start to understand the need for this interoperability um you know we're going to see more chains we're going to see more like degree of stable coins existing all over the world and you know ag layer is really meant to be this kind of crosschain settlement layer that allows you to move money and coins between these chains with zero effort, zero cost. Um, agar is young I think is like a really important part of the

conversation we have around it. It's this really technically capable and incredibly secure system and I think it's on version like 0.3.5, right? It's like this is a young version of it. Um, but we are seeing like a rapid increase in like chain interest and chain launches and the interoperability kind of capabilities that we're starting to roll out across other well-known chains over the next couple of months. I think we'll continue to solidify it. I I actually cannot go super deep into the technical side on ag layer. We'd have to go and pull like Muda in um from from our technical team to really dig into it. But I think um I think where we see aglair today operating as a bit of a uh kind of independent bet right in terms of how do we start to get interoperability long term right the

interoperability story becomes core to kind of the capabilities that we're going to need across the whole ecosystem. So we should we should we should hop on another call about this in uh in a month or two and we can go super deep on a layer. We >> we absolutely should. I I I think there's plenty of threads to pull and you've only been there four weeks, so I I don't want to I don't want to pull on these threads too much and you guys have a lot going on behind the scenes as well. So, I'm I am really excited because you've been in the space and and you know, kudos to Polygon as a as a as an organization for surviving and sticking around because we've seen plenty of projects within the top 100, top, you know, 50 tend to they they just, you know, sometimes they they

don't stay around for a long time and you guys have been able to. And and so, just with a few minutes left, you know, I I'd love to just close out and maybe you could just share some some wisdom that you've collected along the way. you've got a rich experience and history moving through some of these top organizations at Facebook and and Y Cominator running your own startup and then at Stripe and now Polygon. What are what are some bits and pieces that have stuck with you along the way about global payments and networks and just the way in which you're thinking about this space as it evolves?

I think maybe the most interesting takeaway that I've had in in in my career around this space and and really broadly in technology and emerging technology is when you're deep in it, you know, when you're a builder, you're you're way earlier than you think you are. You know, there's there's there's there's there's these great interviews with like YC founders, you know, who were operating uh against blockchain um in the early days, you know, who Bitcoin was $30 or something like that. And they were convinced they were too late, you know, they were like, it's over. I I'm getting, you know, this is it's going to hit $50 and we're done, right? Um and the reality is, you know, when you live your life a little bit in the future, you actually have to have just a bit

more patience than you'd like to have, right? And I think in crypto this is maybe 10x true. We uh we really think about our sort of forward steps in technology and we think about these changes we're making as you know immediate and and done as soon as they're you know present or visible or version 0.01 starts to exist. But the reality is, you know, that's the first step and the organizations that persist are the ones that continue to put another foot in front of the other and build and build and build. And um, you know, we we we can see this at the ecosystem level today, which is kind of what we talked about a little bit earlier. There are these obvious corridors of money movement and then there are these like less obvious ones.

And it's quite possible the less obvious ones will actually be the ones that change the world. And we're very far away from them. um with Poly Market and their recent raise there these great you know uh messages going all every everyone on Twitter right wants to kind of claim that they knew poly poly market was gonna going to work before everyone else um but you know the people who who who did and who were you know understood this kind of core shift that was happening and they stayed really close to it for the long haul even though the downturns shook everyone else away and this is you know to your point a minute ago you know Stripe could have just given up on crypto after the FTX collapse and I don't think anyone would have told them they were wrong to do so.

Um, you know, Polygon could have just backed off from iterating technology for things like ag layer and and the work on Rio, you know, and people would have forgiven them. They would have said, "Oh, we got to wait till the market, you know, goes back up and and triples and 10xs again." But like these are organizations um and it's a reason that I'm at them. I go to organizations that I think will stand the test of time that will continue to build through the downturns. And it's it's you know we we talk about diamond hands and all of these things in crypto and it's it's easy stuff to say and it's brutal to do and I think like once you do it a couple of times you get used to it. And so my biggest learning has simply been to be very accustomed to the idea that you

know we're really early and all of the ups and downs of the early stages of things will just look like a smoothed line up and to the right when you zoom out in the future. And I think that that's I think it's a shared learning. I imagine you could talk to a lot of other folks in the space who have it, but I think it's really important especially for folks coming into the industry today who are really focused on stable coins which are very young. You know, stable coins have had a very kind of up into the right progression and we will have setbacks in this industry in this space in big ways and I'm excited about you know being able to survive those as well and come out uh to a higher peak on the other side.

>> Yeah, absolutely. It's an incredible incredibly patient mindset. Um, and it's also bold to to have the resilience to understand that there will be setbacks, to build in the face of those setbacks, and and kudos to you to pick and choose such a sustainable path. I I just it gives me confidence that this industry is going to continue to forge ahead because people like you are at the helm of some of these organizations that are pushing uh the frontier. Uh, John Eaggan, chief product officer of Polygon. Thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure.

>> Thanks, Rob. Dang. We're We're back. We're live.

We are back and live. Wow. We go offline. We go off air for five minutes. The people are just the people are just ravaging us. Um we're going to close out the show with a bang. We've got a uh a final guest that is going to join us very shortly coming from um the world of Avalanche, which is certainly a uh a thriving world these days. Um, we've got our team in the back that is just fired up. Uh, and we're going to get, uh, we're going to get John from Avalanche on the show here very shortly.

Uh, we're going to be talking about all the things that Avalanche has coming up. Uh, personally, Avalanche was one of the uh, the chains that I had uh, I had spent a lot of time on. Um, I remember uh farming my chickens on Avalanche. Uh, this was one of the more fun NFTTS uh that I was involved in. Uh, I also brought a bunch of my friends into this world of Avalanche NFTTS. These chickens would lay eggs. It was a crazy time back on Avalanche in I think this was 2021 if I remember correctly. Uh we had a lot of fun and we are continuing to have lots of fun with Avalanche. Uh we're going to get John up now. John, welcome to the

show. It's going well. Man, for a while the chickens were a great time. Uh we went from digital chickens. Now I'd like to have some some real chickens of my own one day. Maybe. Maybe one day. >> Lay some eggs. Save some money on eggs. I mean, the price of eggs don't seem to be getting any better, so might as well just get your own, right? >> No. Inflation rages on. Gold goes up, Avac goes up, eggs go up. It's a it's a it's a vicious cycle. Uh, man, John, I think, you know, that that was kind of my my foray into the avalanche world, but you guys have been absolutely cooking. There's been a lot that has happened since uh uh the 2021 uh Avalanche NFTts.

maybe to start and and there's all kinds of things that we want to get into with like regards to the technicals but also you know uh the the general strategy at Avalanche. Maybe you could just you know introduce yourself to start and then we'll get caught up on what Avalanche has been doing for the last the last little while uh in kind of that trough of the market that 2022 23 era how you guys were able to survive and continue to make it through and just continue to build with a with a renewed focus. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's good to be with you today. So, thanks for having me. Uh, John Nahas. I'm the chief business officer at Ava Labs. I've been here 5 years. So, I joined around a month before mainet launch. Um, so I've kind of overseen the growth of the ecosystem

since inception across and I still oversee all the verticals whether it be institutional capital markets, onchain finance tokenization payments DeFi enterprise, consumer, wallets and exchanges and all of our international teams. So I think we have a very I mean one of the things that I'm most proud of is how strong our team is across numerous verticals but also internationally in different jurisdictions that feed back into the team and work together. So it's been a wild ride five years seeing the industry uh grow up quickly. Uh we all have our battle scars and have been through a lot but I think we've continued to really push towards adoption. Uh and the tech has really been built for that. So our job has effectively been to just prove what the

network can do, highlight the use cases and find the best partners out there to do that. >> Love it. And uh you guys are also helping to educate the world broadly, you know, as as the crypto world starts to eat more and more of the traditional financial world. Um the work that you guys are doing and stewarding this industry forward ultimately benefits the industry as a whole. And I think we can all kind of rally behind that mission. Um, but you guys have a fairly unique uh technical view on the way that you believe these things should be architected. Uh, I just want to read off one of the things that uh, your chief strategy officer Luigi said, which is that blockchain adoption won't look like one monolithic network. We certainly get behind that being proponents of

modularity ourselves. It'll look like millions of sovereign L1s. I'm curious what this means in practice. again, you know, coming from the world of Avalanche and kind of the 2021 era and as you guys have evolved, uh, it's no longer just, you know, Ethereum L2 side chain dates. This is a fully mature ecosystem. So maybe you could just you could just kind of, you know, bring about like what the evolution has looked like, what how has Avalanche evolved over over recent months and years. >> So I'll give you kind of the vision and I'll give you kind of in practice what we've done to to make that a reality. I think you know Avalanche from the beginning from the ground up was built with this with this uh mission of kind of hundreds thousands potentially

millions of chains all working in unison right so you have to think of the avalanche ecosystem as a collection or network of interconnected blockchains um think of each chain kind of being you know purpose-built for their its own asset class jurisdiction use case enterprise or what or compliance requirements and kind of the Cchain being that liquidity hub but like kind of the conductor that allows for these assets to move across uh and have the support that we spend time doing integrating the Cchain whether it be exchanges, wallets, anything else. Those L1s can move assets there. You can have a unified hub for liquidity, trading, data, and whatever it may be. But each business, each asset class, each requirement will have its own chain. I mean, I I've been doing this talk for over a year now called reimagining

blockchains. And effectively, you know, if you look at the world right now, uh I I think we're still stuck in a first generation business plan in this industry. We've seen generations of tech kind of improve, but the business plan has been the same. Launch general purpose chain incrementally faster, better, cheaper, launch token, tokens the product, try and figure out what to do with it. These are solutions in search of problems. They're not, you know, solutions that help fix problems. They're not giving builders, use cases, enterprises institutions different asset classes with different compliance the flexibility and customizability that they need in order to come on chain.

Right? And it's like fit your asset, fit your business onto my chain alongside NFTts and memecoins and DeFi and identity and a million other things. Like look, I use this analogy a lot. It reminds me of the early days of the internet. This is like AOL. General purpose chains are like AOL. Nothing wrong with AOL. People got rich on AOL. AOL helped bring people online. >> But there was a there was there's a limit there, right? There's a limit by having stocks and sports and chat and email and every single thing imaginable on one page. Well, Avalanche is kind of your WordPress or Shopify moment where we really proliferate blockchains for different use cases, different enterprises, different institutions. And in the early days, I mean, of this kind

of modular idea, I think L2's caught steam because there was a comfort with being aligned with Ethereum, >> right? >> But there's there's there's settlement delays. It's not instant finality. With Avalanche, every single chain that's built, that's spun up, purpose built, has that infinite instant finality. And we have infinite scalability. You can just keep adding chains. So whereas kind of the Ethereum ecosystem is an inverted pyramid where we see these these monolithic chains that are super fast and cheap. They're like one pipe that infinitely gets bigger and you shove everything through it. We are more like a highway system with all the lanes going in the same direction with each lane having its own rules. You're starting to see this now with Tempo coming out with you know Stripe their own chain and circle with Arc and many

others right people are seeing the value in having the sovereignty of your own 01 the security of your own 01 the premium of having your own 01 and the benefits there and the customizability that comes with it so that's really been the vision from day one avalanche was built with that vision from day one the consensus allows for that infinite scalability of nodes to to to add many more chains um so I see the world with thousands and tens of thousands of chains if not more. Every enterprise is effectively going to have their own chain one day. Every institution is going to have their own chain, right? Every startup's going to want their own chain in the same way that people needed and wanted websites back in the day. 20 years ago, if you asked me if I wanted a website, I'd say

you're crazy. We now take for granted how easy it is to spin up a personal brand, a personal business, whatever it may be, in minutes. You can go launch a chain in 15 minutes uh on Ava cloud right now and get on testn net and try it out for your business and then you can customize it. You also will have kind of this interplay between private permissioned and permission public and public permissionless and you can see a graduation with people becoming more permissionless or public as compliance and regulations allow. What does that mean for us in practice? We started with the Cchain. We started with with where the users were and the liquidity was in 21 with DeFi, >> right? Defi Rush, all of that. Then we launched the multiverse campaign to really bring all these chains online. So

we had a ton whether in g government, institutional, enterprise, and gaming with permission public chains. And now we have the full kind of complete public permissionless chain edition as well. So you have this kind of full ecosystem that allows for whatever the use case may be and whatever the business case may be to really be spun up in in rather quick time. There's one particular success case that I think I I'd love to highlight uh which is the FIFA integration that you guys have done. Um I'm just curious maybe you could expand and just kind of like explain to our audience what what is the integration with FIFA that you've done and why did they choose Avalanche in addition to to a lot of the parameters

that you mentioned but specifically about FIFA building out this purpose-built chain. What was it about Avalanche that really appealed to FIFA uh and ultimately you had have them >> collect? Well, right now what's live on their chain is FIFA collect. That's a uh like a you know a collectibles and think about NFT trading of of like players but you also have RTBs right to buy. So you can purchase a right to buy a World Cup ticket which is something super cool right like instead of dealing with scalpers and a million other project like you know problems there you can secure your right to buy a ticket. That's super cool. They didn't build a chain. They didn't want their own chain because of this application. That's one application. They don't need their own chain for that. But for their ambitions, they will need a chain, right? I'm not

going to speak for FIFA and their future ambitions. But if you could just think about a global brand and a global global enterprise like FIFA, wanting their own chain means collectibles, payments, potentially million other use cases for their millions and millions of users globally, right? Like they're not thinking about what we have today. They're thinking about what do we want to build over the course of the next 6 12 18 24 months and how do we scale with that? >> Where do we go? Are we going to have to deal with gas fees competing with other things on a general purpose chain >> or are we going to have our own, you know, environment just like with just like enterprises used to have their own servers right before cloud. Um the same being for FIFA, the same being for other sports. We have a ton going on in sports

as well with loyalty and rewards for the Pistons, the Cavs, LSU, uh, and a lot of other, you know, great sports enterprise that we're working with through our our collaboration with Uptop. Um, so sports, I think, has really been an untapped, um, segment for this space. Aside from just the collectible NFTs, I think loyalty and rewards matter, payments matter, ticketing matters. We have great partners in SI tickets and, um, Tickspace that are doing great stuff with NFT based ticketing. Um the technology again right is supportive of the business of the mission of of the greater kind of business plan more so than being kind of cornerstone of it which is kind of what we want right we want the technology to enable the use

cases and and and the builders to build kind of the companies and the businesses of the future. >> Very cool. I I love the analogy that 20 years ago you wouldn't think that every company would have a website. Now it's nobrainer. Every company has a website and it effectively makes every company an internet-based company. This is where a lot of their business happens. >> Individual, I could spin up a blog today and become a creator and monetize my own image and my own kind of, you know, voice. Why, you know, in in the future, why would your own personal blockchain not hold your identity and your records and your payments and your accounts and everything else alongside of it? And that's, you know, if we extend that that thought process all the way out. But

>> absolutely business by nature are accepting payments and they're transacting and they're facilitating these financial transactions as a result of buying and selling services or whatever their business is. So inherently if they're online and they're using money, which they all businesses are, they're all internet uh internet money is fundamental to this industry. The ultimate goal is that in 10 years, five, ten years, people will be referring to onchain in the same way that they did for being online.

>> Absolutely. >> Those are the rails for the digital future. Whether it be data, identity, information, assets, value, all things of value can be tokenized. These are the rails that they'll move on. >> So, in that vein, I'm curious what is what are the asset classes that Avalanche is targeting? Because we know stable coins are growing. Like we know all of all of uh these businesses that are, you know, buying and selling things, they're growing in their adoption of stable coins. And there's this big fight and race on chain for these uh chains to ultimately gain more and more of the stable coin supply. But then there's also these other assets that you're talking about, data, records, whether it's health records or it's driving records or it's it's all forms of data. And then there's compute.

All of these are valuable because they're scarce resources and they make up these different asset classes. What is Avalanche's driving characteristic or metric? Is it stable coins? Is it data? Is it cloud compute? What what are you guys targeting as a really as a really key KPI? I think KPIs in this industry are a little bit all over the place because the metas shift every four to six months and everyone talks about one or two things for six months and then six months and a week later they completely forget about it and move on to the next thing. So that's frankly I think why we we're seeing a kind of hiccup in adoption for being industry. We are still rather new relative to incumbent

systems and incumbent enterprises but we keep doing this thing where we hop on to the next thing. It's really hyper financialization because of all the tokens that are there. But if you really zoom out, our mission from day one is to tokenize the world's assets. So whether it's stable coins, you have the US dollar stable coins, you have a number of them on Avalanche. You recently have KRW1 coming out of Korea, the Korean one. You have JPYC in Japan. We have XSGD, the Singapore dollar, um that has its own chain for minting minting and burning. It's all assets. I mean equities we have been already with their with their kind of hub uh to tokenize equities in a compliant way um that's been blessed by the regulators that has the ability to transfer to all chains within Avalanche but also external to the ecosystem. Um ticketing we're

tokenizing ticketing, right? We're tokenizing rewards and loyalty. We're tokenizing car titles of the DMV. We're tokenizing deeds in in New Jersey. There's not one specific thing. It's kind of a a mix of how do all these assets start to work together. How does one asset class support another? You have cash on chain that's needed. That's stable coin. But what do you do with that cash, right? Like then you start to build on top different layers. Up until now, it's just been speculative, right? You trade cash for other for for other tokens. You trade it for NFTs. Let's trade them for like real world activity, real world assets, whatever it may be.

Um, so it's really looking for where we think the puck is going rather than where it is now. If if everyone's talking about stable coins now, if you haven't, if you don't have a stable coin strategy, which we've had for two and a half years, you're already too late. You're just playing catch-up. You're playing narrative games. You're playing CT games. Like, that's not really where we're interested. That's where we were a year and a half ago. That's why you see KW B1 now and JPYC and SNBC and Densen in Japan and all these payment systems coming on chain. Um, these things take time. I think we've done really well at the medium to long term. We've planned ahead and executed well there.

>> We could do a better story in the short term, better job telling our story in the short term, which we've started to do better of now to kind of bridge those things right? >> But effectively, um, tokenize it all, but but but make it useful. >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, what is the the brand strategy? Because another thing you guys have done in addition to planting the seeds of stable coins and decentralized finance and getting to where the puck is going as the the lines become blurred and eventually cease to exist between trady and DeFi. This is essentially just finance and you guys saw that and you you you know went to where that was

going to end up and now you're ahead of the curve. you've also gone and partnered with brands and so you mentioned up top um I know NBA partnerships are notoriously hard to get uh and you you've done collaborations with the Cleveland CL Cavaliers and the Detroit Pistons and you know maybe these things just like FIFA kind of start out as uh loyalty programs or collectibles but you've you've talked about ticketing you've talked about some of these ambitions how do these seeds that you've planted with these brands then blossom and what do they turn into when they're fully developed?

>> So the these things all have a compounding effect effect eventually, right? Like that's the goal. Um so but to go back to your thing about just everything being finance, I mean we started with def we were we were very focused on enterprise institutional in the early days, but nobody would would work with you. You're brand new. Ethereum was the only one there. There was a safe bet. No one ever gets in trouble for hiring IBM or or or SAP, right? In the in the in the in the software world, you don't get in trouble by going with the incumbent, right? It's it's you're taking a risk. So, we went to where the users and the action was, which was DeFi. That success we had in DeFi then made the incumbent say, well, we want to try that. That the the innovation in DeFi and cryptonative

applications is really a magnet that forces the incumbents to change or else they have no impetus to change, right? That's why our DeFi team now sits alongside um our institutional team. Everything is just onchain finance, right? There like CFI, DeFi, it's all merging. It's all together. We we made that change a while ago because that's inevitably where we believed it was going. Uh we're we're fortunate to be right on that call back then. Um so when you talk about like the sports and all this stuff and why does it matter? You can start to see a world where you get loyalty and rewards points and then your tickets go on chain. And you can use stable coins to buy your tickets. And then your your attendance at a game gets you a collectible. If you have enough of these collectibles, then you get you get

early access to a different ticket or a different thing that gets you access to maybe meeting a player or to merch or everything starts to become supportive of everything else. There's a cascading effect where assets that are digitized and tokenized in one aspect are supportive of of assets or experiences on another. And you start to mix these things all up. Right now, this kind of exists in the world, but it's super siloed, right? You can't move your airline points um away to pay for a hotel, to pay for coffee, to pay for whatever. But if these things all start to become somewhat funible and tradable uh and and and adaptable to each other and the use cases that that they support, you can start to see really cool collaboration, right? So

>> yeah, >> you could see a sports team working with a with a sports league or with an entertainment company or a broadcaster to share things, right? You can start to see that stuff. Uh we provide the technology that allows these great companies like Upop and others to do these things, right? >> But >> you know, you get a you get you get a critical mass of teams going on, it starts to become the norm. And the way this happens is to your point, historically this was you go to a team, you say, "Hey, slap my name across uh something and and give me visibility so retail can see my name on an arena or on a on a scoreboard." That's not really developing business, right? That's that's like, "Look at me. We made it. We paid a bunch of money to put our name

somewhere." right? >> What what what developing business is of going to a a sports team with a partner and saying >> here's how we can increase your monetization of your fans. Here's how we alo enable your fans to get more out of their fandom so that it's not one way one-way street with you only maximizing monetization of fans and their habits. The fans also get a reward. >> So effectively you're opening up a two-way street whereas previously that didn't exist, right? Centralized entities hold the data. They hold your patterns. They know what to do and they know how to target you. What do you get for it?

>> Not much. Well, now you get something and you can use that something for an experience or a discount or something else in the future. You're opening up the ability for people to own their fandom and to spend their fandom. Um that's a compelling story to a lot of teams across a lot of um different leagues for how they can stand out and how they can benefit, how they can maintain and attract and grow their fan base. >> Yeah. And sports teams are some of the biggest brands that exist in the world.

And so they they have these cultlike followings, they have consumers, they have one some of the greatest loyalty in any in any business sector. Um, and you're you're kind of describing what I think a lot of teams are going after is they're they're going for the end consumers. Uh, and ultimately I I think there's it's indicative of this broader trend where consumers know their worth. There there was some inflection point in there where people started to understand the power of data and big data and whoever has that really can tap into like the lifeblood of our modern society online. And now consumers understand that and they realize that if they're

just giving away their data for free, they're missing out on some of the opportunities that they could they could have. And so now the these brands, NBA, NFL, these teams, they're realizing they can give more to their fan and their fan can get more from the brands that they're loyal to. >> It's a win-win. >> It's exactly >> or at least it's more of a win-win that currently exists. >> Yep. >> I mean, this we're not going to revolutionize this stuff overnight, but incremental success begets more incremental success, and eventually we just take for granted that, oh, this is so much better than it used to be.

>> Mhm. Absolutely. and and after you know hundreds if not thousands of incremental successes the thing looks entirely different than it did at at at the start and that's how you know that's how these things evolve. I I just want to quickly talk about the la the the maybe other side of this which is the institutional adoption as we're getting hyperfinancialized and loyalty programs between sports and artists become fungeable and composable with one another. How does TR tradi in and you know the more typical sense of the word, how do they react to this trend from from kind of your experience and the conversations you're having?

>> They're not going to ever do anything that puts them at risk, right? So I think there there used to be a time where we said, "No, bad regulation is terrible." Right? So we just said no um as an industry. And then it and I think we got to a point with the last administration where it was bad regulation is better than no regulation because nobody would take a risk that they did something no matter how compliant they thought it was if they could wake up one morning on the wrong side of the line. >> So now we're seeing regulation come through. We're very grateful for that. We're seeing more clarity there. So people are still tiptoeing in. There are some that are more aggressive. There are some that are more conservative. There are some that are still worried. But there are some that want to try. And

there's also some that want to say we are ready to spin stuff up and get ready and have it sit so that the minute we can we turn on the on switch. Previously it was I don't know you know we'd spend months doing PC's and then the PC would then take months to go to some limited production and then months if ever to go kind of larger. >> Um we're seeing people that missed the PC train years ago go straight to let's get something out now. We're seeing people that did the P saying, "Let's skip the middle part and go straight out like quick." We're seeing people that are just saying, you know, forget it.

Let's go all out right away. Those who can do it will, right? The the more nimble, the more fintech oriented, the more tech forward, they will go they will go head in. They'll probably make a lot of mistakes, but that's fine. It's better than having them in on chain. Um, but we are seeing a much uh quicker kind of adoption like like the adoption circle is speeding up really fast and we're having a lot of people come to us particularly with the fact that we can customize chains for their use cases. >> Yeah, >> it's it's just that easy. Like do I want to put my bank's assets or my my client's assets alongside all this other stuff on a public chain? Probably not, right? That's just not realistic. all these headlines of, oh, this guy's doing

this and that. They're not. They're just not going to do it, right? Like your accounts somewhere are not going to sit in a wallet that's on a public explorer alongside everything else that's happening. There's no compliance checks. There could be elicit activity happening alongside your legal activity. That's not going to happen. And anyone who says that is deluding themselves for a nice narrative, but every institution, every financial player is effectively going to need their own ring >> or they're they're going to or they're they're going to want to own, right, their their space. They're not going to share it with someone else. They're not going to rely on somebody else's.

They're going to want their own. So, it's a tipping point, right? It's slow, it's gradual, and then it speeds up. and then you know take two steps forward one step back and then ultimately there's a tipping point where I think it just starts to become inevitable in the norm that most people run you know every bank will have their own intranet type closed end environment but that'll connect to other banks and then you'll start to see networks of interconnected chains emerge in the same way you see sea swift fed wire and a networks evolved for for payments and bank transfers the same way you see you know merchant processing networks for credit card and debit card payments these things will start to happen but it takes time.

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I think we all feel it especially in the industry. We feel like there there's this inevitability to it. And you're right, there is a tipping point, an inflection point. Once we cross it, it it becomes more of a risk to these institutions to not go on chain. Right now, they're looking at, oh, that that world, that crypto world, it's risky. It's for criminals and, you know, they that that's all it's there for. It's risky to go into that world. But once you have the likes of and this next question I'm going to ask you about ETF filings from Fan and Bitwise and Gayscale, Robin Hood is going and deploying. You've got all of these financial institutions.

Once you have all of those onchain, it becomes risky not to join them and be where all of the other big players are. And so for that, and with that being said, I'm curious and and this we'll we'll get you out of here after this. What is your boldest prediction for AVAC adoption by the end of 2025? or let's go 2026. 2025 is almost over. >> 2026 over 200 L1's maybe 250 at least processing billions of dollars a day in value across within within chains across chains and everything else. You know, I I was talking to a good friend yesterday and he made a great point. He said long long gone are the days where people could just brush off blockchain. Like people used to say things and it would

affect stock price positively. Like you say, I'm building something on chain or I'm doing something. This is what shareholders want. This is what the market wants. This is where a market envision this process going. So people who are talking about their plans, granted half these plans are halfbaked and they say it just because they have to. That's why you're not seeing that adoption as quick. But when people say that they do have plans or talk about their plans, you see that reflected in their share prices. We are now starting to see people who say that they don't have plans to go on chain negatively and adversely affect their share prices. like they are being punished for not having an onchange strategy or an onchain plan. That's good and bad because they're going to overrush to do something. They're going to mess it up and then they're going to have to fix it

later. That's fine. I'm fine with three steps forward, one step back. Whereas in the B past, we're kind of stuck in the middle. For us, um 2026 really means proliferating many, many more chains across different asset classes, different industries, different use cases. I'd love to see startup founders build their new companies whether it be fintex or neo banks or whatever it be onchain like they will be the trailblazers creating innovative new applications that don't exist because blockchain enables them to do so and avalanche gives them that blockchain capability to do it from day one. I think that's really the big thing we're looking for that also in kind then um inspires the incumbents and the

established people to really innovate and and come on chain as well. >> John Nahas, thank you so much for joining. Um >> good to be with you today. >> Yeah, likewise. This conversation really spanned beyond AVAC. I really feel like we got, you know, some some nice insights uh beyond into both the the end consu the consumer uh when it comes to some of the loyalty programs with with major major brands as well as the other side of this coin which is the financialization uh and and some of the uh the really significant financial institutions.

>> Look, I'll I'll end on this note right real quick. I've been here for five years and the reason is is because I'm talking about the same things I'm talking to you about today. The reason it I've been here five years is because I believe that Avalanche is a technology in the stack can that can deliver that, right? Like so we didn't specifically always talk about Avalanche, but everything I'm talking about can be done because of Avalanche and I think we're uniquely positioned to do that. Um, so it's an exciting time. >> Really appreciate your time, John. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. What a show. This is great. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, cool. Well, we're gonna we're gonna wrap up here. Um, let's see.

Let's see. Uh, what else do we have? John, you're you're free to go. I think you're hanging around in the back, but all good, brother. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Um, very cool, John. Super nice guy. Also, Avac, I mean, just part of the game about uh crypto is just surviving. Uh, you see so many teams just run into themselves and just uh trip over their own feet if they try to move too fast or too slow. Uh Avac has been one of the ones that has stuck around. Obviously did quite well in DeFi summer 2021. They had DeFi Rush as part of their AVAC incentive programs. Um and they've just stuck around and continued to build in in the space and it has

served them quite well. Now you can see they're partnering with huge brands. Um and they're pushing the the space forward as a whole which is incredible to see. Guys, tremendous show. Um, I think that's about all we got. Let's see. It's about time to wrap up. Um, some breaking news that occurred as we were on the show. Uh, Coinbase launching uh, BNB. It's coming soon. Uh, Superstate partnering with Backpack. Uh, we're going to start to see private companies have liquid markets. Um, I don't think people are ready for what this means. Uh, this means price discovery acceleration. Um, I put a post out recently about what this uh what

there's a big trend that's happening. It's this generational transfer of wealth from boomers to zoomers. Boomers liked the steady growth. I want I want safe. I want predictable. I want my S&P to go up 1% a day for every day for all of eternity. And zoomers don't want that. Zoomers are okay if it goes down 5% a day. uh if it goes down 5% one day, as long as it's going to go up 25% the next day. And now we're getting price discovery in all kinds of esoteric asset classes. And it's providing the kind of price discovery that uh zoomers are looking for for uh now this transfer of wealth uh happening and going into Zoomer's hands. Uh we're going to get

asset classes that resemble the type of volatility and price discovery that Zoomers are looking for. So I'll leave you with this. uh this take which is uh skate to where the puck is going because the wealth is transferring into the hands of the zoomers and you want to be positioned on uh the side of price discovery and volatility. Uh this is where the puck is going guys. Thank you so much for a tremendous show. Shout out to all the guys in the back. Uh Leo, great job. Alex, great job.

Marcelo, great job. Nero, great job. Andy not here today, but great job as always guys. We will see you tomorrow and we will keep rolling. This is the rollup signing off. See you tomorrow.