Rollup TV: Wallet in Telegram, SQD and Stabled Up

Transcript

[music] [music] I'm above the [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> I'm above the [music] >> [music]

[music] [music] >> We threw down two days live stream. We got an event planned Q4. [music] Stay tuned. We're going into the events business. Robbie Andy the boys [music] two straight days live stream TV number one spot [music] [music] [music] I'm about the

>> [music] [music] >> I'm the mother. [music] [music] [music] I'm the mother.

[music] [music] I'm above the heat. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> We'll see you around the timeline.

Feels good to be back. Wow. Bang. We are so back where it's all over. We're so back. It's all over. We're so back. It's all over. Which one is it today? Crypto Twitter Robbie. [snorts] Um, >> yeah. I, uh, I'm not sure what Crypto Twitter thinks right now. Uh, yesterday I was swimming with manatees. >> Okay.

>> Embra embracing my Florida lifestyle. Okay. And, uh, >> I must say the manatees are very they're very gentle creatures. Um, they simply flow and eb with the flow. And it feels like it feels like um they and we are entering a Goldilocks era. >> Oh yeah. >> Where macro policies completing the soft landing that they had set out to do. [laughter] Inflation >> Aaron says GMGM. What's up Aaron? Good to see you buddy.

>> Inflation's cooling off. Uh and honestly it's unanchored. They don't care about inflation now. Maybe it goes a little bit higher, but we know that countries are running all of their all of their economies hot. Uh they're going to be printing money. Uh they're going to be giving sty checks. >> Saying it's not over. We're back. >> I'd say when from a on a scale of it's all over to we're so back, we are closer to we are so back than it's all over. >> Okay. Okay. Cool. That's good to know. Well, it's pretty cold down here in Florida. I know you're up there as well.

Um, I got like a blanket on. Feel great. We're just absolutely cooking behind the scenes right now, guys. We have a great show. Uh, we're a bit behind. So, we're going to bring up our first guest. Uh, we have the lovely lady from Wallet Instagram, Ireina Chuchina China, CSO of Wallet NTG. Uh, I mean guys, this application has gone from like a crypto nerd cipher punk app to like powering all of the world's drug dealers, con artists, and human traffickers. No, I'm just messing around, guys. That's Signal. That is Signal. No, Telegram has eclipsed a point where your friends have it. You have you get the you get the little

message, hey, so and so just joined Telegram. Oh, that's cool. How'd that happen? Um, and so I mean, it's just crazy. And so obviously Telegram has ton network. They've got kind of like this broader blockchain strategy. They've got like sticker packs with that have like certain onchain stuff in the in the application too. Um so yeah guys we're gonna get Ireina Chuchina up. Stoked to have her on as our first guest of the day and she is in the back when she's ready. Ina welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. Thanks Rob and Indie.

>> Absolutely. I hope you only heard the second part of my intro, which is that Telegram has absolutely been growing into the application that your friends just have. Uh it is the app that you get this notification that hey, you know, so and so just joined Telegram. It's it's really eclipsed the mainstream kind of market. I'd like to talk about that a bunch more. First first and foremost, how are you? Um how's your day going? >> I'm very good. Thank you so much. This is the end of my day. Okay. I'm based in London, so it's coming to yeah like 5 uh 18. Uh so coming closer to the end. Uh so far it's been a really productive day. Yeah.

>> There we go. Ireina, I'd love to learn a little bit more about Telegram's uh crypto strategy because um I think there's a strong ethos alignment between, you know, the the privacy preserving elements of crypto as well as Telegram, the free speech, libertarian movement that happens in both Telegram and crypto. Uh, and there's also Ton and this mini app ecosystem that's thriving on Telegram. And so I'd love a little bit of a higher level intro into what crypto on Telegram means. Uh, and then also, you know, would love to get into your role and what uh the wallet uh plays into that.

>> Okay, sounds good. So, let me probably start from perhaps a little bit of the maybe the a quick summary of the history of Telegram. Uh perhaps some people know that at some stage the founders of Telegram have created a have built a blockchain called Tong the open network uh and then passed it on to the community to develop and basically Telegram has a native blockchain embedded into it that actually powers a lot of those use cases and mini apps that you were just talking about. Um as far as I remember there's a few uh dozen thousands of those mini apps currently available. Some of them have made their owners uh and founders millions. I think Pyel has recently just shared that uh last year alone. Um there was $1 billion

that was made on Telegram by the creators of the mini apps. And I think blockchain is precisely the sort of the fertile ground, the connecting tissue that connects them all. Wallet uh wallet in Telegram uh the company that I'm part of is one of the really strong use cases. We're probably one of the largest mini apps. Uh so you've mentioned 1 billion users. That's how many monthly active users Telegram has. A wallet has about 140 million uh registered users to date. Not all of them are active, but that's how many people have touched and registered and interacted with the wallet over the course of the last few years. Um why and what makes us special is uh we do have actually a dual wallet

experience. We have a custodial solution for those people that prefer simplicity. It's a little bit more um tailored to the mass retail audience. It's really sleek and simple. It doesn't really sort of overwhelm you with the web 3 uh features. And then we do have a self-custodial decentralized wallet for those people that prefer to keep their own sort of money in control and don't want to don't well choose not to trust anyone else to uh to be the custodial um or custodian of their money. So I guess that duality is precisely what I find really powerful because we we like to give people choice really and that's what what is helping us to get traction very healthy amount of uh attraction and

yeah >> nice >> very cool uh speaking of traction I'm curious how many users on telegram actually hold like what percentage of the global telegram users and I know I'm putting you on the spot here so you know any rough estimate or if you have the exact number even like how many of the total Telegram users have and hold crypto on Telegram the app in the wallet? >> I I I I wonder if this data point actually exists. Uh again I I what I the only data point that I know is 140 million of those telegram users have well wallet in telegram but they may have maybe some other wallets as well.

There is multiple solutions again there is the telegram allows uh any application and there are multiple financial services and like bots >> okay >> um that I've seen so it could be that there is there's quite a few more >> all right so I'm going to get this app right now so wallet in telegram how do I get this thing >> so I depending on where you are you may be able to find it in settings but I reckon if you're in the U actually you would be able to yes you will all of the US users would have it would find it right in their telegram app right in settings. You don't need to download anything else and that's >> awesome. Okay, so it says wallet >> wallet. Yes.

>> Click it. I agree to terms of use. >> Definitely going to click this. >> All you need to create the seed phrase because what you would be seeing here is the self-custodial wallet. Yes, there you go. Precisely. It's right there. >> All right. So, create extra downloads. You'll register. You'll be able to start uh using it right away. you'll be able so this is ton blockchain assets. Okay. >> What you'll see there is USDT ton and probably a few hundred of other assets including tokenized gold. >> Okay. >> And that is also that you can invest in some people depending on the cycle and this which stage where we we are at at the moment they choose to invest in sort of real world assets. Gold is a wonderful

product by Tether that has been also brought onto Ton blockchain that quite a few people are using as an investment as part of their investment portfolio. Uh but beyond that you can also manage and um manage your NFT collections. You'll see there is like a special section for managing uh gifts uh collectibles send them to your friends. The beauty of it is that you can now once you top up your balance which is 0%. You're in Miami right? Um, there you go. So, you'll be able to top it up with Apple Pay, 0% commission up to $500 in USDT. Sorry, it all feels like a sales speech. It's not. I'm [laughter] about to buy the product.

>> How much taunt are you going to send me for the for the onboarding here? Where's my Where's my little free gift here, Arena? Come on. >> There should be a referral fee for sure. But no, genuinely once you top it up, you can send it to anyone. The beauty of it is that you will actually be able to There you go. You can send it to any of your friends irrespective of whether or not they're registered. So literally you can then bring all of them send send I can send you 50 ton you'll send it to 50 of your friends and we can bring in 50 more people. >> And then you guys have ton wallet news channel as well I see on telegram which I would love for some clips from this video to be posted on that channel by the way.

>> Yeah precisely. Yeah for sure. We will we will do crosspollination right now but this is u in all seriousness just the fact that you it took you what a few seconds to register to the app >> that's how long it takes and that's what I don't know a few clicks yes you do have to uh to create your um your seed seed phrase but ba basically the amount of friction is I don't know like 10 times lower than any of the >> well I just did email signup is even easier forget the whole manual seed phrase just go email and set it up it's obviously >> that different folks have different strokes, but and I see you can use Athena's yield bearing products on here.

>> You can you can earn on Tether. You can do like you can do like there's like giveaways for plush pepes and Telegram gifts. >> There are indeed. Yes, you can win a plush plush Pepe. I think is there still a few more days. Look, yes, there's obviously some short-term sort of activations and promos which our team is responsible for, but then there is also quite a bit of the, you know, really sort of evergreen features that help people manage their money. And I think when whilst you you guys are in the US, you probably are, you know, in one of the well, we're all fortunate to be in the market where we have the options and we can choose anything. But the fact um telegram is particularly popular in the emerging markets and if you actually

bring access to those financial tools in places where there's no excess I think it can make a really big difference. So um this is and which is that is actually part of our strategy trying to make sure that we democratize access to finance through the power of blockchain. Um and one really exciting thing that we are going to bring there as well is tokenized uh equities and stocks. Uh and I love the principle behind it. The the power behind it. If you can actually invest into US stocks from as low as $1, similar to what Robin Hood has done for many of us, but do it via Telegram natively with minimum friction and also globally wherever you are in the world.

Like isn't that a cool thing to do? I actually think that this is pretty mind-blowing. So that's coming in a few weeks time. Uh we have announced it for the custodial solution which you cannot see but on the TON wallet that you have just just registered and just open it's going to be available before the end of the year. Let's put it that way. >> I'm I'm a bit distracted because I'm playing this game on my Ton wallet. I'm playing boinkers. Have you guys It's kind of fun. Uh, and there's a bunch of them on here and they have so many users. I can see uh on the grossing apps, boinkers, 942,000 users. I heard of this hamster combat one, 2.3 million users. Some of these have gone somewhat

viral even outside of the Telegram ecosystem. What are Ireina? What are some of your favorite uh favorite games, favorite mini apps here? >> Uh, we're working on some. Well, I I mean there are some pragmatic ones and there are some some fun ones. Um what are my favorite games? Uh I well I like the simple ones. The lumberjack uh is a fun team play team game that you can send to all your friends and you can have a competition. Uh but there is also some really cool proper RPG sort of uh uh tomb based games um as well. But there's a whole bunch of other apps as well. There is uh whenever I travel now I buy a seam on telegram an e seim literally just by I pay it by a tone

wallet operate by a tone wallet but everything happens now within telegram there's uh shops and storefronts there's communities paid communities that are organized around um I don't know specific themes and and um and passion points I think the power behind the program economy is immense one thing that I I I don't know whether it was ever covered and I'm like my personal favorite thing is that um on Ton blockchain there is this thing the product called Ton Connect. It's basically a form of digital ID. I'm not sure if you've seen it. It allows you to sign into any of the apps and confirm transactions pay for things just by you know by utilizing this kind of

connecting tissue between based on on on the blockchain. So it's your I don't know I' I've seen a similar thing on WeChat really when you're utilizing the single digital ID but when you put it in the western world and you give it to one billion users I think it's a pretty pretty powerful thing. Um so ton connect is uh is literally eliminating any friction between uh the mini app developers and the the actual revenue they can make. >> Yeah. which I think is is something that uh people want to get when they use Telegram in general is like distribution users and they want to figure out easy ways to basically build I mean there's a lot of automated products we've seen

like trading bots and sniping things and these types of products um you know like NFT platforms these gamified platforms it's interesting that you're bringing on tokenized US stocks and ETFs um you know because like that is a whole another question and I feel like this is like the broader theme here for you guys it's Crypto and finance is converging. Uh crypto and finance and social is also converging at the same time. So it's like you got these trady defi if if you were coming together making finance and then finance and social media are coming together and so it's like just the multiple convergences happening at one.

I'm curious kind of like how you anticipate regulation compliance uh and just general kind of like uh rules of the road to be you know changing and shifting as this trend happens. Maybe better asked the new administration in the US has been very very bullish and positive for crypto. How do you anticipate and how do you create your strategy for wallet on telegram based off of this new regulatory regime while keeping in mind that this trend of this convergence between finance and social is like probably one of the biggest trends of the decade.

>> Cool. Yeah, compliance. My favorite question of course. Um look what I know is that the global adoption probably won't happen without global systems and like you know the financial systems accepting this change really. uh but the what the good news is that the change is indeed happening. So Genius Act in fact the whole 2025 has been the year of stable coins and I think globally that wave uh that the US has started is now going to spread to more and more places more and more regions. Um what the genius element between the genius act is that I think there it sort of opened the world to the fact that there is a massive

economic incentive for the government to introduce clarity into stable coin issuance and the regulatoristic status of the stable coins because now we everyone every discussion that I part that I'm part of people are talking about the fact that US government is increasing the global circulation of USD and this this is so clever. It was so clever of um the the administration to make that decision that now I've spoken to some folks in you know in regulation working in policy making in other places and they're looking at that and there there is like that spark of interest the economic um impact on the of the stable coin um legitimacy really is

now helping us all to get that clarity that we were hoping to hoping to get for years and I think the other so and that's why all of the you know the banks are talking about stable coin strategy fintexs are all talking about the stable coin strategy I've seen like five announcements today about you know the treadfi web two companies embedded embedding stable coins into their payment flows into their experience providing so this you know what used to be water and oil for so many years is now finally starting to emulsify and to actually um come together and I love seeing the fact I do expect more of this to happen.

I hope that uh the region that I am living in Europe is start is going to start to embrace a lot more of it and that's going to bring benefits to the whole ecosystem. Now coming back to how we treat this change at the wallet we are quite sort of intentional about it but and we want to make sure that we don't um we don't cut corner corners whenever especially when unnecessary. It's really it's part of our strategy. We want to make sure that we sort of ride on that wave as opposed to go against the stream or try to fly under the radar. So compliance is a competitive advantage as some people try like to say is something that we're trying to um to make you know really big part of our strategy. We're applying for licenses for the custodial wallet

wherever we can and in fact we have quite a few in progress already. We will be announcing and launching uh new markets once those licenses will come in. But then for the self-custodial one, the beauty of it is that it's actually non um it doesn't require the license to operate in in the rest of the world really. So kind of a nice combo between, you know, the regulated world and uh the world of uh decentralized. >> That boring that was a good answer. Yeah, >> it's it it's important. And I would just like to just like just double click on the second part of that question. And then I think Rob has something like maybe you can speak just just more broadly outside of like the compliance and the kind of growth of the industry uh frame of mind like how you think

about the convergence of finance and social like when it comes to your business like what does that look like? Um, look, I'm a big believer in super apps and I think one of the reasons why I joined Wallet in Telegram is that a few years ago, I've seen I I used to be based out of Asia, spent eight years being uh um in Singapore and I saw first of all this huge super rave almost like a storm that was coming from China that inspired the rest of the world to to start exploring use cases. I was um back in the days I was working at Grab and we were building a super app that was built on the right hailing but the kind of the concept of combining your day-to-day

interactions and social relations and your network with finance I feel like it's probably the most mind-blowing the most fascinating thing that could happen to all of us. I know that um our friends uh Elen has been or at least Axe has been quite vocal about actually experimenting and trying to get a few licenses and building a super app on top of ax but I haven't seen anything actually happening there now within telegram things have progressed and advanced quite a bit more the use cases are immense so obviously the P2P sort of transfers um sending money to each other between individuals uh whether domestically or internationally as a remittance uh sort of in a remittance

scenario is just in itself is powerful. Just the fact that now with the moment then that you top it up you can send money to pretty much anyone you know irrespective of whether or not they have tone wallet just anyone you know within telegram a billion people well hypothetically that is mind-blowing and it will lend and it will be delivered instantly and the the cost is incomparable to anything that you would use if you use like a remittance platform. Um that's one but then beyond that social commerce is is such a strong uh new sector that is that has developed over the course of the last few years.

We know that people are making the creator economy is becoming a really big big industry. People are making huge amount of money there like this is now the new career really. How can you earn on the audience attention? How do you captivate create content and actually that becomes your thing? How do you monetize that? All of that is enabled within you know again like the social media but you have to ensure that there is a payments component in it. So every single one of the social media networks would have payments as one of the really important enablers for their global strategy. But beyond that it's not just about community and creator economy.

There's also, you know, again, e-commerce stores and brands like, I don't know, there's there's uh um football clubs, sorry, uh soccer clubs and whatever the that are now building and creating communities and are selling u merchandise and NFTTS within the telegram community. So it can be a business, it can be I don't know a small business, a soloreneurish kind of prneurial journey or it can be a huge international company that can be built literally just on Telegram alone. So I find like this is mind-blowing. We're talking and discussing exploring ideas about social trading. If you're if you're into investments, what you do is you actually sign up for and follow a few experts on the community. Sometimes

you follow people on Twitter. Sometimes you maybe even join some paid communities where like you know an investment expert is sharing their tips and advice and that enabled that is enabled by telegram and if you can embed a wallet and you know you can literally I don't know do copy tracing uh by by two clicks by pre-authorizing and setting up the the parameters of uh of your subscription. I actually think that this is this could be a really powerful way. Again, no separate apps. You don't need to change and switch between all of those things. It all happens naturally within the same universe.

>> Yeah. And it it makes things a lot easier and and so as we're we're helping emerging markets have access to some of these products. First, it's stable coins and then the natural next question is what else can I do with my stable coins? Well, then you can go tokenized stocks, perpetuals, you can do all these things, play these games. uh and it is a very gradual process for someone to become more accustomed uh to managing their own finances. Uh and I think that's the nature of the super app as you describe it. Uh I'm also curious about some of the some of the you know telegram native features that you guys have had um and and generally how telegram has has continued its trajectory towards a super app. you guys have been you know one of the you know the most impressive uh and

resilient uh players when it has come to censorship resistance like the founder Pavvel has you know been targeted by you know several law enforcement agencies and also um you know has has just totally stood in the face of adversity when it when it's come to uh uh resisting censorship from some of these organizations. Um, he also offered to buy the Louve uh stolen jewels, which I think is just kind of a a funny thing that happened in the last couple weeks. But, you know, I I'm curious a little bit how you guys have thought about censorship resistance and and now that you've integrated this wallet into the platform, you know, h have you had any run-ins or any interactions with Pavvel when it comes to censorship resistance, you know, h how have you kind of

incorporated this belief and this ethos into the wallet and then integrated that deeper and deeper into Telegram? How do you think this will bolster um Telegram as as a super app itself as it goes more into this route of empowering people with tools for both finance and social? And I think this uh this sort of belief in the um the sort of permissionless world where no one can actually control the freedom of speech or the freedom of money movements and and other things is precisely what you know one of the sort of core convictions that Telegram and in fact all of our products have been built on. But again like what we are the way the we have integrated into our strategy

is that we have decided intentionally that we will continue to give people choice. Uh the choice it's it's a little bit like in the real world really there is there is part of the ecosystem where you have to comply with the social contracts if you choose to do so. Uh but then there is some other parts and we're giving you that tone wallet which is virtually there's like no control over over your funds. So there is no it's a it's a world where censorship doesn't really exist. So I I personally don't believe in mandating either one of the or the other. I actually think that the more optionality we provide to the users the better. Now when it comes to

embedding some of the native telegram features and like apart from that ethos um we are trying to obviously try to to make sure that we feel as natively as to the chats and the experience as possible. Uh one specific thing again like it's not about the censorship. It's more about how do we how we are part of the the Telegram experience really. >> One of the things that we are we've also integrated into through our partnership with Telegram is uh you can actually you'll see us in the attach menu. >> Um so which is again like another way.

So you send people a photo, you send them money but again like it's all private. Uh blockchain is uh is making it you know as seamless as it can be. Um, and it all lives within the same environment that believes in the same the same things. Um, yeah, I hope that answers your question. I mean, we we've been uh pontificating this saying, return to fundamentals at the show here, >> and it just just feels like the ideals that you shared just now are really aligned with the fundamentals that I think this space needs and and uh what a lot of us came here for and then somehow we've gotten like warped into different, you know, directions for a variety of reasons. But uh it does feel like, you

know, Telegram really embodies that uh overall idea. I think last thing from Yeah please. >> Yeah. No, it's just it's a non-negotiable. I mean, like I think the reason why I'm having such a hard time responding to this is that it's just, you know, in sort of in the blood and the ethers of everything that we we're creating. I feel like we're not making it a self-centered sort of ideology. We are in fact trying to add utility on top of it because ultimately we're also here to solve some of the basic human needs. When it comes to money, they want to be able to save it. They want to be able to spend it and pay each other. They also want to invest it. They want to send it to each other safely simply. Sometimes they care about the you know the everything the underlying infrastructure

and how it's secure and how how it's protected. Sometimes people people just want that utility and simplicity and sometimes they're not able to have that access. So, we're trying to combine all of those elements into one recipe, into one experience without really force-feeding them, the the web 3 ideology, you know, the crypto terminology. We're simplifying the language. We we try to not sort of overwhelm people with the super complicated like, you know, details of the protocols. Some people want to know and want to dive deeper into those, but some people literally are just, you know, maybe the real question is how can people really use crypto without necessarily knowing or noticing that

they're using it? uh they don't maybe they don't need to to to know the difference between all of those again like the the asset types and do some obviously we all need to do our research but it's just trying to eliminate as much as of that complexity as possible to make it relevant again to one billion people maybe one million out of 1 billion is actually going to do the really deep sophisticated trading but the remaining n 99% of the population are just norm really that it's the you know our I don't know aunts and uncles and parents and the taxi drivers and all of those people in in India and uh South South Africa and Usbakistan that are

waking up and reading news and using it as their daily messaging app do they >> need to know about the web three sort of lingo >> not at all but it is our duty to provide them a software and a system which upholds the ethos that we build in such that they get the same benefits of the system that we want to exist in. And that is what I will leave you guys with. Thank you, Ireina. Thank you for coming on, being a part of the show. It's been absolute pleasure. Ireina from London signing off. Thank you guys.

>> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> Thanks, Arena. >> Cheers. All righty, guys. Um, awesome first segment. Uh, Telegram's doing incredible work. I mean, they're literally I mean, that app was so easy to download to know there's 140 million people on there. You know, I'm curious what percentage of the people actually have uh you know, funds on there, but like that's still really impressive. >> Yeah. Look, uh I I think the old messaging sort of uh framework, even take email and facts and like the these sorts of things are are on their way out. just just along with legacy media. the new wave is uh not even these

integrated messaging apps. Uh you know, you really don't even need to have cell service these days, right? Obviously like us in the US this you can just have Wi-Fi, >> right? And be be just fine. So you download Telegram, you can make phone calls, you can go on WhatsApp um and just do Wi-Fi, Rob, and a cell phone number to use Telegram. You get a cell phone number for sure, but you don't need to have cellular service turned on. You can just use Wi-Fi. >> All right, let's do an experiment.

You're going to go to Ponos Cyrus with no cell service. I'm going to go with cell service and we'll see who gets robbed and abducted. All right, >> let's do an experiment. Let's take you off of Stmmies and see how far we can get. [laughter] >> All right, we got Dad coming up from Squid SQD. Ready? Let's pull him up. Um, and yeah, stoked to have Dan on. Uh, uh, Squid and Resolve AI, a public company, have reached some really cool terms on a deal. We're going to hear about that. We're going to hear about more about the AI kind of general realm, uh, of a AI crypto. So, um, yeah, and just generally about SQD as well. So, good good to have Dan up. Dan, welcome to the show.

>> Here he is. >> Hey guys, pleasure to be here. >> Absolutely, man. Dan, pleasure to have you. Um, we've had a couple members from Squid on, but I'd love just a a first frame in one line. What is Squid? What is SQD? >> Um, at this point, it's an ecosystem of datadriven products. That's that's why I tell people these days, we we started off in the indexing space and and now we're getting a lot more ambitious. So, yeah, ecosystem of data driven products. >> Very cool. Awesome. And yeah, I mean, you guys have done quite a number of things as of recently. you've had a couple of big launches. Um, and when you guys are are looking at the indexing layer, we've had conversations with RPCs and all these kinds of things, but what was the problem that you guys

identified, right? And then how does AI help integrate to ultimately solve that problem? >> Yeah, I mean it's a really interesting question, one we get all the time. Fundamentally, the company started in a hackathon about four years ago where we couldn't get data easily, right? the the validator nodes, their main job is moving the chain forwards, right? Blockchains are all about transactions and consensus, like how do we get to the next block? Getting data in is the priority. Getting data out is more of an afterthought. So, an RPC node is is just yeah, it's not an optimal experience for getting data out. And we spent the last four years working on that problem and now have hundreds of clients using our technology to make getting data out of

blockchain and turning it into something that's frankly useful uh in the structure that they need it. So that that's the pain we're we're focused on. How do we get data out uh in a fast performant manner uh and put it in a structure that's that's useful for whatever application or service is consuming it. And then on the AI point, uh obviously AI wants context, right? It wants as much information as it can get. Uh but it needs that information in a in a consumable manner. So if we can give an AI agent structured data, uh and obviously Resolve are very interested in this. That's, you know, part of the reason we're working together. If we can give an AI structured data, AI agents are are bound by the data that they can

can suck up, right? That they can consume. So it's it's a match made in heaven really. Like we're we're perfectly positioned for this this AI agent booth. >> Beautiful. Dan, you know, I think that that that the AI sector has just been absolutely exploding, right? I mean, it's it's in the last week, AI has gone through it, it's closed a chapter and it's opened a new one. And that is really primarily around OpenAI coming out restructuring their deal with Microsoft, moving away from this nonprofit company. I don't think any of us believed that they were a nonprofit in the first place. We'll get your take on that. And and they've announced that this trillion dollar valuation IPO. All of this happening while Elon Musk and

Sam Alman are fighting over scraps over Sam Alman's Tesla order, over credits, over who copied who, etc. The entire AI world has been kind of reshuffled in the last two weeks. In addition, open AI is getting sued by multiple people who have committed suicide as a result of the AI telling them that is an okay thing to do. The AI has told them that it is what they need to do to get their best experience out of life. You know who I want when you tell Chachi, hey, I'm an awesome person. And Chachi is like, yeah, you're great. Or you're like, hey, I suck. And you're like, yeah, you're terrible. It just sometimes it just agrees with you. You're like, this isn't AI. This is just this is just somebody's agreeing with everything that I say.

Anyhow, I digress. Can you maybe give us your perspective of the state of AI 2025? Like what is the landscape? I I know that we want to talk SQAI resolve all the work that you're that you're doing, but perhaps just give us this state of AI 2025. What does the landscape look like from your perspective? >> Yeah, I mean that's a really interesting question. We're touching a lot of topics there. I mean, on the point of of of OpenAI's valuation and the, you know, all the shenanigans this week, um, yeah, I I try and listen to as many podcasts as possible, and I was listening to the All-In Pod the other day, and they were saying, "Look, you can you can either think that AI is going to steal all of our jobs, and, you know, we're all going to be out of work, or you can think

that, uh, we're in a massive bubble, right? Both can't be true." So [laughter] like like we have a lot of kind of um kind of doom narratives around AI about how it's going to change the world. Uh from my perspective personally um I don't think either is is true. I don't think it's instantly going to replace all of our jobs and I don't necessarily think we're in a bubble. Um when I see what I can personally achieve um like I'm sure you guys in in your daily lives you do a ton of research right around guests around projects. you constantly have to consume an amazing amount of information. So like I'm sure it's the same for you. I can do things now in three hours that would have taken me a week. So when someone asks me

what's the state of AI, I go to what I can actually authoritatively say, right? Rather than all of the rumor and gossip. And to me it's made an incredible impact on the way I work, the way my company works. Um and I don't know who's going to win. I don't know if OpenAI really are worth a trillion. I mean, what they've got like 13 billion in revenue right now. And that clip between Sam Alman and whoever was interviewing him, like he he got really quite um aggressive, shall we say, when he was asked about the revenue. He was really kind of defensive. Um so yeah, I I I don't know if they can get to 100 million ARR or whatever it might be, but I can tell you it's changed my life. Um I can tell you that you guys probably

move way faster because of it. So like this this isn't a fab this isn't a trend like none of this is going anywhere um so much of it is is open source and when you start to combine AI and web 3 then suddenly the state of the world starts to look really quite interesting right an AI agent can't have a bank account but it can definitely have a wallet you know and that's a really really interesting juosition for me so yeah we could talk about this I think for a long time um but to me it's a really exciting landscape. I don't know who's going to win, but I know that we are definitely moving forwards here, right? Like it's something we're never going back is how I >> Yeah, I mean 100%. Right. And so my big questions marks with AI when it comes to

crypto is like data privacy, data storage, uh training models, um let's see, I mean I see th those three where does the data get stored that I like where does my prompts get stored? Who can see it? and who is training these models that I'm using? So maybe from that lens, from this crypto AI convergence, where does SQD fit? You know, where does this landscape look like in a in a couple of years? Will we actually see the proliferation of like decentralized AI, decentralized training, decentralized models? Knowing that this sector has gotten about 1/100th of the actual funding compared to the SF web 2

AI world, will we actually see this model work or is it just something that altruists and people who think that, you know, they don't want the big tech companies to have their data are just trying to push for? >> Yeah, I mean that's an incredibly hard question to answer. like we'll I can't promise you that we're going to get decentralized AI proliferating everywhere, but like from my kind of perspective, from SQD's perspective, maybe let me give you a little bit of color. Um, Resolve are an e-commerce um giant, right? Like that's that's the industry that they're involved in and that's what they're innovating and they can see that we're going in a specific direction, right? We're moving to crypto uh native payments, right? allowing

people to pay maybe not in, you know, some kind of memecoin, you know, the rollup TVcoin, but that they're allowing people to pay uh they see a world where stables and just, you know, normal everyday e-commerce is going to be a thing, right? So then suddenly you can see all of these things starting to converge. You can see that an AI agent would make a massive difference to an e-commerce experience. You can see that paying in stables would potentially make a massive difference to an e-commerce experience. Maybe not in certain countries, the US, the UK, may maybe we're happy with our payment systems, right? But there are many many countries around the globe. Every web 3 conference I go to, I talk to someone from a country who says, "Hey, we don't have stable payment rails, right? It's a huge

problem." So, if you combine the AI agents with crypto native payments and put it into an e-commerce experience, you can start to see where there's really going to be a difference in that that that world. And so that's why resolve and SQD makes sense because we've got all of the web free data. That's that's what we do. We make that experience as I said at the start much easier and resolve our experts in e-commerce. So your broader question of are we going to get decentralized AI as you said right with 1% of the money it's a bit of a David versus Goliath fight.

like the amount of capex that even just open AI alone are are deploying and a lot of the time users simply don't care if something is decentralized or centralized, right? They care if it works. So I think in order for decentralized AI to really take off, we're going to have to find a niche where it does something that centralized AI can't do. And I think that privacy of models you talk about that privacy of data maybe is maybe the differentiating factor. I am I'm in this reason for I'm in this industry for a reason and I I believe in that direction. Will it happen in the next few years? I mean I think we'll make big moves but I don't know exactly where we'll be.

>> It muted the Yeah, man. I agree. Privacy is the important question to answer. Rob. >> Yeah, I'm I'm thinking about how we can unlock more of this. Like we used to have a lot of conversations about the indexing space and how this was going to open up multi-chain. You know, we're going to live in this modular world and this modular future, but we had this fragmentation problem. Well, if we can index all the data and we can put this all into one one, you know, API or we can put this all into one RPC, then we open up this very composable world. And so I'm curious as again, we've kind of taken this route. It is still fragmented especially with regards to AI and and and the blockchain landscape. H you know did we did we solve it? Did we did we get you know all of the indexing you

know now we have all all everything in one place it can be composable. Do we still have more to go? Where is the indexing space these days? And h how does fixing that part of the stack open up new applications open up you know new opportunities for end users? >> Yeah, great question. Um, I think that we've made a a large amount of progress, right? So, just to kind of take a little small technical detour here, like we're building on top of RPC, right? We're not >> replacing it. That's still the way that you're going to write transactions to the chain and you're going to pull data out and we're building this or we've built >> what I will often when I'm talking to developers, a universal read layer on top, right? That's how I think about it.

Um, and so we've come an incredibly long way there. And if you want to index any of one of 200 chains, you can come to SQD. You can do that. In terms of have we made everything composable as a as an industry, as a as a as a set of um organizations that work together, no. I mean, we continue to in many ways fragment and that's why we need the indexing layer so much. Um the trend at the moment is towards ever higher throughput, ever lower latency L1s or you know L2s that have got you know EVM compatibility or just EVM compatibility in general. So no, we're in this kind of

arms race of throughput and latency. Um, and that's why we need tooling like SQD quite frankly because as you ramp up that throughput, the creaking infrastructure layer that allows you to get data out becomes ever more obvious. So no, we we have we don't live in a in a world unfortunately where everything is composable. And so we need companies like like SQD to to solve that problem. Will we get to a composable world? The jury's out on that. It's people go and solve very specific problems, right?

Companies like Monad, Megaare, these these things that are coming, they're looking to solve very specific problems for very specific users. They're not thinking about how do we make everything necessarily composed together. They're thinking about a use case of well, how can we serve this audience? And so, yeah, I don't know, you can't have everything, right? You need a trade-off somewhere. So, we can serve users um and what they want or we can try and make everything imposable. I'm not sure you can have it all at the same time. >> I mean like we are getting so much closer though like near intense. You can do Zcash to Bitcoin to Salana all in one interface. The Infinex app is super sick too. You can do all your crypto

transactions there. So it's like super close but like I think what you're referring to J is more like behind the scenes too, right? >> Yes. And and that like lower level stuff. >> Yeah. 100%. And that's that's why we need tooling like SQD. At the level that you're talking about, we're getting really close. And AI agents take us to that next level because they can hide some of that complexity from us. People say to me, um, you know, is is an AI agent another use case for web 3? I say, no, it's a better user interface, right? So, it can stitch all of those things together. So I think maybe to go back to your original question, do we have a composable uh layer, you know, at a fundamental level, no. But are we building all of the tooling that allows

us to stitch it together and make it seamless to the user? Yes, we're in a much much better place than we ever are, for sure. [snorts] >> Beautiful. >> Yo, did this guy just switch on us? >> What's that? Yo, I must be tripping out. You were you were facing the other way at the [laughter] >> Never mind, man. Never mind. >> I don't know what you're talking about. >> I have not moved. >> No, Dad. I'm talking about Robbie. >> Okay. >> This a Andy, he makes some things up sometimes. Got a lot going on up upstairs. Um >> I'm an AI agent.

>> Yeah. Well, that that's actually what what I wanted to ask you about. So, h how does the indexing world work in an agentic economy? Like I I think we're all sort of on the same page where we're moving towards this world. You know, maybe it's not right now, but very very soon we're going to have more agent driven transactions than human-driven transactions. A lot of this is going to be happening behind the scenes. Are you guys preparing for this world? If so, how? And how do you think end users are going to and and maybe a as an infrastructure project doesn't really change what you guys are doing or how you're how you're building but how do you think end users and consumers how will we adapt to interact with blockchains and initiate transactions

when we have more agentic driven transactions? >> Yeah, it's something we talk about all the time and we've been talking about for the last year. it really does um impact us as an infrastructure provider because we're this fundamental backbone, right? Like we if we don't if we don't move to to what is required, then obviously we're not doing a great job. And so we started talking about this probably late 24 as we were starting to see this kind of rise, you know, rise of the AI agent. And we think we maybe have we'll have 10, 100, a thousand times the usage from AI agents than from humans, right? Um and so we have to design for that. Um how do we design for that? It

touches on what I said earlier. We have to provide um an AI agent with structured data. So it needs to be able to understand what data it can even get. So that's what we would call metadata, right? So we need to allow an agent to figure out what's available and then we need to allow an agent to query it and crucially we need to allow that agent to pay for that data. Right? So that's where new protocols like X402 become really really really interesting because if I can just stand up an AI agent and I can make a simple HTTP request to some kind of endpoint get figure out what data I can even get and then make a request for the data I need and pay for it. Well, suddenly we we're living in a completely different world, right? And

an AI agent can essentially access anything on on blockchain. We just need to create that infrastructure such that they can figure out what's there, query, as I mentioned, structured data, something that's meaningful to them, um, and then allow them to pay for it. So, yeah, something we've been working on and thinking about for a long time, and it's a big part of our plans in in 2026. Nice. I mean, do we think do we think that 2026 is like the year when agents will actually interact on chain like like consistently or >> right now it's pretty slow. It's like >> like we need like anything, right?

Things don't move linearly, do they? They just >> they spike, right? They just go. So, [snorts] >> something will happen at some point. Someone will design an agent. >> Yeah. And then it just wildfire >> and bang. Yeah, there'll be some provide, you know, SPD will position. Yeah. So, >> I think the probability is getting stronger and stronger, right? You see, everything's moving in a certain direction. You see >> the LLM models getting more and more incrementally powerful. You see the capex, you see the way web 3 is moving, you see the agents. Yeah, we're just waiting for something to light the flame.

>> Incredible. Incredible. Dan, what's on the road map to the end of the year into Q1 for you guys? what are you specifically most focused on from a technical product perspective? >> So, we've been working for quite a long time now on a big release called Portal. Um, so that's the thing that I'm most excited about and essentially in one line portal replaces is RPC, right? So, this node that you went and queried information from and it was slow and it breaks and it doesn't scale. Well, Portal is our our replacement for that, right? So, Portal is backed by SQD network, which is 3,000 nodes all over the world. It's decentralized, three

pabytes of data, and portal is decentralized. So, anyone can stand up a portal, anyone can use it. Um, it's completely unstoppable, as someone likes to say to me in our company, which is a really great word. So, yeah, we've been working on this for a long time. Uh, the official release is November the 23rd. We're heading to to ETH global in Bonoseris to do a hackathon on it. Um we're also releasing a new SDK at that point called pipes. Um and we've got a ton of re revamps in the works for our docs as well. So we're we're really got a big release coming up docs pipes and portal um as we talk about internally.

So yeah, we're super excited to get out there, see what people hack on, um see what kind of things they break, what they don't break, just get the ideas of the developers. So yeah, the big news is we've been working on Portal, which is this this replacement for RPC. Um, and a lot of people have been testing it in beta for for months now. So yeah, it's a super exciting close to the year. Obviously, we've just been bought by Resolve. So that adds all sorts of excitement to the journey as well. But yeah, that that's our kind of northstar releasing portal at the moment. And a lot of the work we've done with that with, as I mentioned, we're thinking about AI agents and we're thinking about what's coming next.

>> Beautiful. Dan Quirk, CPO at sqd.ai. Appreciate your time. Appreciate your insights today. Um, recording live from Sam Alman's layer. That's Dan Quirk for you. >> That's me. Thanks, [snorts] guys. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, Dan. We'll see you next time. >> Later. >> Take care. >> Cheers. All righty, guys. Um, Rob, I think, uh, this would be a really good time to have a debate. Um, love it. Usually we have these debates offline.

>> All right. So, uh, you're obviously very bullish in November. You texted me the other day. You're like, we're going to put the low in in the early part of the year and then we're going to we're going to pump through November. It's now November 12th. Uh, I am feeling cocky because I don't think that's going to happen. So, I'm going to give you we're going to give you a countdown timer here. I wish we had one on the screen. 90 seconds. Pull one up here. Got 90 seconds to give us your bull case for the end of the year. Uh or sorry for for the end of no end of November. As we write, uh Bitcoin's at 1016, E34 344, hype 39,

Salana 153. Bullish or bearish? Where does the market go? Starting now. >> My turn. >> You're 5 seconds in here. We'll start you over and go. >> Um, I think they're going to reopen the government. People are going to be happy. People are going to be bullish. I think the ETFs are going to go live. I think that is going to open up access to longtail alts. I think the Fed is going to cut rates in December and that's going to cut pe catch people off guard and we're going [snorts] to start to price that in middle to the end of November once they get the data after the government reopens.

>> That's it. Done. >> Uh yeah, I'll yield the rest of my time. >> All right. Well, then you you've got a guy in the chat who's responded to you. We've topped, but it doesn't mean it'll be a two-year bare cycle like before. We may just see four months of bull and four months of bear and go back and forth. The reality is tr's in office. He has massive he and his family have massive Bitcoin bags and Bitcoin companies himself and his family. They love crypto. As long as he's in office, it's a bull market. >> As long as Trump's in office, it's a bull market. Imagine if Camala won. We'd be so cooked. All right, I'll try to uh bring him up bring I'll try to use 60 of this 90 seconds at least here and take a break.

I basically think that we are at a point where there is no more exit liquidity. We have literally exhausted all the DAT buyers. Everybody who's been raising debt in DATs, they have just buying. They've they've already bought. Their navs are totally cooked. Some of them have been forced sellers. That whole exit liquidity scheme has ran dry. It's completely dry. There is zero demand to fund any new digital asset treasury company. Micro Strategy is absolutely cooked. Down about 50% from the highs. probably had a good bounce spot, but its NAV, its MNA, its premiums MNAV is also down about less than 10% higher. It's about 1.1 1.09 point. I got to check the exact numbers cooked. There's no marginal buying power from the big boys.

Tom Lee and Sailor are out of powder. They need to get a bigger price movement to the upside to be able to fuel this bull run higher. We're not getting that. There's no buying power. Everyone in the market has been mentally conditioned to be absolutely gi as hell. Everyone wants to sell half on a double or 100% on a 20% move because they're so scared. No one believes in anything in the market right now. No one believes anything. Maybe hyperlid at the very best people have some belief in. That's it. There's a market full of non-believers apathetic short-term mindset gamblers, and the big boys are out of powder. So like there's only two ways this plays out. we somehow rip higher because of like what Rob's saying or we basically have to go to a

price where there be people deem this to be fair value and then then that's where they buy. >> That's I mean ending your rant by saying this could go either way. We could either rip higher or we go lower like >> it's like >> entry in order profit stop loss. >> In order for actual capital to come in two things need to happen. One of two things to happen. They need to pump the market higher so these dats can recycle and keep buying, borrow more and buy more or they need to dump this thing, take some dead bodies outside and get it to where some bigger whales have a fair value.

>> Didn't we do that on October 10th >> kind of and yeah, I get it. It is up or down, but like that's the bearish thesis right now. >> We have fatigue. There's so much fatigue in the market because people don't have the the endurance to go up forever. >> No. And so >> like it wasn't easy to hold Nvidia for 12 years before it went vertical. >> It wasn't easy to hold Amazon for 25 years before it went vertical. >> So people just get chopped up. I think if you if you have your value in places where you think there's going to be sustainable growth or they have revenue and they're going to be able to sustain a business.

Like what are we what are we talking about here? Why get fatigued? Stay patient. Business models take time to for to see compounds. >> I hear you, man. [snorts] >> I just think I I I think we went up for so long. Now we're just distri we have just distribution. I mean, you're a technical analysis guy. Isn't this this chop? This is distribution at uh at a new price point. Yeah, it's bearish. >> Distribution is bearish. >> Yeah.

>> Why? >> Uh because there's people selling. >> But you only sell if there's a buyer on the other end. If they're selling but we're not falling in price, then we're just exchanging hands. There's equal amounts of selling in. >> I do agree that that is happening. >> Distribution, right? And that's how distribution is met with accumulation. Yeah, but obviously the market on a lot of these tokens like is looking more like distribution without accumulation.

[snorts] >> Like the soul chart is destroyed. That chart is disgusting. >> I mean, soul is an L1 that doesn't have a ton of differentiation from other L1's. And so if you look at the institutional cycle, which I firmly believe, there's also categor there's categories in a secular bull bear case. There's no it's no longer, you know, 0% interest rate environment. Um maybe, you know, when pal is is out and there's a new Fed chairman and Trump really takes control of the money printer like next summer, maybe [snorts] that's when we get cut rates, low rate environment, inject liquidity into the system, and everything goes up at once. That's not

what's happening right now. I think smooth landing Goldilocks era, you know, we're going to get lower rates, but we're also going to have somewhat low inflation, low unemployment, and you know, we're going to be running GDP at like two and a half to 3%. That is a recipe for a good economy. So, I think that is what is starting to happen. We're almost like we're almost landing the plane and [snorts] then when we do end up there, it's not going to just, you know, rip. we're gonna end up with a point where we're gonna have this repricing of assets. And I expect quality assets to do quite well, which is why I think it's important to be in sustainable businesses that have some sort of revenue and some sort of sustainable

business model. And I think we're going to hear from Michael and Vance later today or tomorrow and they'll probably agree with that thesis, right? That we should be invested in good companies with a good business model. And you can say, "Oh, my bags are with good companies, right? Everyone says that." But if you're looking at crypto, only a handful have revenue. Only a handful have sustainable business models. Yeah. I think those are the tokens to own. >> Those are the ones that are going to get repriced higher because we're not in this this when I say Goldilocks era, >> I mean like macro goldilocks. Like low inflation, low unemployment, low interest rates, and high GDP growth. I [snorts] think that is the that is the meta. like that is the uh that's the

moment right now and in that zone quality does well and things that aren't quality speculation doesn't necessarily do well. So I think we're entering this Goldilocks era. I think Powell is actually going to try his darnest to hold on for dear life and not give into the political pressure. basically land this plane with the best of his abilities and then, you know, we're gonna enter this like Q1, Q2 phase, tax season. It's not really going to be as much uh life in the market and we're going to see a repricing and Powell's not going to want to cut rates as aggressively because he

knows that Trump and whoever he puts into place is going to want to cut aggressively in the summer. And so I think we're going to get this repricing into Q1 and we're just going to slowly grind higher and chop. Really, I think the majors are going to chop. We're going to see a repricing in alts. That's my thesis into Q1 for the rest of Q4. >> So bullish. So bullish this guy. I love it. I'm so fired up to be your business partner, man. Let's go to the moon and back. Why? Why don't we? I got another thing for you there, Robert. Mr. Robert, unis swap and lido token buybacks announced. The revenue meta is firmly on. It's not a meta. It is the revenue perpetuity meta, if that even makes

sense. It's kind of ironic. Um, what is your take on unis swap announcing buybacks for uni token? The separation of token and equity li doing the same. What does this mean for effectively DeFi protocols? The this idea that Andre Cronier created for us, this valueless governance token idea, right? Where like, oh, I'm going to drop a Medium article and it's just going to have like this is a valueless governance uh token. Uniswap has now come forward, put out a proposal on this and is talking about what it what matters to them um and why they're doing this and why they are in bringing uni token into a different light. So Rob, give us your

take revenue meta boom or bust unis swap token. You got the proposal in front of you. What does the unis swap token buyback mean for crypto? Like are we going to see more DEX teams you know, copy this. I see Aerrrome coming out with something that's saying that that they're going to kill Uniswap because, you know, UniS swap's going to go and charge these fees and Aeradrome's not yada yada. Meanwhile, UniS swap prints nine figures of revenue a year and they're going to have all these buybacks. Is UniS swap token a buy, Rob? Where are we at? >> It was a buy. I mean, don't take it from me. Take it from the market. UniS swap token 2xed pretty much overnight. It's come back a little bit, but the market tells you everything you need to know.

This was Hayden Hayden Adams that made this proposal. It's probably going to be a governance vote, but this thing is going to go through. They're going to have buybacks. I think it's [snorts] I don't think it's uh Look, it all depends on time horizon, right? I mean, if you're going to be holding this thing for years, yeah, it's a buy. I can see how there's going to be some sort of DAT or Ethereum aligned corporation that is looking at this thing and they're thinking to themselves "Yeah isn't this like the 10th time that Unicoft has proposed a fee switcher proposal?" Um, the first time uh I think this actually the second time and the first time there was some sort

of like 10% thing that ended up going to the Uniswap token, but it wasn't [snorts] the full fee switch. like they did turn on the fee switch that did happen and so if you make a swap on unis swap um there is a front-end fee. So the first time it was proposed yes the fee switch did get turned on but all of that revenue has been going to the labs corporation and so now [snorts] this proposal is to actually revert not increase the fees the fee fees already been on but it's to it's to uh redirect that revenue back to token holders. So I think this is actually a much more bullish proposal than the previous proposal when it got turned on. And I think you saw the market react that way.

[snorts] Uh too much conflicts with unis swap onchain, unis swap labs offchain. No, they're going to do it because look at who's voting on the proposal. It's unis swap token holders. So when you when you look at the stakeholders and you look at the incentives, the stakeholders, the voting uh the voters have everything to gain from this proposing proposal going live. So even if Uniswap Labs doesn't like it, I mean their chairman and CEO is the one who proposed it. So I think they've obviously got a plan. I if if I'm looking at this and I'm looking for a token to hold in some sort of Ethereum aligned company or DAT or if I'm building a reserve of tokens, like this is one that I would feel comfortable holding for the next decade.

>> That's pretty bullish, dude. But if I'm looking for a uh if I'm looking for a quick 10x if I'm looking for a quick 10x, you know, unis swap already 2xed. [snorts] The look the under underrated play and actually what I'm going to check now is Clanker. Clanker started this uh I think they got acquired by Farcaster and then they've come down quite a bit. That is probably a good play. Again, they're they're sitting at about a 3x from where they were pre buybacks, but [snorts] I would just imagine that a lot of these tokens just just melt up. There's not much, you

know, if they're doing buybacks, there's not much sell pressure. Does One inch do buybacks? I don't know. Probably I don't think so. Actually don't [snorts] think one inch does buybacks. Um, so it's all about your time horizon. I think a lot of companies are very sticky liquidity. Uh, some of those ETHAT started to sell like Ezilla sold a little bit, but I I don't think uh these other bigger ones like ESB or Bitmine, I don't think they're going to be selling. I think they still have cash

on hand. Yes, they do need volatility in order to raise more cash and and buy more tokens, but I think they're going to end up uh building out a reserve of tokens that aren't just ETH. I think they're going to they're also going to build out a stockpile of the best Ethereum aligned devs. We've got more more comments in the chat. How much revenue does Uni Chain do? Will this proposal help or hinder Uni Chain? Don't have a great answer. I think Uni- Chain doesn't do a lot right now. Most of the unis swap volume is still coming from ETH mainet and some of the other L2s. Um I [snorts]

yeah I don't know Andy, what's your what's your take? What what is Uni Chain doing these days? >> Haven't really heard much honestly. Um but you know they're still going. You know it's just they don't really have that much users. If you if you go on L2B [snorts] um having some pretzels over here L2B they're number 10 in terms of TVL so they're cooking bro I mean it's pretty damn good >> yeah I look unis swap is a very sustainable team I think they have you know long-term goals in mind uh they're not going to do something like launch an entire chain if they didn't think it was going to be helpful to their overall business model So, I think they're going

to slowly but surely start to uh direct more and more traffic there as they get more distribution. Um, I think it makes a ton of sense. I think honestly, you know, if you think about the stable chain narratives, uh, like ARC, Tempo, um, the main thing to think about here is capital velocity. Like, you don't need a ton of L, uh, uh, TVL just sitting on the chain in order for the chain to do well. they can with and especially as ZK uh costs come down, it could become and depending on the amount of liquidity that they're sourcing from other venues, it could make sense for them to take uh funds from an L2 or from mainet, bridge them

over to Uni Chain, do the swap, and then send the funds back. Oh, shout out to rumor app. That rumor app you guys covered a while back has been my favorite Telegram app. Did y'all see the rumor that Robin Hood might integrate Lighter? Whole another thing about the Hyperlquid thesis. Uh, Lighter raised 68 million at 1.5 billion and they announced it yesterday. >> Yeah, [snorts] >> that's some crazy dude. >> Like, Liquid has officially competition now.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah, they do. >> They definitely do. And we know how Per's competition has phased out in the past. Hyperlid did go down today. They had some maintenance that was being done. >> Okay. But it was programmed, >> I believe. So, >> okay. Yeah. Bullish. That's bullish. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, lighter raising, right? Yeah. We won't really see this as like a call sheet poly market prediction markets competition you know one one kind of makes the other one better you know kind of leapfrogging one another in terms of valuation [snorts] um >> no that's different this is different

for sure way different >> but Hyperlid does already have you know their uh integrations into their [snorts] distribution partners >> oh yeah Phantom all them >> Rabby >> dude Rob would choose hype over lighter for sure. >> Absolutely. Also, I'm pretty sure the hype strategies the hyperlquid [snorts] strategies data. [snorts] Um yeah, so there's uh there's lots of catalysts.

>> Yeah, guys, we're going to take a break. Uh we'll be back in about what half hour or less. We're sing about half hour. >> Uh we'll play some tunes. Y'all can vibe. We'll see you in a second. All right. Hey,

hey hey. Hey hey hey. Hey hey hey.

Oh, hey. down.

Hey Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

Hey hey hey. Heat. Heat. Hey hey hey.

[music] Hey,

Hey, hey hey. Heat. Heat. Hey hey hey.

Hey, hey hey. Heat. Heat. Heat.

Heat. Oh hey.

Hey, hey hey. Hey,

hey hey. Hey, hey hey. Hey,

hey hey. Hey,

hey, hey. Hey hey hey.

Hey, hey hey. Hey,

hey hey. Hey,

hey hey. Hey, hey hey. Heat.

Hey Heat. Oh, hey. Hey,

hey hey. Heat. Heat. Oh,

hey. Heat. Heat. N.

Heat. Heat. Heat.

Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey,

hey hey. Heat. Heat.

Good morning. [music] >> [music] >> All righty, guys. We've got Sam from Fracks [snorts] >> who is not making it to Buenosirus for Dev Connect. >> How could he do this to us? How could he do this to us? How are >> I I feel the FOMO, guys. Uh I I already feel I already feel the FOMO, but uh I did the KBW and and token tour uh and uh just feel like you got to grind on all things stable coins, DeFi, Frack. So got to >> you got to you had a uh an institutional network of payment providers to ship. So

uh that that is a totally valid reason not to slide to the conference, man. Congrats on >> Rob. We got to introduce the show here. stabled up episode 10. Sam, I know this was just an idea in our minds back in the day, but it has really came together. I think it's your second time on. Congrats on Fracket. Uh, congrats for the growth of the show, for the growth of uh just the entire stable coin ecosystem. >> Thanks, guys. Yeah, I mean, I think this show is going to be uh the the coolest uh stable coin show in 2026, let's be honest, right? Like uh you guys have done a great job. Great great guests. I love the Jeremy Aair episode. Um, got to get other guys up here and and uh it's it's been a good it's been a good few uh

few weeks at at Fracks as well. Um, you know, obviously the market itself hasn't been great as I'm sure everyone listening to this knows in terms of volatile assets, in terms of DeFi and things like that. uh we we did release uh fraction our our neo bank platform with a uh ton of signups and and people using it which is uh fantastic but I think the more important stuff like right now in the near term like that people are probably thinking about is all the uh DeFi blowups uh thankfully of none of which affects uh fracks and kind of the the blue chip defi uh stuff like a US I think like sky totally unaffected right this um stream finance stuff and the kind of contagion that uh you know

that that has happened. So hopefully you guys are uh either safe and comfy in spot or in in DeFi that that you trust. So uh yeah, >> bit of both. Yeah, I mean it was just like it's not super inspiring to have one of the biggest OG uh DeFi protocols being Balancer get exploded in year five. It's just like it's doesn't send a great message to investors. that I I don't think um I think the the key lesson here is that there's a difference between rehypothecation and recursive lending. Rehypothecation is is a a method of basically kind of like looping on a single platform with a single wallet. Recursive lending is I'm going to give my money to Sam, count it as

TVL. Sam's going to give that money back to me, count it as TVL. We're going to give it to Robbie, count that as TVL, and then Rob's gonna give it to Sam and then back to me. and then we all just have massive TVL. And so that like that was I think like the core lesson learned amongst others as well as just like the opakqueness of doing like off-chain vaults. Um you know we can touch on that for for a bit but I think there's some more positive developments to uh to talk about Sam. >> Yeah definitely. I think just to I I was looking at this and like trying to also move on but take lessons learned from this whole situation and I think the the main thing to take away from this as like an industry and I I posted about it before is like curators right now which

for for people that that that don't know that they're basically people that run bolts and then also uh funny enough also analyze risk and do and do risk ratings. Um a lot of them are great fantastic all of them. Loba risk gauntlet uh mev all of them you know some of them had uh issues some of them didn't I think the main thing to take away for me was that we need to separate the entities that actually evaluate credit risk to from the ones that actually allocate and take risk and this is why in like tradi uh you know there's there's arms length people doing the credit uh ratings like the AAA ratings and and things like that

um and then the actual people that trade the mortgage back securities or loans totally siloed, segregated, they have like, you know, regulatory audits and stuff. And and by the way, it doesn't mean that what is going on in Trafy is like perfect either because we all know like literally that, you know, when you're in Trafy, you could you literally decide who you pay to do the credit rating. So, it's kind of weird, right? Like, oh, like how good do you think my my risk is? and then maybe I'll go and and give money to you to rate it versus someone else. It's still better than the current situation in in DeFi where the person that is actually in charge of like the uh risk analysis posting it and then like backing it in like governance

and things like that are the same people that like you said Andy like are like moving the funds here and then the and then there and then then imagine in Trafi the equivalent would be like if the guy at the trading desk that is actually like about to make the 200 million like you know like uh bond purchase is in another tab has the uh credit rating like form open and he's like, "Yeah, uh I'm going to I'm going to rate this AAA and then like submit it to to like movies or whatever and then and then I'm going to buy buy uh buy it." Right? That's the equivalent of uh what it is right now. I think we need to think about this a little bit more and it doesn't have to get too any any more complicated like you know slashing or extra convoluted stuff. I think it

literally just has to be a little bit better separated. Like like for example, for us at FRA, we have our SFRAUSD uh earn vault, right? It's it's a it's a savings yield vault. But the way that we do it is like we have literally uh governance processes that and again there's large stakeholders people it's not perfect people like oh there's like big stakeholders or whatever like comics or whatever. they the governance sets the guard rails and then the vault only does the the very very small things that uh you know the the the guardrails are there. It's not that the team sets totally uh novel things that you could just trust us, bro. Right. So, I think there's got to be some kind of uh differentiation, but uh hopefully it

seems like that stuff is over for now. At least I hope so. Yeah. >> Yeah. It it was uh a little bit unsettling to see that this is still happening in 2025. I think this was a little bit reminiscent of the 2020 2021 Algo stablecoin uh frenzy when we had a lot of experimentation but now uh you know we're we're in the world of genius. This is why genius uh exists, right? I'm curious how how you're seeing some some of the stable coin landscape play out a little bit more broadly. I'd also love a a catch up on fracknet. Um because generally, you know, the idea is that we bring this regulation forward. Not everyone has to comply with it, but you

know, we can kind of have the stamp of approval on a certain set of stable coins and then these are, you know, are the stable coins that have some consumer, you know, more consumer trust in them. Um, and so how are you seeing stable coin landscape play out generally? Like what are the stable coins that you see as kind of rising to the top and really bolstering themselves and becoming more robust as a as uh, you know, the regulation develops? And then I know FraNet is like linking all these things together and being kind of like the glue that holds the stablecoin industry together. So uh would love an understanding of how Fraxnet is helping to uh uh you know really strengthen and solidify all of the stable coins that are are uh capitalizing on Genius.

>> Yeah, for sure. Uh, I think the the more time goes on, the more I've realized it literally isn't specifically about like genius like the bill, but more like what the what the act actually represents because without this stuff, I don't think the like 60 70% of the activity like right like Western Union two weeks ago announcing they're going to do a their own stable coin, you know, other big companies. I think JPM earlier today was like, "Oh, the the deposit token at like JPM banks that is on base, right? You can uh test it out and and things like that." Um, and we we've talked to them a little bit even before that. So, there's there's some cool stuff um that they were thinking about as well. I think the most important thing is what

it represents, right? And so, everyone has a stable coin strategy. Uh, and the breadth of different types of stable coins will have like a this kind of spectrum. I I kind of call this like the the spectrum of of different stable coins from extreme money, right? Stable coins that are like universally accepted uh like like Tether obviously the the most moneyiness out of all and then like USDC hopefully FRAUSD is what we're building towards in terms of being able to be onetoone and widely accepted everywhere, right? And then you'll have this like long arc of kind of uh I I guess the the way to put it is like uh gift card stable coins, genius coins, which like if you think about um like

you know all of these stores, if it's like Starbucks, if it's Costco, if it's uh you know online uh places, right? They'll have these programmable digital dollars that basically you can use to get better deals and these kind of things. But then the the most important is what platforms actually allow you to go between all of them as you earn like some of them in DeFi which are more moneylike right but then you maybe get a uh you know some Starbucks USD or something right uh and you want to actually swap it in for for different stable coins something like fraet which is basically like a a neo bank uh that is a professional uh neoank platform so people can sign up or entities right and then you can swap go in and out to fiat

on offramps one to one to all major stable coins, right? Like FRA, USD, USDC, USDT. Um we're going to increase um right now it's PYUSD, USDB from uh Stripe and Bridge and um going to increase the the actual coverage. And so you can think of it like a clearing house, right? Like a clearing house for major stable coins. It's non-custodial. You can attach uh any wallet, right? um or custodial if you need one like BitGo wallet, Fireblocks which recently uh fully integrated FRAUS USD custody and um all these other um FRA net hooks and stuff like that. Um so that's that's what we're building. We're building kind of the central clearing house and then in the middle is obviously like FRAUSD, but you don't have to use it. You could

use whatever other stable coins you want, right? Um and I think that's where things are going. Um, I think that when there's going to be a thousand stable coins, I know that the the the contrary view, right, is like stable coins are like going to be uh L2s where people were like every company is going to have an L2. I think that that was probably a little too much, right? But companies have gift cards, companies have websites, right? Like they might not need like a a literal uh blockchain themselves, but I think it's not the same thing. I think you'll see a lot more stable coins that will be successful that'll have like narrow scope uh distribution. Um and they'll be there'll be money makers. They'll be uh

able to actually capture both the the underlying yields and then also the the revenues from like payments everything by getting it integrated in payments processor. So we'll see. Um I I'm really excited for basically seeing how those type of stable coins will interact with onchain uh DeFi and where we can bring value because that's where FRA actually lives right at the intersection of onchain defy and now offchain uh institutional payment flows on off-ramp flows. Yeah, man. I mean, Rob, that was one big trend of SmartCon, right? Where was like, okay, we've got these RWAs on chain now, but like then what? And I know Plume's doing, you know, a decent job of having like this kind of RWA ecosystem. There's obviously stable coin yields across dozens of chains now, but

it does feel like the next step here is like actually bringing on these whether it's a genius compliant stable coin or some T bill based yield products or other products and like integrating them into DeFi. Sam, I'm curious if your your vision still persists because I once you said this to us, I think it was on the first episode of this show with regards to the two types. I've been using that non-stop and everyone loves it and they they they totally vibe with it. They agree with it. They understand it. Is that still very much your vision for like the two types of stable coins? You got the genius compliant ones and kind of like the yield bearing ones. And I know it's a bit more nuanced than that, but just kind of tapping.

>> Yeah, I think that's proven uh to to be to be even more specific. What I mean by it is is like a payment type of stable coin. Uh and then like the savings or the yield bearing stable coins and um you know internally in the payments ones, right? The most important thing with a payment stable coin is how many places universally accepted as money, right? And and the and the more uh safe it is, the closer to risk-free it is, the more likely this will be uh a a payment stable coin, right? What a payment asset is is that every N person or entity that accepts it, it becomes more valuable for the next N plus one, right? So like it's very difficult to get the first place to accept your thing

as a as a payment, right? The second person slightly uh easier but still very hard because it's only two, right? And then the third slightly easier, fourth, fifth, sixth, right? And then the whole point is the more widely accepted it is as payment the the more likely uh you know the next marginal person or n plus one will accept it. Well if you think about it for a second what is the most important properties of a stable coin to maximize that function n plus1 acceptance over time. it it cannot be super complicated underlying so that every single n uh person institution entity has to analyze oh if I accept this thing is it going to is it going to implode or whatever they just want a dollar they don't even want yield for

for payments right like if you just think about this kind of type one kind of payment asset it just has to be very simple right and that is you know genius compatible or maybe something that's very mature like tether doesn't even need to be that because it's so so moneylike it's just out in a league of its own right And it's simple, everyone can understand it. Uh it's it's useful as a form of payment and general money. Then when you have it, right? The second type is okay when I hold it or or anyone holds a stable coin, how can I get yield from it? Where what's the savings account kind of structure? What is kind of this uh system? And I think one thing that was interesting, I think it was Paul um forbot that uh the the founder of Morpho that uh talked about how

everything is volts, right? Volts is uh the the the next thing and uh I think whether we call it yield bearing stable coins or vault stable coins or or whatever I think is a good way to think about it because then the payment stable coins are put into these savings vaults these yieldbearing you know 4626 volts whatever you want to call them and those have risk obviously right th those uh clearly uh some of them have terrible risk unfortunately like the USDX stuff right um some of them are super blue chip like Sky SUSDs, like FRAX SRAXUSD or Athena SUSD and they they're they can support large TVL. They've never had an issue. There's there's never been an

exploit. They're very very transparent about where the the money actually is going. Um, and if you think about it, those aren't actually good payments to believe it or not, right? because you you do not uh go to people and be like do you accept like uh SF FRxUSD or SUSD which is uh a $17 today or something like that. uh they just want to accept the dollar right so the these two types of uh class of stable coins I think will become solidified like these are the two types there's there's no there's no other types the the other types that we used to talk about CDPs underlying algorithmic or whatever uh they're basically subcategories of of the of the vault savings because that's how you actually get the yield for taking risk right

>> yeah um >> I like it >> yeah did you have do you have a follow just I I [snorts] mean very very well put um and just generally like when that idea has been brought to anyone from a suit to a dev, they all kind of jive with it and understand it. So I think it's like a really good it just makes sense. It's like guys, we've been trying to like kind of fit a square into a circle hole. It's like no, why don't we just have very safe stable coins with no yield, no risk, and then you know have have ones that obviously if there is yield there's going to be risk. It's like it's like it's like finance 101 but took us a couple years to figure it out.

interesting because before I used to even think that checking and savings accounts were like an artifact of like traditional finance because things were like super inefficient and stuff like that. Um but now I I think and this will be more obvious like obvious to other people too is like checking and savings accounts are actually like a fundamental like platonic form of finance. It's like it's it's like a it's like an equation of like you know F equals MA or like you discover this form that and it's not because it's like uh oh the banks were inefficient. It's like actually those are the two forms. You have payments based flows and and units and then you have savings based units and and those units usually uh have risk and you should hopefully be getting good

riskadjusted yield for them. Um, and so it's not that like checking and savings are like this thing of banks and like they, you know, they had shitty tech or something like that. It is actually an economic form. >> Yeah. And it also goes to show that there's a a really nice segue from stable coins into RWAs because as you start to think more about what these yield bearing stable coins look like, they start to look more and more like some sort of t tokenized T bill, treasury, RWA structured product type of thing that people can store their wealth in and they there there's deep liquidity and it can effectively serve as a savings account, but not a savings account that gives you 0.002% 002% interest like a savings account in a

fiat based bank. It's it's giving you the risk-free rate that everyone knows, you know, once you kind of have some sort of awareness of the Treasury bill, bond market that's out there. And so we can actually 10x or 100x and and increase by an order of magnitude or more the amount of interest that we're getting on some reserves and and some of our savings. Do you Sam do you think about this ever ever? Like to me whenever we're increasing something by orders of magnitude that that could pose some pretty substantial ripple effects throughout you know the economy or society. Do you think that's like kind of flying under the radar you know a as we kind of move our cash savings account

into a tokenized version of an RWA structured product and we go from you know 4% to 4%. Do you think that's going to have any any sort of knock-on effects? Yeah, I think first of all anytime that there's like more efficiency, uh it's always better even if like like I I can't I honestly can't think of an example. Let me know if you do where there there was a lot of efficiency in a market uh right which which was legal, right? Like there's obviously you don't want crazy markets for like drugs, assassinations, etc. But a legal market where there's efficiency gains where it's actually been bad, right? And so the the important thing is even like the community banks and stuff that are like

oh no if this happens like we won't be able to lend to whatever uh these efficiency gains are not good efficiency gains essentially is what what they're saying. Uh I I think it it's it's total bull especially because I don't know if you guys saw the new um the I think it was the Fed report. I forget which um regional Fed it was where it said that stable coins uh actually have a good chance of lowering uh credit cost like like interest on on loans. And it's like oh wow look now it's the exact opposite. the the data and the assumptions is uh it's actually going to make creating credit easier rather than harder contrary to what uh the anti- you know crypto bank lobby actually says right and so I think we're going to see more

and more people actually understand that that it's a good thing in every way even if like there's some like uh not great arguments of like oh deposit flight or whatever. Um the the funny thing with the the deposit flight argument, by the way, is that if you read the the Genius Act, one of the actual bill like like the the collateral types that are accepted is bank deposits at FDIC insured banks. So like you can literally create a genius compatible stable coin with for example the tokenized JP Morgan deposits today that that they they announced. Like that is literally a compliant stable coin if you want to go in that direction. It obviously looks slightly different than like the tokenized T bills that like we work with at FRAUSD with like BL Superstate uh

Wisdom Tree and and them, but it's it's still compliant. It's the same. And I think it's just going to create a lot more efficiency. Um and what's interesting and then you you brought this up like what stuff are we thinking about the design space for like transparent genius stables is not very big, right? There's these five like like assets, right, that you can use. Uh and then the the fifth clause is like tokenized representations of the above four, right? That that's literally the the definition in the bill. Um and it's actually I think what's unique is that if you can get the most utility and and efficiency out of this narrow design space. So what we do with FRAUSD is we have all of the collateral uh tokenized

onchain as RWA securities, right? So we really make use of that fifth uh of forgotten uh clause of like tokenized representations of like the above uh securities and assets, right? And so we allow redemptions atomically on chain and we allow people to actually mint and redeem if they can move the RWA token. In certain sense, we even allow uh people to uh redeem for USDC and other tokens in line if there's a uh market maker that can touch the RWA and then put USDC into the redemption contract and then the ARB bot or whatever is is onchain, the mebot uh can only touch like USDC or USDT. And so we actually have the most efficient compliant design uh architecture of at least that I've

seen of uh a Genius compatible stable coin with FRAUSD. And as it gets bigger, it'll be this like center of liquidity um with all the other it'll basically be the um pair so to speak, right, of all of the compliant RWA um securities that you can back it with, especially the ones that we have partnerships with. And so that'll make it even more and more uh enticing for other other entities like like JP Morgan or the next one or whatever to uh participate and and use FRAUSD, get us to uh integrate it into our system. And so it's a really interesting quiet thing that we're doing that we're seeing more and more uh more volume, more usage, more growth. Uh the supply with FRA USD in the past uh 30

days actually gone up by like uh almost 40%. Um and it's uh it's been good. Things are things are growing and up and to the right regardless of the market turmoil. >> Yeah, it's bullish, guys. Uh quick quick news that just hit the wire. Dubai court freezes $456 million linked to Justin Sun's bailout of True USD issuer Tech Terics. Just another example, right? I I don't really remember what happened at True USD. >> I I don't either. All I know is some some kind of stuff like it was during USD or something. Do you remember that one?

>> Yeah. [snorts] But like just another you an another example of basically saying what you're saying right here about F FRXUSD about the moneyiness of these assets about the genius compliant nature of these assets and just kind of I mean to me it seems like it seems like Fraxet is pretty much all in on this genius compliant nature of of future you know stable coins like it seems like that's the bet that you're taking and then the bigger bet is basically just like all of these different types of companies in the world will try to be launching their own Genius Compliance stable coins, you know, in this gift card fashion, let's say. Um, and that Fraant wants to be kind of like the glue there. And, uh, yeah, I mean, look, like like this like like the supply is going up, it's great.

Uh, the market's going down, that's fine. Uh, but it seems like you're playing a way bigger game than like, you know, what is the price of Bitcoin today? >> Yeah, we we try not to look at it. Although obviously we're we're crypto guys. It's hard. But uh the the important thing I think over the long term is look we're we're not building for next year or the or the year after. It's like a 3 to five year uh time horizon to see if we're we're correct about exactly as you're saying. We can also uh do even more interesting stuff as the FRANET platform um matures. Right. So, one of the things we're we're looking at is uh white label issuance using the FRANET infrastructure and actually having relationships with these companies that might be fine with using

FRAUSD or USDT or USDC, but then they also want like like I said their own kind of branded or or gift card programmable digital dollar, right? Um because there's no reason why uh if we've built all this architecture and infrastructure and neo bank system for FRAUSD, it can't be used for a close partner that we want oneto ontoeness with anyway, right? And you can kind of think about it like if you work with us or if you want us to issue your own uh genius compliant stable coin, you don't have to actually uh recreate the wheel. You don't have to recreate the on-off ramp. You don't have to recreate the virtual accounts onchain mint and burns, all of these things. you get all of that for free um rather than having to do uh each of those individual things. And so

there's a very wide set of like tentacles that the whole fraet like platform can slowly move into and and like you said, we're we're looking at where things are going not just this week but like next year basically. >> Yeah. Sam, where what sectors or like is there a sector specific mindset you have with regards to the types of companies that will be you know you know eager to launch a stable coin and wanting to have them be certainly genius compliant thus a good customer for forex. I mean, I think the most important thing if you're going to like work with us uh over other good uh providers, of course, like we're we know a lot of them, um is that hopefully you do want onchain utility,

this ability to mint and burn quickly between a few chains, which we have the most coverage out of all of the um issuance platforms or or companies. uh you do want to actually um have onchain integrations as well as the off-chain banking and uh institutional like like flows and and backing it with like uh Black Rockck Biddle or uh Superstate and other RWAS or cash. um if it's just I guess I guess this doesn't really apply because I'm not sure who would be listening uh super natively to crypto.

But if if there's no use on onchain uh for the for the stable coin, it's only for like remittance and and things like that. Um I guess it's like slightly less of a good fit. But even like fintex that would like to have onchain utility uh either now or eventually for their issued stable coin. I think we're FRA is unmatched in that area in terms of um onchain integrations onchain uh utility and then connecting that now to offchain. >> Incredible. Makes sense. Um man I I think you know what we saw we were at SmartCon last week. I think we were in New York and you know the there was Fidelity, Black Rockck, there was

DTCC you know there was you know people say trillions there was literally quadrillions of settlement volume in the room and it just you know it's it's inspiring but it's also signaling that this is kind of where the men separate from the boys. Um and I tend to think that we're going to see this repricing in the market where coming up in 2026 we're going to get this institutional cycle. Um, and you know, if you have an institutional strategy, this is where you're going to sort of ascend into the next the next leg of where this industry is going. And if you don't, you're just going to get left behind. So, I guess Sam, maybe you could just describe what it's been like, you know, thinking back to to 2021 and 2020 when you were

around. Not everyone, you know, that that's around today was around back then, but you saw the evolution of the space. you saw point A to point B and the the before and after. Could you just like when you're in the conversations, when you're in the rooms, when you're having these conversations, what is the before and after look like and and how stark of a different is it and and where do you think we go from here when it when you know we kind of close out Q4 and we go into Q1? Yeah, I uh it's been a crazy uh past like five years and obviously before that I was in crypto for a while before the the DeFi uh cycle too. I really do think that all of this stuff like you're saying the trillions and settlement

volume, the big boys and stuff is because the the the Genius Act opened. It doesn't mean they're all like gonna issue genius compliant stable coins, but it really is the what the act represents, the regulatory clarity for for digital dollars. And uh this part is just like a a rumor, but I I've heard it from some people that I like kind of trust. And one of the things they told me is like during all of these uh tariff like negotiations and backroom things and stuff like that, one of the things the administration particularly secretary Besson has has like said is like uh you have to open your country to dollar stable coins. It's as important for the US to to do that as uh as as like opening your banking system and

things like that. Again, I don't actually uh know that firsthand, but it's from people that I uh I trust. If that's true, that is really, really awesome because first of all, that is such a long-term strategic view of the US dollar and what stable coins mean to the US dollar in terms of having a ton of new treasury demand, right? And uh people using it across different countries. It's actually very very impressive to see a forwardinking uh administration like this one actually bring it up and potentially bring it up in high stakes negotiations. So seeing that and then from like you said from 5 years ago where people were like uh you

know building things named sushi, hamburger, pickle and and all all this stuff is uh is is pretty crazy, right? And so I think it's far beyond just one act, right? Like the this bill and things like that. It's more about how big can we get? how quickly can we get there? And making sure that you're at the frontier to be able to provide this this efficiency, these services to people that like you said, they're they're the big boys, right? They they settle trillions and they're they're finally here, right? >> I mean, yeah. I mean, Rob and I have been kind of like pontificating like if you don't have a seat at the table right now, there's still some seats open in the market in general, but like the seats are getting set and the the table is getting set uh with regards to the

players that are going to lead the next cycle. And so it's like, you know, no pressure Sam, but like same to us where it's like, well, you guys, you know, we you have to capture some portion of of the market, right? Because like we're in this adoption phase where this only happens once now. It's it's massive and it's huge and it's vast and it's as Rob says quadrillions but like it this time period it will last you know however many number of years and there will be winners and and then there will be the rest and so it does feel like a bit of urgency in the air right now with regards to the institutional adoption phase. Oh, we definitely feel the urgency. In fact, the there's so much stuff to capture that it it honestly um you obviously have to concentrate on

certain things and and uh there's too much stuff. But the the most important thing to uh think about I was I was thinking like certain type of like uh tokens or protocols. For example, a came to mind and and Pendle came to mind. Um most people probably don't remember but a was originally like ETH lend right and and so they um they did uh some some cool products and then they were like okay let's restructure change the brand like like redo some tokconomics and then push it out and then uh a now is you know like the rest the rest is history right like up and to the right and you know just use a right when you're when you're uh when you're doing uh lending or or borrowing right and same thing

with like Pendle if you look at the Pendle like chart of the token or something. And this is not obviously investment advice, but if you look at just overall like the life cycle, right? Um there was this like quiet period before they, you know, hit Eureka, right? And the the the period is when you're designing, you know, what you're you're doing and you you feel like the the thing that you've, you know, you're in is is the right place, right time, and and a huge huge market opportunity. And I think then again with Pendle, rest is history, right? up in up and to the to the right in like a perfect product market fit that brings so much value to to tons of people and I think the comparison I'd give again not investment

advice at a token pendle fra tokens or anything but uh with the with the fra token protocol all this stuff I really actually feel like between 20 uh20 like you were saying uh um Robbie and then like 2025 is between our ETH lend phase and then our a phase Um and so like the the things we've learned and the the adjustments that we've done and then the things that we know are coming and and obviously change in tokconomics and things like that we can you know that that's a whole separate episode. Uh obviously like recently unis swap also announced this huge thing uh where you know uni tokens been quiet for a while and people were like you know what does it even do and then they came out right

and were like okay um I actually really love that uh unification uh token proposal right I don't know if you guys have talked about that at length yet but I think these things where this period of quiet recalibration readjustment and then huge [snorts] huge uh value creation there's going to be a few of these like you said uh Robbie um and I think we've seen evidence before of other cycles like like a and pendle what's going to be the ones in in next cycle and obviously I'm biased and and I think it's it's fra but that's not going to be the only one um I think there's a few other really interesting ones and uh I think that's the real question right what's the next like 20 30x that is right at the right place at the right

time that is creating value and knows what's going to happen in 2026 and 2027 >> 100% >> very well said That's very bullish for forex, by the way. Extremely bullish. >> We'll see. I think so, too. We'll see soon. >> Yeah. Yeah. Sam, thanks for your time, man. Um, we are we are very very slammed into Dev Connect. We are stoked to get out there again. Bummed that you're not going to be there. I'm sure we'll see you at a conference towards the end of the year or early next. But yeah, it's it's crunch time. It's Q4. It's crunch time. Um, so uh we appreciate your hard work. Congrats on FraxNet. Congrats on the success. Um, let's just say that there's some stable coins right now that

are there's uh the stable coin rankings are being flipped and you know if you know you you know so um we'll see you on the other side, Sam. >> Thanks guys. Enjoy Dev Connect and talk to you soon. >> Cheers. Thanks, man. We'll see you soon. >> All [snorts] righty. All righty Rob. Well, hey guys, great stabled up episode, great stream. Rob, um, close us out man. >> Look, I think it's pretty clear that FRA is doing something right. Um, you know, you don't get in the room with the legislators writing, uh, laws into action, uh, if you're not doing something right. So, congrats, Sam.

Literally writing the Genius Act. That's why he knows every provision in the act. >> Um, and then obviously he can capitalize on it, right? [clears throat and cough] I think you made a good point. stable coins are uh are getting their getting uh tested. They're getting stress tested and uh FRA holds up. I also think fraet is huge gluing together the stable coin industry. Yep. Just look, we know that uh this is a gigantic market and if you can be selling picks and shovels into this market uh you know there is a gold rush that is happening and there's tons of speculation like circle beat earnings yesterday but still their stock dropped because there was so much so much

speculation and so much expectation. So I think FRA is doing something right. I think they're leading the way when it comes to genius compliant stable coins. There's tons of stable coins out there. Micah Genius, uh, it's going to be up companies to pick which one is best, but I think Sam is doing great when it comes bringing crypto and stable coins back to America for the stable coin super cycle. >> Yeah, man. That's well said, guys. Thanks for watching today's stream. We'll see you guys tomorrow and thanks for watching another episode of Rollup TV. Peace. >> [music]