Rollup TV: Monday, September 29th

Transcript

[Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. N.

[Applause] Ah, [Music] heat. Heat. Heat.

[Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] All righty, guys. Welcome to Rollup TV.

Monday, September 29th. It is 11 a.m. here in Florida. I'm in Tampa. I'm back home. And yeah, Robbie's in Singapore. He'll be joining us later in the week. Um, but guys, I got some fun stuff to show you. We got a great segments today. We got a Electric Capital. We got Avi and Mike. And we have um the uh team behind Bullet. Believe they have some news coming out imminently as well as um here in uh here we also have IP World coming on.

[ __ ] hope you're not sidelined cuz uh we're ripping. Boys and girls, I got some cool stuff to show you that I've been building on the stream over the weekend. Um I'm going to just get these links set up and make sure everyone's dialed. Um so if you guys are in the in the show, uh if you're on YouTube, check it out. Uh get in the chat. I will be reading the chat on YouTube and Twitter. GMD Advisor GM Koka, good to see you guys.

GMG GM um good to see you. Good to see you. GMG GM GMG CocaCor. All right, guys. I'm gonna um give away some base codes today and it should be good. So, uh stoked on that and Yeah. Yeah. Looks like we're all good to go so far on every platform. Testing out Reream today. Shout out Reream. Shout out to the market. What we're going to do first today is we're going to pull up some little um Yahoo Finance news and do a little reaction to it. So, we got two minutes

left of coverage. We've got Avi and Mike getting ready in the back to come in. We're going to get those guys up and playing ASAP. And then we're going to have our lovely friends from the uh Bullet team as well as our our lovely friends from the uh team behind IP World. So guys, thanks for being here. Bitcoin's looking in trading at around 13 today. Uh love to see it. Yeah. Guys, like I said, I am active in the reream chat.

I'm active on YouTube chat and away 10 codes. Guys, if you're watching right now, throw us a like on YouTube. Throw us a like on Twitter. I'm giving away base codes today, guys. If you have a base code, GMGM, GM8, GMD, D5 Menilus, GM Arya, any comments on Turtle? Um, I don't know what Turtle is. Defi mentalist, could you give me a better rundown of what turtle even is? I would appreciate that. Leo, if you're listening here, let's get some background music playing if we don't already have some. Be good to get the get the juices flowing. Um, any comments on Turtle GMGM Chiron? GMGM. Guys, I'm I'm giving away base codes. Um, if you're seeing this and you're in the comments on YouTube, um, tell me what

you're most bullish on. What are you most bullish on this week? What token are you most bullish on? What project are you most bullish on this week? Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Get me going. Get me fired up. What are you most bullish about? Any comments on Turtle? I don't even know what Turtle is. Tell you that much. [Music] Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. GM. All right, guys. We got a great lineup today. Pretty stoked.

All right, Leah, I'm going to go ahead and pull up the uh stream on Yahoo. Let's pull that up and let's see what they're saying. All righty, guys. Welcome to a new Rollup TV experience. >> Coming up this hour on Market Catalyst. First up, as we enter the final days of the third quarter, we'll look at how seasonality will affect the >> October seasonality is [ __ ] bullish. I'm telling you, it's Q4. Last day of Q3 today or tomorrow.

>> And the why behind the high will >> [ __ ] bullish. Q4 is coming, baby. >> As the company outperforms the majority of the S&P 500. >> Let's go. >> 90 minutes into the start of US trading. I'm Julie. Let's get Hey Julie, how you doing markets here? Uh we >> trading day for trading week I should say last. >> Show us Nvidia, baby. That thing's ripping >> coming back to some extent today, especially on the tech side. >> Turtle.xyz, they were the ones raising all liquidity for Katana and TA and just announced tokconomics. I'm bullish. Turtle Club. Yeah, I like those guys. >> Down 40 points right now. The S&P 500 up about 4/10en of 1%.

>> I'm going to text them actually. >> Western Digital, a maker of hard disk drives and data storage. One of the top performers on the S&P 500 this year. It's up over 150% year to date. In the past quarter, it's >> Whoa, does she really have two of herself on the screen? Did you guys [ __ ] see that? That's trippy. their price targets for one of them. He's going to join us now to talk about the why behind the high behind the high >> capacity. He's >> Western Digital. I've never even heard of this company. >> Research analyst. Kevin, thanks for being here. >> Hi, Julie. Yeah, thank you very much. >> Hey, Julie.

>> Hyperlid. What happened over the weekend with Jeff sparking a fuse? $50,000 of NFTts dropped to Hyperlquid random addresses. This guy Jeff on the screen has no [ __ ] clue what Hyperlid is, but but people in the trenches just got just absolutely got fired up. >> Uh pretty pretty epic bros out here hustling live every day. Built different. Yes, sir. GM GM BGF GM solar ether punk. >> We run into mid-occtober selloff hard in November and then full bull mode into year end.

>> [ __ ] it. We ball. I'm down. >> That's what Western Digital provides hard drives. >> Fight bullish on the Q4. Yes sir. Def mentalist. [ __ ] with that little pudgy penguin, bro. That thing's fire. >> The more data you have, the better your AI outcomes will be. >> So Kevin, um, without getting too technical, >> without getting too techical, Kevin, why is AI investment drives play? Now, I know I got a hard disk drive in my computer, right, that provides storage. In most PCs, I guess all PCs, they have hard disk drives. When we're talking about the role that they're playing in a data center, you know, what exactly do they do? What function do they serve?

>> Well, it is just storage of data. So maybe if you even use Yahoo Finance as an example and all your videos that you uh have made and you've store it all in uh hard drives that's the lowest cost and you use that data to run uh algorithms artificial intelligence algorithms and maybe you can find out which of your shows gets the best ratings or you can optimize what your uh your shows would be. The hard drive is has to be used to store this.

>> I mean, dude, data. >> You can justify whatever you want. The charts up 20 or >> a double in like six months. All she wants to know is who the hell's buying this world. Um, so >> we going on about here. >> Thank you, bro. Just sold it. We'll have to get a new one and match PFP. Yeah, bro. Do it. I mean, look, I I think Pudge Penguins are are sick. Um, they're going to have another run. We see punks are getting are getting fired up again. So, >> give it a shot. Uh, yes it is. You know the >> we need more the rollup clippers. Hey, what up Ash? Good good to see you, bro. >> PC, >> do you find mentalist? I'm trying to find my trade my way to full pudgy. Hey.

Yes sir. >> Made of nan flash. They sir got to be they use lower power. You can put more data in the same amount of space. Uh, the solid state drives started replacing hard disk drives. So that was a headwind for both Seagate and Western Digital for their longer term growth. But now that you know I would say 90% of PCs use solid state drives and not hard drives, they don't have that headwind anymore in revenue and now it's only going into the cloud data centers which uh giving them now revenue growth in 15% per year um over the next five years. So that they they're experiencing new levels of growth and they're also experiencing new levels of profitability. Uh and that's

that's what's really changed. All this guy's saying is AI investment is practically infinite and we're just going to keep mooning it. So, shout out to this guy. All right, guys. I think we got uh Avi and Mike in the back ready to get set up. So, we're going to flip off of this for now. Uh give it a pause and we will be back on some of the more reaction and that type of stuff shortly, I think. Um guys, that is our new setup. So, congrats to us for ripping that. Um we we we had a long weekend. a lot of uh a lot of setup going on over the weekend. I'll tell you that, guys. But the money's coming in, baby. Let's pump it. All right. So, um what I'm going to do is I'm going to get we're gonna get Mike. All right. We're gonna get Michael

and um Avi of uh Mike from Etherfly and Aby from Electric Capital and we are going to bring them up onto the stage. So, we're gonna give it a quick check here. Um, and give me a quick sec. We're going to get them set up, guys. Let's play some music in the background. Leo, if you're hearing this, let's get some music going. Let's get that synth wave track going. That was iter. Um, if you guys are watching, I'm giving away base codes, guys. Just DM me on Twitter. Defy mentalist cash.

If you want a base code, give me just me on Twitter. I'll get you uh get that taken care of. Give me a sec. Let's get some of that wave music playing video. Um and we'll be ready to go in a short um our our show off a little here. busy pulling out the entire stream over the weekend. All right. Um, let's get this guy in here. Um, [Music] um, sideline question mark. Question mark

question mark. Are you sidelines? I would hope they have sideline because we're about to go before Q4 tomorrow, baby. 2 4 look at 2017 look at 2021 there's one reality that reality is the pump I'm starting to break your bearish bones are bearish this is the reality we will Oh, [Music] [Music] laptop can't keep up.

Yeah, dude. I need to get a better laptop. This things This thing's a good one. But all right, guys. We have Mike and Avachal ready to go here. Um, I'm gonna bring them up and we will get started, guys. So, let's go. >> Right guys, welcome to the world TV. Avi of Electric Capital and Mike from Etheri. Guys, good to have you on. Mike, good to see you, Ovi. First time on the show. Good to have you guys. >> Good to see you. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, great to be back.

>> Mike's on his way to Singapore, guys. So, if you hear a little bit of ding ding in the back, he's on his way to chill ether fight to the masses. Obby, it's your first time on the show, man. quick intro about yourself, how you got into crypto or kind of how electric capital formed, what your thesis is. Um yeah, man, thanks for joining. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us. Um yeah, my background uh most my career as an entrepreneur. I started and sold some companies the um most recently to Facebook um and then ran some big teams there and then started angel investing um and uh was fortunate to be involved with a bunch of companies that have gone on to do well in and out of crypto. So things like um Notion and Figma and Air Table kind of like more vanilla stuff.

And then um my my co-founder Curtis and I we were doing a lot of um more out there stuff. So things like self-driving cars and supersonic airplanes and crypto. This is sort of like >> and um the crypto stuff was just the most interesting and weird and fun and it reminded us the most of um of the internet like the early internet when we were kids and we were just too young to participate in in a lot of the early internet stuff. And so um we said, "Wow, this this reminds us of early internet." And and the more we thought about it, the more we said, "Oh, this is this is potentially really transformative. Like if this really works, this this changes the entire financial system, like the global financial system." And so we started um spending more and more time on it. We were early investors in kind

of that 16, 17, 18 era to a bunch of um companies and protocols um from that time. And um a bunch of people started reaching out and saying, "Hey, what is this crypto stuff? You guys been into it for a while." We we'd done some um Bitcoin mining in like 2010 2011 and so some folks here in Silicon Valley knew us and say they said um hey what is this crypto stuff like is Bitcoin real this time you know what's an ICO should we somehow be involved that sort of snowballed into people saying we don't really understand crypto stuff at all and it's different than what we do you know a lot of the venture investors here and so they uh asked if we would manage their money too and so kind of a bunch of the GP general partners at a bunch of these other VC firms started reaching

out and just asking us to u get crypto exposure and um and so that's how electric was started in 2018 and since then we've scaled it up and so if you look at our like SEC filings I think uh the last batch that we did uh we manage somewhere around three and a half billion at this point so we scaled it up pretty nicely um we we mostly if you look at the investments that we do mostly we do um sort of early stage you know our typical sort of speed and series A investor so for a lot of the stuff we invested in we've been pretty you can go look at the stuff we've invested in our website. So that's that's sort of our bread and butter. Um over the years, just by virtue of having been early to um things like um you

know, ETH and Salana and a bunch of DeFi stuff, we've ended up with some good expertise on how to manage these assets on chain. Um and so this um has turned into an interesting sort of um strategy for us where where we work with a lot of our portfolio companies to help them bootstrap and get off the ground um and uh and do that in a secure way. And so we we've increasingly been doing um onchain stuff for the last few years and trying to help protocols really just get off the ground. Um and so we do that now. We work with uh Mike and Co on a bunch of projects and Ethilla. Um we're helping manage the assets there and try to drive those on chain. I think we'll have some announcements coming up in the next couple of weeks. I think we'll we'll help people understand kind of the

scale of the possibility there. So that's a that's a quick intro. >> Beautiful. Yeah, it's good to have a a venture capitalist who does things onchain. That's a good signal there. you know, there's a there's quite a stigma against VCs sometimes. So, glad that you uh include that part. >> There's a lot of people out there calling themselves VCs that are not actually VCs. >> Well, guys, so we have quite the kind of context happening right now. Uh we're very firmly in uh token launch season, if you will, Q4, Q1. I mean, we are going to see a barrage of mainet launches across the cryptosphere. We're also very firmly in IPO season. We we saw uh Kraken announce a big raise a couple days ago. Uh we we've seen the

likes of Circle go live this year and have massive launches. Um and I saw one of Yano's posts. Uh this the full list of potential IPOs for 2026 is is pretty is pretty insane. uh all that happening while treasury companies have been uh kind of really foaming at the mouth to get crypto exposure and buying billions of dollars of ETH, Bitcoin, Salana uh and various other assets down the risk curve. Um all of that happening while altcoin ETFs are on the verge of getting approved by the SEC for the first time ever. The likes of XRP, XLM, Cardano, you know, maybe not everyone's favorite coins, but these are the ones that that are going to get approved most likely.

This is the context that we have here uh in the landscape. Mike, starting with you when you're looking at this from Ether's perspective, from the DeFi per perspective. Maybe we could just kind of zoom in a bit here. So, this is like the macro context. What is happening on the micro? What are you seeing on chain? What are what is the where is the demand coming from? Maybe you can just give us a bit of a context for the onchain ecosystems. >> Yeah. Uh well I there's not aside from Eidzilla um which Avich can can talk about there's honestly hasn't been a ton of impact on chain from these various digital asset treasury companies but I I I mean I genuinely believe that it's coming and the amounts of capital that

we're talking about here are like pretty pretty substantial that could really make uh make moves in DeFi. And we're talking tens of billions of dollars that have been uh you know collected I guess by these digital asset treasury companies. And the big difference versus the ETFs which are generally passive I mean at best they can stake you know some small portion of their um uh of their ETH or solar or whatever uh because of liquidity requirements. Uh these DATs are actually able to do stuff with their uh you know with their assets. Um, now certain DAC's like, and I may be wrong about this, but my current understanding is Bitmine has explicitly said that they're not going to do anything too exotic in in DeFi or

anything in in DeFi at all. Um, uh, but others, you know, more forward-looking ones like Ezilla have said that they in fact have already done stuff. They've actually already deployed into into DeFi. Uh, and I think that, you know, we're talking, you know, there's tens of billions of dollars in ETFs. And if you can own something that's generating a yield of, I don't know, five, six, 7% on the same asset versus owning something that is generating no yield, in fact, that has a cost associated with it. Uh, I mean, it's kind of a no-brainer that people are going to want to own the the yield generating asset. So, uh, so I think this is huge. I mean, I I'm um uh I would have thought that it would have

kind of the the floodgates would have already opened by now, but look, in the next like six months, I think we're going to see some real fireworks. >> Yeah. >> I maybe I can add like two points of color there, plus one to everything Mike just said. One, I think on on the ETF side, because you can't stake, you are essentially getting inflated away a little bit. I think this is going to change. Um, you know, if you look at kind of uh the direction the SEC is going in the United States, I think they're going to they're going to have to allow staking at some point, it's just it's it's a benefit to the consumer. Even with that, I think um you know, because of kind of the way ETF redemptions work, like when somebody says, "I want to sell my shares, you got

to sell the ETH on the back end." There there's actually some like liquidity management um the ETFs will have to do. And so that might mean that they can't stake 100% of their ETH or if they do they might have to use liquid staking tokens or I don't know if the SEC will allow that or they'll have to sell their staked ETH on like a secondary market um you know to to because because the exit cues on ETH and eat some slippage and so when you start looking at all those factors I think it will likely be the case just by the math of it that the that the ETFs will likely and at least in the Ethereum case um not be able to produce the staking yields that you would be able to if you didn't have to deal with all that sort of liquidity

constraints. >> Um it it may be different you know depending on kind of how like some of these other chains work like you know if there if there were Salana ETF there might be some arguments that because of the way Salana block production works and MEV and yada yada that actually might be able to be competitive on the staking. Um but strictly speaking on the ETH side I suspect the ETFs will will be a little bit underperforming relative to the native staking yield. The other thing that I think Mike is getting at on the on the um DAT side where you do have tens of billions of dollars that's come in. One thing I think um that's a little tricky putting on sort of your your DAT hat for a second here is you would absolutely like to be able to go max risk and go

generate all the yield that you can. And I think if you think that DeFi is going to have all these great RWA instruments and and native, you know, DeFi instruments that can generate 10, 15, 20% yield, this starts to look really compelling, right? Like abstractly speaking, you're like, well, if you're sitting on $10 billion and you can generate 10% a year on this, you have a company that's worth 10 billion in assets that generates a billion dollars a year in free cash flow and you need like 12 employees. This is like an amazing business, right? This this starts to look Birkshshire Hawayish, right? You're just spinning cash. Um that's the promise of it. Now the challenge is if you lose ETH um the market will really beat you up, right?

So so like the whole point is to have max ETH exposure with some additional yield. And so where you turn the dial on that risk exposure is really critical. And so I suspect what's going to happen here is some people like BMR, right? Like um we're just for disclosure, we we're also investors in in Tom Lee's thing. Um you know, in the pipe, we're investors in ESB, Joe Luben's um you know, on the pipe. like we we we sort of were close to those guys and have a tremendous amount of respect for them. Um, one challenge is once once you're at that scale, once you're at 5 or 10 billion in ETH, um, you have to be really careful because so much of the value of your company is driven by the ETH price that if you lose any amount of ETH because there's a small contract bug

or something, the market will really beat you up. >> Yeah. >> And B, it's hard to move the needle, right? I mean like you know could you today put $10 billion into into DeFi and dramatically outperform um basic ETH staking yield right and how much work would you have to do to put 10 billion to work and really outperform so I think there are like a couple of constraints in the short term um that that will sort of make it so that all this $10 billion doesn't come in at once but I agree with Mike that like looking forward as the risks come down as the market becomes more comfortable with it as as these entities sort of build up a buffer you know because if you're if you're let's a year into the business and you've been staking and and doing some of the other,

you know, less risky stuff in our opinion like from from the ETC side, you've now built a buffer like maybe you got 10 20 30 millions. And so if you lose a million dollars in DeFi, it's like it's not the end of the world, right? You you're actually still dramatically outperforming staking. So I think like the the willingness to go risk on will actually go up over time. We just need to let the the companies sort of like build out some buffer um of of reserves and and that they can eat into should there ever be a loss on the DeFi side. That's kind of my read on I think how the that side of the market will play out over the next like two years. >> Interesting. Yeah. I I think it's interesting that you bring up Birkshshire Haway because they have a specific workaround in their in their

stock basically that allows them to you know be an investment company under the investment company act like I believe like 1940 where people are asking how you know why can't why can't we do that for stocks like Tesla stock right? Well, it's, you know, you can't do that for securities, but you can for commodities. And so, this is like a whole new kind of wedge here that smart people kind of figured out and have now created. And so, I I expect this to extend for a while. Um, but kind of more on the points they were making. And Mike, I'm curious how you see these effects. You know, obviously, I'm not sure it's so black and white, right? Let's say there's 10 billion in ETH in these DATs.

I'm not sure, you know, ETH Zillow or um Tom Le's Bitmin or ESB are going to go 100% or zero. You know, I could see a world where it's 10% in dollar, 10% into Ether Fi, it's 10% into, you know, slowly kind of build it up such, you know, to signal to the market that they're actually taking care of their shareholders, but they're doing it in a strategic way. Um, and so Mike, >> we can we can easily absorb 10 billion. I'll just I'll just put that out there to mine. >> Okay. Okay. Tom Lee, if if you're watching, >> Tommy, if you're listening, >> all in on E35. And so, Mike, what do you expect the knock on effects to be to to look like from the protocol level, right? Because all these people are valuing these assets right now looking

at their revenues, their TBLs, their growth, you know, things all the way from a unis swap, Athena, Maker to Ether, Hyperlquid, Pump, etc. These are kind of really kind of forming what is looking like uh somewhat of the mag seven if you will of crypto slowly but surely. How do you think about the knockown effects for Ether and for all of the uh protocols mentioned as D5 TVL rips past 1 billion finally or sorry one trillion finally? >> Yeah, I mean I I think it's going to be positive uh for sure. I mean I I'll I'll make a note uh somewhat on the on the cynical side maybe a little bit. I and I think this is changing but DeFi today is still I what I would call very Ponzi

coded. Uh even when people are evaluating things in terms of fundamentals they still um see it through this lens of like well what does this mean in terms of the token price like how does this work in terms of the tokconomics? uh there are you know maybe one in a hundred people in in crypto or DeFi are actually thinking about like have actually internalized what business fundamentals actually uh you know are um uh that's starting to change and I think uh things like revenue buybacks like these things that are now starting to become a bit of a meta and and I think will will accelerate uh will over time act like a force of gravity on uh you know on the ecosystem where anything that just doesn't have anything that

does have it and these are you know healthy businesses that are actually generating uh you know legitimate revenues meaning not you know machine gunning tokens out the one side and then claiming you know some fraction of that as revenue on on the other side but I mean actual like legitimate businesses with gross margins and positive unit economics um uh these tokens are just going to over a period of years dramatically outperform anything else um but it's my my unfortunate take because I I think we're talking about years here. I think it's going to take a long time for people to rewire uh the way they approach these things. Um um but uh I mean on the positive side certainly the ATS and everything else

and the whole you know stable coin mania right now is bringing so much capital to uh to work that uh that's just going to lead to a lot of innovation lots of really cool uh uh you know projects uh having uh having good runs as a result of it. You know, there's there's one thing we talk about on the venture side, which I've said on a bunch of podcasts over the years, but maybe in this context that Mike's talking about is worth reiterating, which is there is this propensity for humans to really overestimate what's possible in the short term and underestimate what's possible in the long term. And it's a side effect of how exponential growth works. Like our brains are not really wired for exponential growth. And so in the early days when it is exponential, it's sort of sublinear. And at a certain

point, it becomes like truly truly crazy exponential, but we still think linearly. And so you get this effect where you like overestimate what's going to happen in the short term, but underestimate what's going to happen in the long term. And I think that's that's likely the case here with all this DeFi stuff, which I I agree with Mike, there's a lot of sort of ponzomics happening and the tokens are not sustainable. Um, but really like, you know, when we underwrite an investment, we build these spreadsheet models and we're like, well, what do you have to believe about an EtherFire? What do you have to believe about an A or what do you have to believe about, you know, some of these some of these protocols that actually are are durable? They're they're building something real. Um, and you don't have to believe crazy things from from like a cash flow and revenue

perspective over 10 years to to end up with like really interesting outcomes. It's just that you might be overpaying for two or three years, right? Or you might get punched in the face with the volatility for three or four or five years. Um, but but you know, I think it's it's sort of like the market manifestation of of this psychological phenomenon which people really overestimate what's possible in the short term and really underestimate what's possible in the long term. And if you have the right time preference, you can essentially take advantage of that. like if you're willing to be patient for seven to 10 years and and bet on the right things um that that's why you know like long-term investing can really work because the human psychology sort of prevents people from being able to do that most of the time.

>> Yeah. So obvious just to follow up on that then when you're looking at the landscape of DeFi of the applications and of the tokens associated with them um is there a is there a thought process that you're having or a mental model right now for okay institutional adoption is happening is saying three trillions of three trillion dollars worth of stable coins by 2028. Yeah, >> the DATs are buying, IPOs are happening, all the kind of initial context. Are you looking at the application landscape today like Etherfy, like others and formulating thesises around these tokens such that you want to be owning the the direct tokens which are uh going to be have have their protocols be exposed to

this institutional wave the most? Like how are you selecting these assets to hold and be, you know, kind of a part of long term? Yeah, it's it's an excellent question. Um, it's, you know, a lot of what we do is trying to figure out how to how to figure out what's real. Um, and by the way, nothing I say here is financial advice. Just you should never ever listen to me about anything, frankly. >> Yeah. It's not like you created Google Maps or anything. >> So, yeah, don't just trust me. Don't listen to anything I say. And if if you disagree with that statement, go talk to my wife. So, um, you know, the way we think about it is basically, is there a real fundamental human need that's being solved? and and a lot of times you can kind of distill that down into a verb.

Um, right. And so if there's like a verb and the thing becomes synonymous with a verb, then probably there's there's like some human need that's being met. Um, and so a is lend, right? It's just like lending is a thing that humans need to do. I have assets. I need to borrow against them. You have money. Like give me money and and let me do something productive with my money. Um, trade is another one, right? And then you sort of zoom into that and you say, well, what are people trading? and you say, "Well, stable coins are a thing to your point." And so, how do stable coins move around and what's the most efficient way for stable coins to move around? >> Um, and so we we kind of take a it's almost like an ADIQ approach to it. Um, which is like what are like the really

base things that people really need to do? >> Um, and what are the things that they need to trade and what are the things that are actually productive? Um, and is there something actually productive happening underneath it? Um, right? Because if there's nothing fundamentally productive happening, then it is just a ponzi flywheel and it's the token will implode. Um but if there's some fundamental new value getting created like somebody can take those assets and do something productive with them then it's interesting. Um and you know today I think there are there are definitely are some things like that. I mean I think Ether falls into this. I think a falls into this. Um I think you could look at you know setting aside again this is a separate question than the tokconomics right is the first question is well is it actually even useful like

great tokconomics don't bail you out of the thing not being useful. Um but you know something like unis swap or curve right like there there are real things happening fluid um right these are these are like real innovations they're they're really interesting things that are happening where people need to trade them and you can look at the volume being real right it's it's hard when there are real fees being taken to manufacture volume because why would somebody burn a lot of money um you if there's actual fees being taken again the tokconomics enter here right if there's some sort of token emission that's subsidizing it but um but that's where we start it's just like is there a fundamental thing here and do does a basic spreadsheet model get you to some sort of outcome where you can say oh yeah like once the market is

fundamentally driven and rational and that might take five or 10 years but once the market is is sort of rational in that way which of these things are a really good buy and I think if you think this way which is really hard because you have to be willing to like suffer pretty big draw downs along the way this is what would lead you to for example invest in Facebook when it goes public or this would lead you to invest in Amazon um when it goes public or Google right it's like you look at the fundamentals of the thing and be like, okay, in the short term people might overpric this or underpric this, but if you just look at the growth rates, you look at the network effects, you look at the real utility of the thing, and then you say, does that compound for 10

years, um, you can end up in a pretty good place. Um, it's hard to do that though. It's, you know, if it were easy, then everybody would be rich, right? So, yeah, it's really, really hard to do that. But that's how we think about it at least. >> Well, Mike, everybody needs to save money and everybody needs to spend money. Um, Ether has been obviously crushing those two uh components. >> Two great herbs, right? Yeah, >> this is like these are massive verbs in the world. >> Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. My >> Yeah, for sure. No, I mean I think uh I'm I'm more excited about what we're building than uh than I ever have. I think you know when we started out and maybe I'll make a small point. you know, we started obviously with the staking product that a lot of people, you know,

know us for, but uh this vision of creating the, you know, cryptonative neo bank or cryptonative banking alternative um uh was actually there I mean from two years ago when we first raised our series A. I mean we have a a slide on it that um uh somehow all of our investors all 130 of them have kind of amnesia. I think they saw it at one point, but it was such a ridiculous thing to say, I think, two and a half years ago. Um, that uh like they they were like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep going with the staking thing. We don't we don't care about anything else." But I think what we built is like I mean it's it's just legitimate. It's legitimately better than anything else that's out there. Um the example I like to give is that if we were you know a financial institution uh

with you know 12 billion in uh in assets um and the kinds of volumes that that we're doing you know we'd need to have probably four or five maybe even 600 employees uh today Ether has 30 employees uh and so operating this kind of DeFi bank as we call it this cryptonative alternative to to a bank that gives you all the same you know services is just over an order of magnitude cheaper. than operating a similar kind of financial institution. And the reason for that is there's I mean there's a multitude of reasons for it but uh one um because we're non-custodial the regulatory burden that we we we fall under is just substantially lower. Uh it

means we can just operate we don't need to get banking licenses in a 100 different countries. Uh second of all, we we actually get a lot of stuff for free from the blockchain that other you know fintexs would have to uh uh would have to build out. I mean you'd have massive ops teams, you know, much larger compliance teams. So it's just anyway it ends up being way way cheaper uh to operate and what that means is we can just give way more rewards to our users. So that's why we can give you know 3% cash back on the card. we can give much higher reward rates on people's savings and assets and and of course it's plugged into DeFi and so you just get all these like really interesting opportunities that you wouldn't get anywhere. Um and so it's been huge. I mean we're we're already just three

months out from launching the specifically our card program. I mean we're by far in a way the largest uh you know onchain card. I think we're like three times larger than the next one uh after us. But we're actually already larger than some of the exchange cards, for example, some of the CFI, you know, crypto cards. I think we'll be the largest within a couple months. I mean, at the rate that we're growing, uh, these days, we're, you know, we're doing over a million a day in transaction volume, which in cryptoland payments, that's actually substantial. Um, I mean, it doesn't really get interesting until we're about 100x that size. you need to be doing, I think, >> you know, 5 10 billion uh uh a year before you can sort of really like credibly say you're you're you're a

viable platform. But um but I mean I think we'll get there and I'm more confident of that than I ever have been. And I think that will be a demonstration hopefully among other things that you can actually build really dramatically like powerful durable businesses in crypto that you cannot do in Tradite. It's just physically impossible to build something like this in in Trad 5. >> Yeah. Obby, I'm curious from the kind of investment perspective on this Neo Bank concept um what you see is like like how big could this get, right? Plasma just came out yesterday with their or two days ago with their mainet. This will come out next week. So, it'll be kind of like last week they announced a card and a neo bank. Obviously, Ether has other uh competitors, but like the pie of the

crypto users is like the main pie that, you know, everyone wants to get now because they're wealthy, but the real pie is like far larger than that. It's the whole world's population basically. Um, Obby, what is the like how how big do you think this could get from the investment perspective? and and what are the what what made the timeline look like to achieve a larger outcome here whether it be actual like the process or kind of how you think it might play out over like a chronological uh timeline. >> Yeah. So, actually there's um there's an interesting statement that you made there about do you actually need to go to the rest of the world? Um and and I think there's actually an argument that you don't and the argument that you don't is that what you have if you play

this right is the emergence of an entirely new capital base. Um so just to put some numbers against it, right? You look at Bitcoin today, you look at Ethereum today, you look at the stable coin sort of dollar onchain uh numbers today. Um and I think all these numbers go up by like 10x. Like I think you go from 250 billion in stables to two and a half trillion in stables. Um and I think those people are effectively cryptonative. They could be all over the world, but sort of their first real exposure to any any sort of financial services is likely a crypto wallet. Um, if you look at just Bitcoin and ETH for a second, you know, you could roll Salana in here, you could roll some of these other chains in here, but let's just look at those two for a second. And

you kind of do the back of the envelope math. You're like, well, how many Bitcoin wallets have something like a thousand BTC in them. Um, and how many um how many ETH wallets um have uh, you know, let's say on the order of, you know, $50 million worth of ETH or $25 million of ETH. Pick a number. And then you start applying forward multiples to these things. You're like, look, could Bitcoin get to a million dollars if it's as big as gold? And could it get to a couple million dollars? I think it could be bigger than gold because now it's gold on a phone. Could ETH be at least as big as silver? Could it could it get to gold? Um I think I actually think ETH there's there's an army is better than gold, right? It's like for all the same reasons Bitcoin is better than gold. And

these markets tend not to be like one person just wins, right? It's like there's Uber, but there's also DD, there's also right you you have, you know, Grab. There's there's like these pretty big markets. So if you if you run the back of the envelope math on how many wallets have let's say more than a thousand BTC, how many wallets have won $25 million of of ETH and you put these forward multiples on it, what all of a sudden you realize is there's something like 5 to 10,000 such wallets that you can find. And if you get to those numbers, you have 5 to 10,000 new billionaires that were created entirely because of ETH and Bitcoin um over the next decade. There's only 5,000 billionaires in the world, right? So that means like half the world's billionaires are cryptonative billionaires in a decade, which is a

really wild thing. I don't like I don't think people have processed this. This is like a tremendous upheaval in the power structure of society that like half the world's billionaires are because of one asset class. Um and this has downstream knock-on effects on everything on you know politics on on governance on um you know family offices like how the money flows of the world work like it has some pretty big consequences. So I think you just look at that and you say, "Okay, well that's just that's just the billionaires. That doesn't even count like all the rest of the tale, right? Like how many new millionaires do you end up with?" Um, so I think there's an argument actually that this like capital market that's going to have several trillion dollars of dollars in it and potentially 20 to50 trillion dollars of new wealth that's

been created through the appreciation of the underlying assets. That in and of itself might be a large enough capital market that you never have to go quote unquote back to the real world. The analogy here would be if you look at the internet, there was an argument that people used to make like 15 years about the internet of like oh like you get started on the internet and then you go mainstream, right? You get a TV show, you get a book, um you get a movie deal. And actually what happened was the opposite, right? Like the internet just ate everything. And so so the way it works now is you you like you if you're a comedian, you want to get a Netflix deal, right? Or like you go big on YouTube and you just monetize your own fan base. Like you don't get a TV show

now. the the world's biggest celebrities are, you know, like Mr. Beast and I show Speed and it's like Twitch and YouTube, right? And Tik Tok. Um, and so I think the same thing happens with crypto actually. Like the real market isn't that like, you know, the the the real world somehow shows up. I think what actually happens is crypto eats the rest of the world and then everybody that actually has money is a crypto native. All righty, guys. That was the excerpt with our lovely friends, our lovely friends Avi and Mike from Electric Capital and from Ether. They are some of the original original people who have brought the well AI actually in Google Maps a bit. Um, which I think was cool.

And yeah, so I pretty pretty stoked on on hearing them. And yeah, I think there's a bit of latency. See, I think my my computer is just kind of getting fried right now, guys. So, bear with me here. Leo, how bad is that? Okay, cool. All righty. All right. Um, yeah, we're going to go ahead and pull up our lovely friends at Yahoo Finance and jump on there. I'm going to come back and we will await our next guest.

President Trump will meet with the top four congressional leaders at the White House later today as a potential government shutdown looms. The bill >> government shut down >> the government until mid November and >> no [ __ ] way. Democrats are in >> this is like one of those things where it's like oh it's a government shutdown. >> It's like oh what does that mean? It's like, oh, all the people that that work in the White House don't go to work for a day. >> This isn't a real government shutdown. Like, what are we saying here, guys? >> After averting a shutdown, now these Republicans will need at least seven Democrats to back the short-term bill in the Senate. Already passed the House.

Yesterday, Trump again threatened mass firings of federal workers if the government >> Pretty good. Pretty good. >> But what exactly? >> Wow. This is a This is really freaking weird. shutdown looming. What is the odds on this shutdown? >> Partial government shutdown is just days away. >> Days away from a government shutdown. Whatever that means. Government shutdown on Wednesday. Kali has it at 68% chance of a government shutdown on Wednesday. >> Wow. So KI has $1.2 million worth of volume on this market so far.

Administration, >> excuse me. About two weeks ago, it started off at 40% and now it's all the way up at 68% on Kowi for a government shutdown on Wednesday. >> Non-essential services will in the past were kept open. >> Yeah, we're going have to clip that one. That's crazy. That's wild. >> All righty, guys. We got our boy Tristan in the back. It is the pers dex meta of this freaking >> it feels like 2021 again somehow.

>> Um and yeah, we're gonna get him up. I'm going to press pause on my lovely lovely Yahoo Finance lady who I've been who I've been talking to today as a as a weird man who is talking to people who can't hear me. Um awesome. Beverly Hills cop background music. Thank you. New type. TSA workers won't get paid. Airports will back up for sure. That's crazy. Dang, that's high. That is high. Uh I did not expect it to be that high myself. So, uh yeah, I love prediction markets have the actual freaking odds of just everything that uh you know, you want to bet on under the moon. So, guys, up next, we've got Tristan of Bullet. Uh like I said, we're going to talk pers.

We're going to talk bullet. We're going to talk what's going on over there. And yeah, let's get him in. I think he's he's uh calling in. I don't know if he's in Singapore or not, but we're about to find out. So, let's get Tristan up on the stage and let's have a session. Here we go, guys. Welcome back to World TV. We have spent the entire weekend building out the back end, allowing us to comment on news on Apple TV, on all this stuff. Uh we are embedding prediction markets soon and and the show is really evolving. So, Leo, let's get Tristan up on stage. My boy Tristan, good to have you, brother. Yeah, great to be back, Andy. It's always a pleasure.

>> Yeah, man. I mean, we chatted last time, I think you were up in uh you were up in New York City at that event. Um, and we had just been talking generally about what you're up to with Bullet. So, it's probably been four months from there. What's the latest, man? Give us the uh give us the rundown. >> Yeah, tons have been happening. I guess we were still very much in like building mode at that kind of time. Things were coming to market. Um, and now is obviously a very exciting time where pers are out in the current meta. I think it's kind of the the thing that's top of mind for everyone. Uh, everyone's talking about perexes. Everyone is launching one it seems like at this point. Um, thankfully we've been building ours for for quite a bit of time, but it's uh, it's almost ready to

unveil to the public. Um, so we were kind of like just getting on to test net at that point. I think things were in the pretty early days, still finding a bunch of rough edges, still kind of improving things. Uh, and I'm kind of pretty excited to say we're basically what should be, you know, weeks, not months from from mainet essentially like the the finish line or I guess like the the light at the end of the tunnel feels like it's there. There's obviously going to be a lot more work past that, but it feels like the product that we're bringing to market with the sovereign stack, you know, with Celestia underneath. These kind of things are going to be very, very exciting uh for people wanting to trade per hoping to get out there with a very compelling offering uh in that Salana per vertical.

>> Yeah, man. I mean look, Salana has been lacking in the per side and people have been giving them a lot of flack for it, you know, saying that Hyperliquid is going to come and take their lunch. I think Bulk Trade just launched as well or at least raised and and kind of came to brought their brand to market. Uh they're not going to be able to compete with you guys in the immediate term because you guys are about to be live. Um and so you guys will be the primary like you know from my perspective, you've been very aligned with the Salana community for years. They really like you guys. to me, you know, you guys are basically the Salana perpex going forward. I know Drift exists, but I think that you guys will be able to out compete a lot of the current ones on the

main chain because of your architecture, which I want to talk about in a second. I don't want to frontun any of the news. Maybe we can just talk about Aster for a second and Hyperlid. Um, so you're sitting there from your lens of being a Purpex builder obviously and get getting ready to ship and you just see this unfold over the last couple days, the last two weeks. What is your reaction like? what is the hell is going on? You know, you can get into some of the details of like Hyperlid listing Aster and the Aster UX being broken and then and then lighter volume going way up and then you know them flipping Hyperlquid in volume. People are saying that there's no moat. Like what is your reaction to what just happened in the purchase landscape?

>> Yeah, it's insane. But this is like crypto at its core. I think markets move very quickly and this is kind of what I've always had in the back of my mind. like we've been pretty locked in this year building and you know no one pays attention when it's like the bare market and things are kind of moving slowly and people are concentrating on AI or whatever might be the hot thing but you know ourselves you know many of the other teams have kind of been building throughout the last couple of years and things kind of finally come to fruition and and when things pop off they pop off pretty hard um you know to kind of dial it back we had very similar experience we we built through the bare market salon at $8 we built through the time of having like basically like a couple

hundred dieh hard users back on the chain and and trading on our decks. And then last year when Salana went absolutely ham in terms of all the people kind of like bridging into Salana using all the different apps, I was just literally up at 2 am one night I think after the goto air drop where I got you know pretty pretty good uh airdrop myself and I was just looking at the wealth effect that was happening people rolling that back into Salana DeFi and watching the kind of like number of uh users on our on our decks just like skyrocketing through the roof. You know, unfortunately, we did like our matching engine did like kind of halt because we just had so much usage that night and I had to go and quickly deploy fix, but it was kind of like a thrilling exciting moment staying up all night and

basically like fixing and and kind of like keeping everything together. But the fact that we'd been kind of working on it for for a bunch of time actually meant that we kind of could scale it to, you know, what was like basically like 100,000 users over that over that month. Um the kind of dial it back to the current meta. Yeah, it's been nuts to see. Like we've been trying to push really hard to get live as quick as possible. And obviously building a first of its kind decks of of this kind of like sovereign rollup model is very difficult and very challenging. It's a new thing. But um it's great to see. I think we always see these narratives rotate in and out and like sometimes there's some vaporware or things that you know it's hard to really attach real value to it. But I think it's really

cool with with PES at least like this is a real DeFi use case. Trading always I feel like crypto comes back to at the end of the day. That's what people love to to do. Um, and it's great to see like I I think that the space has just exploded so much. Like you look at Per's volumes a couple of years ago, you know, DYDX was maybe doing a couple hundred mil volume a day. Now you have, you know, every DEX out there doing hundreds of millions. AA getting up to even like 50 billion. How much of that is like real volume is like questionable, but I think it's really cool that the C5 big C5 players re recognize that DeFi is the future. They should be building dexes.

you know, maybe things could be more decentralized on their end, but it's good that everyone is kind of like throwing their hat in the ring trying to get in there. There's like a lot of competition obviously, but I think that's an exciting thing to be a purpose builder at the moment. I would rather there's a lot of users and a lot of volume than no one paying attention to the space. So, yeah, things just have gone insane and like absolutely ballistic over the last couple of weeks. So, yeah, I've just been like working super hard. I was at KBW just recently, but it was like a lot of late nights of like coming back to the hotel room, pumping out more stuff. A lot of like really good exciting meetings. Like people are very hyped about this space and you don't have to like pitch to

them. It's just like the thing that's top of their mind and everyone's just looking at these pool runner players as well as I guess folks like ourselves who are soon to come to market. I think it's really exciting and I think there's a big TAM and a big opportunity out there to grasp. >> Yeah, man. So curious like what do you think is the staying power of something like like um like Aster for example or some of these newer ones like Justin Sun's son like do you think that these are all just primarily TGE farms and airdrop farms and then after volume is going to decrease significantly and consolidate generally like I think the space is likely a multiple winners take all kind of situation like or like a 8020 thing where couple teams take a lot of the volume and the rest are fighting

for the scraps. Curious if you al align with that perspective and if you do, how do you ensure that Bullet is is one of the ones winning and not just fighting for the scraps? >> Very good question. Um, so yeah, I largely agree with you. I don't think it's going to be a winner takes all. I think it's probably a winner takes most or there's going to be a few winners. This is kind of what we've seen pan out in the centralized exchange space. like Binance still obviously like a behemoth when it comes to centralized exchange trading, but there's a bunch of other very very successful multi-billion dollar businesses being built there and things always change. You know, I came into crypto in 2017 when Bitfinex and Bitrex and all these other guys were kind of the bees knees. I traded a lot on FTX back in the day and you know, the

kind of pole positions seem to change every couple of uh every couple of years. So, I think it's kind of with most crypto things a survival game. You have to kind of be long-term oriented. you have to go through the bull and the bear cycles. Um, so specifically on Astera, obviously I feel like they have pretty big backing in terms of CT's number one K really putting uh his name behind everything in CZ and that's been really good for them. A lot of attention, you know, people know that this thing is probably going to stick around for a bit and going to have a lot of like uh kind of backing behind it, a lot of attention, a lot of hype. Um, having talked to a lot of I guess big traders, Wales, people who are in the know, I guess during KBW, I think

generally the expectation is we're probably not going to see it flip hype. I think hype is like kind of really really uh reached that escape velocity, has this passionate community, but obviously Astra is definitely like pretty sound competition for it at the moment. You know, it has done very well in terms of the wealth effects. I think if you talk to most people who actually trade on the platform, I think the platform leaves a lot to be desired in terms of not sure if the liquidity is particularly real, the kind of UX of a lot of the trading stuff I think could be improved and and the team probably will be that over the coming months. So, as with most things, you know, things take a while to to get to the scale that they need to get to. I've been building a purpose exchange for four years. We've

been through the ups and the downs. things take like a lot of time to build to build up the right liquidity. The UX in terms of like getting a lot of user feedback and you know even Hyperlid I think has had its own share of downtime and like small hiccups along the way. You know to be fair like they've done an incredibly good job but these things are not built overnight. They they take many many years. Um and specifically I guess around Bullet yeah it's something that we've taken quite a bit of time to build. Specifically we've been building Bullet for the last year but running it, managing risk. We've never

blown up the exchange, touch wood, you know, we've been pretty safe about the things that we've done. And so, we take a more long-term oriented approach. There's going to be a bit of a flash in the pan with like craziness of points farming and people listing all new markets and everything coming to market. Um, but I think we got to zoom out and think there's a bigger picture here. There's a lot of like CFI market share to capture. Also, a lot of traditional finance players are also getting into the game. We're seeing institutionalization of crypto. Big players like Robin Hood who are kind of known for options trading and now we're doing pups. I think it's just a really big market. Uh and then specifically on bullet, yeah, I think we have really good technical edge. We're not like a copy paste fork of some other protocol

out there. We haven't just whipped this up in two months. Like this has been built, I guess, on the sovereign labs team. These guys have been building rollups for years. uh we've been building pubs exchanges for years. So, you know, this is kind of the nexus of everything coming together. We've talked a lot to market makers to really improve, iterate the product to have the best liquidity possible. Our other value prop is we've gotten things extremely fast. There's no blockchain out there at the moment that can execute trades within 1 millisecond. But that's literally what we've achieved as of like two weeks ago. >> Beautiful. And yeah, just trying to bring that all together. I think it's going to be hopefully what is a best-in-class post product.

>> Boom. We have a huge huge announcement today from the bullet team. Give you some confetti. Congratulations, man. Gave you some money, rain. Big day for the lads. Bullet is upgrading to Celestia underneath. Clobs on blobs. With Celestia Bullet, traders can count on seamless scalability. There's a Block Works article that has just gone out. The Salana L2 bullet is tapping Celestia for DA. The team announced today at token 249 Singapore. Um, so you guys are building on Celestia. building a Salana L2 on Celestia that is trippy and people are stoked on it. Why did you guys choose Celestia and how is this going to help you uh towards your goal to compete

with centralized exchange per? >> Yeah, really good question. So, Celestia is obviously well known in the data availability space. They're they're kind of one of the big proponents of modular roadmap and and kind of really powering a lot of the top rollups that you would see out there. They obviously integrate very nicely with the the sovereign stack which were built on top of. So we've been kind of looking at their solution for for quite a bit of time. You know in the early days we built out a pure Salana like DA adapter that's something that we spent months of time and like a lot of you know money and engineering effort on building. uh and it kind of worked but we we were kind of getting to about 500 TPS I think which is which is reasonably good but um I guess Salana itself is not highly optimized for you

know storage of of raw blobs and um you know for that kind of rollup use case so we still want to tap into Salana in terms of letting traders kind of on board there very quickly using Salana's decentralized validator set for a bunch of the you know settlement of the rollup but then in terms of DA we really see the benchmark is like what are these other you know top, you know, best-in-class per exchange is doing. Uh we kind of look at Hyperlid, for example, doing 5,000 orders per second, you know, uh on on average and doing up to 200,000. Uh and if we want to get up to those levels, we really need to scale DA. DA was like by far our biggest bottleneck. Um and the really cool thing is Celestia guys are shipping a lot of really cool tech. You know, they've

obviously got the Mammo test net and going to be upgrading that. You know, getting that into production pretty soon. So, you know, you'll be pushing many, many megabytes per second through the network. Um, and I think PEPS, especially what we're building, is a great use case for that. It's something we've been talking to them for a while, and I think they're very excited to have us on board working with them because per you're literally executing thousands, potentially tens of thousands of orders. You know, that can take up a ton of bandwidth uh on Celestia, which is really good, using up that kind of uh block space and driving a bunch of demand for that. And it's obviously great, you know, running a kind of global globally available, you know, uh, you know, decentralized exchange. I think it's just going to be very very hungry for data. Uh and so being able to

scale more and get to those centralized exchange levels or compete with hyperlquid in terms of that throughput is going to be very important. And you know that's kind of always been the road map of uh you know increase throughput decrease latency essentially that we've we've been trying to push for. So now that we've got this 1 millisecond trade latency and now that we're able to scale DA bandwidth to thousands or tens of thousands of transactions per second, uh that's kind of fulfilling both the the check boxes in terms of our scalability and optimization roadmap. >> Beautiful. Yeah. And I know the Sovereign Labs team has just a ton of really great tech, very like custombuilt stack that has kind of gone underappreciated so far, but I I think Bullet will will pretty much be the poster child for Sovereign's abilities.

So, no pressure, man. Don't let Jim down. Um, and Jim, if you're listening, man, congrats. I know that you've been building hard to get this out. Um, Tristan, talk to us about the idea of um, kind of getting the pers exchange that you have to a point where you are doing billions of dollars a day in volume, pushing gigabytes, you know, of data to Celestia on a daily basis and Celestia allowing that to happen. What is the 10x here? What is Bullet's 10X to become one of the leading top three, top five per exchanges? How will you get there?

>> Yeah, really good question. So, I think already the technology is in a pretty good uh spot. So, like I said, we literally got a technical 10x over the last couple of weeks. I wrote a good kind of uh Twitter post on that. We were running at like 10 milliseconds to to execute a trade before, which was already, I think, faster than most uh blockchains that you'd see out there. you know, seven times faster than Hyperlid, roughly on par, I guess, with what Mega Ether is quoting. And we did a bunch of optimizations, working obviously with Preston, you know, CTO of Sovereign Labs to find out how we could optimize some of our state access. You know, a bit of nerdy stuff, but like, you know, always like reading from the local, you know, database is really expensive. We figured out some ways to to improve that to make that more

efficient for our exchange because some of these kind of market maker accounts or like big programmatic traders will have thousands of orders and stuff can get really expensive. So we've really streamlined a lot of that for that use case which I guess solver was not necessarily optimized for in the early days but we've helped guide them and and um got to a place where that's really good and yeah we did all these code optimizations and got some like huge breakthroughs literally just like dropped our latency by 90% down to 1 millisecond. So that was like a straightaway 10x that we achieved in like two weeks. Uh and then in terms of like the go to market getting out there I think the tech's going to be really good. Like I mentioned our throughput's going to be really good. Our latency is going to be really good. Why does that

matter? because we need to grow to a big user base. This is kind of the limitation that we had building on a general purpose L1. It was good in that we could do we did up to 15 billion worth of trading volume there. You know, we were getting hundreds of millions of dollars of trading volume a day. But trying to scale past that to billions of dollars that all these platforms are doing really requires like some zero to one innovation. Uh and we're not going to just do that offchain like a bunch of these other guys are doing. Uh we're doing this fully on chain. We're doing this fully verifiable. That's why we've written the thing with Rust from the ground up. all ZK provable. Um, and so that's like the tech side. We think we can get the scalability basically of a centralized exchange, but have it 100%

verifiable, which I think is just like a very big improvement over what we've had in the past couple of years with like centralized crypto finance. And we're finally starting to get into this meta where performance really matters and that's a non-negotiable and just becomes table stakes. And then a lot of it is just like working with partners. Obviously liquidity is like really the thing that we're trying to optimize and why we built this thing from the ground up. there is a bit of like a me uh toxic flow problem that happens when you're building on these general purpose chains happens on Ethereum happens on Salana essentially it's very hard to provide robust liquidity and be profitable as a market maker so the way that we've done our kind of very fast FIFO ordering cancel prioritization through the sequencer bunch of other innovations you know with like improving you know uh API

devx and all this kind of stuff we've really made it catered to these professional market makers to provide very tight spreads for retail so once you've solved that liquidity side and we've onboarded a bunch of people there, then I think it's a matter of going out to retail traders, having very good liquidity, having a very good UI that's snappy and performant and people love to trade on that's got all their nice little chart features and other kind of indicators that they love to use. Um, and then providing like really good capital efficiency to traders as well. We have a very innovative uh cross margin system and multi-asset collateral system. Uh, no other club per platform really has this as far as I'm aware. Um, so this means that most most platforms you trade on, Hyperlquid and and a bunch of other platforms only let you margin

in USDC, but we had a lot of requests on our previous platform to margin in Bitcoin, soul, ETH, whatever it might be, uh, to bring that into the platform. So, we've built something that kind of rivals, I guess, what you'd see on like a buy bit or a Binance in terms of their margin engine, but putting that essentially on chain. And I think that we're starting to get to something that is like leading centralized exchange performance, very sophisticated margin engine, good leverage that we can add in there. Hopefully where we're trying to like deliver 100x leverage on on some pairs in like smaller size. Um, and then just kind of bringing that experience with fast listings with a really kick, you know, kickass referral system. uh and and really hoping that we can kind of snowball that and grow that uh by really focusing on Salana traders,

people in the trenches, people who trade like significant volume on existing per exchanges and trying to win them over with I guess the uh the good liquidity, the fast execution and the superior UX that's going to be on bullet. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful, man. I really appreciate the in-depth response and I think the only thing that was missing from your answer is probably what the people want to hear about the most which is around the entire like revenue and buyback situation of these perks as they generate a ton of revenue. Billions of dollars a day as possible in terms of or sorry millions of dollars a day is possible in the immediate term if you can scale this up to where you just said that you think you can take it and where you want to go. People want to understand what is the l like what is

the bullet token scenario here. I know that it's that there's already a token live. Um, what is the what is the plan for the bullet token? What is the plan to create a sustainable flywheel based on on the success of your project? >> Yeah, great question. This is very important to us and I think building that flywheel is just like paramount to the success and I think that's what's very interesting about uh you know onchain defi as a opposed to you know like traditional businesses is there is this token component and there's there's a way to have people as like stakeholders of the platform and be aligned with like the long-term success of the platform. I think we've obviously seen this with with hype and some other platforms have done like really well. Um so kind of like taking notes from that I think it's very important to be aligned

with our community. So giving really good utility to the token in terms of like you know usage for trading fee discounts other kind of benefits on the platform but then probably more importantly something that we'll put up to a voter community is essentially like how does value acrruel work for the platform how do we kind of work with the revenues of the platform and use that to kind of like bootstrap and and uh grow the success of the exchange and so we have you know pretty interesting plans I don't want to share the exact specifics but there there will hopefully be pretty significant ificant uh reinvestment I guess into the platform you know to really grow and and we want to essentially we're more uh we're more interested in I think growing the platform long term we want to reinvest into R&D and into growth uh to making

this thing very successful to building up the community you know our point is not to like go and and and just like have all these fees like the thing is like we should grow the pie should make this bigger for everyone else and starting that flywheel of like come trade on bullet essentially like earn a bunch of rewards reinvest those rewards would stake them, earn more on that, you know, come back and and trade even more in the platform, have even more discounts. You start this virtuous flywheel uh where people benefit from that and feel like they have some loyalty and really want to stay in the platform. I think that's what we're trying to build long term. Um and so yeah, just like moving everything that direction, being really aggressive, I think uh in terms of that uh I think will win us a lot of, you know, a lot of

interest and a lot of like passionate users. And I think if we can complement that with like a really really solid product experience that's sticky and that people want to continue trading on, I think that's kind of like the best of both worlds. >> Man, I see MetaMask has announced a per platform today. I don't know if they're going to use Hyperlquid or use somebody else's back end, but the space is getting competitive. It's getting hot. Tristan, I got some questions from the audience here. Uh, first one is, will there be a memecoin launchpad on Bullet? Uh I think in the early days it's probably something we'll like leave off for a little bit later. Um but the good thing is I will mention when we do not only do per we also do lending and we also do spot. This is kind of the uh

magic behind our uh margin system essentially and what makes it so good. Uh you can deposit most kind of major spot assets in there. You can use them as margin. You can also trade them on the spot market. So this is something that a lot of these perexes don't have or kind of shipped a long time after mainet. We'll have it live day zero. uh we're also shipping isolated margin to be able to launch more of these kind of uh lower cap slightly riskier projects without creating systemic risk for the rest of the platform. We want to do this in a safe manner. Uh and I think especially being a Salana you know uh focused project I think memecoins are such a big part of the Salana DNA at this point with you know pump fun and all that's been happening there. Uh so our part of our GTM is really we want to

list a bunch of Salana native assets. Obviously Salana will continue to be the place where a lot of these new meme coins get launched. uh being able to provide per or spot um for for those assets very quickly after launch uh for people I think is is definitely going to be extremely interesting and something we want to invest time into. >> Yeah, I think that's what some of the best perexes in in the world do is they are quick to launch new assets which I think is really really crucial. So I agree on that. I also agree that it's probably not the immediate priority as far as uh that goes. New type has a question checking bias at the door. What in your opinion is the biggest competitor for speed and performance?

Super centralized uh sequencer L2 rollup or will Salana be the kingmaker after Alpen Glow goes live? >> Yeah, great question. Um I mean we'll have to see. I I probably don't have like the full scope of the picture. I I don't think Alpenlow actually necessarily fixes this. It gets us down to maybe like 150 milliseconds on Sal in terms of latency. But I think when you're talking about centralized exchanges, you you really need to be under 10 milliseconds in my opinion to be competitive with with Binance. We got another order of magnitude to go. Fundamentally, I think what is being solved on the L1 is like very different type of exchange which is globally decentralized and I think we'll have a different set of trade-offs what we're building. So I think it's it's fundamentally a different product and a

different space that we're competing in. So I think if you're to use a platform like drift that you know claims to be much more decentralized and run on these different validators you are going to be trading off you know some slippage obviously like worse liquidity worse execution a bunch of other stuff but some people will be willing to make that uh trade-off I think what we're laser focused on is obviously more of this professional trader audience these like very uh you know high-speed central limit order book exchanges obviously CFI kind of the kings of that Binance has 250 million users you know very few of those are actually trading in DeFi. I don't imagine Hyperlid has more than a couple hundred thousand users. Um, and like DeFi in general, I think just very very small pie that we need to tap into.

But I think immediate, you know, competitors obviously the guys on top of the lead board doing all the volume and all the open interest like very interesting. I think like the dark horse over the last couple of months has been lighter. Very cool to see their team do very well. They're obviously building a rollup based model as well as a ZK rollup on Ethereum. So they've taken very similar philosophy to us I think in terms of having this uh sequencer model being able to execute transactions very quickly and provide you know hopefully like a very low latency experience for for certain traders. Uh they've made also some very interesting decisions in terms of the their feed model and basically doing zero fees. So we're we're seeing that obviously getting a lot of volume for them. Whether that's like a sustainable model longterm uh you know remains to be seen. But yeah I

think those are some of like the players that we're we're uh we're definitely keeping an eye on right now. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think it's like a the perststeck version of the modular versus monolithic debate essentially and kind of seeing how that plays out. So Tristan, congratulations, man. Um, huge day for you and, you know, I appreciate you spending some time here with us. Congrats on mainet or sorry, congrats on this announcement going on mainet very, very soon. Uh, and yeah, man, it's going to be a journey. This is just a new day one. So, thanks for coming on. >> That's right. Very excited. Thanks for having me on, Andy. Really appreciate it. All righty, Tristan. Get some rest, man. I know it's been busy.

>> Thank you. >> Peace. All righty, guys. Shout out to the uh Celestia team. Shout out to Bullet. Shout out to Sovereign Labs for getting a big one in these is this these perexes will drive a ton of volume and a ton of demand for DA on DA layers like Celestia and others. Uh, and these will probably be the main uh, guzzlers of gas on these platforms. So, if you like gas guzzling, you know where to go. Go get yourself a purpose DEX, throw it on a high performant DA layer, call it a day, guys. Up next, we've got Red from IP World. There has been a wild shabbacle of things that have happened in the IP

space with Origin Summit in Korea last week. I'm going to figure out what the hell happened. Um, there's a lot of FUD on the timeline. There's a lot of question marks about what happened, who started what, who rubbed who. I don't really know. I barely even checked in. Uh, but I do know that, uh, Red from IP World has a stance, and I think we need to hear Red stance out. So, that's what we're going to do. And yeah, guys, it's noon, Florida, beautiful day, markets green. Happy Monday. And um yeah, we're gonna get Red up and we're gonna get right into it. We're gonna find out his side of the story, what's going on. Red, welcome to the show.

>> Good to be back. >> Good to see you, brother. I think you just talked to Robbie like a week ago. >> Yep. Yep. Just a few days ago. >> Well, a lot has happened in the last couple days, Red. Um >> Yep. I'm going to allow you kind of just like opening remarks, set the stage and give us some context here for what transpired over the last week or so starting before Origin Summit and leading in through and then after um what happened. >> Yep. Yep. Um, so as everyone knows, we had an official signed term sheet with one of Pink Fong's official licences called BBF to launch a token for Pink Fong's mascot. That's what everything

preKBW was marketing around. an official signed term sheet with one of their official licences with direct endorsement with Pink Fong's co-founder. And if you were at KBW, you will also know that he was publicly endorsing our launch at the stage coinciding with the actual token launch. So basically pre-token launch everything was vetted from our side with approval from light multiple licensing parties within Pingong but most importantly with direct endorsement from the co-founder himself. And so what happened after KBW

is less than 24 hours, right before the official IP claim on our platform, a cease and desist kind of came out of Pink Fong's side, prompted by one of the other official licenses of Pink Fong and Ryan, the co-founder, proceeded to ghost us as the token started crashing. And I know there's so much pain within the community because of this extremely hyped up launch, especially after everything else that's developed around IP World. But this truly wasn't a platform failure, but a case of severe misconduct stemming from competing

licensing claims under private agreements under Pink Fong. That's my side of the story and that's what happened. And I also want to be very clear, all of this is completely open for the public to discern among themselves. And you can see all the video clips at KBW of the endorsement happening live. Um, but you know, another way I sort of think about this is like imagine if Walt Disney sort of publicly endorsed the launch of a Mickey Mouse token at one of his summits only to sort of backtrack 24 hours later over some sort of internal licensing issue.

So, I just want to be very clear that's our side of the story and that's exactly what happened. >> Yeah. So, Red, what when you sign a term sheet with somebody to use IP World and to use their IP, what does that really entail holistically? Obviously, you can't get into every little nook and cranny here, but what does the term sheet allow you to do? >> Yeah. So, you know, ju just to be clear, the the agreement we had was with one of their two official licensing partners, BBF, who has done multiple authorized IP product launches around the Ping Fong IP. One example is a huge mobile game and another example is a big

NFT marketplace. And so what transpires between these events into getting this term sheet approved is we get multiple legal councils to approve the agreement which very clearly stipulated that we would be able to use Pink Fong's mascot IP for the sake of token launching as well as any associated marketing. And the most important part is this was also vetted by the co-founder of Pink Fong who got on a call with BBF's co-founder himself too to approve and vet the whole thing. That's why he even did the public evangelizing at KBW. So I just want to make it clear there's multiple different

legal parties involved. There's multiple people looking at these agreements and that's why it's it's such a shame and such a puzzle to us because this truly devolved from competing private licensing claims between internal licensing parties of which we had no visibility into despite all the vetting involved between all the parties including Ping Fong themselves. So, um, did you would you say that you were acting in everyone's best interest by launching the token? Like, don't you think that maybe they they got caught off guard that you launched the token

and then when it dumped they kind of freaked out and wanted to cover their ass, so they were, you know, operating from a state of kind of, you know, wanting to protect themselves versus wanting to screw you guys. I I absolutely don't agree with that because the whole premise of this entire agreement was extremely explicit. It was a token launch agreement for the Pink Fong mascot. We procured like weeks or even months worth of content with approval by their legal team with approval that they would be able to claim with their official Ping Fong Tik Tok account. And again, this was vetted

by the co-founder himself with direct calls between him and the BBF CEO. So, it was abundantly clear from the get-go that this would be a token launch. There was absolutely no reason for any confusion around that. >> Okay. So you so they literally agreed to the token launch itself as part of the entire plan. >> The the whole agreement was a Ping Fong mascot token launch, >> right? Okay. >> That is exactly what they agreed to. Yes. >> And and when you are um you know because like Story's value proposition is around IP. It's around being able to monetize, remix and own IP in this world of kind of like uh AI generated content etc. So had this gone smoothly let's say right

hypothetically this went well what would have been the actual outcome most likely for IP world and for story like how would stories protocol and IP world have contributed to the success of this specific IP that you guys were agreed to do a token for like what would have been the ideal outcome here uh in one of these types of arrangements >> you know and this is why you know we're we're really disappointed because I got on a call with Ryan and and and he really expressed how much he loved the idea and mission behind IP World, which is building this new sort of breeding grounds for being able to remix IPs and directly monetize both the IP owners as

well as the communities who sort of remix the content. One of the central product components of IP World is our UGC feature where we basically reward people for in this case being able to create their own sort of pingpong mascot content and being paid in the token for doing so. Uh but but one thing I also want to make clear is our product did work as expected. For anyone who knows anything about IP World, everything hinges upon the moment our IP gets verified and that's when you get the blue check mark on the platform. Until the IP is verified, all of the token allocation, all of the fees are locked

and untouchable and there is no officiation of the IP. And so what happened was we got public endorsement for the token and it's right before the IP claim happened that the co-founder decided to go radio silent as the token dropped and the claim was never able to be processed. But in a perfect world, what would have happened is following his endorsement, we would have gotten that claim and we would have unlocked all those IP owner fees, allocations, and UGC rewards. Uh but unfortunately, that that isn't how it played out.

>> Well, we got by the dip and hodddle saying in red we trust. We got PeeP saying go red. So you got some people out here showing some love. Appreciate I'm curious, you know, looking forward now that this is behind us, what what what is the future of IP World's platform? How do you kind of bounce back from this and make this a win? How do you turn this into a win? >> Yeah. I mean, I I really believe this is also such a a strong case study for for for our platform because like the whole reason we started this is like I truly believe if you want to open the floodgates of retail into like memecoin land, you have to solve the IP misalignment issue. Like it was literally last, you know, November, October, seeing what happened with

Peanut and Chill guy that I really noticed something big, which is people really intuitively understand investing in culture. But this licensing misalignment issue, this IP misalignment issue, that's the blockade. Like, I completely disagree with everyone who thinks memecoins are over. I think we're just missing that retail unlock. And it's so clear to me that IP is that unlock. And this is just another huge example showcasing how rigid and fragile and opaque these web 2 licensing structures are and how even the biggest global brands, they still have these private IP misalignment issues that no

one can possibly know about except the few internal, you know, folks who are doing all these deals. And and so what I really got from this is we're just going to make our platform a h 100 times better. There's so many things we learned from this process. Even though the product worked as intended, we can increase visibility of the claiming process so much more. We can educate users so much more about the power that the claim entails. And we can even do small things like during the claim process going forward. We're gonna allow people to put every single minute detail that they can, including, you know, who is the IP owner? Is it a lency? Is it

the actual original creator? These are all points of feedback that we're taking from this to make our platform 100 times better. And you know, it really sucks because we've worked on this for a year. I put my blood, heart, soul, and tears into this. Our team has stayed up countless nights not sleeping only for this first legitimate big Korean IP launch to kind of screw everything over because the co-founder decided to drop out last minute for whatever reason despite giving us all this endorsement, you know, but for us, we're just going to move on. We're going to make the platform a 100 times better. and we're going to do our best job getting much better IPs, making sure the verification and claims are as transparent as

possible and making sure communities get better opportunities in the future. >> Beautiful Red, I appreciate that. No, I think I think that you're right in in in the sense that there is a clear lesson here about the which actually serves the entire uh like it it it beautifully explains the the reason why the IP world exists and why this entire idea and concept is even needed and in this case it's unfortunate that it had to happen in this way but that's what it is. Steve Jobs from Twitter is asking, "Is IP World working with lawyers to hold Pingfong responsible? I don't want you to say anything that you can't say. Be careful here." What is actually

happening right now behind the scenes to to, you know, rectify the situation? >> Yeah. So, you know, besides just doing our best to move the product forward and and, you know, try our best to get the best IPs on board to to make sure everything's as transparent as smooth as possible going forward. You know, our legal council does say there are grounds for suing for public misrepresentation. That is the truth. You can't officially endorse a project as the face of the company only to backtrack the next day.

You know, it's it's really gross misconduct in my opinion. And we do expect accountability to be made at the top of the leadership funnel. >> Appreciate that, Red. Looking forward for you now. You know, I I I kind of talked about this a a bit, but what are you going to go and build next? What what what's coming for the platform? What feature sets? I know that you you talked about some of the vision that could have happened here, you know, but outside of just this case, what's coming next for IP World? How are you guys going to uh um you know, make it make the end of the year a strong end of the year?

>> Yeah. So, I think, you know, the good thing that comes out of this is we're we're more motivated than ever. We had a huge timeline prepared. The biggest two features are one, we're completely revamping um our IP verification process to be way more elaborate, to be way more transparent, to add more details to the claiming process and to make it as abundantly clear as possible that the claim is the point at which the IP does become officiated. So on a UX point of view, we're making huge improvements there. The second one is going to be the UGC feature that I mentioned, which is the ultimate goal for our platform is to

align I align IP owners and community members. And you know, it's disappointing because this was a vision that we shared with Ping Fong's co-founder, but I still believe in it and we're going to do our best to get there. a world where both IP owners and community members equally get rewarded for producing content around marketing the IP. However, the most exciting feature that I haven't revealed to anyone yet is we will also be tackling the streaming world. We don't think streaming is the main feature for any of these launchpads. I still think UGC is the powerhouse, but it is a new form of marketing that we think we can uniquely

nail because we understand DGEN product mindset very well as well as retail product mindset. And so that's something you can expect by the end of the year that uniquely will be nailed by IP World. >> Wow. Look at that. Wow. Okay. So, let's talk a little bit a little bit more about that. what what what part of IP world makes streaming more powerful than other kind of platforms or just what new idea can be brought to streaming due to the setup of IP world?

>> Yeah, so I kind of think of streaming a bit differently than I think Pump does. I don't sort of think about it as the main feature value ad for our platform. I still believe the main mission that we want to evangelize is this sort of like making IP owners the protagonists and giving them a way to work and cooperate with their community to best build their IP as best as possible. And so I think of streaming as one avenue for sort of marketing that. I kind of think about it in the same way I think about UGC. You can think of UGC or usergenerated

content as a way of having users create short form content and using it to market their IP. I think streaming is just an extension of that. It's just longer form video content. And so I sort of see these two things as two ways to get to the same end goal, which is building a new way of evangelizing IPs with community endorsement. But you can think of IP World's angle as almost like an app package of different sort of marketing tools. Whether it be, you know, Tik Tok clipping, whether it be streaming, whether it be building your own Shopify marketplace, that's how we

see IP World. And I really think our branding and our team is uniquely capable of building this out the right way. >> Beautiful. Red. Red. I mean, I guess just one last thing, like what was the what was the lessons that you took from this experience? Like what would you do differently going forward or or what were some of the key learnings from this as a young guy in business? Kind of, you know, what what did this experience show you? >> Yeah, I I think the biggest lesson that I have from this is you have to exercise incredible due diligence with every step of the legal review process. you know, despite co-founder endorsement by Pink Fong, despite approval by the actual

company with a green lit term sheet to execute this launch, there were still private licensing issues that we could not have foreseen. And that's why we are now making our verification process 100 times more strict. Even if we get this green light, even if we get this public evangelization, we want to make it abundantly clear that until the official IP owner claims on our platform with their official, you know, social account, nothing can be deemed completely legitimate. That's why a right way of thinking about this is until the claim is made, it's almost like you're speculating in a prediction

market kind of manner that the IP owner is ultimately going to claim. And once that's done, then the grounds are solidified. I mean, look, I I think doing due diligence is always something that people uh sometimes you just overlook it, whether it's a mistake or just in a rush or excitement and you know, these things happen and then and then you don't ever do it again. So, exactly. >> You know, it's a it's it's a learning experience for sure. Um, Redman, I don't have much else for you. Any just closing thoughts from your end about where things are headed for IP world? Um, and you know, kind of what your just, you know, closing thoughts here, man. Yeah, man. I appreciate that. I mean, honestly, man, like we we really do think this incident was was gross

misconduct on, you know, the co-founder of Ping Pong's side, but I think it it also in in a way is proof that this system works and it's proof why these IP guard rails are needed. We are only going to grow 1,000 times from here. We're not going to stop till we, you know, perfect this infrastructure and build the ultimate decentralized breeding grounds for IP monetization uh and remixing and you know honestly community is everything and you know our users are the bread and butter of our product and without you know their trust none of this can happen and and that's why you know I just want to express so much you know frustration but also empathy for all the users who got

screwed over from this But I want to say we are going to put our life's work into making this better and rectifying the situation and providing the best launches, the best experience, and the best app in the ecosystem. >> Thank you, Red. See you soon, man. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, man. Appreciate you. >> Good luck. All right, boss, man. >> Peace. >> All righty, guys. Um, that was Red from IP World. Um, crazy crazy crazy situation. I would not want to be in that situation. It sounds really unfortunate for the guys. But look, I believe him. I, you know, I think he's uh I think he's an honest guy. I think he's uh I think he wants the best. I think that he's actually a good hard builder and it's just a really

unfortunate circumstance here uh from just the these people who basically backed out last minute. So, um yeah, guys, I think there's uh somebody in the chat is saying, "Wip wrote any sort of IP partnerships with leaders outside of Korea. Next big partnerships." Sorry, Steve Jobs. We'll get to that one next time. Um, WIP World, WPP, thanks for tuning in. All right, guys. I'm going to pull back up on some news, check out what's going on in in the latest here. Uh, and then probably sign off here. So, let me let me just pull this up and we will check in on our favorite news channel, Yahoo Finance. Let's get some music playing in the background.

All right, we are back up and live. Government shutdown is looming. That's okay. Um, let's go ahead and pull this up. >> Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. >> This is crazy. This is crazy. This is Bitcoin. This is important, guys. >> Also, gold higher. I mean, you've got gold that's been higher because of the Fed easing. >> Yes, the Fed easing, but also everyone realizing that fiat is dead, >> shut down. So, you're seeing gold going higher. Silver as well. Silver's going to hit alltime highs. Ben Cohen >> outperformer this year.

>> It's calling for 52 53 and then a pullback. >> Wall Street. Yes, it may be overextended right now, but Wall Street is still saying >> this lady's so bullish. >> It does have room to run. It's going to go on a multi-year probably a decade long rally has started a couple years ago. >> The denominator is going to zero >> right now. Gold has made 38 alltime highs this year. That is massive. You also have as I mentioned central banks but look there's been also uh a graph that's been circulating through uh Twitter as well that central bank holdings have topped US treasuries for the first time since 1996 in so bullish value the US reserves for gold

>> this chick is fired up in today's value >> I guess Tom make sense of this move in gold for us uh is it something if you're not long >> come on Tom >> do you Get long. >> Tell us about your Boomer Boomer gold bug bags. I'm bullish. >> Yeah, I'd be hesitant to do that. Gold is very volatile. It's going to give you an >> Oh, gold is not volatile, Tom. >> At the highs, but I think >> take a look at my portfolio, Tom. >> Really makes a lot of sense. I mean, if I at the beginning of the year were to write you a script >> for what could make gold go higher, it would be a weaker dollar, general geopolitical instability, >> confusion over US trade and general domestic policy which is making people sort of shun traditional investments and

go and gold, right? Bitcoin, I know it's dipped recently. Yes, Toming well also consistently elevated inflation. I mean, this is the environment where gold should be doing well. It is doing well, but like all things and especially gold because it's volatile. It can't go straight up forever. So, >> no, Tom, it's going to pull back a bit. I think I would wait. It'll give you a better entry point. >> Yeah, I agree. In 2026, it'll probably give us a better entry point. I agree. >> Surprise a lot of folks. >> I agree with that, Tom. Got a good take uh not break >> Bitcoin. Look at that green on the day.

Everything looks good, guys. We're going to take a little break here. We're going to go full screen on the Yahoo uh finance and I'll be back in a second, guys. See you guys in a sec. I'll come back and we'll we'll talk about some more news in a sec. Let's go full screen here, guys. Welcome back to Yahoo Finance. I'm Ally

Canal live at the NASDAQ. Let's turn now to some of today's top analyst calls on Wall Street. First up, Morgan Stanley turning more bullish on the big banks. The firm rates price targets for large US banks by a median 14%, setting street highs for Bank of America, City, and State Street while downgrading Wells Fargo and US Bank Corp to equal weight from overweight. Analysts said they're rolling their valuation year forward to 2027, expecting M&A and capital markets activity to return to long-term averages as rate cuts support loan demand. New targets include $66 for Bank of America, 129 for City, 162 for State Street, and 854 for Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley

also upgraded midcap lenders to attractive, pointing to a stronger backdrop as the yield curve steepens. Next up, shares of Electronic Arts jumping after confirming a deal to go private. Silverlake Partners is Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, and Infinity Partners, which is run by President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, will acquire EA for $210 a share, valuing the company at about 55 billion. The deal is expected to close in early 2027, pending shareholder approval, with CEO Andrew Wilson staying on. Ahead of the announcement, Wedbush downgraded EA to neutral from outperform and set a $200 price target, roughly reflecting the deal value. Analyst Alisa

Ree noted noted that the downgrade is a reflection of limited upside now that a buyout appears likely. She still sees fiscal 2026 as a pivotal year with Battlefield expected to drive growth and margins higher, but says that going private could help VA build out its mobile business and live service revenue. Finally, Comcast shares in focus after Bank of America cut its price target to 36 bucks and kept a neutral rating. The firm now expects broadband losses of about 120,000. That's slightly better than its previous estimate, helped by seasonality and mobile growth. Media earnings should also get a lift from the timing of Peacock's NFL game. While Park's revenue remains pressured as Epic Universe ramps

up, separately, Comcast named Mike Kavanaaugh as co-CEO of the company, he's set to join longtime chief Brian Roberts. Keep it right here on Yahoo Finance. We'll be tracking all the market moves throughout the session. Now, time for some of today's trending tickers. We're watching media stocks, Beyond Meat, and Kroger and Door Dash. First up, we got media stocks. were watching the sector as President Trump threatens 100% tariffs on any movies made outside of the US. He first floated the idea on tariffing foreign films in May, causing shares in US media giants at the time like Netflix and Warner Brothers and Disney to slump. The um untested idea received strong push back from the entertainment industry. It's

not clear how such a tariff would work nor how films would be valued for duty collection purposes. Those shares are mixed today. Next up, Beyond Meat. The plant-based meat producer plunging after making debt holders an offer that will erase more than $800 million of debt, but also most of the stock's value. 47% of the company's convertible note holders have already agreed to replace them with new bonds and common and in kind. That means Beyond Meat will be able to pay interest with additional debt rather than in cash. The company is now asking other creditors to take up the offer. The proposition comes as Beyond Meat grapples with weakening consumer demand for plant-based meat alternatives in the US. Finally, Door Dash and Kroger, the delivery app and grocery store, are expanding their

partnership. Starting this week, Door Dash will offer delivery from Kroger's 2,700 US stores. Since 2022, Door Dash was delivering sushi sushi from 900 Kroger stores and flowers from 1,700 of them. But starting October 1st, Kroger's full assortment will be available to Door Dash customers. Both of those stocks higher Door Dash by more. You can scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks with Yahoo Finance's trending tickers page. Coming up, much more markets action, including a deep dive into the FX market. You're watching Market Catalyst.

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offer both an ETF and a mutual fund of the same strategy. Well, I think that the the big question here is what's the right thing for the end investor and we work with the financial professional play a part and the economies of scale

are bringing together I think will ultimately benefit the end investor and so we're all here to serve the end investor in the end of the day and trying to understand what they want is important but once you get that I think that will move things in the right direction. >> Gerard final question to you will the ETF class be cheaper? ETFs are of course uh have been taking market share from mutual funds because of their cost and the ease of trading. >> Yeah, Dimensional has taken a unique approach to that in my view which is for a similar asset allocation, similar set of services, we charge a similar fee and you can see that for our standalone ETFs and our sister mutual funds. So our expectation is that the expense ratio should not be the thing that drives your decision about what vehicle to use. The

tax efficiency should not be the decision to drive uh the input into the decision what vehicle to use. It should start with the investment proposition. >> Leo, I'm going to hop on. So go ahead and just do the uh screen share with me on the left. >> And we think that we've achieved that with our ETF complex and our mutual fund complex. This pushes us down that path even further. uh where dimensionals investment proposition is what drives the buying decision and then we have a lot of that you can choose what's the right vehicle for you >> based on your circumstances >> what's going on here thank you so much for joining us >> what's going on here and co-CIO of Dimensional Fund Advisors I also want to thank Katie Griffel and Eric Vrunis who stayed over from ETFQ

now coming up on Bloomberg markets electronic arts just hit the high score in dealing selling for a record breaking 5 billion in the biggest leverage buyout ever. This is Bloomberg. >> Whoa. Look at that. Private at 55 billion. My god. Wow. >> All righty, guys. I'm going to probably sign off here. I just want to watch a little bit more Bloomberg. >> Sorry about this. >> All right, guys. Perfect for any playbook. Call your own plays and drive a new Rogue just 319 a month or lease a new Ultima. Only 339 a month. Don't wait for the twoinut warning. Get here now and save today at

Crown Nissan online becomes a consumer-driven drug and that could be a big deal with maybe more out of pocket costs. Um then I think it's just expansion of the indications. So >> oh my gosh, these weight loss things are crazy, man. I was at this outdoor gym these drugs. >> And this this girl I overheard she's like, "Oh my god, she's on ompic back in the States." It's crazy. So there's a totality of a benefit that I think the category I feel like has a lot of growth still left for sure. >> How how well Jeff do these drugs work? I asked because you have so many headlines and reports and studies is act it's it's tough to keep up. I mean weight loss, but then you know you have concerns

about muscle loss that are out there. What do we know? So what we know is you know between uh Novo and Eli Lily uh the drugs the injectable drugs and it's a simple once a week injection it's with a a pen subcutaneous you know very very much painless uh at the low end you know it's something like 12 or 13% at the upper end it's 20% and that's the data and that's probably the real world experience as well uh could be you know I know probably it's not going to be much more than 20 uh the oral drugs are maybe slightly less potent you'll call it 10 to 12%. But the key thing here is that these drugs are very well tolerated. That is one of the whole world

>> concerns for investors and and really and patients is you know nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, a lot of the GI side effects. Is is that going to be kind of a deal breaker when you think about how long a patient could be on these drugs? As it turns out in the real world, you know, they're they're better. They're better than what we saw. >> All right. See you later, buddy. >> Patients start off at a very low. We're going to get you off the screen here. We're just going to We're going to come to a close. >> We're going to talk crypto. >> Um we're not going to be talking uh drugs anymore, buddy. >> Sorry about that.

All righty, guys. Thank you for being a part of the show today. Uh it was a fun fun fun show. We had a great interviews and then I got to experiment with my new new uh kind of uh tech here. So, uh, as you can tell, guys, the show going forward is going to be more dynamic. It's going to have more feature sets like this, and we're just going to be scaling this entire kind of part of the show up. So, yeah, guys, stoked to stoked to be here today. We we have a busy week of people in token in Singapore. Uh, should be a good week for them. Thank you for being here. Thanks for being a part of the Rollup TV. See you guys tomorrow. Peace.