The Rollup TV: Our Next Chapter

Transcript

Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat [Music] up here.

Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat.

Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, Heat.

Heat. Heat. N. [Applause] [Music] Okay, let's go. >> Happy Friday, >> Carlos Domingo. >> Special guest unleashed. First second of the stream.

>> Carlos D. All right, guys. Happy Friday. Welcome to back to the rollup. Check out the the new look, the new logo. Little Shout out to Brendan for that. Um, shout out to the uh people out in Florida. Rob, I'm in Hawaii. You're in Florida. Happy morning. Good morning. Uh, banger stream today. We've got a ton of great guests. And we've just unveiled our new brand. So, I put out this entire uh thread just kind of talking about how we're viewing this market. Um, and really just kind of what the details of this brand is. And you know, it goes from 119 days ago, we made a leap to lead our industry into streaming. Why we

did this, you know, this this gravity shift of podcasting to streaming, the advantages of streaming, you know, real-time content, more fun, shorter time commitment, closer to the audience, all competing for this kind of attention. Um, then we saw clips. We saw these really get, you know, hot, get picked up. A lot of people want to do clips and then we got into uh kind of where we want to go next. We got two-way interactions, these new shows. Shout out to our new shows. >> Oh yeah.

>> Organization show with Polygon, stable coin show with Fracks, AI show with Near. >> And we got into the next 100 days, what we're trying to do uh and how this is just such a fast industry that just keeps moving. And yeah, I mean guys, we're stoked on this. It's going to be a fun couple of months at the rollup coming up. >> I'll tell you what I'm most excited about with respect to these new shows and that is speaking to those beyond the crypto Twitter echo chamber. Um, you know, we were going back and forth a little bit on the announcement and how we wanted to position this and frame this and we positioned it, I think, accurately as the world's biggest categories.

>> These are emerging technologies. These are finance and technological innovations that span countries, continents, industries. And we can no longer just refer to this as our industry or our sector or category. This is about the most innovative things that are happening in multiple industries and really some of the most emergent and impactful technologies that are happening in the world. That means that we're going to be talking to some of the most important people and influential people in the world. And that's what I'm really really excited about. Um, >> yeah, our boy Ilia just quote tweeted, "Don't miss the rollup co scaling to AI." That's going to be an awesome show.

We're on the road to Jensen Hong. I'm telling you right now, if Jensen Hang gets wind of this, uh, we are coming for you, man. We are coming straight for you. Jensen Hong is coming on the rollup at some point very very soon. If you're seeing this Jensen Hong, if you're reading this, >> Jensen Hong, he's coming on. We're going to get some awesome AI guests on that show. And I think we're gunning for Larry Frink on tokenization side of things and that type of uh of uh guest in these niche topics.

>> Dude, what a brand. Dude, the brand was getting kind of stale. the new kind of sex appeal look to it. Man, it just looks sick. >> I like the chrome. Shout out the new designer that we have working at the rollup. There's a whole team behind the scenes. I mean, we've scaled not just operationally, but the entire team, I think we've added almost doubled our size, and a lot of these are sort of part-time, but you know, onboarding now. And a lot of them have proven to be super super helpful and we couldn't we couldn't do it without them. Uh, so I'm >> Yeah, I mean I think in my in my post, dude, I put like >> Did you put everyone like Andy, Rob, Alex Zach Nero Leo Justin Alion Maria, Jezel, Marcelo, I I missed Brendan, and maybe N. So I mean, yeah,

teams up. I mean, dude, don't even talk to me about uh the the expense column, >> man. I uh >> capex. I saw a clip of the replet CEO talking about like what is not commoditizable in the era of AI. >> Um and it's entrepreneurship and I think you know these are some of the problems that we face on a day-to-day basis like yeah cooking doubling the team size and it's like oh where's the hole in the ship capex is growing quite a bit and uh >> you listen to that voice memo last night I was pretty I was >> I was I was >> you were you were you were thinking the waves were >> I was elevated. Yeah. And uh and such is uh the nature of being an entrepreneur,

right? These are the things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis and we balance and uh we try to make sure that we run the most virtuous company uh that we can and as a result everything is in order balanced harmonious. >> Congrats on the new brand, dude. >> Congrats. It's a team effort >> and congrats on getting paid. I think I feel like our announcement was like, "Yeah, these guys are getting paid. Cool." But um I mean we have a lot of work to to do honestly with these shows. Like I think a big part of what we're trying to accomplish here is like really get closer to the audience. So like we you know in that tweet I wrote about 2A interactions that's going to be a technical lift. you know, we we really just want to figure out how we go from

uh you know, you know, go from basically this kind of like one-way show to like this more indicative or like this more interactive two-way interaction. So hopefully hopefully some of that tech technical lift isn't too too long and strenuous. But I think even just even in the immediate term, it's just going to be a more a a better looking brand, more more uh brand appeal, better visual identity, uh and just kind of just generally more locked in. So let's talk about the amazing lineup that we have today. We've got John Woo, the founder of 40 IQ. Uh John is a a interesting fellow. I spoke to him on the first time in Austria when I was there this year. I

was actually just on the phone with him. Uh and we were speaking about kind of just the general just the a lot of the kind of media marketing uh shenanigans that have been going on. And so John Rue runs 40 IQ which is a really cool uh founder brand and I think we can talk to him about that. Um really just kind of like pushing on the idea of founder ghostwriting, go to market brand storytelling. Um, and yeah, I mean it's pretty bullish. Like it's like they they have a really good brand and a good company and they help a lot of these early stage founders. So I'm stoked on that, Rob. And then we got a couple others as well. Oh yeah, stoked lineup as always. Um, pretty excited. Uh, tons

to talk about. So we are going to go through it and I think there's plenty to talk about. Um, another thing that I'm excited about is some of the institutional uh, data that we can hear from the guys later on. Uh, we may have a special guest that we dropped a little bit too early in the show due to the headlines, but we're we're going to keep that a secret for the rest of the show. But we also have, uh, Adam who is confirmed from RWA.XYZ. He's been sending us a ton of really great data. Anyone can check out RWAXYZ.

They were actually included in our announcement this morning because we're going to start to include a lot more of their data on the show. We're going to build out these overlays tokenization stream with Polygon. Money moves fast is going to showcase a lot of the data and a lot of that is going to come from RWA.xyz. So, we're excited about all of our data partnerships as well as uh our show sponsors. So yeah, shout out to >> shout out to Polygon. Shout out to Frack. Shout out to Near and some other ones that we're, you know, kind of cooking up. We've got quite a bit in the tank for you guys. We got John Woo in the back. We're gonna get him up. John, welcome to the show. Congrats on all your success before IQ. Thank you for joining us last minute, sir.

>> Yo, appreciate it, guys. Good to see you, Robbie. Good to see you, >> man. I was telling a story like we had the I was in Austria in January this year. We we first connected. I was in like this kind of like high high tension state. Uh and and I mean you just had a lot of really good things to say and and uh you know stuff to bring to my attention and also just kind of chat on. So just appreciate your time today >> dude. Of course excited to be here on such a momentous day for the rollup. >> Oh appreciate that man. It's been a lot of fun and uh we're we're accelerating and uh I am glad that you are here to be part of that acceleration. Uh, first thing I wanted to ask you about was 40IQ is such a such a phenomenal and and

ironic name. It just just right off the bat it it it captures you. So, how did that come to be? How did you how did you think and invent 40 IQ? >> Man, it's so funny because like when I came up with the name, you know, obviously everyone knows it comes from the Midwit meme and I was just thinking about all the times that I've been a Midwit in my life and it's just like just overthinking, right? And like there's actually this idea, have you guys ever heard of this idea of like magical thinking? >> Yeah. >> The magical thinking >> basically magical thinking is this idea that if you think hard enough about something that like your reality will change. And like it's obviously not the way the world works. But I think like especially if you're smart, like you you kind of just are like, "Oh well, I've

always been praised for my brain or I got hired for my brain and so my brain's so powerful that I can shift the world around me." And just like in 99% of cases that's not true. So I actually wrote a manifesto that I never published. But you guys are making me think I need to do it which is just like the Dow of 40 IQ like the way to just be you know almost thoughtlessly in action. >> Um I like I went pretty deep on the Bavagita a little while ago. It's this Hindu text epic poem and it's basically just like >> how do you do things effortlessly? And that mean that doesn't mean be effortless. That doesn't mean do nothing. That means like how do you do stuff without overthinking it? And so I've been trying to let that guide my life. And um man, I have so many friends

who are effortless in action and really successful and they don't overthink things. I have also friends who are, you know, just caught in magical thinking and just like if I just think hard enough, like my life will improve. So that's what 40 IQ is about. Um it started because I realized that founders have such amazing stories and if they could just let themselves tell it without overthinking it. Just be like just be yourself, which is the hardest thing in the world, right? To have just the courage to just exist. I mean, they would just crush. And um yeah, that that was really that was it. >> Reminds me of the flow state, right? Get into it.

>> Exactly. Exactly. How do you not overthink it? Exactly. >> Right. And so 40IQ is is not quite a VC firm in in in the traditional sense. You guys are a little bit more boutiquey, right? So, you know, helping founders tell their stories. How how do you do this and kind of help share your philosophy of just letting it you know letting founders kind of effortlessly do their thing? Are are there tactics generally? How have you seen maybe you can share some success cases with us? >> Yeah, the the initial um idea behind 40 IQ was actually just a very simple format that a lot of people use. And by the way, I encourage you if you if you're listening and you work for a company out there, go try this with your founder or if you're a founder, go try this with your team. We should just sit

there and just talk, just ramble, just talk about what what's on your mind. Every time when I edit people's writing, and and one of my favorite things in the world is editing people's writing. If something's confusing to me, I always ask the person, "What are you trying to say here?" And inevitably, they then say what they're meaning to say much more eloquently than they did when they wrote it. So, I'm like, "Okay, why is there a delta between what's going on in your head and what you have down on paper? Oh, well, I'm not supposed to just say that. I'm not supposed to like write in this way that's like too colloquial." And a lot of our job is just to challenge founders to be like, why not? Why can't you just say that? Because like, man, we are in the slop era. You guys know this. Everything's being

generated right now. Everything's converging on 100 IQ. Like even the way the models are trained is it's almost definitionally 100 IQ. It's like the plurality majority way of thinking about things. And so your own vibe and like your unique take on the world is the most important thing. And so we extract that from the interview. You know, we draft content for founders. That's the ghostwriting side of the business. But we've we've evolved. We've become much more than that. We're a more comprehensive comm's agency now. And uh we've been focusing a lot more on announcements recently. And announcements like another good example of what my mission is in crypto over the course of the next months and years is like man there's so much competence out there outside the crypto world. We're stuck in our little bubble of like marketers marketing marketing and like

you know the conference circuit and like we just we just all the world is and it's not man like you know having been a generalist now for a while and having invested in in companies that are outside crypto including note which is this really sick nicotine company if you haven't heard of um I just met with the founder morning >> I need some of that >> dude I I will ship you some um they're amazing companies started by these two guys Alex and Eric out of Sweden they were ex- Philip Morris Of course, Swedish, >> they sent me the Swedish House Mafia show last night. It was super super fun. Um, but like man, they're doing amazing things around consumer awareness and triing and sampling and retail and point of sale that, you know, it's not always onetoone with crypto, but there's just so much we can learn from outside of our

industry. So, you know, announcements is a really good example of that. We published an open playbook, you know, that on a on a thread that went viral a couple weeks ago, which is just like just follow this check checklist, you know, and just this is how you should execute your announcement. Get a project manager, execute it perfectly. Um, I want to open source like best practice from around, you know, go to market, not just but outside of it, and just be like, look, I want to be the best repository for open knowledge that that there could possibly be around go to market. And then if you still need help with that, like you should call us and we can work together. But man, we just shouldn't be in the dark ages compared to every other industry on earth in terms of how to do the basics. Totally

agree. I mean, that's kind of how we feel about this whole stream concept is like, all right, we're just going to go start streaming daily with really high quality, get clips going, get get it going in other markets, and just try like like we just got to catch up here. Like you know it's been it's been a process of doing that because of the like the incentives have been you know the incentives have allowed mediocrity in the industry for a while which is like a result of like probably just overinvestment or just zer in in you know the 2020 era but I think we're like we're really getting into like the practical era I'm calling it for the tech and it really feels like it's like the grown-up era for everything else in the industry. So, I'm glad that you bring that up and I'm sure your process

has changed as well o over like the last couple years even just seeing kind of what works, right? Because you get all these different narrative and metas and strategies, but really it just moves really quickly in the space, you know, like uh in my post today it was like, okay, you know, we started streaming about, you know, four months ago. Today, there's probably 12 crypto streams. Yep. >> You know, clipping we started really aggressively, you know, right after. Now clipping is like not that we started this whole thing but like these things have a shelf life and you just got to keep innovating and so you know I feel like that's probably a big part of your business too. I mean the your your edge just gets eroded so fast like in everything right but I think in 2025 like things are moving so rapidly

there's access to global talent like man I even think about the boomers it's like they had no competition like the world was literally bombed out there was no competition like people were like literally in poverty in Asia just trying to survive and like now there's global competition it's like you have to constantly maintain your edge and so I think the only way to maintain that edge is to have a great team and a great culture and like whatever you have today man you better iterate it tomorrow because it's going away. >> Does a really good job now on socials with >> capitalizing on a unique edge. Take, you know, really any meta and they change so fast, but take like prediction markets has kind of held up as of late. Like who in the prediction market space these days is is really just been able to find

some place unique in which they then they can tell their story. Any anyone stick out? >> I mean honestly, one of the guys that like I admire so much is John Wang. Everyone knows him obviously as a couchi now and like I I saw him posting about prediction markets and I'm like man he's about to make a big announcement. I don't know what it is, but like nobody nobody talks that much about one thing without having something up their sleeve. And like lo and behold, but I think he's one of the few like him, Thicky thought, some of the other like smart traders. Like there are some of the only people who are able to put out high engaging long form content right now because look, I made my bones in 2021 writing like Twitter explainers.

Like back in my day, you know, it was like there just wasn't that much competition. It's like if you were a smart person and you were willing to spend three or four hours writing about something, like nobody else had the attention to do that. And on on the flip side, there was more than enough attention span to consume that level of content because the alpha was in the technical it was technical alpha. It was if I understand the protocol better than someone else, then I know how to play it. I know how to kind of play the yield, etc. It's just not the case anymore, right? And like people don't have people don't really have the the the attention span for that. And so every time I see someone writing long form that engages, I'm like, they have to have some kind of weird secret sauce

because even my long form doesn't really engage anymore. I don't know if it's because I've lost my edge, but I mean, John Wang's just an all-time goat. Um, yeah, he's he's one of the best. >> Yeah. I don't mean to I don't I don't mean to clip farm you too hard here, but like when you're looking at founders, is there any like specific moment in past history where there was a founder who did a a marketing stunt or a marketing tactic either that was part of 40 IQ's like brand and strategy and like your client or just that you witnessed that was like an astounding move and that you were like wow there is a lot of like that was just something that was extremely well done very well executed and we have, you know, something to learn from that. Is there

anything that you can draw on in the last year or maybe even two years? >> You know, one thing that's like controversial and I don't know if it worked for them, but was like the story rage bait. It seemed to work, it seemed to kind of work like and that was >> the bar chain like real build something real thing >> that was Yeah, that was all engineered as I'm sure you know like dude anytime you see that's any like if I were to say one thing to founders out there like there's no such thing as organic guys. There's no such thing as organic. like you're putting something out there and you're like expecting it to go viral. Like maybe it'll happen, but like I pretty much tweet as like, you know, part-time job. And I'm like, I don't even go viral that often. I've probably

gotten over a thousand likes. I've only done it a couple times in the last month, maybe like three or four times. And I'm thinking about this all the time. I'm thinking about it all the time. So most of the time when you see some narrative, some meta, it's not organic. Like people are working really hard on it. So, I thought Story actually did a kind of weirdly good job kind of setting that like me against you. Again, did it work for them? I mean, it felt like it worked for the token for a while. Um, you know, I think that one kind of weirdly stands out for me. Not again, the attention it got was wellcraftrafted and well engineered.

Forgetting whether it was rage bait, forgetting whether you agree with it or not, like every time I see good execution, you can just tell that it's good execution. Sometimes you see founders put stuff out there and you're like, "Man, you should be getting a lot of attention. You have great tech. You have a great story. Maybe you're compelling as a person, but you just had poor execution on the back end." That's what you hate to see. You know, it's like that's what I wish I didn't see out of crypto. And like that's why anytime I see founders get really salty about somebody else who's like clearly less talented than them, worse tech, blah blah blah, getting more attention, and they're like, "Ah, everything's such a scam. This is blah blah blah." Dude, the world is still a meritocracy. It just might not be a meritocracy around the

things that you care about. Like the smartest person doesn't always win. The best technology doesn't always win. >> Sometimes you got to get good at some of the other stuff. You know, >> John, is there a meta right now in founder marketing that is working better than others in today's crypto market? We're in a very like show me the money market. like show me the revenue. Show me the buyback. Show me the adoption. Show me the institutional sales. Show me that you're actually just doing something and not just literally a you know worthless kind of token if you will to be very blunt. What is like from from the founder comms you know maybe it's a better question if we ask like let's say you're somewhat in like the pre-revenue pre-product kind of like you know segment. Is there some is there some kind of founder marketing that's

working? or if you're in a more advanced segment, is there a founder marketing strategy that's working? Like just generally like what are you seeing for the founders out there that want to have a quick couple tips to improve their marketing that's working today? Is it a certain medium? Is it a certain platform? Is it a certain thought process? What's the what do what do our founders need to know for >> here's a tip that's gonna annoy a lot of people because it doesn't it's it's like it's it's like it doesn't make for a good tweet but it's like if you look at the way the algorithm works right the way the algorithm works is it basically assigns every single person to a community so it's basically a highdimensional vector space like technical founders will probably know more about this than me if you read the

GitHub but basically it assigns like a vector to like the shape of your account based on the people who like your account and so depending on who likes your account that's like the shape of this like very high dimensional vector and then based on your affinity between your vector and a community that's like basically which assign community you get assigned to and the way that you get distribution within the community is that the pillars within that community the people who hold it up right the Andes and Robbies of the world and crypto whatever you know it's like whatever community pillars they engage with your content and so it's really important to get the like pillars of the community to engage now how can you do that right a lot of people want the like easy like I'm behind my laptop and I can just like click some buttons to do it.

And here's my like kind of like difficult take is like no, I think you should go have dinner with like every single one of those people. And so like I kind of think my best tip for you is like once you create that affinity circle of just like here are the 10 people I know are really important for my protocol. Make that list. First of all, the number of founders who have that list is like zero as far as I can tell. Sometimes I'll work with founders and I'll be like, "Do you have your investors like on a telegram?" And they're like, "No, should I?" And I'm like, "That's insane to me." But like yes, you should have that. You should have the people that you want to retweet you. You should be I I I would say you should be militantly making friends, right? And not like in an

annoying way, but like hang out with the people who like you, you know, live your life. Like have fun. If there's somebody that you enjoy meeting at a conference, be friends with them. Invite them to dinner, but like if you create close personal affinity with that person, that person's far more likely to engage with you on the internet. It sounds so obvious. And so kind of one of my best tips is like if you go to a conference and you're not hosting a dinner with some of your friends, I'm like you got to get on that. Not only is it just fun, but like you're going to support each other, you're going to get in a group at the end of the day. And that plays out on the algorithm. That's not just like a vibes thing. Like if you read the algorithm, that's the way it works. So

go go out there and militantly make friends. >> It's actually important to touch grass and do it collectively with people. Like we we've said this before like handshakes are so rare to actually face tof face meeting people is so rare in this space because everyone is terminally online and so that is a level a step function if everyone else is on the playing field of just being online >> and you have to become uncancellable. Dude, I've never been mean to someone internet that I've met before. I mean I try really hard not to be mean on the internet. You should pro everyone should probably try not to be mean on the internet.

>> Really? you're going to go dunk on someone that you had a drink. Like someone kind of dunked on me the other day that I've had a cocktail with. And I DM'd him and I was like, "Bro, what's going on?" Like, we had a dude. Yeah. >> What's happening here? Like that was so like in violation of my expectation. >> I mean, people will be mean on socials and then you get in front of them in real life and it's like it's a completely different world. So, but I think that's a really good tip though. It's like like I I've I've experienced this like you get you know you just shake the hand talk for a bit in in in person and then you know you can call in favors like even on today's announcement. I mean I'm not going to lie like I texted some of the most

influential people in crypto media before and I was like hey like this is what I'm doing just like check it out if you're interested. And lo and behold I got Yano commenting on I got the Delelfy CEO engaging it. We got Far coming on later. It's just kind of like a a thing. But without that like actual, you know, yeah, that first step uh of getting in person, then then I think you're right. Now, now I'm I'm curious what you think about this streaming clip kind of video meta that we're seeing from like the attention spans deteriorating across the board in media across all content vectors. the fight for your attention being more aggressive than ever causing you know higher thumbnail extravaganzas and to try to get better CTRs and you

know all these things like from the pure media perspective what is your take on this evolution of uh I suppose short form media lower attention spans and fighting for attention more than ever in like a noisier crowded content environment just generally online uh as it relates to your media strategy as it relates to the advice that you would give somebody uh who's trying to implement a media strategy. >> I have a lot of thoughts on this. Um I spent a lot of time with like UGC folks, short form video agencies. And like I think now is actually one of the best times in the universe to be creative again. And that's basically because these algorithms have made audience targeting a thing of the past. It used to be like data nerds won because if you just got the audience targeting right, you could send the message sniper shot

into that person. Bro, not how it works anymore. Meta is like let us build the guided missile, okay? you just have to give us the right payload and we'll get it delivered. And so, weirdly, the power has come back to the creative, which is can you create the best payload and then meta will guide the missile to where it needs to go. And so, streaming is really interesting because the bet on streaming is we're going to just pump volume for hours and hours and hours. And like it's power law, right? One of these clips I'm going to get a spicy comment and like that's going to go viral and that's going to make all the hours worth it. I have like we're so early in this game like that that may be the case. TVPN obviously like you know you know took the beach early. You guys took the beach

early. Um I I really don't have a take on whether it'll work because it's so so early. But the other argument I could make is like okay you should spend hours and hours and hours in the writer room. You should spend hours and hours and hours just crafting the perfect like video, the perfect perfect thing for your audience that's like perfectly entertaining for them and pour all your production dollars and all your thought process purely into the creative and then like yeah, you're taking way fewer shots on goal, but like the the level of the creative is so much higher. So, I think just two totally different approaches. I don't think anyone's really doing a good job of the latter in crypto. And maybe it's just because people don't hang out on short form, you know, media or like maybe the highest LTV customers out there are like your

whale traders and they're on CT and they're watching these streams. So like this might still be just where they live and that might be the most valuable thing. But I would say for like consumer products like this would like never work for note. Like it would just never work. No, it would just never ever work. Like I would never ask these guys to sponsor TBPN or like a live stream show because like they need to own their voice and they need to own the UGC and they need to have like fantastic creative that really really speaks to the consumer. So, you know, I think crypto is just a weird little beast and uh I think the jury is still out, but I think, you know, the approach could still very much work. Like some of these clips do go viral. You know, you guys get spicy

takes out of people like >> Yeah. And it's it's kind of balancing that with the insightfulness of the content as well. I've kind of thought of it as like as like you got this really short form stuff and then like I think for us it's like okay now we're g we we go do these you know do podcasts in person with people and we do like an hour and a half long >> yeah so for me it's like go super short form one 90 second max virality max clickbaitiness and then go super long form show the depth and then that barbell I think is golden so it's like you're saying like as a founder okay or as a media brand super short form form short form clips, video video streams, okay, whatever. And then maybe do some really good long form written stuff

because written stuff is not it's not over. It's not like it's dead. Chachi didn't kill the author. It it killed people's attention span to read a lot, but like it's not going to kill somebody who actually people want to hear from. And so I think this like barbell is probably a good way to think about it for a lot of brands. Like very very good short form strategy and very very good long form strategy. I don't know where the medium form, you know, fit really is and like think about a 45 minute podcast or like doing multiple kind of medium-sized articles a week or, >> you know, kind of like how does that fit, you know? I don't I don't know.

>> I I I think you're right. I the way I think about it is like video is for affinity. It's like, dude, I see your face. You know, you create that parasocial relationship and then the written and the long form is for for education, right? So, it's like you kind of need a mix of both. But like I I don't think you can really get away from not having the affinity too. People want to buy people. They want to see your face. And the more cringe you can get. The more real you are as a human, the more differentiated because like guys, everyone's going to do slob content from here to infinity. So if you can LLM generate the output, it's not worth publishing. Just don't do it. If you are even touching an LLM to generate the output, I would just say don't publish

it. Just literally don't publish it because it's like what's the point? It's filler. It's going to get skipped over. It's like really really easy to tell. So be yourself. be kooky, be real, be authentic, or have some kind of really differentiated education about your technology. But like, you're right. I think this in between of like we'll do a weekly technical blog post or something. I'm like, I I look, I have no evidence against this, but I'm like, I'm not reading that stuff. >> Yeah. Yeah. that it worked early on, but the like you said, the edge deteriorated and and a lot of people got away with that because they were early, but now that more competition has came into the space, it's gotten crowded and you just have to level up your game and sort of stick out and and I'm curious just from like this perspective because we often

get into this and this is not the right way to think about it, but it is like almost the most in intrusive thought, which is this quality quantity dynamic. And so what you're saying about fewer shots on goal leads me to think like okay make sure that what you are putting on goal is super high quality. But then you get into the other end it's like well how important is volume when these algorithms are are based on on visibility and they're going to feed you that they're going to do the guided missile. You just got to arm the payload. H where do you draw the line? How is it both sides of the barbell? How do you quantity and quality I just know are not the right way to think about it.

So what what do you think is the right way to >> No, I actually don't think that's the wrong way to think about it. And that's why I'm like I don't know. Jury's still out as to like TBPN the live stream your guys roll up >> versus like being you know ideally you have both if you could put out a high volume of high quality creative like >> and that's what like all the brands are doing is just like we're going to pump a ton of high quality creative briefs through UGC and like something's going to hit and then we double down with paid right this thing's starting to take off organically. Let's put into it because this is a winner. You have to you have to identify your winners though. Like I think if you're doing volume and you're not learning what your winning patterns

are, that's where you're in a really really tough spot, right? And so like you should be doing volume on Twitter, but if you're doing volume on Twitter and you're not learning anything, that's such a tough place. Like you have to figure out what's the format, what's the tone, what's the storytelling angle, and like that's it. It's a learning tool, >> right? You don't know why. So it's not replicatable and you're just going to continue to guess. >> Doubling down on the winning formats is like that. That's one of the biggest things, right? And it's like I think that's why having a really iterative and and divergent creative team where it's just like if you could put out 10 different types of creative briefs and like lots of different types of ad like you're going to learn some stuff. You're going to learn what hits, you know, what

type of what type of creator like works for you. Um yeah, no easy answers here. Like I don't want to pretend I'm an expert. I just want to I I'm just trying to get as close to the edge as humanly possible. I think that's all that anyone can promise you today because it's literally day by day. Like every day it changes. >> It does. It does. John, man, I I know you're slammed. Thank you for your time and appreciate you joining us today. It's been a it's been a really fun conversation. We don't really have these types of conversations too often with regards to marketing and branding and stuff, but today was it was pretty present and uh it was an important one just based on the entire the entire setup. And yeah, I mean I think you're totally right. It's still early in like

in this setup. We saw TVPN jump on maybe like eight months ago or so. Took us about a month and a half to really realize like the caliber of what they were doing and like understanding, okay, how possible is this for us at at scale as well. Obviously knowing that we're not, you know, in the same room. Then you look around at kind of like what else is is happening in the crypto space and you realize like a no one else is doing this, b there's a lot of podcast competition and c it's like where's our real like long-term edge here? Um and and so we just decided to make a full brand pivot. We had you team of 10, you know, was uh agile enough make the full move and >> I think now, you know, we we we kind of thought thought about monetization. It

was hard to kind of figure out how exactly it was going to work. We kind of returned to this house of brands model under as subbrands within the rollup niche shows weekly. You know, advertising is now starting to happen as the clips roll. Still figuring out a lot of stuff, man. There's a lot of multiplatform shorts that is still a process. paid media influencers. How much do we want to, you know? So, it's it's a whole thing. But, uh, but yeah, man, I I I appreciate you you kind of sharing some wisdom. >> You guys are fighting the good fight, man. You're on the edge. You're definitely on the edge, you know? You you got to be in the arena to like see what works.

>> There you go. Appreciate >> you coming on, man. It feels quite meta talking about media as a media company. Often times, we're talking about something that's that's not it's crypto or blockchain or something else. And and yeah, this feels like another dimension up. >> Yeah, the playbooks are getting thrown out. You guys are fighting the good fight for sure. Well, thanks for having me on, guys. Appreciate you. >> Appreciate you, John. Have a good weekend, man. Be easy. >> All right, Rob. Well, that was pretty good, man. I do I do wonder how the tides will turn. You know, this streaming stuff is obviously new and it's hot. It's fun. Uh the question is about the you know, for me, it's more about like how sustainable is it to be streaming all the time for so for such long periods of time. Um that's going to

be a question to answer. and just like what's the endgame, you know? Like I realistically think that like the top streams that are like doing this similar format like this will get bought out by major companies. Maybe not like massive ones. There'll be different levels of scale, but like dude, it's pretty obvious to me that like TBPN could get bought by like a massive like like a CNBC, you know, stuff like that. >> Crazy crazy dynamic that's happening is that look at Hyperlid and NASDAQ and there was a there was a fantastic post that put this into perspective. I'll try to find it, but it's basically that these companies are doing more revenue at such a more efficient scale. Um, it was something like like uh the try to I'll try to find

>> well they did more Hyperlid did more uh revenue or profit than NASDAQ in one of the >> in one of the last weeks. >> It was Hyperlid's net income is 1.2 billion surpasses NASDAQ 2024 net income of 1.13 billion. Yep. >> With a workforce 180 832 times smaller. >> Wow. >> That's such a that's such a mind [ __ ] honestly that it's hard to say. >> Yeah, it is >> eight the same scale of revenue at 832 times smaller. And the the the reflection of this in media is what you're talking about. It's companies like ours and others being bought out by

bigger companies that have more resources but are not able to keep up even though their teams are four to 500 bit times bigger. >> Yeah, I know. It's crazy. It's [ __ ] It's absolutely nuts. >> We've got a team of 10. You can think there are media companies out there that have teams of a thousand or 2,000 or 5,000 yet are not able to reach the same levels of distribution. Look at podcasts and how they were enabled to innovate traditional like mainstream media legacy. >> 100%. 100%. Dude, I mean I think I mean crypto companies are some of the most uh some of the most insane you know >> you can have these lean efficient machines and it's just it's really it's really really impressive. So that's the

beauty of this online economy as well. So, um, all righty guys, we've got, uh, the Starkware, uh, ecosystem team in the back ready to come on. Uh, we'll throw them up. Uh, great to see you guys. Thank you for joining and welcome to the welcome to the stream. >> Happy Friday. >> What's up? How's it going? >> Hey, welcome. Yeah, I think we are here to talk about Starknet. Startbering Starktember. >> First of all, how are you guys doing? Was it a good week, bad week? How how are we feeling?

Yeah. >> Yeah. A Friday night over here in Europe. So, um, this is how we spend our Friday nights on warrior. I I know the feeling. I know the feeling. Um, maybe we we can just do a quick intro, guys. It's your first time on the show. I've seen some of your content, Victor, on Twitter and in Telegram, um, as well. And just love to get a quick intro about yourselves, what you guys do at at Starkware. Um and then yeah we we can get right into it. >> Yep. So yeah I'm Victor I ecosed ecosystem team at Starkware. Um I've been at Stoker for about almost two years now and before I was just um in a lab called Kazer Labs in the starting ecosystem and then before that I was

doing volunteering at ETCC. So that's actually how I got into um the whole crypto space was just volunteering at ETCC. Um, and then yeah, first ecosystem I was truly in was the startnet one and I'm still in the starting ecosystem and I'm loving it. >> Awesome. Very cool. I saw Ellie had a pretty

funny tweet today. Uh, congratulating extended on 50 million in TVL. He said, "Hyperlquid." >> Did he really? At the bottom, >> we're almost there. We're on our way. And so maybe you guys have have had some interactions there. Um, overall like there there is a lot of growth. All kidding aside, so what is Stark Timber uh and and how do you anticipate this will continue to fuel the growth that you've seen in the ecosystem so far? Very cool. And uh is there incentives at

play like you know what what are some of the projects that are involved and and generally like can you share a little bit more details about just how people can get involved and and what they can expect from some of the incentives in Starktember? >> Absolutely. I mean there's incentives across the whole uh initiative. So on one hand for let's start with builders we have two options we have like an on-site hackathon or sprint in uh in India and then we have the online sprint where um people are obviously encouraged to build apps and ship to mainet um and then we have on the user side we have various incentives across s different apps like gaming defi where uh either yield is boosted or you can win

uh something if you're part of a guild that guild wins. It's uh it's very versatile. Um we have uh I don't even know off the top of my head, Victor, maybe you know more about like numbers of prizes and and such, but uh it's all it depends completely on the app and uh it's welcome for everyone. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's uh so we put uh around a million STRK um like as a budget and the goal was to give back to the community and so we focused on three campaigns. We focused on what Mara just said um on the builders uh like um like the hackathon.

So we have a builder house in a pun in India. Then we have like an online hackathon. So that's number one of the starter campaign. Number two is the most exciting aspect of the campaign which is everything that is user focused. So we have a bunch of like ecosystem applications ranging from DeFi to gaming and basically we work with them to um to uh create competitions such as um like we have apps from like troves which is a yield aggregator but we also have like games such as art piece um and also loot survivor but basically we work on contests and people can earn rewards by participating in those contests. That's second part of Stark timber. And then the third part is the the meme part slashcontent part slash people people

can earn rewards like earn um stark token by uh um by creating memes by participating in the bounties. So the overarching motivation is to give back to the community and to kick off you know it's not back to school it's back to the trenches like kick off the year or like the school year. um because we also have more exciting stuff coming up after Stark tender, but we can also talk about that later. Um but yeah, that's that's the overarching view of of what the this campaign is. >> Nice. Very nice. Um I'm curious how how you guys are reacting to the uh o overall result of extended launch so far on the per side of things. Like if I go on perpetual pulse.xyz, which is a great website, it kind of shows you the

different uh uh volumes of of per exchanges. It shows you their OI. It shows you their revenues and it's just kind of like a notion board that somebody created. Um, and I can and extended it's been on there quite a bit. So, it looks like in the last 24 hours 153 mill uh million dollars of volume, which is top I guess probably like top 15ish uh maybe top 12. Um, so pretty damn good, which if you're doing $153 million of volume, 24-h hour period, you're making a significant amount of fees. Uh so definitely a sustainable app app there. How are you guys feeling about the effect that it's having on the starkness load um on how is the chain handling it? How's the how's the entire

uh kind of process been from from your perspective? I think it's I think it's amazing like ever since their migration to starket to mainet um the fact that also the network can handle this load the fact that it's an onchain purp um the fact that it runs on kairo smart contracts like this is just it's beautiful and it's a proof that the tech is truly there to work um and that scaling with starks and scaling with validity proofs like truly is the way to have this kind of defi applications so in general It's it's and also what you said Robbie in the beginning like it's um they just surpassed their 50 like million TV goal earlier today like their number one D5 app right now on

starknet so ever since their launch or migration to mainet they've just been killing it it's super serious like super professional also X revolute by the way so um yeah I mean in general it's one of the it's a killer app for >> start yeah it seems like it Um do do you feel like uh there's there's a path for um this this kind of uh singular purp exchange to become like the app for Starknet like the like like the you know like it just becomes like it it almost just encapsulates the entire chain or or do you see like there actually being uh you know other kind of uh apps that are a part of Starktember really kind of

like getting as as much traction because like all I'm saying here is that this app has gotten a lot of traction And uh it it's really going to you know kind of like lead Starket's success from here into like a different category of like actually uh you know kind of competing with some of the larger perpetes the hyperlquids the lighters which will put Starknet on the map in a big way. How do you feel about the other uh ecosystem apps in Starktember? You know what other apps are being highlighted? I'm just curious like what's going on there? Yeah, I can say a bit about DeFi and and Shadowfax on the gaming side because Shadowfax is a big gaming nerd. So, she knows a lot about what's up on gaming >> on the DeFi aspect. So, we have we have

extended um as part of this startup timber campaign. So, we have a competition live with them. Um there's also so trophy which is a yield aggregator. We al they've also had a record in Tvl, right? So um this starter campaign it's rewarding users but it's also a lot of value to the actual apps and the teams who have a business behind those D5 applications. So we're also rewarding those teams and it's just beautiful how it's um like everyone's playing um this uh like it's playing along and um is having just a good time because you also see it in the culture and the memes. You also see it on Twitter online. Um and uh how I see extended playing on Starknet now. Um

just to finish off on the DeFi aspect. So it has the majority of the like it's number one in terms of TVL. And what's also beautiful with extended is that they have an API. So you can build with extended your own D5 app on Starknet. So you can tap into those purpose contracts, right? For instance, you don't have to build your own Cairo per contracts. You can just tap into that API. Um, and maybe build like a delta neutral vault or something like that. Um, and yeah, I mean there's an API so people can definitely build based on that like that base architecture that extended offers.

>> Yeah, very cool. And um maybe we can hear a bit about the other apps in the in the Stark timber uh campaign and kind of what what you guys are looking to achieve there uh you know you know through the campaign and and then after. >> Absolutely. Um I mean from the gaming gaming perspective we definitely also have some some pretty cool stuff. Obviously volume wise it it doesn't it doesn't quite reach extended but uh maybe one day. We don't know. Uh but for now we have uh the cool thing is about the games especially is it's very versatile. So, for example, we have one game that's called Blobberina, and they are the first fully onchain game that is actually partnering with a real world um like I don't know if you guys know this, but

AMA like it's an armored MMA league and they've partnered with them and they've like reskinned their game and turned it into like like they they've turned the blobberts into the fighters and such. So we have like games that are connecting to real world things and then we also have games like for example Loot Survivor who is launching very soon which is like a a dungeon crawler and the team behind it has shipped many different things that aren't necessarily games but more like frameworks for example like spinning up your own dungeons with the format of Loot Survivor and being able to plug in your own like design and brand and whatever it is. Um, I think one of the like wins that we have in regard to game gaming is also the whole

like dojo stack and cartridge behind it all. It's making building onchain games possible uh in that sense. And nowadays you do get a lot of games that that are more web 2.5 and on startnet we do follow a very true fully onchain gaming um narrative. We're still early. Teams are shipping like crazy and they're also building like crazy. So, we have yet to see. But, uh, I mean, I may be biased, but I'm very bullish. I I have a question on on generally how you're approaching the the ecosystem.

Um, because a lot of L1's, L2s have started to almost they they've started to try to pick winners, right? And and kind of consolidate a lot of their resources around just a hand selected few projects. And you know, oftentimes that means that liquidity isn't spread out across different projects. And then they they also consolidate their marketing resources and just continue to hammer a a few projects and try to funnel all of the all of the new acquisitions into the ecosystem into just kind of these cherrypicked apps.

This is maybe a little bit less um uh you know flourishing of of the entire ecosystem, but it does center around just a few apps and it could make th the chance of success for those few quite a bit higher. So when when you're thinking about picking winners and and again you see the success of maybe one app, do you do you try to kind of focus on that one and double down or how do you how do you balance new apps coming into the ecosystem and and and you know try to maintain neutrality but also make sure that you know the the winners continue to uh continue to flourish.

>> Yeah. So, as an ecosystem team, if you send us a message on Telegram and you ask for help, like we will always always always respond. We're always going to create a shared group with the ecosystem lead. Um, if we if we start seeing potential in the project, we start putting a lot more resources. And that's also the goal of the ecosystem team at Stark where it's to be that you're basically connecting teams people to resources they might need. Do they need help with their kairo contracts? Okay, we're going to connect them to a um do they need with help with marketing, with grants, we connect them with A, B, and C. Um so we're that first point of contact. And then those teams also have it's also up to them to prove how serious they are and to which extent

they want to be involved. But as an ecosystem team, you obviously you you put a lot of resources into teams such as extended for instance or or Vzu or Troves or or the gaming ecosystem um like Loot Survivor because they prove they have approve of ship right they have to ship we have to have some kind of material to understand to which extent we're going to commit resources to that team um and then based on that we have internal discussions and it's it's this path that you build with that team Right. Um, but the this ecosystem team like me and Shadowfax and Akash and Rian, we're four plus Odin Free, the ecosystem lead.

We're always going to reply to your DMs on Discord on on Telegram um on on the fact that if you want to be involved in Starknet and if you need help with building and and shipping whatever you have to ship. >> Yeah. And so when you guys are uh kind of trying to figure out what the what the like what the further impact of this of this ecosystem uh marketing and ecosystem growth uh strategy is going to be when it as it relates to the tech, right? So you guys just had Starknet's grin to upgrade on uh September 1st. You know, what are some of the main features that you're expecting that will impact these ecosystem projects? How do you how do you see the technical upgrades improving the actual applications in

this in the ecosystem >> huge boost for UX right because the user gets instant feedback of their transaction status right UX just gets amplified and I think many ecosystems nowadays also have pre-confirmation so it's not something you need to start net but it's in general for also the whole Ethereum eosystem system and and other L1s that also integrate it. In general, it's just a huge UX boost. Um, and that was just shipped on on September 1st.

Um, that's I think that's a killer feature or killer tooling for for people who are building on Staret. It's it's everything that's related to UX. We also have an open source and battle tested paymaster. So you can decide to sponsor your user's transactions or um choose which tokens you want that user to use for gas fees. Right? For instance, you have a which is a DEX aggregator and you can choose to pay in the Lord's token and the Lord's token is something specific to the gaming ecosystem, right? But I can use my lords to pay for my swap on on Avenue. Um so that's grits tooling, right? And then the whole econ native

econ abstraction story, right? Just um removing as many those annoying popups of that you usually see on MetaMask. So that's also a killer feature for new teams entering the ecosystem is hey we have great UX and great UX tooling that we can offer you. Here's how here's um here's documentation. Here's how you build with it. Here are some use cases. Um here are some games that use it and and this is how they improve their gaming experience. And also ever since we shipped pre-confirmations, we had a lot of good feedback. I think also from from Loot Hero, from the loot survivor people that with pre-confirmations like um there they tap and the transaction is instant, right? So for um bringing onchain games to normal users, things

just got a lot more easier. >> Very cool. Very cool, guys. Um I think Starknet has often been uh kind of touted as one of the leaders in technical innovation. Obviously the technology I is built so that we can go and get adoption and and the applications that that's kind of their job is to go out. Uh we had you know we we had Russ from extended on a little while ago before some some of the recent growth. Uh we also had focus tree on and uh that was another one that was like pretty interesting because it was starting to get real world adoption outside of this crypto Twitter echo chamber. Um I was just curious if you had any other updates regarding any of these apps um that you could share just

you know how how is this growth going? Um anything that is particularly exciting any updates or or alpha that you can drop on some of the other ecosystem apps that you're most excited about? I think uh for focus so what's interesting with them is that now it's um people used it to focus to study >> and now uh like for the summer holidays we had a drop because people don't study during holidays right >> but now we we start seeing a peak again so that's beautiful with uh it just indicates that hey it's not any web 3 agent that's using this is like an actual student at Harvard or something that is using the app. Um, and so I mean

I I I put a lot of trust in that team because they know how to ship. Um, I put a lot of trust in extended because their XR revolute. They just prove that they can ship a quality product. Um, and and other games. Um, I think Shadow F can tell you a lot more about the games. Um, and also combining gaming and finance and and DeFi. We have some teams building on that aspect. Um, yeah, in general, uh, um, yeah, I I think in general, we just put a lot more support into those bigger teams that have ship and have a history of shipping, but we also give a lot more support and we continue giving support to the smaller teams, but still have this proof of ship.

>> Yeah. So, um, Victor, is there is there a lot of focus around the Bitcoin aspect of the ecosystem now? Like, how do you guys feel about that? Are are are you guys more ETH or Bitcoin? Like what is your personal take? >> Uh so >> both you guys. >> I mean it depends because at Star you have ETH people, you have uh BTC people, you have both. I don't know. Shadowfax, what what side of the coin are you on? H >> it's a I mean I've like my first crypto job is this. So, like I'm I am tied to the ETH Ethereum ecosystem for now. I am obviously also uh intrigued by Bitcoin, but I'm I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have

to choose ETH for now. >> Awesome. >> What about you, Victor? >> Speaking of the I'm I'm BTC. I love >> Okay, so good balance here. >> Yeah, but I'm I mean I see the value that we can bring to BTC and I'm super bullish on the road that Starkware has put on the table for this. Um, and what we can highlight here is what we plan to do after Stark timber, which is Starknet's BTC fight. Um, Starktember is a campaign to to to kind of it's it's the back to the trenches mentality, right? Onchain summer is over. It's back to the trenches, but there's something much bigger coming up. We cannot share a lot, right? We have to keep this

superficial because no official announcement has been done. But the BTC fon start is coming. So, question for you guys. Um, with the DeFi growth with BTCI, last thing here for you. Uh, obviously Megga ETH is not live yet, but Athena came out and made out this this announcement that they're launching their own stable coin native to their chain. A lot of L2s have like the I'm calling it the token market fit problem right now where it's like there got to be some reason to like create a flywheel to get people interested in the Stark token. I'm curious like from the perspective of like either launching your own stable coin, creating revenue, this whole like kind of buybacks kind of meta that hyperlquid and pumped up fun and Athena are on like when it comes to

creating a a you know mechanism for the ecosystem to drive value to Stark the token. What are your broad thoughts on this? And if you don't want to comment too deeply, that's all right. I'm just curious how you guys are thinking about this. Uh in terms of utility, the Stark token has utility, right? Because we're soon rolling out the BTC staking update where you will able to like we will add another economic um like economic security layer to starket because you can stake um um ETH on Starknet now, but you can also soon stake BTC and receive rewards in in STRK token. Um but that's just one of of the options that we have.

Um I think uh I think what the other projects do is very interesting. It's in some aspects it's also a marketing move. You've heard this narrative that your token is your marketing. Um but um yeah we I think we we focus on um we prefer to focus on the apps and shipping the apps and shipping the the road map and sticking to it. Um and the road map includes things which are related to the token, right? But um all of that to say that the road is the road that we have right now is really exciting. What we have with BTC fight coming up next month is also really

exciting. So we prefer to stick those to those principles. Um and yeah, >> beautiful. >> Our our lawyers prefer us to stick to those principles, too. >> Yeah, I'm sure they do. I'm sure they really do. Guys, thank you for your time. Please get some rest. And I I know it's a European night. Uh kind of wish I was still out there honestly, but uh back in the States here. Guys, thanks for your time. Look forward to the growth of extended the end of Starktember, what you guys have coming next, Bitcoin Fi, and uh just kind of more growth in terms of total usage, TVL, etc. So, thanks guys.

>> Awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you guys. >> Cheers. >> Ciao. All righty, Rob. Up next, we've got Adam Lawrence, the co-founder of RWX. following the Stark Net Starktember segment. How you feeling, man? It is uh the It is Friday. >> It is. It is Friday. I'm pretty excited. I think we've got some motion at the end of the stream, which is going to be pretty exciting. Not really quite sure who's going to come on. We're going to wait and see. But what are they whatever happens, it's going to be exciting.

>> Yeah. I mean, Adam is coming on for sure to talk about RWAs. Um, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the growth of his platform. I mean, these guys have just absolutely just nonstop crushed it. >> I got um something fresh off the newswire. >> What's that? >> Uh, Brian Armstrong, >> 40% of code written at Coinbase is AI generated. >> Yeah, I saw that as well. >> Uh, that just came in a minute ago. And I think it's pretty interesting just to see like, okay, well, these are companies at scale deploying projects that reach millions of users, generating billions of dollars of revenue. And this again highlights how someone like

Hyperlid is able to do the net income of NASDAQ with 832 times less employees. >> Yeah. I I don't know how much of Hyperlquid's code is AI generated, but I'd imagine that, you know, they use some >> not very much. I bet it's not much. >> Probably not, but you have to you have to wonder where those efficiency gains are coming from. And so I think >> having way less people and not having >> following any rules >> as much if not more with less people. >> Not following any rules. We don't have any rules to live to to to to play by.

You don't really have to. It's not that expensive. When you have to follow rules, [ __ ] gets expensive. That's the whole hyperlquid thesis. I feel like >> Yeah. Yeah. That as well as uh as just being smart and making good decisions looking at the data >> and and reading it, right? >> You sound naive, buddy. >> Let's get Let's get Adam up on the show. I think this one this one's gonna be a fun one. >> Adam, >> we'll see what's going on in the data. Adam show, welcome. the official research partner, whatever that means. That's just like the the receiver of alpha.

>> We gota we got to be official, you know, no other way to do it in these these days. >> Man, congratulations on the success of RWXYZ. It's your first time on the show. Um, obviously we've chatted on, you know, on the phone. Actually, haven't met in person, but been talking for a while. Would just love to get a quick intro about kind of the the the platform, what you guys are looking to build here, what you guys are building, how it all works for our for our community who's unfamiliar. >> Yeah. Yeah, totally. You know, my name's Adam, uh, one of the co-founders and CEO of, uh, RWI.xyz. The, uh, the name kind of speaks for itself, and you can tell we're pretty early with that threeletter domain name. So, you know, you guys will, you know, >> world.com. I think that'll be coming

through at some point, you know, >> uh, for you guys. But, um, but yeah, you know, we actually got our start, I guess, like simply put, what we do is, you know, we run a data company. So we uh aggregate every single tokenized asset and put it all into one place into a really seamless dashboard where people can understand you know who is tokenizing what are what is being tokenized on what networks are the assets being deployed onto uh and more importantly you know you can see all like the bigger institutions that are adopting crypto. you know, we we all sort of think that, you know, the institutions are here. They're coming, you know, and that they're they're going to be the folks that, you know, save our, you know, save the bags of every single crypto investor. Uh, and on this site actually is where you can see like

the real uh adoption. You know, we cover stable coins, tokenized treasuries, private credit, a whole bunch of different uh asset classes. Um, and we actually got our start initially building in Salana DeFi. So not many people know this but uh we built the first open source yield aggregator on uh Salana and then when FTX crashed you know we decided to change course because all the yields went to zero and we thought you know okay like what's the long like what's the point of all this stuff you know and we kind of went back to first principles and thought you know like capital markets and payments those are the by far the largest uh segments of of of industry that are going to adopt this technology and al also where everyone's going and make the most

money. And so we thought, you know, let's sort of skate to where the puck is going, uh, organize the space, rally the industry, and build a town square for everyone to, you know, uh, look at the look at the traction of, uh, real world adoption. >> So, I'm thinking that RWAs are hundred trillion dollar opportunity here. >> I'm thinking it is around that around that like market. Is that kind of like the right like ballpark? >> Yeah, you know, I mean, actually, I think there's uh, it could even be TAM expanding, you know. Okay. I think the the when technology when it's kind of like AI too like we think that there's even more value to be created with these crazy technology sort of shifts and I think that's that same thing applies with crypto. Uh we think there's going to be even more value to be created with

these tools like you're going to shrink you're going to destroy the intermediaries in finance but then also enable you know unlimited amounts of financial products to be to be created in what in customizable ways that no one's ever thought of. And that's uh that's growing the pi pie for everyone. >> So we've just broken 300 billion right now Adam. >> Just a I think you uh I think you probably know that according to your platform, sir. Um so so it's going to be a what it'll be a 3x or so to get to a trillion and then to get to 100 trillion is so about 300x from here is what we're looking for. We're at We're at 30 billion right now, but >> Well, including stables.

>> Oh, yes. Including stables. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we are. >> 300 bill. >> Indeed. Indeed. You know, we we love the stables. We're not always looking at them, but uh we do. >> Yeah. You guys Yeah. So, you count them as a separate category basically. >> It is. You know, I think it's a totally different use case that is also like in a massive tamp for the industry, but you know, you pay for things and then with money and then you also invest in things. And they're usually two very different use cases, but you know, traditional finance is actually like all the banks, they do payments. They make tons of money on payments and also make tons of money creating financial products. Um, and so we kind of differentiate between the two. Um, but you know, you'll find many different teams starting to to bundle those

products into the same thing eventually. But yes, you know, we we keep them separate, different use cases, different for different users. But um you know real real value on chain is yeah uh we're at the 300 billion mark. It's huge. >> I'd love to get your reaction to something that came in probably earlier this week which is that the NASDAQ is looking at kind of putting out both a tokenized representation and a regulated offering and kind of pairing these two as as a complete product. And I'm just curious where your mind goes when you when you see these regulated entities that are are really core for the market structure in you know assets equities and beyond today. H how do you think this plays out not just from like a

scale and like TAM of the industry perspective but like from a from a fundamental perspective of how capital formation is going to take place at in both avenues harmoniously? How how do you think that plays out? What do you think that looks like? >> Yeah, that's a super good question. Uh, I think it definitely levels the so like laws will still exist, you know, securities will still be securities. So that kind of baseline kind of set set of rule following will still take place, but I think this is I think tokenization, you know, and this um with with the NASDAQ, you know, it represents finance finally coming into the the internet age. there was a lot of just like how Amazon and all the internet

companies you know in in the grand marketplace of buyers and sellers uh the internet makes it extremely easy to aggregate supply and create a single sort of entry point to access any kind of product whether it's buying houses on Zillow or buying you know laboo on Amazon or uh whatever else you're trying to buy you know that's those same sort of dynamics now apply with uh assets and crypto was the perfect example of this you know it was a very easy to create uh yield aggregators or aggregators like Jupiter or one inch and you know it's not easy of course but when all the assets are uh purchasable sort of onchain you know you'll have a layer of KYC and all that stuff but um yeah it

really sort of levels the playing field for anyone to create their own sort of like access point to buying all these all these assets and um you know like at the end of the day like who I think cryptos has done an amazing job of of of rallying together retail retail uh capital and I think that it's a good good example of like you know let's say you're trying to IPO and would you rather and you're trying to sell you know your stock to let's say like retail investors would you rather go to a bank you know kind of boomer bank you know they might have some nice branding or they might have some nice kind of columns let's say in their office but would you rather do that or would you rather rather IPO through you know the rollup securities maybe you know it's

like who would you rather kind of who would you kind of I'm fun or anything else like that you know so I think it really >> yeah I mean she literally was open to ICOs which was an incredible like she said it was an ICO is basically a direct listing of an IPO and and she wanted to make it easier for companies to go public. One of the ways that she could do see that happening was a direct listing on a tokenized platform which she said is effectively an ICO. It's just >> crazy like they're institutions are here. >> Yeah, they are. They're here. Absolutely. >> Adam, you sent me the or you know I I was looking around at the Well, I Okay, so let me wind up. I saw an Ono post about this uh Fidelity Trust. I was looking at the RWA site, found it. You

were talking about how BlackRock is going to have some competition now. It seems like maybe with build. How real do you think Black Rockck's number one spot with securityize is in terms of RWA's onchain? Like if I look at your site, number one, all assets Black Rockck USD uh securitizes fund. Like how how much of a moat do you think Black Rockck has? And like do you think that securityize and builder will stay as number one for like the next 12 months or do you think that they will be surpassed? >> Yeah. You know, we definitely definitely can't see the future. Uh but you know, brand goes a long way in finance, especially in the world of uh you know, yeah, commodity products. you know, money is a commodity, like a a money market fund, one versus another, you

know, like a lot of these things are all kind of the the same. And so I think it's more about just getting the product in front of the right people and the right audience and actually like selling it, you know? Um, so I think that's what everything is going to come down to at the end of the day is who can sell the most products. You know, who can sell the most boooos, you know, go to all far and wide, all any different country, any different website or kinds of, you know, sort of group of people and just sell and sell sell sell. And uh, you know, I think um, those places to sell really are the exchanges. they are you know it could be like podcasts even you know it's like anyone who has an audience you know I think the the attention is all

you need kind of meta that exists in AI like that exact same thing applies now in in finance and I think before tokenization it was really hard to find the kind of assets that people would want to purchase and when you enter the tokenization age uh you know everything's on the internet and so it's whoever packages those things in the proper way and sends them down down to the right distribution channels to find investors, you know, that's all that kind of matters. Um, and so yeah, you know, I think again back in the traditional world, it's uh when when things weren't on the internet, you almost by definition have to meet in person and have to do, you know, uh, you know, in face tof face kind of deals and uh, yeah, it all it all sort of changes.

You know, Amazon is just a little cute website, but they have literally every single thing in the world. Um, you can never shake anyone's hand from Amazon, but you press a button and someone delivers something to you. So, if you build the cheapest way to deliver products to people, um, I think usually those win. >> Yeah. >> So, you don't see Black Rock getting taken over or anything. They're number one, >> you know. Well, I think they've already taken over in some many places, you know, not to do conspiracy theories, but uh, no, just kidding. I think um, >> uh, no, it's definitely true. I mean, if if you if you see the success of a lot of these uh asset managers in traditional finance and assume there's armies of PD people, uh a lot of a lot of those folks actually have entered, you know, started working full-time in

crypto because they're like, I was I sold products for Black Rockck and now I'm selling products in crypto. Um but yeah, you know, it's kind of like, will the best be team win? I think. >> What are you most excited about in RWAs? It's such a general category. So yeah, it's a general category. Um I think there's different uh different like aesthetics, you know, that I think are are interesting. I think one of them is a bit more of the goodwill, you know, uh which is everyone, you know, give uh creating access for people, I think is a definitely a huge huge benefit. Um and you know from like a personal personal perspective I grew up like overseas have lots of family sort of all over the place and it's really hard to access

high quality financial products and so the access angle is very very you know that's a huge one I think that that and in terms of it being most interesting it's more like people are going from zero to something or zero to you know what all of us assuming that we're in states like all of us have kind of access to. So I think that in itself is is just generally interesting. It's like opening up a whole part of the internet to to a group of people that never might have had it before. Um, and so that's like one kind of, you know, what general aesthetic that is very very interesting to me. Uh, I think the other one is more so on the capital capital markets side of things. Uh, there's massive players.

Uh, we actually just launched a a new dashboard uh, in collaboration with a company called Broadbridge, which is a publicly traded Let's see how broad what are these guys worth? Bridge. This the repo thing that you were showing me. >> Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So these guys are, you know, $30 billion company. So big dogs. >> Yeah. >> And yeah, they have actively actively been using uh blockchains to run processes, you know, where >> instead of, you know, me sending stable coins to you, it's bank A sending um doing repo transactions with with bank B.

>> Yeah. >> And I think this like >> the institutions sort of in some cases like have been here uh they just don't really necessarily operate um in the clear sort of light that a lot of the other sort of you know uh players kind of do. >> Yeah. >> So I think we're going to see a lot more of these use cases coming out soon. Um >> yeah, JP Morgan said that they had been using internal blockchains for a while >> and >> yep, >> that most other banks like too big to fail banks are going to launch their own L1s and there's going to be a few L1s that end up winning >> and what what do you think is the incentive? like how important is it do you think for those banks to end up on an Ethereum or or a public blockchain

versus the consortium chains that you know they might have been testing internally and and we've seen come out here and there. >> Yeah. You know, I think it doesn't really matter if whether or not they or as in like there, you know, if there's a business case to expand to these like public sort of chains, they will, but um you know, even like City already has a blockchain running at scale live in production, but it's between their own customers and that saves them tons of money, you know, like it's it's very beneficial. It's simply like a new ledger where you know you have the old ledger or the old system and actually I don't know if they built it internally or if they actually took something out of the box from somewhere else but just a new like backend that they use to make

things cheaper and I think again it all goes back to the distribution like if there's more money to be made by maybe launching products on Ethereum versus their own kind of like internal corporate sort of network or maybe like intercorporate networks but with a lot of other banks working with each other um you know then they'll go ahead and uh go ahead and do that. So, you know, I think one day you'll see uh the possibility of one tokenized asset, you know, being bridged from one of these corporate chains to Ethereum, you know, or, you know, I I feel like, you know, keep an eye out for one of the the bridge the bridges, you know, doing some sort of large announcement with uh in in the space with a big with big bank. But >> that see it seems like the interop

providers are poised to win that whe whether they end up migrating to a public blockchain or not. Uh interop is going to connect these banks and like you said these are now launching where they're going to go from bank A to bank B rather than you know end up in a consumer's wallet or bank account. Um, but I'm curious more from like your your perspective in building our >> We lost we lost our boy Andy as well, you know. I think uh >> yeah, he I think he had a bounce, but I think he's going to be right back. >> We'll we'll see. Maybe >> some Floridaian, you know, uh some Fian bugs flying in maybe or getting attacked.

>> He's off finding alpha somewhere. We'll see. >> Finding what's coming up next for you guys. >> Yeah, you know, I kind of like to say it's more of the uh more of the same. like we have a lot of different um you know we're onboarding tons of different tokenized assets working with large institutions small ones sort of all over the place. Hey there he is. Um and yeah you know I think just keep an eye out for you know numbers to numbers continuing to go up but also like ratcheting up as well as we start to onboard new kind of pockets of uh of data that people didn't necessarily uh know about before.

>> Got it. Um, another kind of off-the-wall question here, but I'm curious like how do you guys make money? Do you have a subscription and is there an enterprise enterprise platform? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, it's a it's a variety of things, you know, we do partner up with the with some uh with the supply side uh but we also partner up with the the demand as well. So, uh yeah, we have various, you know, institutional clients who consume the API whether it's for like regulatory oversight or whether it's to produce their own internal komemetrics or maybe it's even power um power their own like wallets and their own investing experiences. So yeah, you know, data companies like uh like even like the large ones like S&P, you know, they work with the people creating assets and also they work with

people sort of consuming the data for those assets. And so we do a little bit of both at at this stage. Yeah. >> Very cool. Adam, what's your uh what's your tokenization bullcase here for like I I really want to get to this 300 bill stable coins included to 100 trillion. Like what is the h how is this going to happen? Like what is the is it a regulatory question? Is it a time question? Is it like a demand question? Is it a product? Do we need certain sectors to really get interest like even maybe just from 300 bill to 10 trill like what is the what is the 10 or 30x in tokenization today?

>> All right. I think it's psychology at the end of the day. I don't think it's anything to do with uh things of the material. >> Spicy take. Okay. Okay. You know, I I like to think of uh you know, finance is definitely driven by FOMO and everything we see in crypto. You know, as moment momentum, the momentum trade is like this canonical thing that that uh makes you the most most of money. And that's because that once one person does something that shows that they're making a little bit of money, everyone else starts to follow. And so, >> of course, >> you know, I'm not sure anyone else can imagine this, but I like to think of TFI or the adoption as like this amoeba sort of like squeezing through like a little hole. And as soon as like you know a critical mass is out coming on what side

everyone's gonna everyone's gonna come in. So that's my take. You know, once one person does it, everyone else is going to. And uh you know, you're only going to see things go faster uh sooner in the space. And and dude, I think sometimes people get a little bit dis like unencouraged and uninspired by RWAs and tokenization because it feels like like like there's not really that much value in oh we're just going to take an asset that exists offchain and just you know make a a ledger annotation such that you know that says like hey this asset exists.

What what I think is really valuable is like actually having having the native asset issuance directly on chain. So like that like the like the main ledger of Accord is Ethereum or is Apptos or is Polygon whatever it is. How do you think about the actual material value of tokenization as a concept? Like if you were to explain this to people who want to understand why this is an important concept and why you're dedicating your career to this idea and that's not just ledger annotations, you know, is this native asset issuance is that an important part of it? What are like the core properties of the thesis of tokenization? if you can if you could kind of make it simple for us.

>> Yeah, it's uh two things at the end of the day. One is getting of intermediaries. It's like the most obvious one, but in between someone buying a stock and selling a stock, there might be seven different parties involved. It comes to securizations or even the more complicated uh products out there, there will be like up to 12 people in the mix like I'm, you know, all doing different parts. But when you bring everyone around to the same table, when you bring everyone around to the same the same ledger, you can get rid of all those sorts of intermediaries and those folks that do, you know, just rent extraction. At the end of the day, they sort of start shuffling things from one place to another, not really adding any value. And I think >> um that's like one huge opportunity for for blockchain. It's it's simple, but

like it truly is >> getting rid of all the different intermediaries that you really don't need. Uh then the second one is uh again not as noble but it's leverage you know so once it once you have everyone sort of looking at the same uh same ledger it's very easy to do margining it's very easy to like to move your collateral to one venue to from one venue to another um and you know all the finances leverage a formal leverage at the end of the day and so that that simply becomes a lot easier and uh and cheaper so I would say those two things and then you know the the regard one I would say is probably just the access so it's easy to for anyone with a phone at some point to access any asset uh in the world.

>> Yep. Yep. Very cool. Um Adam, last thing from me for you is, you know, you're very much in the weeds with the right people in this space. Um you know, different kind of sectors, different uh types of of companies. I'm just curious like what is life like between the flows, you know, like you're really much you're very much in the flow of information of of uh value transfer of this type of stuff like you're in New York. Like what is what is the what is the Yeah. What is the lifestyle and experience of like working with institutions very closely but also working with some of like the top crypto project closely? Like you're very much just in the information flow. I guess

like the main question is just like is like what do you what do you value the most about your position in the market at RWXYZ as well as just like the personal uh you know stature that you've built? >> Yeah. Well, I'm not sure about the the personal stature. You know, we like to just do a good service, you know, uh solve people's problems. Uh keep it pretty simple, but no, it's definitely a definitely a privilege. You know, I think there's a lot of uh trust that people put in us when we work with them to onboard a lot of their assets. And you know, finance at the end of the day becomes like a trust game. I was talking about everything's a commodity, you know, and and trust ends up becoming like this intangible thing that you can kind of feel it a little bit. Um, and so

that's kind of our main focus is, you know, we are trustworthy enough to work with large companies that like the Broadbridge uh data for example. I think that's never been shown publicly like ever even to traditional finance. Um, and so we managed to, you know, work with a lot of these big players on those projects, but then at the same time, of course, you know, we kind of have crypto native backgrounds and so we kind of get to see some of the more wackier stuff that people are are launching and um, you know, again, we got our start in Salana DeFi. So, we've sort of seen the the full spectrum, you know, full spectrum of crypto, uh, I like to call it. Um, but it's fun, you know, it's fun, very busy. I think I have my first gray hair, so, you know, congrats.

>> Maybe that's a good summary. >> I got just one for you. Do you is is there any teams that stick out that you think are doing a really good job and maybe flying under the radar? You mentioned Broadidge and, you know, they're doing some innovative stuff. Well, who who else kind of sticks out is doing a really good job in the space. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think there's always, you know, always startups, you know, that are that are new that are building that deserve tons of shout outs. But I think, uh, just for the audience's sake, I think there's two companies that are cool. Um, one of them, they're, you know, both these companies are are gonna have announcements coming up soon, so I think it's it's pretty interesting. But um one of them had recently had a big announcement. First, it's a figure. So,

Mike Hagy, the founder, traditional traditional finance guy, uh, launched SoFi, you know, massive fins lender. They just IPOed and they run their entire lending book on, uh, on the providence blockchain, which is crazy. >> And they have a token. So, >> that's a thing. Um, and the same thing with uh, digital asset.com. You know, both of these players >> uh, they all they also operate at scale. and wow the Broadbridgeidge one that we did project that we did recently that runs on uh runs on Canton uh which is also now a public >> uh network. So like both of these companies you know have been at it for a long time. I think uh probably one of the most interesting kind of market dynamics that uh I think is is good to not know here is that like you can

either start like bottom up or sort of top down and crypto you know like the Ethereums and Salana and the things that we all sort of know and have used. they launched something. It's very much like build it and they they will sort of come and we just launched this open ledger to the world and then you get this very organic bottom up sort of adoption of the technology and you know it's it's uh it's crazy to see and then um I think the these two companies I mentioned uh they're they sort of started with like the use case in production and then are now starting to like enter the crypto sort of sphere a bit more. Um, so definitely >> interesting. Interesting. I've heard of Providence, but it's crazy that they are doing that much that that much reliability is on them for such a large

company's basically financials. >> Yeah, it's everything. I mean, it's it was like it was like the full it was like a full stack ecosystem. >> The chain and the app and the capital markets on top. >> And you're saying Providence has a token or the actual company that is doing it has a token? Figure >> saying figure. I think they I think there's like a foundation, but I think they they might have had some reors at some point, but I think they officially merged recently. And uh yeah. Yeah, there's a token. Um it's it's a public blockchain, so you need a you need a token to to rally the validators, >> but um >> interesting. Oh, yeah. Here it is.

Figure Heliloc token. Figure Helock as in Yeah. >> Yeah. That represents the the loan book of the company that you know. So >> as in like home equity line of credit. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that that represents I believe the portfolio. Uh we're going to do some announcements soon uh as it relates to uh figure provenence. Uh so you'll see some new saucy data on the site. But um yeah, I think the the core message is that there's companies that uh went sort of full stack from from day one and built every single part of the the puzzle. And I think actually more blockchains should be doing this. You know, everyone should be going >> chains should be verticalizing. You know like >> if you're if you're a chain with a huge treasury, I think you should you should,

you know, there should be on-ramps automatically available. You know, you should fund on-ramps, fund offramps, fund KYC tools, fun like, you know, I think the world's going to catch up really. I think these traditional players are going to move extremely like slow, but like when they do move, they're going to move at scale. And I think a lot of the blockchains have had, you know, 10 years to to uh do real things. and you know uh I don't want to say that the clock is ticking but uh there's a lot of um yeah I mean yeah you have to build something useful for people and uh get it to the hands and start adding adding value and so you think you'll see you know which which ecosystems are serious about that and which ones are you know sort of you know

took it easy for for a while that's my >> there's quite a few of them and they want to dog food their own techn apps they want to do you know it's very it's coming very hard to a lot of the L1's and L2s And I mean the the DAT strategy can only go so far. The kind of uh you know riding the coat sales of of the of lower rates or the market going up can only go so far etc. So totally >> uh I think you're totally right. I think and I think a lot of them see this this kind of sectors if you will as a big part of their potential strategy because this is I mean you just kind of go where a lot of the money is. So Adam Lawrence co-founder of RWXYZ um great to have you on. excited to be

working together more closely. Happy to just keep helping on the amplification side, doing some more content on these new shows. We've got stabled up with Fracks. We've got money moves fast with Polygon. So happy to have you on the co-host once in a while. Do some coverage of some of the teams that you guys are working with. Bring them on the stream. We're missing RWA Summit. I know that you'll be there. Enjoy that. We'll see you at SmartCon. We'll see you on the live stream at SmartCon if you're going to be there. Um and uh we'll be good to grab a beer, >> dude. Hell yeah. Let's do it. You know, the uh the world of brands. This is the year of the world of brand. You know, let's go.

>> The year of RWXYZ is what it is, buddy. >> Adam, before you get out of here, you mentioned them twice. Do you own labuboos? Are you bullish, >> dude? I don't own labuboos, but I you know, you know, you have to they're a little demonic, you know, so you got to be stay frosty on them, you know. So, you see them. >> Adam, you're infiltrated. They've already troll, dude. You're a big troll. Did you know that? Has anyone ever told you that? >> Yeah, dude. We're just, you know, it's the energy the show needs, right? There we go. That's great. Yes, sir. >> All right, dude. >> Thanks, man. Stay >> frosty. >> All righty.

That is Adam. That That guy has a funny sense of humor. >> Yeah, he is funny. Very dry sense of humor. He's a character. >> He's a good dude. All righty. Up next, we've got AJ um of of Arbitum Offchain Labs. Um excited to have him on talking about the latest at Robin Hood. There's going to be more and more coming there from him. Um Oh, yeah. and Hyperlquid and Arbitum one and Robin Hood and this uh Athena USDM thing that they did for Mega E and you know all that. So yeah, should be a fun one. And then I think we got Faro after uh followed up by maybe Carlos from Secure Ties. So still just kind of checking in on those guys. But uh

>> yeah, stream >> should be a good stream. >> Great stream, Adam's hilarious. Um, we got uh AJ coming up in just one moment. You mentioned that they might have some affiliation with the Mega ETH Athena stable coin. What's the >> No, just just curious his take on that actually. Um, and just kind of like what they're what's going on. But I think the the most pressing thing is what's the latest on on Robin Hood? I feel like that's kind of gone quiet for a bit. >> Uh, and just trying to figure out what's going on there and uh and then go from there. So >> cool. We're gonna get him up whenever he is ready.

>> Yep. Yeah, man. Happy Friday. >> Our token's been on quite a T as well. >> Is it? >> Uh whole market's been pretty bullish. >> Yeah, it looks insane actually. Like I think I look at my Telegram chat. It says two week candles primed on ARB. Actually, literally on ARB is the token that my buddy JP just sent nine minutes ago. So AJ will be glad to hear that even though he won't be able to comment on it. >> No, we we we won't. It looks good, but we got we've got a bullish arbitum chart.

>> I think the only conclusion to draw is if you work with arbitum, you get added to the S&P 500. Is there is there any other conclusion to draw about Robin Hood and Arbitum? >> The the arbitum effect, AJ, that's that's what we're going to call it. >> What can I say? I I don't I still don't know what happened. What did I miss? Uh, well, you missed the Telegram chat of a guy sending TA of the twoe ARP token chart, saying it looks good. But Rob's talking about Robin Hood being listed on the S&P 500, and we're calling it the Arbitrum effect. >> Oh, there you go. Congrats, Robin Hood. I had no idea. All right, that's exciting. >> Congrats, Arbitum. Congrats, AJ. Welcome to the show.

>> Thank you. >> Yeah, it's good to have you back, man. >> Yeah, it's been a while. >> Yeah, it was uh last last I saw you was in um was at that hot event in K. It's the A one. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah, very hot. Yeah, exactly. And then I think Robbie, I think you had me on. You like moderated a debate we had like what was that like in December last year? >> Oh yeah, with Ryan who's no longer at Optimism huh? >> No, it looks like he survived. >> Yeah, AJ AJ won that one apparently. >> Sometimes just a battle of attrition. >> Yeah, Ryan's a great guy.

>> Yeah, he is. Well, AJ, man, uh community is dying to know and I don't even know if you you have much to tell us, but I hope there's some updates is uh so we had this big Robin Hood announcement in July. they chose arbitum. It was, you know, the Ethereum community has really rallied around that. Then we just saw this proliferation of announcements, but they weren't in the same direction. It was Circle launching their own L1. It was Google want to launch their own L1. It was Stripe want to launch their own L1. So, we, you know, we got really fired up about Robin Hood and then and then I think some of the community has been kind of let down with the with the other announcements. Um, so kind of a lot to kind of, you know, go through there, but maybe we can just start with

Robin Hood. what is the latest uh on the tech side, on the product side, on the development uh what what can you share with us as to what the latest progress is? >> Yeah, so like with Robin Hood right now, there's like really two things that are happening in parallel. One is um and you have to remember it's very important to understand that obviously Robin Hood's like a cryptonative company like their priority is not to like build blockchain technology their priority is to build financial focused applications for their you know user base. So right now there's two main work streams going on in parallel. One is the tokenized equities product. That's what launched um in the Robin Hood app for EU customers on June 30th and Khan. I'm sure all of you guys have saw like like all those memes about

like Vlad and stuff and the chalkboard and everything. Um so they're still in phase one of that which means that you can buy sell it and trade in the Robin Hood app tokenized equities. Those all live on Arbitrum one today. um they continue to add more and more stocks that are available as part of that product. Um they are working towards as Vlad you know sort of very clearly articulated um a world in which they want these equities to live anywhere. They want them to live on chain. They want them to be able to be posted as collateral. They want to be able to be swapped and do whatever you want with them um outside of just like the core Robin Hood app. So that's like work stream number one. They're still in what we call phase one. Um doing a lot of work on their end around 247 trading

around permissionless behaviors to bring that like fully on chain. That is the thing that I am most excited and bullish about. That's the thing that's growing the pie. That's the thing that's bringing people on chain. That's the thing that like you know the original visions that I had for a lot of smart contracts was instead of just building products that work for crypto people, how do we use crypto to build products that work for the entire world? This is like I think the best example of a company accelerating their global growth strategy using crypto rails. So that's like thing one very important. Thing two and this is going to get into like the circle tempo all those different conversations. Robin Hood recognizes as a part of this it makes a lot of sense

for them to have their own blockchain um to do all of this within their blown blockchain architecture work closely with our team. So we are working with them um a lot on the design of what the Robin Hood chain is going to look like. It's going to be powered by Arbitum technology. It's going to be a part of the arbitrum ecosystem through a product we call orbit. Um and that's going to live within the arbitrum, no pun intended, I guess. Orbit. Um those are like separate work streams to some degree. Um and they're both like progressing very nicely. I don't want to like share too much on timelines because there's like never upside only downside and it's also more their timelines than mine to share. But it's been really exciting to see a lot of the progress

that's happening um across across both of those things. So um the people are going to be really excited. They want to build a very strong ecosystem around this. I think it's like you know the way to think about this chain is I don't think it's their intention to just like launch a chain. It's their intention to launch a chain that's very centralized and focused around the user experience they want to curate. They want external developers to be clear like to be building on top of it. But they they're not just trying to like launch a chain. They're right. So we're thinking about what are some of the design decisions that go into this chain that will help you know accelerate that. We're thinking about things like you know at the infrastructure layer like what can we do to make the onboarding experience for non-cryptonative people as seamless as

possible. Right? So there's a lot of things especially when you consider that like the average Robin Hood user is actually not cryptonative, right? So like the best we like to compare it a lot to like base because like they're probably the most like natural comparisons generally. I would say more of Coinbase's users like have been on chain than like a typical Robin Hood user. So there's a lot of things that we're working on to make sure that that user experience obviously at offchain labs I don't know if you guys saw we acquired zero dev uh last year that's like smart account wallet infrastructure we want to make or sorry last month that we want to like integrate into these experiences like for this exact thesis which was part of our broader thesis for how we you know we can build products that helping people on chain. Um so

that's like the latest with Robin Hood to comment on like the L1 versus L2 thing. Um, there's a couple of things that I think and I think that like a lot of these chains that are launching as L1's I think are much more comfortable because like they're so focused on like the um centralized like asset issuance of the stable coins. I think they have different priorities around like decentralized validation, permission versus permissionless behavior because they're very centric around these payment use cases. I think you if you just think about like if you want to launch a chain as an L1 versus an L2 like unless you're doing like a proof of authority style chain which it sounds like what circle is starting with there is a lot more

complexity around launching an L1 than an L2 right and we can talk about like the intricacies of it but like the simplest thing is to think about if you're launching an L2 you're outsourcing security to Ethereum and you just need to focus on what the execution environment looks like. If you're launching an L1, you need to still focus on the execution environment, but you need to make sure your consensus doesn't break, right? So like you can't really solve for that, right? Like that like that's just a factual statement, you know, like in terms of and then a lot of people like to say like, oh, the problem with L2 is like interoperability and bridging. You don't have better bridging between different L1s, right? So like unless there was a world in which there was only one L1 that was going to exist, you have worse biding problems between

different L1s than like different L2s because they actually share an exec a consensus environment. So like a lot of those things are are different. I think what you're seeing is there's a lot more potentially control. Um I think that the term people are using for this is like finality. There's a lot of ways to get to finality. um you know and I and I I think that like really to be honest what's happening is there's like a confluence of stable coin issuers that are bringing chains at the same time um and an L1 architecture for them they actually think might be better. I I kind of disagree but you know maybe different minds can can can argue but I think if you think just generally about wanting

to launch a multi-purp like a like a general purpose chain even if it's opinionated like the Robin Hood one might be on terms of features L2 architecture where you just have to focus on execution environments is a really a much better architecture. The second point which is really critical is around the operating margins of these chains. Um, and this is very it's somewhat related. It's less technical and it's more business. But if you look at like an L1, let's say you wanted to launch like an L1 with like a blockchain with like, you know, proof ofstake system, right? For example. So, first you have to launch a token, which is already a lot of complexity for a lot of these larger enterprises. But let's say you got to the place where you're comfortable launching a token, right?

You're like fully all in. We're going to launch a token. We're going to build a blockchain. The biggest challenge and the the reason why I recommend L2 architectures consistently is unless you know you're in the blockchain business, one of the biggest problems with an L1 architecture, a proof ofstake architecture is that your costs are not a function of your revenue. Yeah. >> So what do I mean by that? If you like let's say run like look at like Sooie or Avalanche or Apttos or Salana they are all inflating the token supply for the sake of security at the rate and tune of like between five and 9% annually. All right. So if your token is trading at a billion dollars in order for you to get that economic security in a proof

ofstake system you're spending between 50 and $90 million on security. There might be zero transactions right? Like it could be that there's absolutely no transactions, but your like hard fixed cost if you want to maintain that level of economic security is somewhere between $50 and $90 billion. If you look at an L2 architecture like an arbitrum one or a base and base doesn't have a token, right? Obviously arbitum one does, but it uses ETH for gas token. Your expenses for security, what you pay the L1 scales with your demand. So if you have no transactions, you don't pay economic security.

>> And this is a really important difference because a lot of these enterprises, they want to launch chains as a as a like like an accelerator to their broader business. They're not like trying to focus on building blockchains. But you can get stuck with a product that has like this 50 to90 million overhead. If you've got an L2 and let's say even your your your you know your strategic strategy changes and you don't want to maintain this as a key priority like you just have less transactions right you might like have to pay some operating overhead to keep it running but you're not just like emitting tokens and if you stop then like the chain security model breaks and that's like I think one of the killer differences. I know I've been rambling for a while so I

don't know if you guys have any questions or I've been trying to like sort of lay it out like very like clearly. That's the killer distinction, right? And it's a superpower, by the way. Like if you look at Arbitum One and Bass, >> they run right now at like a 93% gross profit margin, right? So >> Arbitum One has no inflation for security. Bass obviously is like a centralized company. We're generating two to five million a month in transaction fees at like a 93% gross profit margin, >> right? Like that is a killer killer feature of the L2 model. I've actually argued in the past that I think L1 is like not getting its fair share. That's like, you know, for a different conversation.

>> Yeah. >> But like the fact that like the simple fact that you can maintain a 93% gross profit margin, you can scale what your security costs are as a function of your revenue and as a function of your growth. And if you decide to strategically pivot, you're not stuck with this overhead. To me, those are like the killer differences. And again, in a proof of authority system, right? So if you're launching all under proof of authority, you just like shut it down. But the problem is then users might might have their assets stuck or it might have the economic security the chain might change and again I'm not judging that difference but it's not the same economic security. If arbitrum one decided to shut down you just do a forced inclusion mechanism to get all your assets back to Ethereum. Again it's not an ideal outcome

>> but we're not stuck with it. The users aren't stuck with this, right? It's like a totally totally different security model. >> Yeah. I mean, Victor Boon from Coinbase, he's like a protocol specialist. He he responded to one of the clips that we had asking that we just had the circle CTO on Monday and asked him, you know, kind of why like why do L1 and he he kind of compared it to uh AI compute in GPUs basically how, you know, we started with like like low-level, you know, basically very general GPUs and then got to really more sophisticated ones as the models got more heavier and, you know, more resource intensive. And Victor's like, "Okay, that's fine." But like networks are defined by their network effects. That's the entire point.

Comparing the network that they're building to a phenomenon with zero network effects is a fundamental is a fundamental misunderstanding of what can make ARC successful. And he says that the argument is just circle will be the only one using the chain. Then yeah, I get it. It's just about the scale throughput customization, but even then L2s are faster and cheaper to run. So just do that. and he says, you know, he he wishes Arc and Circle well, but he's just not seeing how the product strategy is going to play out. And so that's kind of his take and I think it aligns, you know, decently well with what you're saying. But again, you know, these are Ethereum people speaking. So, so you got to kind of measure the, you know, >> Yeah. I mean, to me, it's not even so much about Ethereum. I think, you know,

I'll give you like our our general perspective like Ethereum is the best L1 for us to settle to, right? What I'm really advocating for with enterprises is you don't want to be stuck with a fixed cost. >> Yeah. >> Irrespective of what your future strategy is that like that sentence has nothing to do with Ethereum, >> right? I think if people decide on L1 L2 architecture like Ethereum will probably end up being like their best decision. Look, we have L3s that settle to arbitrum one. We have L3s that settle to base. I think we have some L2s that are planning to settle to hyperlid using the orbit stack. I'm more explicitly talking about this concept of like make sure you don't get stuck with fixed cost. Rely on

the security mechanism of the underlying chain. Again, everyone's going to have a different security mechanising chain. I think that's why Ethereum is the best for this model. You can, you know, have the most confidence in that security. But, you know, again, businesses pivot all the time. I think that and again, it's a little bit different these like sort of proven authority style chains. And for example, like the Stripe one, from what I understand, it's not actually Stripe. Like the Stripe and Paradigm invested in this like third party team. It's like I'm guessing that blockchain is not going to go anywhere. But if you're an enterprise that's building a blockchain under your brand and your strategy pivots, you don't want to get stuck with a massive fixed cost.

>> Yeah. That's basic business, >> right? Exactly. So like that's really the again my pitch is nothing to do with Ethereum. I think Ethereum is the best execution consensus layer for this. I think arbitum as a product is the best execution environment for you to do this. But that's again that's like orthogonal to like the core pitch which is get get really high gross profit margins and derisk what happens if you decide to shut down the product. >> Just the last the last guess that we we were having this conversation that there's already consortium chains that are internal to City Bank and internal to JP Morgan and they just haven't really publicized it a lot and it kind of feels like that could be the play.

Circle is the only one using ARC, but they've gone and made it public for the intentive of boosting their valuation presumptively, right? And >> I think I think the Google one's going to be closer. Again, I haven't looked at all the specs, but my suspicion is the Google one's going to look a lot more like what you're describing >> on the consortium chain side, right? Like >> I don't know if this is going to be like a permissionless network that anyone can use or deploy on. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure, but my suspicion is it's going to look more like that. I I'd like to get your take aside because you gave a really comprehensive insight into into the technology of it and how that relates to the business element of it and just taking the business side one step further. I you had a pretty

passionate tweet about buybacks and how passionate you are against buybacks and I was just curious like you guys are operating at great profit margins like you said as an L2 and and there's plenty of other businesses out there that are also you know using arbitum in some way shape or form and also running incredible businesses. Some use buybacks, some don't. What is your argument against buybacks? Why why do you feel so strongly that these are not the right way to grow a token and get more growth capital into the industry? Okay. So, I I'll I'll tell you my take on this and it's like, you know, it's um maybe it's a bit of a hot take, but one of the things that I think fundamentally I think the reason why people are doing

buybacks is one of two reasons there. By the way, there I should just say there are actually some ex exceptions to this. Pump. Fund again doesn't mean you do a 100% buyback, but like the revenue that pumpf fun generates and hyperlquid generates are potentially like a kind of exceptions to what I'm I just want to kind of caveat with that, right? Like those numbers are like incredible and outstanding. All right. The first thing is I think a fundamental reason for why a lot of people advocate for buybacks is because they don't believe in the governance of the protocols that they hold tokens in that they will do a good job of growing the value that acrru to these tokens.

That's like number one. And if you don't believe that, a buyback is like a surefire way to gain confidence that's like kind of unavoidable around like just like a deflationary concept, right? So I think that like but that to me is like the opposite of ambition, right? That's just skepticism, right? The second is I think people don't like a lot of the crypto businesses don't have large enough moes where they feel like if they reinvest they'll see the returns right and I'll tell you what I mean by that is you know it's not it's not a

tragedy it's the wrong word but it's like one of I think the unfortunate like um byproducts of crypto ethos which is like It's very easy if you want to like vampire attack a protocol that's done a ton of innovative work to just like launch a token, do it, and like attract capital extremely quickly. We've seen this like through AMM wars, we've seen this through per wars, right? So, in like a traditional business, right, if you're growing like crazy, you're just funneling back money in because you've got something proprietary.

you've got user lock in usually to some degree and you just continue to funnel funnel funnel funnel right so like those are two I think very distinguished differences in crypto versus let's say a traditional company the thing that I don't think is true is just because you have decentralized ownership and decentralized control of a protocol it doesn't mean you don't have to run a protocol like a business to some degree so I look at something like arbitrum okay we have an you I'll walk you through some of the some of the different programs and initiatives that are going on. We have a ton of incredible things that are happening beyond transaction fees. Like I would be surprised if in five years from now that the majority of

arbitum revenue actually comes from transaction fees. I like to use this term called economic zones of opportunity. And I'll walk you through what that means. And I'll walk you through like how arbitrum is designed because I think it's like one of the most fundamental things that differentiates arbitrum from other protocols. And I know like I don't know how much how much I don't know if somebody after me like I can go on for a while. >> No, just keep going. Far's coming on. But like just just let it rip. This is really interesting. >> Okay. So this is very different distinction also by the way between L1 and L2 models. Um, and I was talking like I I quoted something from Mer about this when he was talking about like the Salana stable coin.

The nice thing about arbitum is that like I said, we have 93% gross profit margins, right? If you don't have a Dow like architecture, what are you supposed to do with that money, right? You either like go into like a centralized entity like like Coinbase. I'm not criticizing it's just it's a public company or you have to like programmatically do buybacks. So that's one of the things that like L1 blockchains and it's one of the criticisms I have of like Ethereum and I've been talking about this in the concept of like funding development.

It's a criticism to me. You cannot have like a burn as and like giving validators like a hund like a if a 100% of rewards go to a burn and to validators, you're screwed in a rainy day. Like imagine if like when Ethereum was doing $30 million a day in 2021, they're like, "Wait, we don't need to give a 12% return to stakers like and burn the rest." Like why don't we save a hund00 million a month that we're generating for like a rainy day, right? The problem that everybody always criticizes is well, we're not going to have a credible neutrality neutral entity that's going to do that. One of the nice things about like the L2 model like arbitrum, every dollar of onchain revenue, whether it comes from

transaction fees or like time boost, which is like the ordering mechanism, flows onchain into the arbitrum Dow's treasury wallet. The only way to get those funds out is an arbitrum dow vote by the token holders. So right now like that treasury like the arbitum dow controls like 2.7 billion ARB, but then on top of they have like $200 million of non-arb assets. It's like around a 100 million like stable assets and like a 100 million in ETH. All of that is controlled by the token holders, right? So the way I think about this is what do we have? Do we have $200 million of stuff that we plan to do to grow the demand for the technology and continue to compound value, right? So what

happens is is let's say we just distributed all that to like token holders, right? So everybody got like a 5% yield, 4% yield, right? What happens when arbitrum, you know, progress slows down? We have to sell more tokens from the treasury. Like what did we just gain, right? We should be getting to a point where we continue to compound the business. So that means demand for our product, our core products are Orbit and Arbitum one and continue to find business lines that compound that. So what are things that like the arbitum dow has done right? So the most like I would say unique example of this is what we call the arbitrary gaming ventures. So that is a fund essentially the LP of the fund

like you can read the Cayman bylaws. Essentially the LP of the fund it's structured a little bit differently like a structured like a foundation but if you read it the only one who can call capital from it is a vote of the arbitrum DAO. So effectively the Arbitrum Dow token holders have full ownership and control of this entity. It's like a fivep person team with like investor experience deploying capital on behalf of Arbitum token holders. It's really freaking cool. They they call that a round of paradigm. They call that a different round in T-Rex with framework and all of the value that's going to be generated acrru back to arbitum token holders. But what's actually happening if you think about it? We're using our treasury to attract the category gaming. So, we're bringing

games on chain onto Arbitum. This is a category, by the way, that you're never going to make money off of transaction fees. So, if you look at all of these different ecosystems that are trying to like bring games, right? And you can say like games is a worthless category. Put that aside for a second. If you're going to allocate capital, why are you allocating capital in the form of grants in no upside? These games that the gamers don't like trade per after. So, you're not making money on transaction fees. They don't like really use unis swap. They play games. they buy inapp things, right? Nobody wants high transaction fees. So you align with the category with the vertical in a way that creates and captures value for arbitum which is at the application layer whether it's tokens whether it's

equities whether it's revshare while also continuing to to grow demand right another great example of this and again this only works and goes back to the point I said about governance this only works if you have confidence like this is not like white labeling like an external VC that's just like doing an ecosystem fund this is on behalf of the ARB token holders it doesn't work if it's not it's not a foundation that's like not controlled it's actually controlled by arbitrage from token holders otherwise it doesn't work another example of this is very similar right with there's a big push now to bring rwas on chain right so there's a lot of ways you can do that but one of the things right now that you're seeing is there's a ton of supply every major asset manager that's new rwas the demand

side because we're still like figuring out regulatory clarity of like how do we have this stuff work in a defi environment demand side is light. So one of the things that arbitrum strategically did is the arbit the arbitum dowo started buying rwas. They've had RFPs saying we're going to buy rwas. >> Join the arbitrum ecosystem. We built out the supply side, the demand side, right? So the arbitum dow owns 45 million RWAS from BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Wisdom Tree, you know, a number of others. I don't want to leave anyone out, but you get my point. So that's like not the sexiest possible return. But again, you have 45 million assets that are earning about four to

four and a half% a year. All controlled by the arbitum token holders, controlled by the members of the Dow, but more importantly are utilizing resources to compound demand and growth for the network, >> right? They're not relying fundamentally on like a foundation that has a finite amount of tokens that's just like solely selling tokens to continue to fund growth. Yeah, the Arch Foundation has tokens to help grow the ecosystem. So, I'm not saying but their their role is much more diminished. Like they have like 3% of the token supply versus like 40% of the token supply. The token supply lives with the DAO. If the arbitrum foundation wants more tokens, they need an onchain vote by the token holders. So the power lives in the hands

of the token holders and that's a really important distinction because you have confidence if you invest in these business lines right like I don't know if you know the entropy guys well they're controlling through a treasury management program $88 million on behalf of the Dow now which is getting deployed into protocols like a fluid Camelot like you know Morpho like and all of this is being acred to the arbitrum Dow so the broader thesis is why buybacks to answer your questions to the longest answer you've ever heard on this show. >> The thesis is that you do buybacks when you don't have confidence that you have mechanisms to have sustained growth. The thing about arbitrum which is nice and I would say you know you might disagree

but I think it's pretty true. There is strong product market fit for the actual underlying product >> right a lot of people who want to use arbitum one there's a lot of people who want to use the orbit stack. The question is how do we build a business to continue to create more demand for that? Right? If we didn't have stuff to do with it, if there wasn't people who wanted to take the arbitum token holders money to invest in games, if there wasn't DeFi protocols that wanted to give good opportunities to the Arbitum token holders, then yeah, we should be returning capital. But we have way better things to do than the equivalent of a like a a buyback or a dividend.

um considering the amount and magnitude of growth that we have moving forward >> and it's just like you got to invest in the business you know like that's basically like if you had to if you had to summarize exactly everything that you're saying it's like invest in research R&D business development scaling and not just in because you know then you just start chasing your token up as well you know there are certain ways to think about buybacks you could set really low bids if you had extra cash and like have a floor but people are just equating the value to just immediate buying guys we're going to have to uh wrap here in a couple But yeah, just kind of closing thoughts here >> and and just one thing what what you're saying speaks volumes about arbitrum's community endow governance because something you preface this by saying

that a a a project with a less robust governance process is not able to facilitate the decisions about how to allocate that capital >> 100% it's our it's our superpower right now. Arbitum is the only I think L it's for sure there's no L1's that could do this. I think it's the only L2 that the token treasury in order to move it is an onchain vote by token holders. >> Right? So again, the way the token holders think about it is they have the power of the purse. They control it and the question is we have to build consensus that what should we do with this money, right? And that's a critically powerful thing.

>> Um and it's unique and you know again people don't I think realize the magnitude of it. You know, I'll look at the latest dashboards. It's somewhere around $200 million in non-ARB assets that are controlled by the Arin token holders. Again, every day more transaction fees at a 95 93 95% gross profit margin business keep flowing in. And we've got, you know, more and more distributed and diverse revenue streams that are continuing, you know, to to grow the business. And that's that that that's the real focus of what we're doing right now. And you you alluded to another really interesting question about a potential avenue to allocate capital which is this enshrining stable coin. Just to get a succinct answer there to close that loop. Good idea, not

a good idea, good idea for some projects like Salana but maybe not arbitum. What what what's the conclusion to draw? >> Um I think it's very interesting to look at. I think like the hyperlquid stuff this week has been fascinating. One of the things that I think has changed is the dynamics of the relationship between asset issuers and chains like who actually has the leverage. Like hyperlid was a great example of of a shift there. Uh I mean a lot of this is a function of the genius act. I think there's going to be a lot more commoditization of stable coin issuance. So it's like an evolving thing. I mean, I'm not going to, you know, comment on any strategies that we're looking at right now, but it's a great example of building another business line that can compound value, right? Like blockchains don't have to

have a sole business line of transaction fees, right? The same way that what all the stable coin issuers, you know, implicitly decided is they don't have to have a business that's only that interest margin. They're launching blockchains now, >> right? And I think it's just a continuing question of how do you create value? How do you capture value? How do you compound value? How do you grow the business? And whether you're a DAO or whether you're an L1 or whether you're a private company, I don't think anything philosophically changes. I think people's skepticism of certain governance structures might change. I think the ability to actually execute might change. I think the power of community might change. But like fundamentally, you have to understand your business and figure out what levers

you have and that doesn't change. >> Yeah. AJ, absolute pleasure as always, man. Thank you so much for coming on. >> AJ, you just silenced all the L1 uh L1 uh uh rev maxis and buyback revenue meta maxis in 25 minutes. So, this is this is going to be >> I'm happy I'm happy I'm happy to like discuss it because I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing, but like this is a I'm pretty passionate about this because I think it's really important because otherwise like you know I just end I know you're trying to kick me off, but I'll just end with this one thing. I've been in crypto since like 2017. I think one of the things that's evolved and that's I feel like kind of like sad and disappointed. I think people have gotten less ambitious, >> right? It used to be people were trying

to build hundred billion dollar protocols, >> right? And now I feel like and a lot of this has to do with like the financialization of like memecoin trading and stuff. I'm not passing judgment. >> I just feel like what people's end goals are of what they're trying to build over longer time horizons has shifted. And I think buybacks and this whole meta is an extension of that. And I find it to be really unfortunate personal opinion >> for a hyperlquid in investment. I find it to be extremely fortunate for the sake.

>> Hyperlid's different again like they generate so much money. >> Correct. >> But again even though Hyperlid I I know those guy they source a lot of their liquidity from arbit like you know they have like what is it like somewhere around 10,000 daily active users. if they want to tackle a lot of the biggest players, the Binancees of the world. If they like Binance is investing probably two billion dollars a year in marketing and growth. >> Yeah. >> Right. Like it doesn't like there's Hyperliquid's a tiny team generating a ton of cash. Like >> I feel like there's a better balance than like what is it 97%. That's a personal opinion. Again, these guys are better executors than I am. So I'm not like I'm I'm like deferring to Jeff and Julian. I know >> these guys are crushing it. So like I'm

not like here to tell them that they're wrong because they know their business extremely well. But like I don't know that that I I just I'm so curious about like if they changed it to like a 7030 or 6040 or toggled with it. I'm curious to see how things would change. I mean obviously they built an incredible business. So yeah I mean they the community is used to the 100%. If they changed it would destroy sentiment I think and just I mean yeah pump pump is a little bit different. It's a bit more o opaque but hype's been the same way just through and through. So AJ man appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us. Hey, what's up >> guys? In the back this year, >> good to see you, buddy. I'm gonna leave you guys. See you next time.

>> All right, we got we got a whole lot going on in the back. We got Faro Carlos, the CEO of Security just hopped in. He might join this session. We're going to start with just getting Faroke up. Uh and then we will uh reorient around uh our boy Carlos. Just give us a quick sec while we got Faroke in the back. Rob, let's get your your uh take on that, >> man. Absolutely incredible flow while uh while while you change the headline. Absolutely incredible flow from from AJ. I mean, comes on. Went for a 20 minute rant before even getting prompted a question about the difference between why a change could launch an L1 versus launch an Ethereum L2 and why Robin Hood decided to launch their L2 with arbitum

orbit. absolutely incredible rant, great flow, and then goes into another another just really comprehensive, educational, but also entertaining because AJ, you know, just has a way with words and a a great insight about the alternative, the the right way to do buybacks and the wrong way to do buybacks and why a a company that has as much revenue as we're seeing Hyperlquid and Pump generate, but why it's important to also allocate to the growth of the protocol and not just you know w >> without faith in the ability of the protocol to generate some sort of return on that capital just use it to buy the token. So just a highlighted really powerful and insightful.

>> Everyone looks at Hyperlid and is like, "Oh, this is the only way to do it." But it's like, guys, they're generating 2 mill a day. Same with Pump. It's like, come on. Like that there's a there's a reason why they're able to do this. So, all right, let's get Faroke up. He's in the back. I think he's ready. He's on now. >> It is the literal midst of the prediction markets mania right now. You are positioned over a year ago. You saw this coming, man. Welcome to the show. >> What's up, guys? It's an honor uh to be here. >> Yeah, it's great to have you, man. It's a big day for us because age is good, man. >> Yeah, I hear you. And we might have Carlos join you for a bit, so might get institutional real quick, but we're just going to get started. Uh he's got a hard

stop. We got a little complicated there. We're trying to make this as fun as possible. But man, we are in the midst of the prediction markets meta. You guys are obviously building myriad. I've got you as Faroke on prediction markets times media. Give us your prediction markets times media thesis. Why is this such a powerful combination and how do you feel that this is going to shape the future of content media in general? >> Yeah, I mean you know and appreciate you having me to to talk about this. You know for us we we made the pivot really the pivot we decided to get into production markets in March 2024 so about 18 months ago from ideation to like execution. Then we launched September 9th last year in beta to like 2,000 users like small group and then fully launched USDC markets uh earlier this year. Uh but for me it just made

perfect sense right you you you run a large media company I mean at this stage we own rug radio and the cryp media right the cryp media being the second largest new site in in the industry after coindesk or arguably one of the largest media players in in in the game and as you both know media companies are extremely hard to monetize right it's very hard to make money as a media company you're either bleeding cash or you just barely uh break even until you sell to a billionaire right I think that's why uh I think that's why you know time was acquired by Ben off and then bezel buys WSJ, Elon Musk buys uh Twitter. So, there's always that, but the thing is that's not enough. And so, Lock and I, my co-founder and CEO, were thinking like, yo, like how are we going

to monetize this media company? How do you build a unicorn? How'd you build a billion dollar company? And then someone throws this at us in Hong Kong during a meeting last year like, yo, you guys should do prediction markets. And that was before the poly market boom that really happened during the summer, right? The whole election thing. And uh and as soon as that happened, we were like, okay, [ __ ] it. Sorry, pardon my French. Like, let's go. Let's build this. Let's build a prediction market platform. makes perfect sense because we own rug radio which is like the voice of the people, right? It's like a a cryptonative podcast platform that made its way to the White House, right? Led by myself. Then you own the cryp media which is like journalism, right? It's just news, pure news. But then you have prediction markets, which we all know uh

the value of them, which is really where people can put their money where their mouth is and you can get different types of news and it makes perfect sense um for the for the media flywheel to enter that and then to become more of a tech company uh powered by media. Yep. Absolutely. Um I mean it's just a perfect combination. Like well at at a certain point we're pushing the frontier. I like to think about prediction markets almost as these like alternative realities that can take place. We just don't know which one of them is going to take place yet. And it kind of puts your mind in this quantum reality where it's all probabilistic. We have a probability of going into this probability of going into that and it's all dependent on the outcome. And at a certain point, truth, like literally what media is built on, which is truth.

And and what we perceive is all built around this probabilistic nature of the things around us and the outcomes of those things happening. So prediction markets and media just make such a perfect blend when we're thinking about how we're putting together this this world that we live in. So it it makes total sense. And I think now you're starting to see some of the prediction market platforms become more news. And they've started at prediction markets angle. they're going into more media. You start in the media angle and now going prediction markets. Ultimately, I imagine you'll meet at the frontier, the edge of these two markets.

>> Well, that's exactly what it is. I think Shane Copelan um for for for a moment after the election, right, the biggest winner, the second biggest winner of the after Donald Trump of that election was was poly market and Shane Copeland, right? And uh he he likes to say that uh prediction markets are the social news. I agree and disagree in that point, right? I agree in the sense that yes, prediction markets won that election and showed that they are a source of news but people still need different sources like you guys are an example right creators right um but then again journalism done right right without we've seen mainstream media do it wrong sadly but journalism done right which I believe we're doing over at the crypt I think block works and other media platforms in the in the space are doing a very good job in crypto um I think it

just adds it on to that so you're able to really see everything now it's like what the people actually think what a journalist thinks and what a creator thinks and I think it's up to then the person to go and make their own, you know, um, opinions out of that. >> So, for we're gonna throw you a curveball. We've got Carlos Domingo, the CEO of of Securityize in the back. He's going to join the conversation. You know, this is like this is two different parts of the crypto kind of verse coming together. We've got uh a lot of the institutional side uh and we've got some of this more kind of native uh kind of uh uh you know in the in the onchain in the actual kind of state of of you know using the uh technology that has been built. So guys Carlos welcome to the uh

show and I think this this will be a fun panel to just kind of uh get your both of your perspectives on uh just some of the latest happenings really in in in in in the space. So Carlos, thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, sure. Thanks for inviting me and and sorry I'm not going to have a lot of time, but I was supposed to be joined at 4:30, but I'll be here for a few minutes with you guys. I didn't want to miss the opportunity to say hello to you. >> Yeah, I appreciate that. >> All good, man. All good. We know how the traffic gets down there in uh in in uh I think where you are. Um but we've got a very interesting mix here between securityize and uh and Faroke from RUG and the media side of things. And so, Carlos, just to kind of introduce, you

know, you and and you know, you've been on the show before, but you guys are working with Black Rockck, you're working with some of the biggest institutions in the space, and you're bringing on billions, soon to be trillions, into the space. I'm actually curious because you're not necessarily in this world, but a very, very similar adjacent world. What is, Carlos, your take on the prediction market meta that's forming this entire new asset class? Is this something that institutions are taking a look at? Is it interesting to them? or generally how do you see these worlds converging? >> I think prediction markets by the way are very interesting and they're not necessarily just a crypto thing. I mean prediction markets is something has existed outside of crypto before um and now it's you know becoming a crypto

thing as well. Um I think they're very interesting as uh I think far was mentioning that I kind of like take the social temperature of what people think right and sometimes those things tend to be a lot more accurate. So from the RWA perspective which at the end of the day are is just you know bringing financial assets on chain and some of them have you know price uh you know that changes etc. I think uh prediction markets are probably a very interesting you know way of maybe looking at different price predictions for for things >> uh once they are on chain and they interact with prediction markets. Um you guys probably are familiar with it Toro.

So it to used to have this this social construct where your people were trying to replicate portfolios by following you know what other people were doing etc. So to some extent prediction markets are like that or you could maybe create a prediction market about what portfolio will perform better or what asset will go up higher etc and see what people think and whether that gets correlated with what happens on the markets. >> I anticipate we're going to start to see prediction markets on the size of the RWA industry who's going to be leading. uh Faro from your side I I just kind of a reciprocal question here like how are you thinking about RWAS and the absolute like just the scale of inflows into the space we have institutions all across the board that are now coming in and

they're onboarding their flows and their user their users and their balance sheet when you're when you're building for this next wave of institutional capital how are you framing this I'm curious also from a media side have you started to shape kind of a different nomenclature different termin terminology that you're using. What's the right way to think about this? >> And actually, you're going to love this one, Carlos. Uh, we ran prediction markets on RWAs uh last week. >> Oh, that's pretty cool. >> Awesome. I'll send you the article uh that our CEO wrote for for the crypt. But basically, we running prediction markets on the Darth Vader lightsaber that was selling at auction, right? And so, you can do that for like so many different um so many different assets, right? You have an asset right now that let's say is going to sell at an auction

for x amount of money. Not everybody can afford it, right? A lot of people can. I definitely can't afford Darth Vader's last lightsaber, right? Millions. But you know what I can do? I can take my opinion on whether or not it's going to sell for over under $3 million uh at auction, right? And I can do something like that and be able to take uh to to have skin in the game and also almost like feel like I was part of this auction, right? Almost >> price of the auction. >> Yeah, exactly. It was a pretty smart [ __ ] about the price of the auction. Now, we're going to run a few about like the price of like, you know, RM Autos, like what this Ferrari F whatever is going to go for or what this like, you know, Rolex, Daytona, Lemon's going to

>> new avenue of price discovery. >> Exactly. New avenue of price discovery. And then it also allows many multiple people to have skin in the game and to be partake in this. So, for us, like that's how we approach it on the prediction market side, on the media side, like yeah, definitely like we're covering I see people on the [ __ ] side or journalists like cover RWS a lot. Actually, when security ties was announced, right? Like we we were we were right up there uh all over that news. Personally speaking, I haven't dabbled too much into RWAs because I like to collect items. I'm a big watch guy and I'm obsessed with watches in a way. It's a good way. It's a good way to park crypto, but every time I buy a watch, we dump like 40%. Uh, you know, maybe it's correlated. Uh, but in a way,

I guess that's a good asset to own, but I I still haven't wrapped my head around whether or not I want to own the digital version of it, right? Um, same thing with latest Pokemon thing. And I'm curious your thoughts, of course, but >> I I rather have the card still. I see I have the PSA 10 little slab. >> This is similar like next week um they they do the RWA summit in in New York. I'm doing a panel with Khaledora from OUM about per versus RWA. >> A debate a debate. Yeah. >> And it's kind of like the same thing. What you don't if you want to speculate on price, you don't need to own the asset right?

>> But if you want to own the asset, then you need to get the asset. So, there's going to be people that are just speculating on price that they would like to buy the digital version or a fraction of a digital version just to see what the price does um and not actually own the asset. And there is people that would like to actually own the asset, right? They're not going to buy like a fraction of a Picasso. They'll wait until they have money to buy the actual Picasso and put it on their home. So, the same thing I think applies to to all sort of financial assets. Some people want to own stocks and then, you know, if you do token stocks the right way and the token represents the stock, they're going to buy it. And some people are just speculating with price and they're going

to buy some this these weird derivatives that are out there that do not have any intrinsic value, but they just track the price for people to speculate with it. So >> this is this is the thing, right, Carlos? Like NASDAQ said that they're going to go and they're going to tokenize a lot of these equities. Black Rockck has said that they want to tokenize these ETFs. Which one is the real like if you have it on both and you can speculate on price on both and where does settlement take place? How do you what is your reaction to some of these offerings from regulated entities that are talking about tokenizing their assets?

>> So the the announcement from NASDAQ and DTC uh is actually not what I will refer to as like the tokenization the way I will do it because it's just basically everything stays what it is right is DTC has a ledger already that keeps track of all all the shares that are tradable and they're going to use a blockchain for that but then it's going to trade in the same place which is NASDAQ with the same market participants. So, so you and I or or any other one will not be able to uh you know become a new market participant there. So, while it's great to see NASDAQ and DTC, you know, you know, pushing for tokenization, I don't think that that is a a radical departure from where we are. What I think tokenization is more interesting is when you can actually take shares in in native form

outside of DTC and put them on a blockchain where people can trade them in new market structures whether they're like dexes or or all type of you know cryptoentralized exchanges that have the right licenses to trade uh equities you can then use them as collateral for borrowing etc which you will not be able to do with the way that NASDAQ and DTC announced the other day because it would just be within the same place. Um we we did we tokenize a company called colleus and and that is in both places but two different shares like there's some shares that are on DTC some shares that are in the books and records of the transfer agent using a blockchain which is essentially tokenization uh and and that's I think the the interesting part right or or things like you know Viddle or some other products we have where the

token does represent the the actual in the the security um and that trades outside normal market uh things and can do like you know peer-to-peer transfer, trade 24 hours, have instant liquidity on chain. And that's what I think is interesting about tokenization. Toxation just to keep everything as it is. >> Yeah, >> it's a maybe a more efficient way. It's an efficiency play. The other one, it's a way to create new markets, right? In innovation, I always say that there's some innovations that provide efficiencies and some innovations that create new value because people do new things or or things that you couldn't do before. So anything that is just pure efficiency is less interesting that creating new markets, new value, allowing for new functionality which I think is where the interesting things

will happen. >> Yeah. >> It's just like just I was talking to somebody else. You guys are all very young but but I do remember when internet started you had the American online or MSN you know wall garden and then you have the open internet right >> so so for me and the open internet ultimately is the one that you know we're all using and we're all innovation happen and it it happened because it had permissionless innovation right anybody could actually create a website talk to any other create a new protocol a link to any place etc and the other things were wall gardens closed for only the the approved market participants as you that could post content or do things and those things die, right? because they were just basically uh an an efficiency

version of other means of you know distributing content while the other thing was an open platform for permissionless innovation which is what a blockchain is right so so I'm a big proponent >> there we go >> the second model >> that's the institutions talking dirty to us cryptonatives right there I swear that's what >> by the way some institutions like black do share this belief right because they tokeniz >> that's where they started started to do it on a >> permission on blockchain closed only for their partners and their friends. Uh so I do believe that the realization that will create disruption and new stuff that we cannot even think about it will happen on on public blockchains where permissionless innovation will flourish.

So >> Ethereum >> Ethereum coded indeed >> more than just an accounting software we will let you go brother thank you for joining us today. >> Well thanks for letting me join for >> congratulations and um >> Carlos >> I'll join you. >> Thanks for joining man. Thank you. Bye. >> See you next time, Carlos. Thanks, man. >> I love that. >> Just a little, you know, jump in there for and then just >> Oh, no. I was like, I got I got hit up by a friend. I was like, "Yo, this is so random. Why are you talking with the CEO securityized guest?" I'm like, "Dude, this guy's working with Black Rockck." >> I'm like, "This guy's like Black Rock and Morgan Stanley's [ __ ] blockchain." I'm here like, "Yo, so this market the lightsaber, you know?"

>> This guy pulls the Darth Vader lightsaber RWA. That's the RWA that we're talking about, >> dude. That [ __ ] was hilarious, bro. >> He's like, hm. Okay, >> that's not a T-bell. >> Well, like the thing that actually worked though is that like you were saying that you're you you like to own the watch. You like to own the asset. And he totally agrees with that. >> It's the same principle. >> It's the same concept just on sale, right? Exactly. >> Not just price. Yeah. securitizes whole thing is like look we want to have the actual asset be in you know in custody in some form be natively issued not these rapper versions and all these >> yeah I don't like that stuff I'm not too convinced about that side of the rule narrative you know like I've talked to a lot of watch companies that have tried

to bring it on I was in Geneva with like one of the biggest watch the company that owns like one of Cardier and all these brands right and they they flew me out there so we could have a conversation about like how do they want to approach like the watch industry for crypto like what's in the brain and the head of like the next wave and generation of buyers because that's us, right? Um and and I they they can't wrap their heads around the RWA side and I can't either and I'm like technically I should be able to, right? >> Yeah. It it it's it gets super fugazy when it's like, okay, we have a billion dollars in like equities or whatever in our balance sheet. We want to do tokenization because it's like the hot meta. So boom, we just we just, you know, write on paper that now we have a

tokenized version. Now we have $2 billion on our balance sheet. But it's like wait, >> yeah, >> there's still there's still just one billion. >> Oh, there's only one billion. Yeah, exactly. >> Right. So, so in that's where it gets kind of hairy and it's like, okay, well, we have to actually have native issuance or you got to make it clear like this is just a digital representation. It's actually uh it's going to settle with the same assets that you have offchain. >> Yeah. Um, for coming back to our to our uh to our uh prediction markets conversation, that was a that was just a a big >> super random. Um, so you know you know we we've been doing a lot more thinking about like two-way interactions with um with the audience, right? Like like you

know Carlos comes on and gives this take, right? He's doing this debate at the RWA summit next week. Per versus um tokenization or whatever it is. Now, it's obviously we have an Oracle problem here where it's we don't really know who's going to win. There's not going to be a winner, but like there's got to be a way that we can get our guests to come on the show, have a take, have a claim, set up a prediction market for it, get our audience to be able to bet or gamble or bet or predict alongside us, and basically create this like this kind of shared value loop where we can do a we can, you know, create this economic relationship with our uh audience. How do you think the evolution of creators and prediction markets is going to unfold when it comes to like creating

these deeper ties other than just like the typical creator fan relationship? >> I think I mean this is the end goal, right? Like to be able to say, "Okay, let's make a let's make a call right now with your guest. Let's say with me, let's be able to spin off a market, get the market out, get some volume on it, and get get the right resolution." And then and then there's an end goal. The only the problem is I'll tell you first like the the the the what's the hurdles, right? First and foremost, not every market is going to have enough liquidity to do that. You'd have to like see liquidity for a lot of these markets, and we know that's the biggest problem for most prediction markets, right? It was a problem for us. It's becoming less of one right now, but it's going to be a

problem for 99% of them, and that's why 99% of them are not going to be around in a year from now. That's just the truth, right? Um, second problem, second hurdle is resolution. You've just talked about oracles, right? I know Poly Market's ran into its own their own issues with UMA, right? Which is probably why like Koshi's still centralized, right? It's all done internally, which is why we started off as centralized. de developing our own oracles in house, working with some great tech partners, etc. That that that will all come. But how do you set the resolution, right? Is it you guys that's going to set the resolution to let's say I make a call on this like Darth Vader thing, right? Whatever. I guess it's easier to set the resolution, but on a random call that we're making like Bitcoin is going to be at that price by

then or the rollup's going to get that many amount of gas by that time or views and stuff like it's extremely hard to find resolution source. So, we have to agree to resolution source. That's very strict cuz you can't [ __ ] with the resolution source, right? You once it's there, once it's stamped, once it's in the res in the in the market, you can't go and make an amendment, right? Cuz you're playing with people's money. So, that's where it becomes very tricky. Now, live markets on screen blah blah blah. That's not that hard. We've built we've built a tool for that. We can already almost bring it up and or creator markets where it's like you guys tell us in advance like there's ways to that like you guys call us in advance like yo today we have Carlos coming on and this is the skew of guest we have

coming on. That's a broad topics. Here's five markets that we believe will be pertinent to the to to what we're going to talk about. Okay, cool. I'll have to say mirror, right? The mirror team goes back. Let's see what Koshi P market whatever. But obviously the bigger ones have are less prone to do something like that. But like someone like us will go in. Okay, let's make five markets that actually fit what you know Robbie and Andy are going to talk about today. And then you have them ready in advance. You guys are pushing them to to your to your markets to your uh to your audience. They're be able to predict live on air etc. leave it open for x amount of time and then that's resolved in a f in a in a in a timely fashion blah blah and done right and then there's a there's a

there's a there's a percentage resolve let's say that goes back to the to the creator. So that's the way we're approaching it right now. It's like hey like easy and clemente we're doing a 30-day challenge for trading. >> So then is like yo and Clemente can you can myriad launch market for that like okay [ __ ] it let's go. So we did a market for it and people were able to like take >> dude that's what I'm talking about man those fast crowdsource markets that like >> there's those three pro two three problems that you like that you mentioned but like you know right now poly market's slow to do they have very strict rules because they use um and they have oracle koshi I think is getting to the point where it's they can do a bit faster but these like like dude

doesn't matter if there's $500 of volume on the market in the first you know week because it's a new thing dude I don't care like it's going to be five grand at some point and it's going to be 50 grand at some point. Like it's just a matter of time. But but I think that that like innovation flywheel is what we're trying to achieve with at least with like how we're thinking about it. And I I I imagine a lot of other creators will kind of also be wanting to uh you know entertain you >> way. I mean the think I started off like you, right? I'm still a creator. I still have my morning show every day, right? And so this is exactly why we did prediction markets because we have so many creators like we work with Mando, Obie, Kiwi Mari, Tyler, myself, like etc

etc etc. So, we're able to like just push these markets and we're using our own platforms to do so, right? We even launched a prediction market show blah blah on Thursday. But the thing is like we're able to now create markets around what we believe we're going to talk about and then push volume to them, right? Because it's pertinent to our crowd. Same thing for the crypt. Like if you go to the crypt media, there's markets in line on every single article. We've built the SDK where like as you're reading an article on the cryp media, you're able to predict natively within the crypt platform. >> Yeah, that's sick. >> Yeah. We've done that with Coindesk as well. It's not just for us like we're try our goal our like the way we see our growth is by doing that right this is why you're going to compete compete with

the $10 billion poly market or the $5 billion cash right the numbers just dropped like two hours ago it's like wow it's crazy but at the end of the day like this is how I think we're we're going to be able to like kind of not play catchup but like innovate in a way billion dollar term sheet poly market right 10 billion >> yeah they did that just came out today >> with three billion cash something came out >> so I put up a tweet that was Like I think prediction markets can get as big as Binance in terms of volume whereas people are thinking of them as like just a prediction market. I'm thinking of them as more of just like a an obfuscated purpose platform or an obfuscated kind of like trading platform. What what is your scale of tam here for myriad for poly market koshi

you know let's say like top three top four markets end up with 80% of the volume you know what is that volume what is that daily you know numbers like you know is there any kind of estimates that you would have for us over like a five 10 year horizon maybe you know I'm not saying like exactly perfect but like we talking like trillion settled every month are we talking like a billion a day like >> I mean what's what are memecoins doing right now like pump fun did what 18 billion in 30 days. >> Yeah. >> Um something like that in volume like >> Yeah. >> Like there's no there's no >> there's no it's no it's it's impossible that prediction markets don't start like beating that by a mile, right?

>> Wow. >> I think because the thing is people don't understand >> prediction market is not a meta. Meta is like meta is just like a a word that's like CT uses and I use it sometimes. So guilty by like guilty but like it's childish. Prediction market is an industry. >> Okay. It's a serious growth industry. It's not a mess. It's like prediction market next big thing. Prep market is existed for like 100 years, bro. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> The two first apps on Ethereum were prediction markets. Auger. >> Auger. Shout out Augur. >> That's augur. They're making a comeback too, right? But like people don't realize just how deeply rooted crypto is with prediction markets. So like you're telling me this like prediction markets going to be as big as the NASDAQ, bro.

Like Binance what? Like it's just like gonna right? It's going to make as much money as Binance if not more. Binance are going to integrate prediction markets. is just going to like just start creeping up and they look people would never expect today that poly market would have received a term sheet for $10 billion to me. I'm just like, "Okay, cool." Like that's normal. But like everyone's shook, right? Of course, it's cool. I'm euphoric as a founder in the space because the TAM now is grow like the ceiling keeps raising, right? Like the floor price of these like or like of these markets just keeps going high and high, right? But I I don't want to make a call for five years, but this is a multi- trillion dollar.

>> Yeah, we're not going to put you in that in that position where you have to make those predictions, but you're absolutely correct because prediction markets are are part of the derivatives market. And so they're going to make up derivatives are like multiple trillions of dollars of business. And I think one thing that we had someone I think it was AJ that came on earlier and he said basically this is not just growing market share of an existing derivative sector. It's actually creating an entirely new asset class because of the ability to create more asset more outcomes that were previously not speculated on. Now we have price discovery for those things that were never even valuable before because you couldn't really make them tangible. Now prediction ma markets make them tangible and they let you discover

price on them and they're already part of one of the most expansive and general industries that that is out there right now known to man. So I think absolutely we're talking trillions not billions. >> Yeah. Go ahead. >> Sorry. I'm just like thinking like how do you even price the financialization of the most prolific asset which is information? >> What do you what do what price do you put on information which is even starting to be tradable? Like look at this like credit swaps, right? >> That's a $5 trillion a year industry. You're telling me predictions prediction markets are not going to top that? Like I'm not even It's on this is it's not like Farog 2021 NFTs, Moonboy or like a M. Like this is not that. Like I'm I'm

in the like I'm literally in the arena, right? >> I'm so dead, dude. >> I'm talking to all these like Carlos dudes all day long outside of the [ __ ] Twitter spaces and stuff like you're starting to see it like prediction markets are literally going to be the biggest thing. This is going to outpace securities. >> Wow. for I I'd love to get a a take from you on on something that's adjacent to prediction markets which is this entire creator streamer token meta right like pumpkot project descend they're doing great I mean you have revenue buybacks the token is doing tremendously >> ripping >> absolutely ripping as a result of this new announcement and very rarely do you see an announcement correlate with the type of movement that you see in the

token chart a lot of times it's just macrobased but in this case it's actually working and So I'm curious from your perspective, obviously we have memecoins, but this is this is a new meta to use to use your meme. >> What is how sustainable are creator token markets? What do you think is the value proposition? Do you think these things rip day one? You get a bunch of creator fees and then volume dwindles out over time or how can you make these sustainable generally? What is the right way to think about the creator tokens? Dude, how many times have we tried um to tokenize like people over the last like do you remember BitClout? I love that [ __ ] The first I was like one of the first >> like it was so early people were calling

everyone on big cloud scammers. It's like dude I'm just trying the new thing. Do you remember um >> there was another one I forgot which one. So obviously remember fch obviously now you're seeing a lot of different ones. I'm not seeing the same thing because pom I'm a huge fan of pom phone. I b post pom phone. support pump. I love what they're doing. Um, but like I I just I I just don't see it as much cuz then like what the person's going to have to continuously stream for it for its token to be worth something, but then it's just like a meme, right? Some memes are worth a lot. They get the attention like the Jet 22 Holiday was all over like Instagram for a moment and all of a sudden nobody's talking about it. So, it's tough because also creators are a dime a dozen, guys. I've been in

the creator game for like 16 years. I started when I was 18 years old. I'm 31 now. Uh, but I started my first like, you know, uh, blog when I was like 14 years old on Tumblr. So, I've been in this like creator economy my entire life, as long as I can remember. Um, and I've seen creators come and go back then on Instagram and I've seen creators come and go since 2021 in the space, right? Founded Rug Radio, we're one of the largest creator networks. How many people are still here from 2021 creating content? Almost none, right? But out of all the ones that are here, how many are relevant? And I don't mean this in any like arrogant way. like how many creators are relevant today and how long can they keep this relevance going, right? We've been hosting the show for four years now. We're still there. You

guys have been doing this for a long time. You're still there. But like once you're not there, like or once I'm not there, why would my token be worth anything? So like there's like this these creator tokens just have an expiration date. So in that sense, they're not much better than like memecoins, right? And by the way, if I'm going to trade creator tokens, I rather just own Pump. >> Yeah. Yeah. 100%. >> You'd rather just own the casino. And I mean the the thing is a lot of these on the first day you're going to end up making a ton of cash because like you get this launch really get this big pump on the launch and you get all this volume but the volume from there most likely is going to be about negative 90% negative 95% per day you know just kind

of like perpetually because it's just there's never going to be a a a time when you make more creator fees than probably on launch unless you're one of the ones that I do think even though I completely agree with you and I don't think we're going to do it because I don't think it's going to make sense for us and I don't think it's gonna make sense for you. There's going to be a creator who runs one to like multiple hundred mil if somewhere to do it. >> Yeah. It would hit 100 mil get close. >> I mean it can't hit 100 mil, right? Um >> that was 2024. But like yeah, I feel you though. >> Yeah. I know. But like it would it would run. I just wonder like see this is when like you got to get like I think Pom Fund's going to start getting the big

big big boys onto their platform and see and see what happens. It's just like whenever it's a token tied to a person, it never ends well. It has nothing to do with the person's intentions. They could be the nicest, kindest person on earth. Like I'm not like it's not I'm not talking about like ruggy. I'm saying like it just never ends well >> and then people have this like weird it's like really black mirrores, right? >> It is. >> There's like this weird value that they attribute to you. Um we we had the conversations, right? Like I think it was Mando was like, "Yo guys, are we launching a FOMO hour token on Pump Font?" And I was like, "Dude, and then Tyler and then me." I'm like, "Dude like >> I'm glad we weren't the only ones, dude.

We got we got Mirat TG coming right now. Like we can't be focused on the [ __ ] FOMO hour token. You know what I mean? So it's like like definitely not for now. It's like yeah, no matter how much money they give out to creators, which hey, maybe the rewards become 120 million, not 12 million. Now we're talking, right? So I think everybody at some point will have a price and the value where they're willing to do it, but I just I'm always scared of like what happens to, you know, to the quality of the content too, right? With with >> I completely agree. And then it Yeah. It's just it's a it's a it's not a winning battle for the creator. I do think just to close it off, there's going to be a fat air drop for streamers on Pump that would probably

>> it's probably going to be six figures if you're doing a good job and maybe seven. So like that is another thing that I think is reasonably likely just based on the they haven't even done an airdrop yet and the token's already at like six bill. >> So that's something to consider. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> You can't you can't stream on Pump without launching the token, right? No mandatory. >> Yep. Same with Zora and all that. Uh last thing for you, Farooq. We uh I got a flight to catch. We we run on a marathon here. Um dude, you you interviewed Trump, man. What What the hell was that like? Like like how was that, man? Tell us like give us the Trump story. How'd that happen? What was the best line in the interview? Uh where can we find it?

>> Um I mean, dude, it was surreal, right? Because it was the day after the second assassination attempt. So it was September 16th, almost a year ago. So September 15th, 2024, um I was under a tent uh with the Secret Service getting checked at Marago. I literally had like one of the German shepherds up my balls and then one and then they go, "Sir, like you got to step aside." I'm like, "What the hell is going on?" They're like, "Step aside. It was raining." So we're in the car waiting for half an hour, 40 minutes. Got a call. Homeboy is like, "Yo, don't say anything, but something's happened to the president, but don't tweet because if you tweet, it's going to, you know, everybody's going to know." I'm like, "Okay, I say nothing." The next thing you know, I got Walter Bloomberg, Delta One, uh DB, everyone's like second

assassination on President Trump at the West at the at the golf course. I'm right there. Like the golf course is like right next to Mara, right? And uh and then I was like, [ __ ] what happens? Like so I go to a hotel next door. I wait. I wait. I wait. Is the interview going to go on? Is the interview going to go on? And I get a message at night saying show goes on. The president wants to keep the interview on. So how it happened is that uh I was in August. I was at in Japan for WebEx. I'm with the homies, you know, drinking drinking at a local bar in Ginsa and uh and I and I get a call uh from from from a friend's like, "Yo, these guys, they work with President Trump. They're about to launch a project project which is now word

Libertify. So, you guys know it very well. Uh they they want someone for Twitter spaces. You're the guy like you're the Twitter spaces guy. It's got to be you." I'm okay. I get on the call with them. They're like, "We know you. I've known the guys for a really long time through my other industry and like, you know, I've been in the game for a long time." And it's like, "We love what you do. We love Fo Rug Radio. would you like to help us with the production? I'm like, I'm down to help you with the production, but can I host a thing? And at the time, they were thinking like Tucker Carlson, like way bigger. Like, I'm not relevant. Okay. Outside of that, like I'm just I'm just me in the space, right? >> Yo, that's crazy.

>> They're like, "Yo, let me get back to you." 30 minutes later, yeah, you can do the Trump interview. I'm like, "Holy shit." So, I go back to the phone like, "Guys, we're doing a Trump interview. When is it?" In 2 weeks. So, I'm in Japan. I had to go celebrate my 30th birthday in London on September 7th. >> Happy birthday. Thank you. Later, I'm I'm on my flight tomorrow. I go on a solo mission. I hired 15 person camera crew that we had in uh in in um in in Miami that we've done some work with before. And this how it happened. Like they called me up, which we pulled up, we did the interview and and it was crazy because um the assassination attempt happened and then Hannity from Fox wanted to be the first to interview President Trump after that cuz dude, the whole

>> the most powerful man on earth, the most influential human being on earth at the time, the most popular, right? He was like about to become president. Second attempt on his life. So you can think all the eyes are on him. And here I am just [ __ ] myself and and Henry didn't get it. It was us. And so here I am like the show's about to start. I press play on Twitter spaces. By the way, it was the most listened to live Twitter space in the history of Twitter, right? It was like concurrent and we know that because Elon sent the stats after to his team, right? And so I press start. So when you press on Twitter space, guys, there's no going back. There's already a million people.

Everyone's on me like, "Yo, get me on." I had to get Baron up on stage. I was on the phone Baron 30 minutes before trying to help him out with Twitter spaces. I have >> What's like, >> dude, it was super cool, right? But I was on the phone with him to help him out make a space. He didn't have an ex account. So like I'm helping Eric and Dawn Jr. are next to me cuz I interviewed every single Trump in one night, right? That's why people are was nuts. And then security comes are like, "Yo, Faro." And I'm like, "Yeah, they want to meet you right now." And I'm like, "No, I can't. Like the Twitter space has started. We can't do it." Like, "No, they want to see you." I'm like, "Oh, fuck." Uh, and so I I go to the other room. It's just President

Trump. He's like 6'5. Like I'm like 5'7, 5'8", you know? I'm like not that big. And then I look I look up to him and I and then he looks me. He's like, "Young man, huh?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I just turned 30 30 years old last week, you know." And he goes, "We're going to have a lot of fun." Bam. Shakes my hand with like firm. And then we pull up to the thing. And that's at that point when he shook my hand, all my stress and I was stressed. I got the ordering. I can tell you my receptors that day were insane. Like in so and so I pull up to the thing and then just cooked the interview for 35 minutes. Um then after that, you know, the the whole Liberty Fight team, blah blah. Shout out to them. Zack Chase and that whole team, the Wickoffs, like

they were the ones who really helped me make this happen. But it was surreal. Um, contrary to popular belief, he was super cool, super kind, uh, very supportive of me. I think he pul I mean, he's an expert, right? He saw was stressed out. Um, cuz this was the biggest gig of my life to this day. Still is, probably always will be. And uh, and it was super cool, dude. So that's how it happened. That's how >> dude that's legendary. >> To this day, I think the only crypto interview he's given. So >> it's insane lore. Baroque some uh prediction markets Trump creators we really appreciate your time boss man and uh we'll definitely need to chat more about this combination and prediction markets media brother >> we got you >> all right brother best of luck in the TG man I know it's going to be hectic for

you >> thank you thanks for coming on brother >> we'll see you next time >> all right Rob that'll do it for us I got a flight to catch what a stream that was pretty that was pretty >> chapter of the roll up you guys you just got a taste that's just a taste That was a vibe, dude. That was That was Yeah. >> Yep. We'll see you next time. Let's close it off. >> Thank you guys. Much love. See you next week. >> Don't miss your flight. See you next time guys.