Superstate Raises $82.5M, Chainlink Acquires Atlas for SVR, SUMR ft. ChainlinkGod, Sandeep

Transcript

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

>> [music] [music] [music] >> JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. [music] It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. [music] You said it. finally said it. So, boys, boys, I'm boys. We're boys. [music] [music] I'm the [music]

>> [music] >> I'm about the [music] [music] above the [music] buff. [music] [music] High above the

[music] [music] mother [music] [music] is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're [music] on fourth floor today. We're going to be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys. [applause] >> All right. All right. All right. We are live and we are back. Happy Friday, everyone. Man, we're bringing the energy. It's solo. Andy dipped out

again. That boy is going to surf the Northshore and discover Neo Finance somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Um, guys, we've got a tremendous show and we're going to get started very quickly. I uh if we have some screen share, we can go ahead and pull it up and we'll speed through it. Um because we've got a an incredible lineup. Uh we've got Superstate, which just raised 82.5 million. Um they're doing incredible things. Next up, we have a So, first we're going to be joined by Summer Finance. They recently launched Sumer token. It's live. That's very exciting. Hilter uh excuse me, Jim Hilner is the next guest

from Superstate. They raised 82 and a half million dollars. Uh pretty insane. And M&A season public uh uh private companies, crypto companies are going public. It's amazing to see. Uh then we're going to have Genius Terminal come up. Exodus has launched some tokenized stocks on Salana. We're going to be hearing from JP on everything that's happening in the tokenized stock world. Uh there's some some rumblings that uh the SEC and the CFTC are going to band together and throw a fantastic event and we're going to hear a lot more about the tokenized uh equities market as a result of that. Chain link God um is joining us from Chainlink to discuss the Atlas

acquisition. Uh these guys at Atlas, if you guys are unfamiliar, are very deep in the MEV space. Uh they come out of Fast Lane and Fast Lane recently pivoted to the Monad ecosystem. So there's all kinds of crypto native, DeFi native uh underpinnings to this acquisition. We've got Marson from Red Zone. Uh Redstone is uh not too happy about this acquisition. We'll see how that pans out. And then we're going to wrap up. Uh last but certainly not least, we've got Sandeep from Sentient uh and he is going to uh close out the show because Scent uh from Sentient, another token generation event is uh is also live. So tokens are going live, companies are going public,

companies are raising funds. It's uh it's pretty awesome to see. And guys, I'm sure you're keeping track of this because there is a bigger world outside of what's happening right here in our bubble of this industry. Um, we have uh this whole debacle with Greenland. So, Trump wants Greenland. You guys, I'm sure have seen this. Uh, will Trump buy at least a part of Greenland? You see this on the screen now. You also see we've got some updated call sheet in the ticker. Uh, some updated markets there. um particularly relevant to the macro landscape and uh we're going to be revitalizing some more of this uh in the coming weeks.

41% that Trump is going to buy at least a part of Greenland. Um there's a long date here which I think is leading to uh the probability as to why this is priced at 41%. Uh Greenland deal boosts market odds. This comes on the heels of Trump's speech at Davos um and his meeting with the leader of NATO uh I believe it's Mark Root and he did this meeting right after his speech where he said he wasn't going to use force to acquire Greenland uh but at the time tariffs were still in effect and so at the time there was tariffs put on pretty much all of the

European countries and the Arctic countries for not allowing this Greenland deal to happen. Trump halted the February 1st tariffs after talks with NATO on a Greenland deal. He says there's concepts of a deal or concepts of a framework for a deal very ambiguous. Prediction markets now put the odds of a Greenland purchase at 41% with negotiations being led by JD Vance and Marco Rubio and Steve Witoff. We can go ahead to our next headline because this is going to continue to unfold. Um, and so we're we're going to see what comes out. But the boost in the market that I were seeing over the last couple days is a result of those tariffs no longer taking place, at least for now.

Um, okay. What have we got here? Changing CZ reveals groundbreaking talks with 12 nations on sovereign asset tokenization. I have a feeling this also took place at Davos. you know, journalists and especially like, you know, when when we see some of these headlines love to embellish a lot of the things that happen here. I I we see it all the time when we're when we're looking at Tradfi, they love to make announcements. They love to say that we're exploring, researching, and developing what a potential solution could look like. None of these are action words. None of this is like, yes, this is what we're doing. None of it is definitive. And so, what do I think happened here? I think CZ probably got into a room with a lot of um uh

countries and nations and there's interest, right? And so he probably got in in Davos and he was sitting around and you know these people are very curious about how they can monetize their balance sheet, monetize their debt, uh kind of separate away from fiat currencies, whether it be you know the BRICS countries and the yawn or if it's the US dollar as a fiat currencies countries and sovereign nations and central banks are looking to separate away from the world economic monetary order that has been established as inflation continues to eat away at these fiat currencies.

That's why we're seeing the rise in gold and silver. And inevitably, we believe Bitcoin will be a benefactor of uh this separation away from fiat currencies as well. This is um almost a prerequisite for the debasement trade. So, we hear a lot about the debasement trade. Um the central banks are uh are one of the reasons why uh they're actually going deeper into this and they're starting to buy more gold. Uh and so that is propelling the the basement trade forward. Let's continue to move uh forward in our headlines before we get our first guest uh up. Why don't we just cycle through a couple more and uh then we'll get Chris in here in just a moment.

So, a whale is looping USDE, borrowing and accumulating gold. This is a great segue from our last headline about how central banks are accumulating uh accumulating gold. They're looking to separate from these fiat currencies because the world reserve currency and the dollar and the whole monetary power are starting to shift. And so what is happening here is that this this whale, we don't know exactly who it is beyond just a wallet address, has borrowed uh USDE, the stable coin, uh to a tune of 42 million [clears throat] and has bought uh Tether's tokenized gold product X aut.

Uh this was uh with a an un unrealized profit of about $3.5 million at the time. Um and gold has continued to go up. Silver has continued to go up. Palladium has continued to go up. Um and I think that will continue to happen because um you know if you look at uh you know you look at Canada and you look at his uh the prime minister of Canada went to Davos. He also talked about how this monetary order is eroding from the inside out. Um and Trump is only accelerating this with some of the um neocon and imperialist natures of his foreign policies. So, we're not going to go too deep into this rabbit hole, but it does have economic uh consequences,

and this is one precious metals uh are are doing this. So, let's keep moving here. We're going to go and do one last headline, and then we'll bring our first guest up with Chris. What have we got up next? It's been a busy, busy week here. Uh it's been a short week, but a busy week. And last but certainly not least here, we've got RWAXYZ reporting that JP Morgan, the world's largest bank, is now live on Ethereum. Uh so we know that their tokenized money market fund uh has uh deployed. Uh it is live trading. Um you know, there is a snowball effect here where if you look

at RWAXYZ, you'll see that a lot of these tokenized funds don't have a ton of holders right now. There's not a lot of retail buyers that are buying this. Uh there's a few, but by and large, we believe that the tokenization power is unlocked when all of the institutions are on chain. This is when a lot of the institution to institution flow is fully unlocked and happening on chain and that's when we believe size, holders, all of these things will increase. Um and of of course you know each one that tokenizes its fund moves on chain is uh is is a further success case to all of the other institutions that show hey this is really happening and the

liquidity effect is that liquidity begets liquidity at a certain point you don't need you know people say all the money is going to be on chain you don't need to get 100% of the money on chain what happens is you need to reach some critical threshold call it 50% once you have half of the money onchain, it becomes worthwhile for anyone who's offchain to actually join forces with the rest of the liquidity because that is how capital and markets move more efficiently. So, we're reaching the critical mass. Uh the financial incumbents in the neoinancial world and the legacy financial world are moving incrementally on chain and uh and it's incredible to watch because we believe

this is a snowball effect that will continue. So guys, we're going to have a very short commercial break and we're going to bring up our first guest, Chris from Summer Finance. We're going to talk about launching a token in 2026. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

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We are here and the time is now. Chris, congratulations on launching the summer token. Um, man, I want to hear all about what it what it takes and what it means to launch a token in 2026. Welcome to the show. >> Hey. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. It was Yeah, been a busy week. It's a busy 24 hours as well. >> Yeah, I I bet. I bet. I mean, man, you you know, um you know, our audience is primarily it's primarily founders and builders of other token products, right? And and projects. And so, um obviously, we've got retail and DeFi power users out there that, you know, they want to know how they can, you know, most effectively accumulate the summer token and how it's incorporated into the protocol. But I I'd love to get the founder story over the last 72 hours,

right? like gearing up for a TGE is something that a lot of projects are are looking at, they're looking into, they're trying to prepare for. Give us a sense of like of of what the war room is like in the 17, you know, the the three or four days leading up to a TGE. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's it's pretty crazy. There's a lot there's a lot going on from various different teams and so on, like making sure everything's lined up. Like we like for us, it started like really like over a week ago because actually the TGE was triggered by a governance vote. um and so on. And um yeah, and as we talked about, I think uh I think it was on Monday, right? Um we we launched the Aerodromes ignition program. So actually for the entire week, uh like we've been

just chatting with people in the Aerodrome Discord, trying to campaign for votes and so on because the whole point of Aerome ignition is is effectively um battling for votes uh from VE holders um and so on on there. So doing that, making sure everything's aligned on the on the centralized exchange side of things as well, the market makers, that felt like it was last minute. um like making sure everything was like deployed and like sent their liquidity and and so on and and and like dotting the eyes, crossing their tees and so on um in the last few minutes and then and then yeah then kind of almost the anxiety in a way like the last six hours um and stuff like been around a long long time like launch a multilateral die like launch this latest summer protocol when we launch automation like 22 and stuff like it all

kind of kind of feels the same but like the the token is like out of your hands right it's uh it's like it feels the one that's least in control. Um, but yeah, at least it's done. >> Absolutely. And man, it's it's incredible. You know, you you have a protocol and you guys, I think, went about it the right way. You launched the protocol, you get product market fit. For anyone who's unfamiliar, we're up to how much in the summer finance protocol? It's it's billions at this point. >> Yeah. Well, it is on the front on the front end. Uh so on our summer five pro product we have about several billion dollars being managed through the front end and and have done five >> yeah for like five or six years now have had billions of dollars being managed there on the new lazy summer protocol uh

it's about 80 million um right now so like lost some of the mercenary capital as soon as the token started trading which which is to be expected and stuff like we always had planned to lose somewhere between 15 and 20% there um as you see on every protocol and so on but um yeah it's growing again and uh yeah it's it's an exciting Fine. >> Got it. And so tell us how the the token is going to fit within the broader, you know, lazy summer and summer five protocol. What are some of the mechanics here and and and what is the game theory that someone as a market participant in the protocol should be thinking about?

>> Yeah. Yeah, 100%. So the latest summer token or just the summer token really is um yeah, we think it's pretty unique compared to most DeFi tokens and most tokens in general really. Um it has a has a dual reward system. So the uh if you're a token holder, you can stake your summer token and then you'll share in 20% of all revenue that gets distributed from the protocol. So the protocol charges for its it's an AUM fee on its vaults and 20% of that revenue is paid out to summer token holders uh crucially in USDC. So that money is charged effectively converted to a USDC amount continuously and once a month is redistributed to those that stake uh the summer token. So unlike most bridge calls where kind of there's no never really any economic value tied back uh to the token or anything like that. Um

especially if you look at tokens like uni and so on. Um the summer token is very different. So you get that you also earn summer rewards as well. Um and the great thing about the summer token is you don't have to go and buy it on the market if you want it. If you participate in the lazy summer protocol then you earn summer tokens. Uh they're continuously streamed um through Merkel. You can get them, you can stake them. The longer you lock up uh the more the revenue share you'll earn. Um so it goes from a kind of 1x um thing right now um all the way up to 7.2x uh kind of share if you uh stake for the full three years. So um yeah like we internally would describe it as like one of D5's most productive tokens. Um you'll get governance rights to decide on the

markets that supported within the protocol and uh yeah and then you share in the success. So if you're a summer holder, it's you could if you could spread the word, grow the protocol further, then you're going to share in the success of that um moving forward in in a real like material way. >> Yeah, I I I think it's it's something for other projects to take note of. You know, we're we're seeing how the market is treating buybacks. Um and then also, you know, we we have gone through this, you know, valueless governance token process. I think crypto is really having this this realization where look, you know, we need product market fit and and it goes for the protocols as well as the tokens, you know, like we're going to end up in a world where there's there's

equities and tokens right next to each other. And I think a lot of these market participants and retail buyers, they're going to think to themselves, why am I going to own, you know, XYZ's, you know, governance token when I can own an equity and it's performing pretty well? you know, earlier today we were talking about, you know, tokenized gold and how, you know, there's someone borrowing, you know, some stable coins on on Athena. They're looping it in order to lever up on on tokenized gold. And that is possible because these things are tokenized. And and so I think when it comes to the protocols, these are going to get, you know, the the ones that stick around are gonna going to find product market fit. They're going to have to. But I think when it comes to the tokens, the there's there's things

that you guys are implementing that other teams are are not, you know, implementing or maybe they're thinking about, what what would you say are some of the the key things that again, you know, for a token to survive in 2026? What are they going to have to do? And what were some of the lessons that you guys took into account uh for the summer token? >> Yeah, so I think I think you hit the nail on the head around I think the protocol and the feature that the problems you're trying to solve for have got to come first at the protocol level. like there's no point having or there's no point like holding on to a token if the if the underlying product doesn't solve a real problem. Um because eventually those users that are using it maybe just to fund the tokens are going

to move elsewhere. So yeah, we spent a long time researching exactly what the kind of customers the users even the institutions and stuff are looking for at the protocol level. And I think if you could build a successful protocol that that has pre-product market fit and then you have a token that can can reap the benefits of that protocol. And I think that's that's the crucial bit again when we talk about product market fit of a token like people want to be able to like get value from it ultimately through the end of the day and then feel like they're part of like part of something kind of bigger in a couple of years time as well. So yeah like we took a lot of inspiration from a dream ve kind of lockup model and so on and how they do that. We went with a

slightly different um idea of having the to the kind of stake position tradable. So that their token obviously is tradable uh after it's staked and so on. Like ours you can't you can't trade but you can take a fixed penalty. So everybody can take the same penalty uh depending on the kind of time left of their stake um and so on. But again it's it's it's about understanding I think what works. We're in the privilege position of of ultimately being able to see lots of different projects from a protocol point of view and from a token point of view. What works, what doesn't work. I'm sure we're going to see some new things coming up as well throughout 26 as like some novel ideas and novel mechanisms kind of come to the four as well. But um yeah, we're super excited about the kind of protocol design uh

first of all and then the kind of token design to support to support the success of the protocol moving forward as well. >> Yeah, well well said. And so um when it comes to the aerodyum ignition launch that you guys did, this is relatively new. I think people may still be somewhat unfamiliar. take take us through what it what it means to launch on Aerad Drrome and and you mentioned earlier, you know, you got to kind of fight for your VE votes in order to allocate incentives. You know, a lot of teams are going to go the high float or excuse me, the high FDV, low float, launch on centralized exchange with their market makers. They're going to go that route. What are the tradeoffs that that maybe you had to go and and realize by by going in this aerodrome and DEX first launch path? But but what

are the benefits kind of you know take us through some of the pros and cons. >> Yeah. Yeah. So the whole the whole idea of launching through Aerodrome as well is is a it's like a fair market launch from a price discovery point of view as well. You you 100% allow the allow the market to to decide the kind of price points to price that in as well. You can kind of like it gives you a good idea with the votes as well like kind of where your where your kind of price is going to land as well. um like the OJ community has got some great people that do some great assessments and so on and I call out one guy Roy in their community that kind of like hit the like literally right bang in the middle of his prediction and so on um of where I

was going to land to start with based on where summer is today. Um but yeah like it's it's a completely fair launch um like protocol and so on and uh for us it just felt right like Erdrame obviously is it's D5 first it's it's non-custodial first and so on. Summeri has always been about that ever since its early days in Maker and so on. It's all about self-custodial kind of DeFi first and so on. I think if we if we try and push everybody on chain, try and like push them into this like, hey, earn a yield on chain from the like the proper decentralized marketplaces ultimately and then go down the centralized route, try and launch a token, it kind of feels like you're you're cheating or don't really truly believe in the technology side of it. Um, as well, the other thing is is we've we've had the token live for

a year. Um, uh, but it was just the kind of transferability and trading that enabled yesterday. So, so we've been building up all of the users across it. I know lots of protocols obviously do like points campaigns and build up those users hit the airdrop at the exact same moment and everyone is kind of a race to claim and then a race to dump off and and things like that. But we already knew how many people like were actually holding the tokens um already. We could see kind of the activity with it. They already were able to stake for a month before the token went live as well. So, we could see the kind of like the difference in people and like the average stake time was already over 500 days and so on. So, like a lot of that liquidity was already off the market. um

for example. But yeah, like the Aerodrome is just a it's a DEX first um thing. The protocol is is is home is on the base network. Um and yeah, ever since we launched the token and protocol and actually about three or four months before we launched it when we knew base was going to kind of be our home was a drone was one of the reasons for that um because of the kind of the launch pad they had. Um and then they introduced ignition which yeah you give a certain supply of your token. So in our case we had 3% of our supply went to the aerodyrome ve holders um as bribes uh effectively they then vote uh to to give their aero tokens um or vote to put a emissions onto the onto the pool in return for those summer tokens um and so

on and we know a large number of those those kind of holders because we've been in contact with them this week have then gone and stake their summer into the into the summer protocol and so on. So yeah, like that was the the ultimate goal um for us and hopefully yeah, we we continue to grow from here. >> I I I think you know may you won't say it, but I'll I'll I'll go ahead and say it. 3% is a lot less than what centralized exchanges are going to are going to look for like this this bribing mechanism. It might be confusing to people, but they're this is exactly what's happening behind the scenes at centralized exchanges, right?

where projects are forced to give their token supplies over to a centralized exchange as a basically a I maybe it's not quite a bribe that's just the the terminology that we have in the DeFi world because it's sort of a crowdsourced network of liquidity providers you know in in the centralized exchange world it's just one liquidity provider they're going to go and make you know the deals on behalf of their market makers and whatnot and and you know it's kind of like a it's just a negotiation as far as how much of the token supply, but 3% is far less than what I've heard and seen from uh some of these other projects that are forced uh if they want to list on some of these exchanges. I guess they're not forced to, but in order to list on centralized

exchanges, uh it does cost them a significant portion of token supply, uh upwards of 10% is from what I've seen. So ultimately the community is better off only 3% of the token supply and then you do get the distribution of all of the liquidity providers that you know are are uh on Aerod Drrome and and part of the ignition program. And so you mentioned now um staking is sort of the next available action that you you would recommend uh that people do with their summer tokens. I'm just curious like what are the knock-on effects here? How how do you think people should activate, you know, their summer tokens? What should they do now that they have some tokens?

>> Yeah, so if they if they if they've got their summer tokens, they can head to summer.fi um launch the app and connect their wallet inside the portfolio um uh tab is is a summer staking a summer rewards section and they can yeah go and go and go and go and do what they want of their summer. I think the USDC yield on that summer right now is around 25%. Um uh and that that only grows effectively with with protocol growth as well. Um but yeah, they don't have to just choose one one time period to lock up all their summer. They can they can choose multiple different staking periods. So if they want to put a portion of it in for three years, some of it in for two years, some of it in for one year, some in for like say six months uh and so on. Um they can go and

do that and like I said, they're they're continuously earning a little bit more summer um from that, but the the main yield ultimately is on the USDC side on the protocol revenue. And uh yeah, there's a lot of plans uh behind the scenes to to to be driving that revenue upwards over the over the next year as well. Yeah, let let's get into that because I think now you know tokens live um you know you guys have like you said billions in the summerf platform um you know upwards of of uh 80 million in the lazy summer program which you know is uh uh enabling yield on you know all all of these tokens uh especially stable coins great yields and you guys are you know crowdsourcing these these asset managers which is something that you know we all

believe is going to progress what's next right how do we at Lazy Summer, you know, from the 80 million to the 4 billion that's in the whole summer 5 protocol. Uh, and then ultimately, how do we grow beyond that? Um, and and source, you know, a lot more liquidity and a lot more yield uh to ultimately benefit the the summer token holders through these uh this revenue share. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I think the main the main the main avenue of growth you're going to see this year on the latest summer protocol is going to come from institutions. Um so last year was all about the kind of public vaults and so on and a lot of work but kind of behind the scenes on the institutional side. Uh the protocol was designed ultimately for institutions first like a lot of the design and a lot of the kind of like

modularity that you see in there and the kind of segregation of control for different parts of the the vaults and so on is all is all designed for the institutional adoption and so on. So hopefully very soon you're going to start to see some some kind of more public announcements and so on on that side. Um and that's that's where we expect to see a lot of the growth. Um, we also have some down managed what called down managed vaults for slightly kind of like more risk on strategies. So people that are are more kind of open to to taking on probably a little bit more risk where the vault's not going to be actively managed like full-time by a risk manager. Um, but they will seek to achieve probably a slightly higher yield and so on. So they'll be they'll be pretty I think pretty good and pretty

popular as well to bringing in more TVL um on there. But yeah, 2026 I think as a few protocols have been talking about as well recently, this kind of move towards institutions. 2025 was obviously a huge year for kind of work in the background. I think both for institutions and both through a lot of m like major DeFi uh projects as well. And I think 2026 is the year we're going to start to see more of that capital coming coming more on chain. So obviously a lot of capital went into ETFs and so on. last year there was a lot of kind of tokenized funds and so on and um yeah I think we're going to see a little bit more happening with those tokenized funds and going to start to see some vaults containing on some of on summer at least containing RWAS uh kind of the money

going to RWAS and things like that that's uh that's yeah I think the end of 2026 is going to look very different to how it starts um this year on summer and across DeFi it's exciting times um I I tend to agree with you I think we're going to see an institutional wave coming um you know right now I had, you know, someone on the show the other day talk about just the the quality of assets that are on chain. Look, we've got Bitcoin, we've got ETH, and we've got stable coins, and the breadth of stable coins is probably the is the most quality asset class that we have. Like, we meme coins lived and died. Like, they're not here anymore. RWAS are slowly but surely coming on chain. And then you got Bitcoin, ETH, the rest of

the alt L1 tokens are sort of cooked. And then you've got actual businesses that have chosen to tokenize. And this is where we believe that there's a lot of growth. You know, you guys are are are an example here where there's actual revenue and that revenue is shared just like an equity's revenue is shared via dividend. You know, there's there's uh there's shares um there there's revenue that is that is passed along to token holders. uh whether it be in the form of buybacks or whatever, you know, it it is it is there and there's product market fit for those tokens and those protocols. And so I I think we're going to see a lot more of this. The quality of assets has to improve. I think slowly companies are realizing this and legacy

financial institutions are moving on chain and they're bringing some of the more established asset classes with them. And I think all of this is going to help to sort of cleanse uh uh a lot of the the token dilution that we've seen out there. Um and and so Chris, man, how are you approaching this institutional strategy? Like you mentioned, you know, the way in which your infrastructure is modular and it's set up for this. Um and also like RWA coming online. I I agree this primes you guys uh for what we're calling the neo finance movement. Um and and you know this is something that we believe is going to take hold in 2026 and beyond.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen a lot of your Neo Finance kind of like uh like graphics and so on recently which which look really awesome. But yeah, I mean from from the summer point of view, yeah, like I said before, the vaults have been designed for institutions to be able to ultimately deploy their own vaults. Um kind of the tagline for them from our point of view is you they can get access to the entire DeFi market with with a single integration. Um and and the beauty for them is is that we've done all of the technical uplift for all of that access both on deployment and then moving forward. So we know that so many of these big kind of trady companies at FinTech even and so on they have big technical road maps quite often not humongous like engineering teams and

so on and at least like their road map we're trying to get things in it's three six nine months away and when we look at kind of DeFi in particular like you support a protocol or a couple of markets today and in a couple of months there's another new market or another major new curator you need to support or there's a new version of the protocol or there's a there's a there's another vault on a new network that need access to and so on. So with the lazy summer um institutional vaults, they can deploy one of these vaults. They become a vault manager. They can have all of their either their own capital or their users capital um access it. They're closed access vaults. So they restrict them only to their own users. That's how they then get access to private like kind of KYC markets as as well to access the

RWAS um on there. But whenever they want a new market, a new product, a new protocol, they will come to us, we'll get the adapter deployed for them, um sometimes in in a in a matter of a couple of days, if it's if it's a brand new one and and a slightly different to the kind of standards that we've we've already got kind of templated out, maybe maybe a couple of weeks and so on. But they don't have to involve their engineering team um for for anything beyond that very first um kind of um integration, which is also fairly simple because it's they're just their standard 4626 interfaces. It's a it's a deposit withdraw and kind of balance read function ultimately just for them and whenever they they bring on want new markets added the automated rebalancing kind of features that they that they can

take and can use if they want to will automatically just start allocating capital to those markets for them. So yeah, from a kind of engineering upkeep time for them, it's uh it's absolutely minimal. Um if if not nothing, um and then and then if yeah, if it's a B2B T2B or a B2B TOC uh company, then they add their own revenue stream um on top of those vaults just like they would if they were like an ETF issue or anything like that. And now they've got a really solid revenue stream um continuously updating products to keep up with the market without any technical like kind of upkeep cost. and uh yeah, they're then at the forefront of all of this this new like financial revolution basically. So um yeah, it's a it's a win-winwin um for them and um yeah and it's and it's completely customizable,

completely scalable and kind of again whatever they want they can have um all within the kind of infrastructure that we've that we've built. It's incredible, man, to to think about the rising new cohort of asset managers as an nonsans on the internet, but everything is verifiable and permissionless and you can choose to whitelist or modularize like certain components of these assets. Uh, as well as as the strategies that are taking place in these vaults. I I I think you know you put it extremely well where you kind of give all of the same components the privacies the KYC's the AMLs all of these things you know you pass that along to the institution because that's table stakes for them they need to maintain compliance they're

regulated but they want access to not not only do they want access to the liquidity that's you know piling up on chain especially as new new asset classes and RWAs are onboarded and tokenized they I'm sure also want the collective int intelligence that is brought on chain by these asset managers and and these strategies are able to juice out, you know, we'll we'll see how much more yield, right? Like >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think yields are pretty low at the moment just because I think there's a little bit of like just just general fear in the market of like the unpredictability and stuff in the market and I think a lot of leverage is off at the moment which is obviously pulled kind of defy yields down um and so on.

But yeah, I mean if this is a kind of a low DeFi yield environment like like we only have to look back at like late 22 and into 23 where the yields were like 1% or like less than 1% at times and so on. So if four and a half 5% is a low yield market at the moment. Um and that's the stage of DeFi we've got to then then I'll take that and yeah hopefully we get back to the kind of 9 10 11% we were seeing kind of like early to mid 25 as well. >> That's that's the plan man. That's the plan. Yeah. Uh Chris, last question for you. If you know it's 6 months from now and uh you know you're you're post TGE founder, you've got you know the protocol and the token you know has has protocol has been live for a long time.

Token you know now transferable stakeable for you know six months. What is the number one metric that you're looking at that you're you're you know judging success. What give us a milestone at which you're trying to hit here? >> Yeah. Yeah. Tvo. TVO is TVO is the big one for us. This is a kind of like 2026 is that road to kind of 1 billion ultimately. Um like we felt like we're on a good course for that up until kind of late October, November just before the stream finance uh stuff. I think we talked about that on the last the last time as well. Like that obviously hurt DeFi quite a lot. You can see some of the other major protocols that that have had a huge setback since then as well.

But this is back on that track is the kind of institutions are the ones that gets to us that 1 billion and um yeah I want to be like six months time on that path but TV TVL TVL is the is the one because of the rev share that will then should in a in a somewhat rational world tie into the token as well but TVL grows revenue is growing um and then the token will do what tokens do in this market but um yeah TVL TVL is the is the northstar for us >> nice I think you guys are thinking about it the right way Chris as always thank you so much for joining us man congrats hats on on the tremendous success uh in the protocol so far and and the launch of uh of the summer token.

>> No, Robbie, thank you. It's appreciate it every time. It's been great. >> Absolutely. We'll see you next time, Chris. Thanks, man. >> Cheers. Take care. Cheers. >> Get some sleep. It's It's tough launching a token out there in the trenches. [laughter] >> Yeah, it's been Yeah. Yeah. It's It's a doozy. Um Chris is gonna go get some sleep. That guy needs a break. But uh they're doing tremendous work. And um and and guys, I mean it is tough tough uh to launch tokens. Like you are discussing with market makers, you're talking, you know, if it's onchain partners, you're talking to onchain partners. Um it it doesn't stop.

And ultimately, these are founders that are trying to deliver good products for you guys. You know, we want healthier assets. We want quality assets on chain. Ultimately, there's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that are poured into these businesses. And so, um, you know, a lot of these a lot of these businesses are choosing to launch tokens rather than, um, you know, go public or raise another fund raise and stay private and just retain all this value for themselves. What other industry is going to just go share revenue? Like they there's VC cabals that just stay private forever, you know? Not every company goes public. and and here it's basically it's it's common it's the most common to just launch a token go that's how you go

public on chain. So shout out Summerfi they're doing great recently uh integrated with Hyperlid as well and so you can deposit on there and earn all kinds of yield generated from the Hyperlquid protocol. Uh and so this is what we believe it's kind of like a burgeoning category in Neo finance. It's not oldg guard defi pool two token emissions. It's stable coin centric yield and it's yield that is sourced from all over DeFi. And this is um you know this is only possible because chain abstraction works, modularity and interoperability works and so now yeah we do have the opportunity to source yields uh from everywhere in DeFi no matter the chain uh and and make sure

that we're providing the best form of yield in the best form of collateral uh and ultimately these are uh higher quality assets that are available on chain and not available anywhere else. Our next guest um is uh Jim. And so we've got Jim coming up. Uh he is the co-founder of Superstate. And Superstate is doing amazing things uh in onchain equity issuance. And so these guys are fundamentally very uh instrumental in the tokenized equities market. Um and we're going to hear from Jim. But first, I think we might have a couple more headlines that we could go over.

Let's see if we can uh let's see if we can get uh some more news up here. Uh because there's plenty going on. Um and we're going to get Jim up as soon as he joins. [snorts] So guys, [clears throat] you're going to want to reshape capital market. Superstate raised 82.5 million. Um just give us a moment. And what have we got here? 2025 crypto fundraising report, 50.6 billion dollars raised, 149 fundraising rounds. Let's scroll through this a little bit.

The 2025 cryptocurrency and web3 fundraising market raised over $50 billion across,400 transactions uh thousand with disclosed amounts representing a 226% increase compared to 2024's 15.5 billion. Look, they're saying that cryptovc is dead. Meanwhile, look, we're we're got a 225% increase over 2024. Um, this aggregate growth mask a critical market dynamic. Nearly half of all capital came from only 21 merger and acquisition companies. What?

All right, let's run through these. And so 23.3 billion across 800 transactions and then the other 22 billion across 21 transactions only company acquisitions. Um and then we had some public token sales and and and IPOs. Um but let's go down a little bit more. This just goes to show the M&A is super hot. um$22 billion dollars in crypto M&A which they're bucketing into um they're bucketing into uh the rest of these fundraises which is pretty pretty interesting the way that they've uh they've gone and done that. And so the way uh they are counting these deal

statistics is that 2024 had 1,600 total rounds 12% decrease in 2025 but obviously much bigger rounds. I I think this is um honestly no surprise. Maybe it is surprising just the scale at which this is happening. But when you look at it, we knew that there was going to be consolidation. Where is the strength in the market? You have to look, it's not in uh you know these VC fundraising rounds that are taking place in private markets. The era of those deals making money has came and went with high FDV low float. They're no longer doing it.

the retail market is on to them and so they've gone and and they're you know these VCs are exploring other avenues uh digital asset treasury markets when have you heard of DATs there's only like two DATs that have survived uh pretty funny how you heard of Bitine Sharink you hear Micro Strategy but the DAT concept the DAT meta no longer really a thing um and so IPOs are quite strong as well um but the bulk the lion share of this is coming as a result of acquisitions and mergers. Obviously, we saw Echo uh must have been one of those transaction.

Let's scroll down a little bit here. Get a get a bit more of a breakdown 2025 capital uh and deals. So, if you look at uh that middle category there is going to be the the mergers and acquisitions one only three in 2024 and 21 in 2025. a 1,500% capital uh percent increase and 600% more deals, six times as many deals uh in 2025. So, yeah, pretty interesting to see. And this just goes to show that, you know, you might think VCs are kind of like this onesizefits-all

um you know, some VCs are are uh just not the same, right? And so you've got latest stage acquisitions, uh, teams that are looking at playing in this market. And then, you know, you've got smaller VCs that are going into the depths of the crypto markets. Those guys are going to struggle. There's really not a path for, you know, a a crypto company that's maybe abroad and, you know, is struggling with European legislation, which is not as friendly at this point, as American regulation. So, you're seeing, you know, a talent pull back to the US. Um, and at the same time, uh, you know, you've got a lot of these companies that are

choosing to stay private for longer. And so, I think a combination of this is, yeah, we're going to see more token launches, but the VC landscape is changing. The capital allocation landscape is changing. And this just goes to show where the action is and it's it's in M&A and it's in the later stages because now there's actually a path for these latest stage crypto companies to end up going public. And so you saw Bitco the other day. Uh we see Anchorage Digital, you know, we're we're seeing the likes of Franklin Templeton. Uh Wisdom Tree is already public. Circle is public. Coinbase is public. There's a cohort of crypto companies now that are public in the US equities market. And I think this is a trend that's going to continue

especially because you have a lot of companies that are going and acquiring and I think they're building out this repertoire and uh and we're going to see more and more of these companies go public. So keep an eye out for that. Um and this is a great segue actually uh to our next guest because Superstate is reshaping capital markets. They are connecting financial assets with crypto capital markets through onchain public listings and tokenized investment products. This is very very core to the NEO finance thesis. You know they're working with tokenization issuers to raise uh capital on Ethereum Salana major blockchains. Uh they're also offering tokenized shares right and so we've seen New York Stock Exchange you

know NASDAQ they've announced that they want to go 247 and they want to tokenize. So, we're going to be talking about tokenization in general as well as Superstate's uh latest fund raise. Um, and uh and yeah, $82.5 million is uh is is quite the raise. So, you can tell they're gearing up for uh some pretty interesting happenings in 2026. So, let's uh let's bring up Jim without further ado. We're going to bring him up on stage and we're going to talk about the raise. We're going to be talking about NEO finance and how tokenization fits into this broader landscape of what's happening onchain uh with onchain equity issuance tokenized stocks and

generally how we're seeing the legacy financial world come onchain and so we're going to get them up here very shortly. All right. All right. Jim, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to see you again and and congrats on the big fund raise man. >> Thanks, Robbie. Thanks for having me on. It's good to see you. >> Absolutely. Um, you know, I think uh I think a lot of people maybe, you know, this is kind of their first foray into Super State. Uh, you know, it's a mega raise that you guys have gone and done.

Um, which, you know, is is incredible to see. And it it sort of validates a thesis that we've been uh working out over the last couple weeks and months, which has been this neo finance thesis. We see it as sort of this evolution of what we're calling legacy finance tradfi world is being forced to innovate at the same time. Uh you know we see kind of the old guard crypto native infrastructure slop. They're going to have to evolve. They're going to have to grow up as well. And and ultimately this puts you guys at the center of what of what we're calling this category which is neo finance. Um tokenization is a really important piece of this as well.

So just just tell us about like what the story has been especially in recent months as you guys have have really found some traction and ultimately you know leading up to this race. >> Yeah thanks. Well you know it's about time if uh you haven't heard of superstate now uh now it'll be on everybody's radar but you know we've been around you know building out uh all the infrastructure to your point to upgrade capital markets for the last uh you know better part of three years. Um so really excited about the raise. It's a definitely a validation of the growth uh you know that we have experienced and that you know is is uh you know right around the corner for us as well. Um and we brought in some great investors you know Bane Capital Crypto uh distributed global Han you know Galaxy Digital and a

whole host of other really great both uh crypto investors as well as you know you know large you know traditional investors as well too and and some strategics as well. um you know bullish the exchange uh is on there and and a whole host of others. So um yeah I think you know what we've seen you know our origin story is really coming from compound. So you know Robert Lushner is you know the CEO and and my co-founder here at Superstate. Um, you know, really the the genesis of DeFi really came from, you know, compound building out, you know, the borrow lend markets back in, you know, the early days of of DeFi summer and really kicking that whole thing off. And and I think, you know, his vision from day one, uh, really was not just to make it

available for, you know, tokens, but to make it available, uh, you know, market structure for the traditional world. And you know aside from this just being a you know evolution of crypto markets. I think if you take a a step back and to your point Robbie like you know the demand from the investor community is to have better technology and you know better way to own their assets and better way to move them and you know more connected markets and really bringing not just you know things from a crypto wallet you know of your Bitcoin your ETH your soul and your memecoins and your NFTs and whatever else is sitting in there but to make it a holistic marketplace for all of your assets um whether that's your stocks you know funds you name it um you know I

think you're going to find uh this you know the whole reason why crypto is great is because it has this you know singular platform for capital market participants whether it's you know investors or issuers or intermediaries that like you know really kind of connect the financial plumbing in traditional markets you know that's all done very siloed and in very archaic systems and just you know because uh we've all experienced how great it is to self-custody an asset and move it into a protocol and you know do financial activities. We want to be able to do that for things that um you know we have in the rest of our brokerage apps and other portfolios and you know this convergence of you know taking what is a uh very you know archaic system of of

traditional markets and and putting it into uh in intoken tokenized form you know really just gives uh a much better investor experience and and that evolution is is really just kicking off now and we have the regulatory tailwinds behind us to make this uh make this happen. [snorts] We uh we had a panel of of VCs on uh yesterday and there was not much consensus among them despite for the fact that there was not quality assets currently on chain. Like we've got Bitcoin, we've got ETH, all of the L1s, a lot of the DeFi tokens, a lot of the the things that you know have have came and went over the years, not to mention the meme coins, right? Like all of these things are just uh you know they're not the quality of asset that a a true investor is looking for. And so I think

this is why we're seeing the growth of RWAs. We're seeing the growth of tokenized stocks. Um, and ultimately I I think this is why Wall Street is embracing this technology because they also understand that there is a whole composable world of finance uh that can really upgrade their financial stack as well. You guys currently have two funds. Um, US uh TB is approaching a billion dollars and then uh USCC is approaching a half a billion dollars. Right? So, there's significant product market fit here. I'm curious, how is this series B?

The $82.5 million that you guys raised. How is this going to further the upcoming goals that you have? What are the upcoming goals and what what are some of the milestones that you guys are looking to reach? >> Yeah, we've been um you know very uh heads down focused on building our asset management business for the better part of the first you know two years um that we launched Superstate. uh USB really you know launched back in you know 2024 um and you know has really taken off uh over the last you know uh few years uh USC is a little bit younger than that and and has also found product market fit but we had to build a lot of infrastructure um and I think you know you know you ask about how we're going to be deploying the the capital that we've just raised uh is to continue to

develop the infrastructure um despite having you know a lot of uh momentum and you know proof that the technology is suitable for capital markets. Um there's just so much to be done. Uh you know, we're on ETH, we're on Salana, we're on, you know, a horizon where the biggest asset is collateral in their RWA market. Um with USCC being, you know, a couple hundred million in that in that market. Um you know, we're excited to expand that type of utility out into the Salana ecosystem into other protocols that, you know, we haven't been able to to build yet. Um in the equity space, there's even way more to be done. you know, we take a radically different approach um I think the broad category of tokenized equities breaks down into a few different areas um in terms of like the

approach and you know I think they all have their merits but in the way that we look at it from uh the superstate perspective is you know we want the actual issuer to bring their assets natively on chain um and that opens up a landscape of opportunities for sophisticated investors that really don't want to hold a synthetic exposure to an asset they want to hold asset and the reason why they're investing in the company is because they, you know, want to have, you know, voting rights. They want to be able to get the dividend. They want to be able to, you know, participate in the upside directly of the company and have a relationship with that company. Um, so I think, you know, the way that we approach it as a digital transfer agent is the share of Galaxy that's on Salana is an actual share in

Galaxy on Salana. And so, you know, that that opens up, you know, more sophisticated institutional uh investors that, you know, that want to hold um the assets that they're investing in directly themselves. Um and it opens up, you know, capital formation opportunities, which I think is what is going to be the big uh you know, growth story in 2026. Um I was listening in a little bit, you were talking about all the companies that have gone public in crypto. you know, BICO, we were at the New York Stock Exchange with the team yesterday. Really proud of uh of their ability to go public. It was amazing to witness that firsthand actually sitting there on the floor. Um but the, you know, the wave of additional like large businesses that have either indicated

they're going public or that are, you know, in the process of registering or have already registered. There's a whole host of them that are out there. And you know I think these companies are going to be pioneers like they have been in their businesses to also being pioneers on the capital market side as well too. And you know with our model you know we work directly with the companies and I think you know Wall Street is paying attention to this because you know back when IPOs first happened it was really who do you have a relationship with at your bank and you can sell them shares in this new offering. And now these syndicates and the growth of the investment banking capital markets has gone into things like Robin Hood is a huge channel. SoFi is a huge channel and it's because they have so much demand

from investors that they can tap into to make the offering, you know, as strong as it possibly can get, but none of these speak to exchanges or wallets in the crypto world. And we want to be that connective tissue for IPOs and other types of offerings, secondaries, ATMs, like you name it. Like capital markets at large is a broad category. Um, but because we work directly with the issuers, like we want to be the direct enabler to reaching folks that have a Phantom wallet with billions of dollars of stable coins on the other side. And that is just not something that the JP Morgans and the Goldmans of the world are set up to be able to do today.

Certainly, they will be tomorrow and in the next couple years. And they're all approaching the space. But I think we're, you know, validation in terms of the round and the investors and the traction that we build and the customers that we work with is that we can, you know, uh, accelerate their time to market and, you know, do this in a way that, um, you know, certainly follows all of the compliance, uh, you know, rules that make the US capital markets great today. >> And, yeah, that I I mean, extremely well said. And I think, you know, you you've got my my wheels turning on, you know, capital markets at large. There's all these components. DeFi was able to to kind of bite off a small chunk of that.

But in order to to really uh embrace this this you know larger world of of you know the capital market uh uh world in general there's so much more infrastructure and so much more depth to this than just a simple like lending and borrowing market. There's all kinds of compliance and complexities that are baked in. And so, you know, we're we're seeing plenty of announcements like every day it feels like UBS or Wells Fargo or JP Morgan is making another announcement or kind of a step closer into this for, you know, they haven't quite like really dove in head first, right? And I'm curious what you think could be like that moment that ultimately opens the floodgates. Um, if you think that there is a moment, right?

Because we've seen even JP Morgan has said, you know, we're going to tokenize, we're going to go and do this and do that. we're going to offer, you know, these things to our customers, but is there a moment that you think could open the floodgates here and and then, you know, we'll we'll see dep tokenized deposits and money markets and all kinds of tokenized assets and products, you know, to the extent that, you know, we currently see in legacy finance. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think all of Wall Street is going to be running on blockchain rails. Um it just these things take time and you know when we first started our business we talked to a lot of folks on Wall Street who you know during the Gendler era when we first launched Superstate didn't really want to spend any time with us and you

know now they're coming back and calling us and saying hey like we we realize you've done a really lot of really great work and you know we want to be able to to work together um so that we can bring our business into these markets and I think you know the inflection point um is actually not so subtle it's like the loudest thing in the room which is stable coins like the reason why Wall Street uh is so successful is because it can move money around uh between depositors savers investors issuers you know, lenders, like you name it. Um you know, the fact that uh there's an interesting thing that I've been paying attention to, which is the trajectory of stable coins has gone up and to the right.

>> Meanwhile, the TVL and DeFi has either been flat or somewhat down. and the break of the correlation between like it used to be there's more stable coins there's more borrowing happening in DeFi that means that you know they were just tightly correlated you know as like risk came off in the market stable coins went away stable coins are never going away anymore like that's just never going to happen and so I think what you'll see is you know more sophisticated institutions want to interact with stable coins and the collateral that they want to use in these markets is not maybe it's Bitcoin maybe it's ETH maybe it's an LST but it's not your like longtail meme coins they want to use their stocks they want to use their funds, they want to use other things as collateral and it just takes time to onboard that. But I think

you know the mission that we're on you know because we came from compound we could have sat there and continue to tick around with the protocol and and you know make enhancements and and you know uh continue to operate uh as as a contributor to that ecosystem but we decided hey like let's go bring a step function of growth to DeFi by onboarding in a regulated you know compliant way in a you know highly tech sophisticated way um the assets that should be interacting with these markets so that you know they can meet the demand that that is that is growing on chain and you know if you're raising capital and you're realizing there's $300 billion worth of stable coins, like why wouldn't you want to tap into that market to go raise assets? You know, you you know, BCO raised $200 million uh yesterday in their IPO. Um,

which is a fantastic number, but you know, $300 billion versus $200 million. I'm sure, you know, a lot of that demand can be filled with the capital markets on chain because the investors know that business. They want to participate in all of these, you know, offerings. And you know, instead of offramping it and doing it in your uh in your JP Morgan account or your Robin Hood account, why not do that from your MetaMask wallet instead? >> Yeah. Yeah. I I think you're absolutely right. And you know, we've seen the crypto sentiment on, you know, it's somewhat apathetic, but a lot of these community sales are still doing extremely well. We know the capital's there and I think once we do see the higher quality asset classes come onchain, that's when we're going to see a lot more capital velocity and we're going to see this thing really start get

going. Again, I know we've got about seven minutes left here. So, there's there's two things that I want to get your take on. First one is you know Davos was this past week and um you know the the leaders were there and uh you know we had uh Black Rockck's uh Larry Frink basically go out and say that you know one blockchain to rule them all you know which is something that we heard a long time ago but you know we had this whole modularity uh frenzy and then it was like okay well there's a multi-chain future we have chain abstraction we have all these things and you know you came from DeFi right so you've you've heard this argument as well but we it feels like you know as an industry we kind of came pass that now you know legacy finance is catching up. Where do you

stand on on the one blockchain to rule them all? >> One is a strong number. Like that is like there's like no if ends or butsuh about one. I think few is a better number. Um and whether few means two, five or 10, I'm not quite sure. And I think you know there's different benefits to the architecture of different ecosystems. Um but I think you know the the challenge with having you know uh so many different environments is it's number one developer miserable like misery like keeping up with you know uh a product on one blockchain and another and another and how they're all different upgrade cycles and not necessarily coordinated like it's just

it's tough and like just so capacity constraints are there and I think you know the reason why the US capital markets are great and you know just capital markets in general is liquidity And like the more you have fragmentation, you know, interoperability definitely solves some of that problem, but you still have assets, you know, kind of in different places and we haven't really solved that problem. So, so I I don't know. I mean, you know, there's three or four big cloud providers, right? Um, I'm sure a lot of other people wanted to go after AWS, but like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon won. And like that's probably going to be the same thing in blockchain world as well too. And people are going to have different risk tolerances. you know, that Canton has been doing an amazing job uh growing, you know, the institutional chain. Um but that's not

everybody's cup of tea. Um and I'm not here to be spicy and say whether it's mine or not. Um but I would, you know, folks have different viewpoints on whether public permission, private or not. Like there are different needs um for each uh use case and user. And so I think you're going to have a few, not one. >> Yeah. And and you're right, there are different use cases. There's, you know, uh different lanes in which you want your assets maybe not co-mingled with some other assets. And and so I think we realize this as an industry. And you know, that's why we have several different L1s. And you know, I I I think Larry Frink may realize this as well, but it's going to become, you know, I think I Black Rockck probably launches some sort of chain. I think the question

is whether they launch an L1 or or a rollup, right? And if it's a rollup, then maybe it is part of Ethereum. We'll we'll see. Um if uh if New York Stock Exchange does what they're saying they're going to do, this is going to make ex extremely huge changes, right? Like they're talking about tokenizing and they're talking about going 247. You know, some people are coming in, they're saying this is hyper financialization. Why do we need this? I thought, you know, there was supposed to be a break in the market so we could go outside and, you know, spend time with our families. But on on the other hand, you know, this makes, you know, capital more efficient and, you know, machines are doing more trading than humans nowadays.

Anyway, I I I'd love to get your reaction to, you know, some of the things that New York Stock Exchange is doing. You know, how do you how do you feel about this 247 thing and and most importantly, how do you how do you think tokenization is going to change the way the US equities market operates? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think um it's great to see folks like New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, you know, both of them, you know, the stalwarts of US exchanges are going directly towards the future that we envision in terms of things being on chain, but they have different architecture in the way that their uh proposals um if you read into the details, you know, NY is still very fresh. I think they dropped something, what was it this week or maybe it was it

was last week, but um a lot more details to be seen in how that all plays out. Um, but what I want to see is, you know, the reason why we all love crypto is being able to interact with markets with your own assets and not needing to go through intermediaries. And so my fear is with the large traditional businesses that want to protect their, you know, the the economics that they have in their legacy businesses. Um, I really hope that it enables somebody to go there with a phantom holding their Apple stock and trade on the NY and not need to go through a broker dealer. Um I would love to see you know direct ownership and direct relationship uh with the the capital and the investor um sorry the issuer and the investor without it having to go through DTC. Um

like these systems are great um but they also leave a lot to be desired in terms of you and I that are probably on one end of the spectrum that really want to you know have things in our wallet and say I want to go to Camino and use my shares as collateral to borrow against it. um I don't want to ask per for permission to do that, but you know there might be others that don't have that type of mentality and they want to use a broker to go find them the liquidity or the borrow or the the economics. So um I think you know having uh these institutions validate that blockchain rails are the future is is fantastic. Um but it still remains to be seen on you know where exactly things land in terms of the actual like specifics on the market structure. Uh,

but 247 to me is is one thing and you know that's that's cool. Don't get me wrong. Like Maduro gets taken out on a Saturday, you know, right after New Year's and like the only thing people can sell is Bitcoin. So like I would love for that not to be the case so that like people can hold on to their Bitcoin. They have other risk assets that they can sell. Um, but you know, I think it's really about global access. And so for me, you know, when I look at the work that we're doing, it's, you know, being able to connect issuers to capital regardless of where they are in the world as long as they are not u, you know, North Korea or Russian, you know, entities trying to do elicit finance.

Like there should be access to individuals and institutions all around the globe that want to participate in deals and assets that they right now don't have access to. And so that to me is the future that will win versus the, you know, uh, closed door intermediary driven world that we live in now, even if it's upgraded on blockchain rails. >> I I I think it benefits the American economy to democratize access and owners and and let people from all over the world access the American economy, invest here. That's one of the things that we're we're trying to drive home here, right? Um, 100%. >> Yeah. I Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if I think Nike stock might have been hot when they got Maduro. I don't know if it would have gone up or down, but uh I I saw those uh those jumpsuits were sold

out pretty quick. Um Jim, absolute pleasure. Last thing I got for you is uh you know 82 and a half million series B IPO season is super hot. Are we going to see a superstate IPO here soon? >> We got a lot of work to do. We are heads down focused on, you know, building as much infrastructure as we can for the capital markets. Um want to definitely, you know, help upgrade Wall Street. Um but laser focused on executing on the mission and you know uh we'll we'll see where the future heads but uh definitely not anytime soon.

>> Very cool. Jim, pleasure as always. Thank you so much for for coming on and congrats on on uh on the last race. >> Appreciate it, Robbie. >> See you next time. Thanks, Jim. All right, Jim's a legend. Um and and Robert, too. I mean, over at over at uh at Super State, these guys, you know, they've been around in DeFi for that long. Uh, you know, they built Compound. They know what they're doing. They know both sides of this industry. Um, because, you know, they've they've been here. They've done it. Um, and so I I like that there's DeFi founders that have been in the trenches. Like, they're going out now and they're going into the, you know, Wall Street world and they're they're

raising series B's and they're scaling companies. like this is what this industry is meant to do. And the industry is made up of the companies within this industry, right? And so it takes uh uh uh the companies themselves to go out and and be mature. Raise series B scale themselves. And as a result, they're scaling the industry with them. And so I think I think Jim and Robert are doing a tremendous job at Super State. Um always a pleasure to have them on the show. We're gonna keep things moving right along. Uh next up we've got Arman. He is going to be joining us and uh this one is going to be a lot of fun guys. So we're going to bring him right up. We're going to be chatting about the future of onchain

terminals and I think the the future of UX is going to get uh particularly interesting as we as we get AI agents as we kind of evolve into this neo finance landscape. We know banks are going to be forced to innovate. um you know they're going to be forced to pay interest on their stable coins and I think people are looking for this neo bank like user experience um and we know uh we know crypto uh UX has been broken for a long time. Arman, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here from Genius Trading and uh and yeah, man, we're we're going to be talking about terminals here. It's a pleasure to have you.

>> Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and yeah, like you said, uh the UX has been broken for a while and I'm excited to talk about how we how we plan on fixing that long term. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um you know, it's your first time on the show. Why don't why don't you just give us a quick intro and and tell us a little bit about how you got here? >> Yeah, for sure. Um so, as Robbie said, and as you could probably see on your screen, my name is Arman. Uh I've been building in crypto for the past five years, coming up on around five years now. kind of got into it through a very ideological filled lens of sovereignity and freedom and kind of the sovereign individual being a core primitive of how I want to see society evolve uh over the

next 10 15 20 years. Um originally kind of got into crypto was building in the block data space. So we were the same team me and my two co-founders um met when we were at university kind of studying adjacent things uh in in NI blockchains and and data and how how how that data is computed but we initially wanted to solve kind of the data legibility um in crypto the kind of issue of data legibility where yes it's amazing that you have this open ledger but what good is it if nobody can actually read that open ledger if the the kind of common everyday user can't read that open uh that open ledger and We we built a block data and block explorer company um called Lore which we decided um to kind of move away from and

move into solving the more pressing problem that we were seeing in terms of UX. So for us the overarching theme has always been crypto has a UX problem. Originally our thesis was around well that UX problem is around data. Uh and as we kept going and as we kept pressing more and more buttons, we kind of just realized that the problem is is less around data in terms of UX and more around how people are actually executing and transacting on chain. And that was kind of where the idea for Genius as a terminal was born. Um the kind of 5-second DLDDR on Genius is we want to be the everything terminal for crypto. I think that's kind of the end goal. Uh where users come on and the asset is is the first thing that they see, not the network, not the chain. Um, that's that

kind of takes a backseat to the UX. And so kind of the the the oneliner, the elevator pitch off an elevator pitch is it's and this is a funny thing that I I like to say at ETH Denver, but like let's have sex on chain. Um, right. Like what what what does that what does that actually mean in practice is is kind of the question that we're attempting at attempting to answer at Genius. >> That gets people's attention, man. I I think that's a great slogan and and it paints the picture well. Everyone knows what you're talking about. like the centralized exchange experience is super smooth. It's super fast. It's it's cheaper, better, faster. Ultimately, that's what people want, but they want it onchain. And and Arman, I'll just tell you a little bit about how we're thinking about this. You know, we we kind of saw that, you know, the the

space was moving to this convergence point. Like we these legacy we you know, it's Tradfi, but like mainstream media, it's not mainstream anymore. It's legacy media. Like it's legacy finance. These guys are forced to innovate because they want access. everyone wants access to these things. And so now on the other side, you've also got a lot of the crypto infrastructure slop that doesn't have product market fit. That's going to have to innovate. They're going to have to, you know, really do some do a a, you know, some reflection and a look in the mirror and understand like what they're doing is going to have to provide a better experience to the end user. And I think we're going to end up with exactly what you're talking about, which is a centralized exchange experience, but it's going to be onchain. And so it's

going to be fast, it's going to be it's going to be affordable. Um, and it's going to be secure. And so the the thing here has always been, you know, if something's decentralized, it can't go as fast or as cheap as centralized. It's it's just the name of the game, right? How have you been able to overcome this? And and how do you think about this dimension of, you know, speed, this, you know, scalability trillemma, the speed, security, uh, cost trilmma that, you know, we've we've learned so much about here. Yeah. Um, to be honest with you, I actually don't ne necessarily find, especially jading on Genius, and maybe I'm biased about this in particular, but I don't really think there's a huge latency discrepancy between what you're able to execute through, let's say,

and what you're able to do on a centralized exchange, right? I think that a lot of that execution layer is up to us as builders to optimize and give you something that let's say the human bar is a discrepancy between a centralized venue and a decentralized venue. So I think in that sense the way that we're framing Genius is more let's get up to par with the exact execution on the centralized side in terms of speed. Um and then in terms of fees and how how that's structured it's it's a question of incentives and where those incentives align. Right? For us as the interface layer and I'd love to talk a little bit more about this concept of the interface layer. Um, for us the incentive is obviously to keep users around longterm and to keep fees down kind of long term, but we're not

centralized in that the pricing power to the the layers below us, right? So the LPS and the liquidity pools that we're routing trades through, um, that's that's something that we're just beholden to as an ecosystem DAX, let's say, for for transacting on a decentralized exchange. But our bet kind of long-term when it comes to why someone would choose a centralized exchange like UX but still trade on decentralized exchanges even if there is a slight tax associated with it is access to opportunities happen at the speed at which they're created on chain as opposed to waiting for a listing team waiting for you know XYZ process to happen such that you can access it on your centralized exchange and so a big motivating part of our philosophy in building genius is for the most part

people who have gotten wealthy in this space have done so because they've had no tech well they've had technical advantages and there exists a massive technical learning curve when it comes to trading on chain but there also exists a massive wealth of assets exclusively on chain that then you know by the time the alpha is by the time they actually get listed on a centralized exchange that alpha is gone it's been captured by the people uh who who are on chain first and the reason that this that pool of people has stayed small as we've said is is primarily because the UX the UX has been terrible.

So, just to backtrack one quick second and then I'll hand it back to you. It is of course your show. Um, but um, yeah, I think just to summary is speed. We think speed we're almost there, right, in terms of actually competing with a centralized venue. We're not that far off and scalability will continue to get better on the blockchain level. That's less of a problem for the terminals per se and it's more of a bet that that just is where the networks will continue to go. Um, and in terms of cost, there might be because of the way that it's vertically integrated, a slight DAX that the user has to pay. But over time, we think that DAX is completely amortized to the cost of the opportunities that they're losing by not trading in these venues.

>> Yeah, I I think it makes a ton of sense. And I think you've articulated the interface layer particularly well. You know, for a long time, it was sort of this barbell approach. It was like, okay, fat app thesis on one hand, you know, we're going to have all of this revenue. We're going to have all this TVL. we're going to be able to monetize, you know, a lot of the the deposits that go into these smart contract vaults, DeFi projects, that sort of thing. And then on the other hand, you had, you know, the the the layer one thesis, right? Why layer 1's traded a premium at all is, you know, because well, they are the underlying infrastructure for this entire thing. The app couldn't exist without the L1 or the infrastructure underneath. Um, and so, you know, that was the whole fat protocol thesis. And

so you kind of had this barbell approach, but what I think you know you're articulating here and what people came to realize was this thing called the fat wallet thesis which is what actually matters is the relationship with the end user. That is the interface or the portal through which they interact with both the apps and the base layer. And so if you're closest to the customer, you own the customer relationship. You kind of have, you know, the first dib to take a tax. Everything else is sort of price set based on what you guys decide. Walk us through like fat wallet thesis interface layer. Is this the right way to think about it? And how do you think the market structure shakes out as a result of owning you know the end customer relationships?

>> Yeah, I I I think this is the exact right way to think about it. Right. When when we talk about an interface layer and we talk about a terminal, we have to first define what a terminal is. And the terminal to us is just the interface layer to onchain finance, right? And so this layer in itself, the problem that it's solving, I mean I I don't know specifically I don't want to quantify it because I I don't want to cap it. It's not because I want to inflate expectations. I think that the the opportunity is theoretically uncapped on this interface layer because things will continue to happen and people will continue to innovate. But basically, you know, you think about the last year, year and a half of onchain finance and you basically realize that the majority of that volume that has happened has

happened on terminals and people have been speculating and trading speculative assets primarily through those terminals. Um and just like what we're seeing there's a race now to become the default interface for onchain liquidity because as you said that means as you keep going you know you can vertically integrate the value stack and that's that's kind of the way that we think about it right there's obviously the fat protocol thesis that we're not competing on a on a on a blockchain level right now we we we're totally okay with the existing infrastructure that exists there there's the app thesis which understandable right and that that is also kind of the thing interesting thing about this theory is that I think both of the the theories before this are kind of correct. Um right and we we kind of

sit somewhere in the middle of both theories saying yes they are kind of correct but there is no unification necessarily of how that value trickles back to the end user. So what we've realized is that there's maybe six or so actions that have emerged as the standard onchain action things to do right and all apps basically have the same UI to do and accomplish these six things. You can add a colored gradient here. You can add a, you know, an animation there. But ultimately, it is it is kind of what it is at the end of the day. And so that's swapping, buying, selling, borrowing, earning yield, taking out leverage positions, and at more recently taking binary bets on outcomes. So outcomes trading being, you know, more poly market. And so our goal really is to cannibalize every interface that I've mentioned in terms of acrewing

that value inside of the genius ecosystem. I think that's where wallet providers and o providers such as Genius and Genius partners with other wallet providers. We aren't a wallet provider per se and we're also not a traditional wallet in the sense of, you know, you're clicking, you're signing, you're bridging, you're doing all of the the UX associated with that, but I think in terms of the the core behaviors that people are taking on chain, we want to move all of those in and we want to be early to whatever is next, right? So there will be a new emerging behavior that comes out as a uniquely blockchain enabled behavior. We don't necessarily think that that should be an independent UX. We want to absorb that into into Genius. And that's why I said that the cap on how big an interface layer could really be for onchain liquidity is is

effectively limitless. It's yeah, the only cap I can think of is is the amount of people in the world. But then again, you can think, you know, AI agents are going to have even more um you know, uh uh throughput and trading volume than maybe humans at some point. And so they're going to need their interface as well. Um maybe there's, you know, different interfaces for different species conversation from for maybe a different podcast. But um a question here is is you know, in order to reach the levels of scale that you're talking about, distribution is critical. Um we actually I I was on a panel yesterday.

We had Abashaw from Electric Capital and we had from Dragonfly and and we were talking about how intense products have have reached scale near intense at 10 billion dollars and so they are are saying how you know right now there's sort of this value acrruel question this monetization question about how these protocols should be acrewing value and how they should be charging fees. But the result and the conclusion that that they were speaking to was don't charge fees. Like the game is won once you've reached sufficient distribution where you can set the price and everyone else has to listen to you. And so you know from your perspective you know do you follow the same the same train of thought don't charge fees now we need to reach meaningful distribution and if so

how will uh you and Genius reach meaningful distribution >> yeah it's a fantastic question. Um I mean out of the gate we when we launched uh with our funders announcement and our strategic partnership announcement with easy labs uh we we charged zero fees right on top of what people were already paying the network and so on and we saw I think one of the most successful launches um of any terminal I think for the first week week and a half of us being live we did more in combined volume than our nearest two competitors um we did about$8 billion in volume um and since then we're kind of figuring out what the best way to do fees is. So obviously on a business level we we we feel the need to monetize just on an economic pure

economic model um and viability level we we feel the need to monetize but how we monetize and like what that monetization looks like longterm is still the open design question for us right so right now we have the industry's lowest fees across any terminal it's just kind of what people are used to paying but to answer your question about long-term monetization the answer to that might change and so this this kind of comes back to the idea of eating value and vertically integrating could be in the future that let's say right now genius users are paying because they're paying both a fee to the interface layer and to the underlying decks. I think at the point at which we reach meaningful scale through you know some of the strategic partners that we have through the millions of active users that we have

and kind of presence that we've built um through this launch and will continue to do so. um what we can do is is effectively launch vertical products like a DEX, right? So there's no additional fee on top of what you're already paying for the DEX, but you have this, you know, for lack of a better word, a sexy experience. Um and I see uh but you have this sexy experience on which you're you're actually trading that liquidity. The final little bit that I'll add is the biggest thing for us will just continue to be community building and regional community building. I think this is something that that sexes have done extremely well. uh over the past six, seven, eight years of of sex dominance has just been establishing local presence and being accountable and and I think that that is

something that decentralized actors have hid behind for a very long time. I'm appearing here. A lot of your guests appear here with full names and everything and faces and I think that if decentralized liquidity and decentralized exchanges want a chance at that kind of meaningful scale, you have to play that kind of game and be legible to people where they are. And so that's that's kind of our strategy. I I now I can't help but think about it like what is your perspective on like the agentic economy because I I think you're absolutely right when you're thinking about how to monetize and balance monetization with distribution and scale but I can't help but think a significant portion of the market participants in the next three to five years are I I I I

have to think that a lot of them are going to be agents right do you dis do you agree disagree And if so, how do you build an interface product that appeals to both? Do you segment? Do you verticalize? How how how are you thinking about the agent economy as a whole? >> If I'm honest with you, I'm confused about the agentic economy as a whole. Um, and and the reason that I say that is I can see a very real use case for it, right? Like delegatable wallets and delegatable agents. Like delegable delegatable wallets is already kind of a part of the architecture and infrastructure that we're building and some of our partners have built as well.

Um, and so from that point of view, like I could totally see a future where wallet A is supposed to only farm, you know, a particular strategy and wallet B is supposed to take decisions on the fly and only only do X, right? And I can I can see a world in which there's an agent for each tab on the Genius page. There's a spot trading agent, there's a burp agent, there's a yield agent, and so on so forth. I can totally see a world in which that is the case. And I'm I'm excited about that world, right? Like if you were to tell me here's this thing, it's a robot. It's you give it your money and here's 14% at the end of the year, I'd say thank you very much.

I'll take that. I'll take two. Um but at the same time, I think you know a core philosophy of building genius is real people. So while while we're excited about what it will mean over the next year, two years, three years for those real people to have access to those agents and we've definitely architected in a backwards compatible way um to make sure that that's the case. At the same time, we want to make sure that we reach the real people first who can then delegate to those agents and kind of go from there. >> Yeah. [clears throat] uh you know one thing one thing that's a little bit more near-term uh than the agentic economy is is the evolution of what we're seeing happen on chain and you know it's it's I I mentioned this I think at the beginning of the segment which is you

know the legacy financial system being forced to innovate and on the other side the old crypto infrastructure guard like that whole that whole segment of the industry is being forced to realize look you know take a look in the mirror we need to to find some product market fit where we ultimately think this converges is um is what we're calling NEO finance. And one component of this is a breadth of new asset classes because right now we just don't have quality assets on chain. You know, we've got Bitcoin, we've got ETH, and we've got a variety of stable coins that are actually doing particularly well, but ultimately we believe there's going to be, you know, a a rush of tokenized money markets, things that are paying 14%.

Take two, put fries in the bag, right? like we're gonna we want that. We need that. And and and so I'm curious how does the interface does the interface to those kinds of products look different than the interface to speculative products like a Bitcoin and ETH and and you can even put you know uh tokenized equities maybe into the speculative bucket and then you can put you know things like the money markets the tokenized deposits into the other bucket. Do you segment this on the interface layer? It's just there's so many assets out there. There's so many different ways that people trade it. It can't be a one-sizefits-all solution, can it?

>> No, it can't. It can't. I I think it can be an aggregated solution and a unified solution. And I think the the correct answer to your question is effectively it's a more mature interface, right? And so this is this is a question that we've been asking ourselves internally as well is look obviously if you go into Genius right now you'll see a terminal that looks a lot like a memecoin trading terminal because that has become the most legible UX over the past couple of years in terms of you know this is a this is an experience that people understand um and that they want to understand. to be completely candid and transparent on your show, I don't think that there are that many people left on the terminal side who have an incentive to continue to innovate and actually bring into the fold all of the new

assets that will come on chain. And so this is this is a long-term persistent question for us as well. I know you had superstate on the on on the show just before me and I think generally speaking like we're very bullish on the assets that will come on chain and what we're trying to do right now is effectively shepherd that capital the capital that has made that speculative return that that is used to a legible interfa that a speculative interface is legible too and shepherd that capital into an asset class that may not be you know 6,000% in 5 minutes but at the same time may be something that actually brings on a much more significant part of the economy onto the guilds that they're already using.

I I man I think we're at a very uh interesting crossroads here with prediction markets and 247 trading and the hyper financialization of everything on one hand and then this new asset class that is coming on and using blockchain rails and getting efficiency and can honestly especially with like a high you know a hot GDP environment like can potentially reach six seven eight nine% just using the same relatively safe and secure methods that we've used for the last century just g with a given macro environment.

That's still not going to be enough for some people. Like some people are still going to choose to look for 6,000% in five minutes. >> Yeah. But you know those those people are used to 6,000% in five minutes. If I were to give you a an everyday person who ultimately is I think that's the end goal of everybody in crypto. I don't think this is a unique thing to genius. I think this is, you know, when we say it's a global technology and it's a global product, it really should be a global technology. Um, but but if if you were to say to just and I love using this word, but to ignore me like, hey, I can I can beat your 2.5% or 2.5% that your bank is giving you or I can give you access to just a yield asset class that is completely different does it's

not legible to you at all quantum than dollars in the traditional bank would be. I think at that point it does not you know it how it's generated because people you know ask anybody right now how that yield is generated and they don't know for for for the most part right and so I don't necessarily anticipate that being a big barrier blocker in the future as we keep going and as the terminal space keeps maturing as well >> yeah well Armani it was a an absolute pleasure having you here on the show just you know before you go give us a sense of what's coming up next for Genius the the people that are trading um you know they they love it 100 million plus of volume so far I believe uh maybe more at this point. Give us a sense of what are some of the milestones

that you're targeting and and uh you know what what what are you putting your focus into uh in 2026 and beyond? >> For sure. Uh that 100 million is now around 9 billion. Um so we've we've we've around 90xed since the time that we did the kind of intake for this show. Um >> I've got to double check with our our fact check our uh our team our research team behind the scenes. >> Incredible. Awesome man. >> Uh it's been it's been quite something. Um but yeah in terms of what's next right I think a big part of what we want to do and what we want to enable is privacy on chain um we have an orchestration privacy solution that we're going to be bringing live to market I think end of the year um is a is a timeline that we're targeting on

that but as we keep going I mean the thing about what we're building as opposed to other web three protocols are building is it's less as protocol version releases and more as just keep incrementally adding more and more to the user experience that we possibly can right and so That means adding yield. It means potentially integrating prediction markets. It means, you know, adding as much as we can to continue to cannibalize. And we're going to be publishing a road map soon as well. Um, we've publicly committed to a TGE date before April 12th. Um, so like everything that we can do in anticipation of making sure that that is obviously successful for the community as well and then continue in our longer term road map which is we want the world to move on chain. We recognize that there is a need. There are certain

features of centralized exchanges and things that are super valuable like privacy and build everybody build together for everyone in kind of our our genius garden if that makes sense. It >> it does. It does. And it it says here in my notes 160 million plus. So the plus saved them. They weren't they were actually it was correct. But um but in all seriousness um congrats on on all the success so far. would love to have you back on the show around that TGE so that we can get a c catch up on you know what's happened uh since then and and then you know uh everything that happens in in post TGE world. So absolutely uh uh loved having you on the show Arman.

Thanks for coming on. First time but uh I have a feeling it won't be the last. >> Thank you so much Jav. This has been amazing. Thanks guys. >> See you next time. Thanks Arman. Guys, we're gonna we're gonna we're going to talk about this in our postp prod. I don't know where the 160 million number came from. 9 billion in trading volume has gone through genius interfaces. Um, which I think just, you know, it it validates even more so what Arman is saying about the fat wallet thesis, the interface layer. We know where value occurs and customer relationships, uh, monetization at scale. I'd say that they've they've found some product market fit. Um, and now, you know, they're they're looking

at meaningful distribution and looking at monetizing. So, it makes it makes complete sense. Um, guys, we're going to spare you a lot of the commercials because uh you guys listen, if you if you watched the show yesterday, you saw plenty of commercials. Uh, next up, we've got JP Richardson, uh CEO at Exodus. This one should be uh great. And so we are going to get him set up behind the scenes and then we're going to have JP come on. Uh guys, if you are unfamiliar, Exodus uh has actually been around a long long time.

Uh they are now working on tokenized public stocks. Uh I believe Exodus was a Bitcoin wallet. I think this is the same Exodus. We're going to we're going to hear uh from JP Richardson uh as he comes up. Um and they are publicly listed. So guys, I think uh you know it's important to take into account that there is a strong cohort of uh of companies that aren't launching tokens and these guys have significantly successful business models, right? Um, Exodus is a wallet that I've actually used. I think going back to 2018, I was looking for a wallet maybe for

Litecoin. I don't know. It was an OG Dinocoin and Exodus was one of the only wallets that supported it. And so, um, I I I ended up using them. You know, they had the first mover advantage. Um, and Exodus is public. And so um you know this this is again an example where you know I if you know you guys are in the US then you can you can get on a broker you can get on Robin Hood and you can access a lot of the same stocks that are available on the New York Stock Exchange and and the NASDAQ. Um if you're outside the US and maybe you are looking for a tokenized representative of um you know the the stocks that we have here in the US on on the New York Stock Exchange. Um ultimately I I believe we're going to

see more and more uh representations of equities. Some of them are going to be natively issued. Some of them are going to be representations but settled offchain. That's okay. Um obviously we want direct access to these financial instruments. You heard uh Jim from Superstate talk about why native issuance is so important. But ultimately, uh, these equities are going to be side by side, uh, with the rest of our token economies. And so, this is something to keep in mind, um, you know, as you're building out what your portfolio construction is going to look like. Um, you know, there's there's a lot of tokens out there, but there's a

lot of other assets out there. And and part of what we want to do on this show, especially with this push into NEO finance, is we want to help educate you on some of the assets that are out there that maybe you haven't been exposed to in the onchain world, right? You know, we we were born on chain. I I said I said to someone earlier, I uh I had a crypto wallet before I had a brokerage account. And so I think a lot of others are like this as well. And this is the lens through which they view the world, right? um we're gonna end up with more quality assets on chain. It's not going to just be Bitcoin, ETH, and then a long tale of stable coins earning yield, you know, and then a bunch of meme coins that that you know come and go. There's

healthier assets and more quality assets that are coming on chain. I you know we're gonna see US equities on chain and and I think it is worthwhile to say to yourself hey you know even in this you know this tokenized world where there's thousands of tokens out there's quality asset assets that you know have been on the stock sock exchange they've been on NASDAQ and now they're coming on chain it's worthwhile to take these into account when you're constructing your portfolio especially as native issuance takes place and we end up with these things on chain so uh we're going to get JP uh from Exodus on the show very very shortely shortly. I believe he's ready behind the scenes. There he is. JP, first time on the show. Welcome, man.

It's a pleasure to have you, >> Robbie. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited excited to be here. >> Absolutely, man. It's a It's a pleasure to have you. I was uh I told a story I think before you joined Behind the Scenes, which is uh I I forget exactly which asset it was, but I think it was 2018. I used Exodus for some asset. I don't remember. I think it might have been Litecoin, but it was something I used. I use the Exodus wallet. Um, and and I mean you guys have have just been crushing it lately. A lot has happened since 2018. So, um, I JP, it's your first time on the show. Why don't we start uh tell us a little bit about yourself and and how you ended up as CEO of Exodus.

>> Oh, absolutely. So, yeah, back in in 2015, my co-founder and I, we were kind of looking at the landscape and and I had a failed crypto startup already. It was actually, funny enough, it was it was a Bitcoin wallet, but I didn't have any design chops. But my co-founder, fortunately, had design chops from Apple, Nike, Louis Vuitton, a number of name brands. And so, anyways, we were we were talking. We're like, well, wait a second. Mount Gaus, it it happened maybe a year, year and a half before that. And and there's, you know, a lot of fear still in in the marketplace. And we're thinking like, well, what if what if we were to build an app, especially a desktop app, which was underserved at the time. There was no desktop wallets

at the time. >> And what if we were to build a desktop wallet that allows consumers to manage a whole portfolio of assets and allows them to easily oneclick swap or exchange from one asset to another. So you want to you have some Bitcoin, you want some Ethereum, you want some Dogecoin, whatever it is, one click and then you can you can make that happen. And so that's where it all started. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. I mean the the forward thinkingness at the time to think that this is where it was headed, you know, now we we've built out all this infrastructure behind the scenes, this chain abstraction, these art, all these things. um that a lot of that infrastructure predated the modern smart

contract DeFi world that all of us sort of know. >> I don't even think you're you're still I don't even think like smart contract or like DeFi was even language or words even invented at the moment. Well, someone that's watched like no Nick Sabo actually [laughter] smart contract. Okay, you're right. But in the kind of the consciousness of crypto people, people weren't saying DeFi then. So, you are spot on with that. >> Yeah. Yeah, man. And and so, you know, uh here at the show, my my co-host who's not with us today, we've been been thinking a lot about how we see this Wall Street legacy financial world and the crypto native world, how how we see these two converging. Um, and you know, we're we're seeing a lot of tokenized equities come on and you guys are

getting into this as well. You guys are public on the New York Stock Exchange. And so, you know, there's there's a convergence happening where these are two worlds. when they do converge, this becomes just one world. And and we're calling this world neo finance because we believe this encompasses tokenization, stable coins, fintex, neo banks, and everything that is sort of this this cross-section as we have a lot of the uh the currently off-chain assets come onchain and we access them uh through a crypto wallet or a neo bank or a modern fintech. And so I'm curious to get your sense of how you know t as a traditional wallet project that again was ahead of its time with swaps and and

you know a lot of these features baked in. How have you approached some of the more traditional assets and financial mechanisms that are out there like public stocks and bringing these onchain? How how are you thinking about this convergence of neo finance? A lot of people don't know this, but actually Exodus is the first company in the United States to actually tokenize our common stock and and offer it to retail in in a public offering. A lot of people don't know that. And we actually did it in the spring of 2021 is is when we started on this journey.

And so what it actually required is so back in I don't know the summer of of of 2020 we were we were raising a series A and I started thinking about all the complexities of of raising from from venture capital. I started thinking about wait a second we have this wallet platform that at the time you know it's a desktop wallet and then we had released a a mobile wallet I think about a year before this and we're thinking like we have you know likely billions of capital that people are storing in Exus wallet across all of the Exodus wallets right because we're a self-custodial wallet but it's all across all these Exus wallets billions of dollars of of capital and so we're thinking like wait

a second hold on why are we trying to go out and and list in the traditional uh you know New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ and those great platforms of course but why don't we actually start with an offering directly inside of Exodus wallet to our customers and and start there and so we're like well how do we do that how do we do that in an SEC regulated way and so that's what kicked off the journey and there's there's a lot more to the sto story but that's what kicked it And so 2021 you guys tokenized your stock and and now there's kind of this debate about you know native issuance and and you know representative uh

represented issuance but it you know it is again you guys were at the forefront right tokenizing back then and now you have the New York Stock Exchange right one of one of the biggest you know in the space talking about how they want to tokenize pretty much all of their equities. What what do you think that transition does to the industry? And and generally, you know, you've done this, right? You you tokenized back in 2021, almost five years later. Can you say this was a positive experience? What what were like the benefits and the advantages that you guys experienced as a result of tokenizing your common stock back in 2021?

>> Well, okay. So, you know, there's an expression that says that like if you are a pioneer, you're going to take some arrows in the back from time to time, right? You've probably heard that. And and so, you know, when you when you think about the advantages along the way, there was there's one thing that really stuck out to me, and this was actually it did not play out in our favor early on, but it's still very interesting nonetheless. So, this was back in the spring of 2024. And and and I remember I was I was driving with my family to the airport because we were being invited by the New York Stock Exchange to fly out, ring the bell, enlist and and and you know, basically celebrate the American dream, right? And

and on the way, I remember I was I was uh you know, I we were looking at Twitter, somebody's talking about the Twitter feed and it's like, "Oh, wow." Um, you know, there's this this article that got published about um Exodus tokenizes a stock on on Algarand and the SEC uh approves and I'm like this is going to be interesting because remember this was in a Gary Gendler era, >> right? So, so we we we we tokenized and we did our offer everything that we did that this was pre-Gary Gendler.

>> Mhm. >> And then when we were invited to list in the New York Stock Exchange, which was kind of to be legally uh compliant, >> right, >> we this was, you know, in the Gary Gendler era where this this headline was was published and and it was this was also when Grock AI had just been released. So it was summarizing what was being talked about and so that's not literally what the article said but it was a Grock AI summary. So I'm like oh this is going to be interesting. So flying to New York 130 friends family and uh you know you know employees c celebrate the moment and and this was supposed to be on May 9th is when we were supposed to ring the bell. May 8th we got the call that they

were blocking it >> that that we could not list. Now, now fortunately, we were able to do all this in in early uh in January of 2025 and you know, all turned out well post election. Right. Right. >> But when you ask about what did tokenization do for us as a company, that was one moment where it was like, oh, oh no. Like, you know, it kind of uh caused us to take a step back. >> There's an arrow. [laughter] >> Exactly. Exactly. But but that's okay. like, you know, to innovate and actually, you know, be a trailblazer on stuff, you have to be willing to take these risks because now what you brought up earlier about the New York Stock Exchange actually creating a platform

for tokenized equities for people to actually be able to settle instantly. It's just it's it's going to be phenomenal and there's a lot more to talk about all this. >> Yeah. Absolutely. So that you know a lot has changed, right? even in just the recent months. But I want to get your perspective because, you know, coming from that and then and then, you know, going and and doing the the listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025, you've you've kind of came around to ultimately doing the thing that, you know, had you in this position in the first place. And so give us a sense of like from your perspective is it what has been so like the the largest change right that has o actually opened up this industry and enabled you guys to do the things that you were setting out to do

to begin with. Is it just the the Overton window? It's it's okay to talk about these things and actually do these things now. People aren't afraid or is there codified regulation now? Like what are some of the things that ultimately open the door to allow this to happen? >> Yeah, you know, you said it. You said it best right there. Like the Overton window alone right there is is now I mean you have you have a pro SEC or you have an SEC chair that is very pro- innovation, very forward thinking when it comes to innovation and especially when it comes to tokenization. You have, you know, Larry Frink, the CEO of BlackRock, right? He's out at Davos a couple days ago talking about how, you know, we've got to have tokenized

equities. You've got Trump talking about America being the crypto capital of the world. So, so absolutely like the Overton window has shifted. You have the regulatory landscape that has shifted and and so now you have what I would say what I would classify as a very collaborative SEC that is actually sitting down and having meetings with people in the industry. I mean, you you remember when when Gary Gendz would be like, "All you got to do is just call us up and come in and and have a conversation." I mean, you remember when he would when he would say that?

>> It's like Red Riding Hood and Calling the Wolf, right? >> Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And um so so it's just it's it's just wild to how things have absolutely have changed in the way that that they've changed and and to have such a again forwardinking uh SEC that's that's embracing the industry and now now what you have is you have like let's like let's look at Salana for for a moment and what's happening on Salana right you have that the technology that that superstate has created as a transfer agent and has enabled on on Salana so that now you can take stock and you can go to Camino, you can take out loans on on that stock and and

actually you can start to inject traditional equities, but they're tokenized into the world DeFi and you can bring these together and and so I think there's just there's so much potential from the instant settlement. We haven't even talked about dividends yet. Like the abil like can you imagine? Okay, so earlier you were talking about how you have the worlds of crypto and tradi coming together. Now, imagine a young investor, young Gen Z investor, Gen Alpha investor, and they're looking at what whatever it is, Robin Hood, Exodus, whatever it is, and there's they're looking at like, okay, I can buy CocaCola and it pays me out, you know, you know,

3%, 4%, whatever the dividend is, right? Oh, wait a second. I only get it per quarter. Or I can get Salana and Salana will pay me whenever I want it. And so tokenized stock actually unlocks that so that you can pay dividends whenever you want. You could pay dividends in USDC. You can pay you can pay dividends in in Bitcoin if you want. You you can pay it in in so many ways. So there's just so much potential on on what what can happen.

>> Yeah. And and you know the power of tokenization is what what you're speaking to here. And um in addition to like you know the different assets you can pay you can also I'd imagine you can pay you know not by quarter but you can stream it by block right because you can split up those payments. there's and then you know you can do things like I I was watching uh Tom Lee's uh presentation from Bitine um and how you know what what you can do with tokenization is you can effectively split up the duration if you only want exposure to the earnings potential of you know say you know Exodus in Q4 2028 you can do that you can buy like a particular duration uh by tokenizing the time axis of of these assets um and and

you know not to meion and how you can split these things up, borrow against them, and compose them with the rest of DeFi. It's it's incredible. Um, and and JP, I mean, you you know, you've been around a long time. You were forward thinking back then. I have a feeling you're forward thinking now. Give us a look in like through your mind into the future into what you're thinking comes next, right? because we we have tokenization, we have RWAS, stable coins, we see how these worlds are converging and and I I'm curious to hear, you know, with all the things that are happening and and a friendly regulatory environment, what are you seeing as some of the next milestones to accomplish as an industry?

Well, I mean, I think like when when it comes to, you know, tokenization, I mean, let's just talk real quick about one one other aspect we didn't even touch on. The the notion of of shareholder voting, right? Like right now, you get like if you have a to or if you have stock in Tesla, Apple or whatever, right? You get an email or even sometimes some scenarios you get like a m a paper certificate mailed to your house, right? and you got to sit down, fill it out or and that costs companies anywhere from 30 50 to even $100,000 to actually do the proxy voting. Now, with having tokenized stock, actually having the given people the

ability to vote whenever you want and and no people have even thought about this, right? Like imagine if you have your stocks tokenized, all of us tokenized and you have investors all over the world and you're uh you're very forward thinking company. You're like, you know what, the people that are most invested in in my business are my my investors obviously. Why don't we ask them to have a vote? Why don't we do this real time? We could have a vote every single day if we wanted to on certain product ideas, strategy, whatever. And so I think things like that are really exciting. I think another thing that's really exciting is to get into US equities like Tesla, Nvidia,

for investors outside the United States, depending upon the country, it can be really difficult. And so again, companies are going to have to start thinking about this because like if I'm an investor outside the United States, yeah, it's probably a little bit easier to get the Mag 7. Um it's really easy to get Bitcoin, Salana, or any sort of crypto, right? But if you have a tokenized equity, then you can have that available in almost any country in the world for those investors to easily get in and participate in actual real ownership. And I think that's super exciting.

>> Yeah, it it certainly is. I I actually was chatting with uh with Jim from Superstate earlier on on the same show um and and we were talking about this which isn't this is you know this is part of the administrator administration's mission uh is to you know accelerate investment into the US right what better way to do that by tokenizing these assets tokenizing US equities and democratizing assets access all across the world and allowing anyone in the world to invest in the US stock market right? This is one of the outputs of the US economy. It makes complete sense to open up this access, allow people uh to invest in America. I think I think that's one of the pillars that uh is a particular focus for this

administration. >> I I thousand% agree. And like when you talk about like even you were talking about just the future and even if we we fast forward you you could start and this is like maybe years and years from now but you know people start start talking about the convergence of AI and and and crypto. You could see a world where agents start creating tokenized equities. And yes, I know the regulatory framework needs to support some of these things, but an agent could ultimately start creating equity in the AC activities that it does and the economic activities that it does. And then you can start imagining that agent is going to start raising capital on its own, right? And and and so all of a sudden

you have what could be thought of as an autonomous economic agent, which is quite wild to think about. >> Yeah. The world's going to get really weird. >> It is for sure. [laughter] For sure. >> JP, man. Absolute pleasure. Congrats on all the It's been wild to see Exodus from using it in 2018 to to, you know, having you on the show now is a is an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining. >> Appreciate you having me. Thank you so much. >> Yeah. See you next time. >> See you. >> Thanks, JP. Bye. >> All right. JP's the man. First time having Exodus on, guys. I think that is uh we're going to we're going to start to have a counter a tally uh that appears every time we have a publicly listed company on the show. We're going

to add we're going to add another counter another number to the uh to the counter. And I have a feeling we're going to see some rapid expansion of that uh here in 2026. So our second to last guest, we've got Zach Ryan. Uh his title is community liaison. He's better known as chain link god. uh let's send him in uh and we're going to bring him up on stage to chat about one of Chainlink's uh most recent moves. These guys, I mean, they're constantly uh they're constantly announcing things um and they're getting involved in the M&A space as well. Chainlink has acquired um they've acquired Atlas and so we're going to be talking about what

this means. Uh you guys may have not heard of Atlas, but we're going to be hearing from uh Chainlink God uh exactly what Atlas is and how it helps chain link around this concept of SVR. And if you guys think back, I want to say maybe maybe over a year ago when we were deep deep into the modular stack and we were looking at oracles and um we were looking at Oracle extractable value. We're looking at all at the MEV space and all these things. SVR was uh something that came up quite a bit and so we're gonna get uh the latest in SVR from Chain Link God. Uh Zach Ryan, why don't we bring him up on the stage? And there he is. Chainlink God, welcome back to the show, man.

Absolute pleasure to host you as well. Um I I you know, so much has happened since uh I I think the last time you were on the show was SmartCon. I got that right. Yeah, it's incredible, man. I I think SmartCon was one of these pivotal experiences in in the last year or maybe you've seen this uh from the rollup. We we're we're pushing and and we have this thesis that the legacy financial space is being forced to innovate. Um they're being forced to not only pay yield, uh you know, because stable coins are able are able to do that according to genius and maybe clarity, but also neo banks, fintexs are kind of coming for their lunch. On the other side, DeFi, a lot of DeFi infrastructure slop has not found

product market fit and and they're being forced to kind of take a look in the mirror and say to themselves, hey, we've got to go out and find product market fit like a company like Chainlink. This convergence between these two worlds we think is going to end up in what we're call like these businessdriven tokens these neo banks these modern fintexs and and generally we're calling this category neo finance and you know chain link has been crucial to this and and uh what I was saying is that smartcon was a pivotal moment where I think fidelity was in the room black rockck DTCC all of these guys were at smartcon but at the same time chain link like this defi goliath was the one that was putting her on this whole conference and it and it felt like you guys were squeezing these

two worlds together. Like I'm literally I I I can just picture like these two atoms and like an atom bomb. You guys are fusing the two worlds together and like giving birth to this one new world of Neo finance and you guys have done a tremendous job of this. Um I I think today I I want to talk about how chain link uh chain link's acquisition of Atlas helps to fulfill the vision that you guys are ultimately looking to achieve. Give us a sense high level what has it been like since you were last on the show um at SmartCon. Give us a sense of what the vibes at Chain Link have been and then we'll we'll dig into the the nitty-gritty behind Atlas and how this helps uh Chainlink's uh positioning with SVR.

>> Yeah, definitely. And I I I got the same exact sense as you did at SmartCon where you had both the DeFi DJN web 3 developer, you know, the the obvious of the world mingling together at a Fidelity sponsored conference with Black Rockck and Swift and JP Morgan and all these employees and you know the people at these uh institutions who aren't just you know interested in web 3 and crypto and blockchains but their title is you know head of DeFi, head of crypto, head of stablecoin like there actual divisions now within DRAFI institutions. And I think things have, you know, really only accelerated since then. We see, you know, the New York Stock Exchange announcing tokenization. Larry at Davos talking about tokenization, how it's going to change everything. Like

it's it's only accelerated. And I think that a lot of the attention on crypto is also increasing just due to the, you know, the discussions of the Clarity Act, getting the market structure bill through. That's going to provide a whole lot of clarity that the institutions need to feel comfortable that if they, you know, build tokenization and then they they deploy crypto solutions that they're not going to run into any legal issues or ambiguity issues that's plagued our industry for its whole existence pretty much. Once we have that market structure and that market structure is one part of it, but it's also just the the rights and the clarity around tokenization and tokens and self-custody and wallet interfaces and like h how do you treat each entity?

Once there's that clarity, I think that'll be the real unlock. And chain link's role in this world is just providing the infrastructure and the connectivity layer that enables an institution where if they want to tokenize an asset or build a DeFi style application, they're going to need the data to power that application. They'll need identity verification. They'll need the crosschain connectivity. They'll want to be able to connect in their existing back-end systems and their existing Swift messaging standards. like they need this this compatibility layer, this translation layer is usually how I like to think of it and chain link's perfectly well suited. It's already the standard within DeFi. A all these massive applications are, you know, been able to scale to the level that they have been able to get to today because

they were protected by chain link data the whole way and chain link being already the standard within DeFi. It's very easy to translate that to Tradfi and say, "Hey, these standards are already being adopted. They've already been proven over the past half decade. you adopt these standards and you can speak the DeFi language and you can put in, you know, permissions and identity verification and all the stuff that that institutions specifically need, but it's the same data standards. It's the same infrastructure, the same protocols. And I think I think more and more of institutions are realizing they they don't need to reinvent the wheel when there's already this proven infrastructure out there. And I think I think this vision is just just accelerating.

>> Extremely well said. And and I'll just the only part I'll add here is that um in addition to Tradfi being able to speak the language of DeFi because you are ubiquitous. Chain link is ubiquitous with its price feeds across DeFi. Chain link you got you and Sergey like are doing the work to go into the legacy financial world. Go to Wall Street and and speak their language. Learn their language. Adopt it. Speak it fluently. Go into DC. Do the same thing. Speak the DC language to get regulation done. So absolutely and in addition to going into that world and pulling them so it's sort of like pushing DeFi closer to that in institutional world and pulling it it closer um as well which is has been

incredible to see for the entire industry. Um and and you know you guys have not abandoned your your DeFi roots. I I think there is still very deep technical rigor and infrastructure that is taking place here. So it's not like you guys have gotten complacent. jobs not done on the infrastructure layer. You know that this acquisition of of Atlas speaks to how invested you guys are still in the MEV pipeline in SVR and and Zach I I I think you do a tremendous job at um simplifying some of these more difficult to understand concepts for the layman because you know there are there there's you know significant community that stretches far and wide. give us give us, you know, the the quick and

dirty on SVR and and and you know, we'll we'll talk about why Atlas is so crucial uh to further chain links goals with with it. >> Yeah, definitely. I can provide a little bit of like a TLDDR breakdown because the Atlas acquisition is definitely, you know, you need to have a little bit of context. The the way I put it is that typically when you have a loan in DeFi and it needs to be liquidated. The way a protocol does that is it sells the collateral at a discount so that some MEV bot can come in, buy at a discount, pay down the debt, and keep the protocol solvent. This is very, very critical to the solveny and the health of the DeFi economy. Anytime that there's a position that needs to be liquidated, it needs to be liquidated quickly, accurately, and safely to protect all of DeFi. uh in

order to incentivize liquidations protocols will pay uh a liquidation bonus which is this discount and that money typically gets kept by me bots and L1 validators and a lot of this liquidation me as it's called gets leaked over the years I think the number is about 300400 million over the past few years has been leaked now this value these protocols are purposely paying for liquidations to happen it's really important but it's expensive I mean that's a lot of money that you're leaking out to these third parties who are keeping this value. So what chainlink SVR is designed to do is that it's effectively an extension of chain link price fees. So when a loan needs to get liquidated, what typically happens is that a chain link price feed will

update. It'll say that the price of ETH is now, you know, two 5% lower than it was before. This position is now marked for liquidation. And typically this auction of who gets to liquidate the position happens on a blockchain and the blockchain validators and mebot keeps the profit. And what SVR does is that it shifts the the landscape such that rather than the who gets to who gets to liquidate the position auction happening in the blockchain, now it's happening in the Oracle network. So now all these MEV bots are bidding for the right to liquidate a position and that value is now being captured by the Oracle network and the Oracle network which in this case is Chainlink can redistribute that value back to the DeFi application. So to date uh Chandlink SVR launched in

March 2025 last year together with a the biggest DeFi lending protocol and it's recaptured over $10 million in liquidation me to date and that's split at a ratio between chain link to keep sustainable oracle networks continue to operate as well as returning that value back to the A and the A community and the A dollar to to use as they want to. This has also expanded over time to being adopted by compound and and various other lending protocols. So the whole point here is that DeFi lending applications have been leaking a lot of value during the liquidation process and chain like SVR is designed to recapture that value and return it back to the D5 application.

>> Makes complete sense that the D5 protocols have to maintain solveny at their as their number one priority and and like you said they have to fire sale this collateral when it becomes bad, right? this bad debt. They have to sell the collateral to maintain solveny in the in the in the market, but you know, they sell it at a discount. They don't need to sell it at as at so steep a discount. And that's where the leaky value comes in. They can sell it for a little bit of a discount. And this SVR Oracle auction helps, you know, the the MEV bots come to a more fair price rather than um you know, really taking advantage of uh the the lending market itself. and and so give us a sense of you know uh you mentioned 10 million

over 10 million dollars uh has been saved so far as a result of these integrations uh with chain link SVR how is how does Atlas fit into this equation and and you know how how are we going to help you know to scale 10 million to ultimately 100 and and a billion dollars of SVR saved. >> Yeah. Yeah. So Atlas what that is that is what it's called a order flow auction protocol. So it's the actual protocol that's doing and facilitating the auction itself and SVR has operated on Ethereum mainet uh since it launched initially and the integration the merger so to speak between Atlas and SVR is designed to bring SVR to more blockchains due to the whole ecosystem.

So with the announcement yesterday SVR went from being live on Ethereum to now being live across five different EVM chains and it can scale to any EVM chain uh that lending protocols are on. So, it's really about just kind of accelerating what SVR is already doing. And I think this whole concept of of of OEV is interesting because I think it shows a clear pathway to how data feeds and price feeds can be monetized in a way that's not actually extracting value from anyone. I think when people think of me, they think frontunning, they think sandwich attacks, like, oh, who's who are you taking the money from? But in this case, the money is coming from MEV bots and L1 chains >> and it's not coming from the users. In fact, it's actually returning value back to the users, back to the applications.

So, it's almost like this this win-win dynamic where chainlink oracles are able to operate more sustainably because of this source of revenue. And the DeFi applications and the Dows have a new source of sustainable revenue that they can put towards building a better lending application. And MEV bots still get paid their share. Blockchain still get paid their share, but they're not getting 99% of the liquidation value. they're getting a more equitable amount of value for the work that they're doing in those liquidations. Right? So, I I I I think that OEV, while it's a very kind of niche kind of concept, it's it's like the the liquidation plumbing of the DeFi economy. It's taking something that was very extractive and just leaking value to third parties who, you know, were just running liquidation scripts to now

returning it back to the infrastructure that's actually securing the loans and facilitating the the loan making process, which I for me just seems like a more fundamentally fair deal for everyone involved. And I think that's when people hear me, they don't necessarily understand that you're actually creating a more fair distribution of value. >> I I think you make a great point. You know, there there's some people that might say, "Hey, like I run an MEV bot. I'm a person, too. I want my fair share." But the the result is they still me bots are still getting their fair share. They're just not extracting as much from these users as they were. But the MEV bots are still doing quite all right. Um I I I think this is extremely forward thinking for for a couple of

reasons. Um, one is, you know, obviously the the multi-chain world is proliferating and we're seeing uh a lot of DeFi happen on multiple chains. Um, so this acquisition makes a lot of sense to scale uh the the chain link SVR approach. On the on the the same note, we've got a swath of assets that are going to be tokenized like you mentioned ear New York Stock Exchange, you know, is tokenizing. They're coming 247. We're seeing it happen. the RWA space, the tokenization space is taking off. This is a a segment that's poised for a ton of growth. Um earlier we had uh Jim from Superstate. They recently raised 82 and a half in a series B. Um incredible to

see and and this again just helps to validate, you know, where we see the space heading with this new asset class uh that is going to be onboarded. We're going to get equities, tokenized equities. we're going to get, you know, tokenized gold and precious metals and and I'm curious to to hear how you react and how you think about the the scale of def the DeFi landscape as a whole when we start to get you know more tokenized money markets, more tokenized precious metals, more tokenized equities and and they become e uh you know tokenized and composable with all of the same DeFi functionality. You know, I there was an example earlier. Someone borrowed 42 and a half million dollars of uh USD

uh from the Athena stable coin and used it to to uh purchase uh uh Tether Gold, right? X aut, right? which I can only imagine is going to continue to proliferate these types of use cases on a and a horizon with their RWA protocol, you know, powered by chain link. Like with RWAs and the scale of tokenized assets entering the DeFi landscape, how does how do you react and how do you think chain link is thinking about like where we're grow where we're going and how we grow from here?

>> Yeah, it's a great question. I think in my mind and maybe this is self-evident to everyone listening but I think tokenized assets is going to be the next mega trend of our industry. You have just unbelievable trillions amount of dollars to come on chain. But I think when you think of why do you want to bring equities and stocks and bonds on chain just bringing the asset on chain and then the asset just sits there is not that useful. It's useful when you can actually do things with those assets. for example, putting them into an a horizon market and being able to borrow stable coins or using it as collateral in a purpose position and doing a delta neutral trade. Like there's it's interesting when you can do things with it. I think what what chain link does the service it provides to asset issuers is utility and it does

that for stable coins. It does that for governance tokens and utility tokens. But it can do that and it is doing that for tokenized assets as well of okay you've issued the assets you know you have the proof reserves and the nav data and all necessary data in order to make that useful you need to be able to list it on a horizon you need to list it as a per market you need more data you need more integration and chainlink is kind of this facilitator connecting the assets to the applications and providing more utility to those assets so you know chainlink plays I think a lot of roles within this new tokenized asset economy but I think one of the big roles is making these assets more useful By being able to offer, hey, you're tokenizing a bunch of equity or a bunch of debts.

Chainlink's already integrated as the standard across all of DeFi. For example, a horizon, you can come get plugged into a horizon and chain link will provide the NAV data, proof reserve data, the crosschain interoperability to move it between the different lending markets. It'll provide the glue that connects that asset into the lending market. I think that u in my personal view DeFi is exceptionally useful and it's been a great case study for what a tokenized asset economy will look like. I think a lot of these applications in DeFi today have been used for assets of maybe questionable value so to speak. I I think that there are blue chip assets but I think there's also a long tale of you know things that people just want to speculate on. But we as an industry can very easily hot swap in tokenized assets

as the asset layer and keep the same protocol layer. Maybe you need to add identity verification for permissioned assets. Maybe you need to add some more compliance tooling for the more sensitive jurisdictions, but it's the same infrastructure at the end of the day. And so the same role that chain link provides of you know securing 70% of the DeFi sector is going to translate one to one to securing hopefully 70% more you know of the tokenized asset economy which is what Chainlink is building towards. So it's it's it's the role that Chainlink plays within this new tokenized asset economy is the same role that it's been playing and has been proven to excel at within the the DeFi economy. So I I think it's I can't be more bullish on the tokenized asset economy personally and I think that Chainlink is very very well

positioned to be the the plumbing of this new economy. >> Yeah, I I like the mental framing a lot of the asset layer. Um you know, we we've built out the protocols. We have all these blockchain layers and and and all of this plumbing in in terms of the infrastructure and and I think you're absolutely right. we we failed, you know, to to see that what's what's now missing is the assets, you know, have to be just quality. We have to have quality assets and and for so long we've had, you know, we we do have our blue chips, right? But, you know, that we do have thousands of longtail assets that, you know, don't don't don't belong in, you know, the typical investor's portfolio, right? And so, I I think that is coming to a lot of people's uh forefront of

their mind. We're also seeing in the Wall Street world, they're realizing, you know, all of the infrastructure that is here. And it feels like we're putting some of those final touches on like those KYC's and those privacy elements, those are starting to click into place. And when they do, it becomes fully ready for this asset layer to to migrate on chain and and and we're seeing it happen right right before our eyes and chain link is a centerpiece of that. Um and and so Zach, just you know, I'll hand it over to you to to close us out and and give us some closing thoughts on what's to head uh for Chain Link in in 2026 and beyond.

>> Yeah, I think a lot of it's going to be somewhat similar in terms of continuing to secure the DeFi economy, offer new products like bringing SVR to more blockchain so that more lending applications can recapture value. But I think a lot of it's going to be focused on bringing institutions into production. Getting them to a state where they can start to issue their assets at scale on public chains, on private chains, on whatever kind of environment that they want using chain link as this orchestration layer to kind of facilitate the connectivity between their existing systems and their standardized uh approach of issuing assets. You know that they have trained thousands of employees and paid millions of dollars for the existing systems. they're going to want to reuse that in this new context of tokenized assets. Chainlink

provides that translation layer as well as providing all of the infrastructure for the applications that exist on public chains both today and the applications that are going to be created in the future as a result of tokenized assets being brought on chain. So I I think that tokenized assets adoption is only going to accelerate. Hopefully, you know, the clarity acts and market structure bill gets enacted and that provides the necessary clarity that industry needs. And I I think that that's ultimately only a positive dynamic for chain link that this this recent acquisition of Atlas, it's focused on DeFi, but again, you know, DeFi lending is in the tens of billions currently. If we're able to bring on tokenized assets, now DeFi onchain lending can be measured in the trillions

of dollars. And so the proportional value capture of the oracles and of the DeFi applications can scale with that linearly. The more liquidations that's happening, the more me recapture, the more that gets captured in the oracle network and returned back to the application itself. So I think that you know people are very bearish in the current environment everything after 1010 that that's happened. But I think the protocols that are building the infrastructure that will be used by tokenized assets have never been better positioned. Absolutely. >> We just we just to you know to my previous point get the high quality assets on board get the institutions engage in these applications and we already have all the infrastructure like we we've been building this for you know since really DeFi summer and so we just

bring in the proper assets that people want to access and all the infrastructure is there. So I'm I'm very optimistic. I I I hope everything plays out you know this year tokenized asset adoption goes vertical. I think it may take a few years to fully ramp up, but I think this will be the year that things actually go into production uh in a meaningful way. So, I'm I'm very optimistic. >> Yeah. And and there are protocols that are well positioned to capitalize on this growth of tokenized assets and and the growth of stable coins, which you know, the the powers that be are are saying, you know, again, trillions um and and that uh that's where we're headed. Zack Chainlink god, uh thank you so much. always a pleasure having you on the show and uh looking forward to uh to uh really th this this neo financial

world that's uh taking place right before our eyes in 26 and beyond. Um we're going to see you again soon, Zach. Really appreciate you coming on and uh yeah uh stewarding the chain link uh community forward. So we'll see you again next time. Always a pleasure, man. >> Appreciate you having me on. Thanks, Robbie. >> Absolutely. See you next time. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Zach. All right. All right. All right. Zach's a man. Uh Chainlink is doing amazing things. It's been a long show today, guys. Wow. We uh we've gone through five guests today. Let's just do a quick recap before uh we play an interview that we recorded a couple days ago, but we're gonna get Sandeep here

and show that to you guys very, very shortly. We had Chris from Summerfi. We had Jim from Super State. We had Arman from Genius. We had JP Richardson from Exodus. And we had Zach uh the Chainlink god from Chainlink. So an absolutely incredible show. I mean Chainlink is blue chip in the DeFi world. Um Exodus is a public company. Superstate raised 82.5 million for their series B. Summerfi launched their TGE today. and Arman is doing 9 billions of dollars in the Genius interface. So, pretty pretty incredible lineup here and uh it's only

going to get better. Guys, we're going to play our interview with Sandeep now and then we're going to sign off and uh we're going to have a great weekend. So, let's do that, guys. Without further ado, uh we're going to take a very short commercial break and you guys will see our interview with Sandeep for AI super cycle and the scent token. Time to get sent. Let's go. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

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Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins from the team. >> What's up guys? Welcome back to the rollup. I am here with Sandeep from Sentient as well as Polygon. You guys see the shirt, you recognize the purple. Uh we're here on an AI super cycle. This is our flagship AI segment. It is powered by Near. They're doing great job in AI as well as Sentient who is backed by Near and uh I I believe this is a partnership that's incredible.

Sentient's got some big news. The token is live uh or depending on when you're listening to this, it will be live very very soon. And so Sandeep is here to talk to us about AGI sentient and everything that is happening uh in the world of crypto and AI. Sandeep, you're a friend of the show. Welcome back, man. It's a pleasure to have you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me on. >> Absolutely. Last time uh last time we saw each other, I think it was in Korea. We were on a on a panel together in KBW and uh it was fun. Feels like feels like a long time since KBW.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I I don't even to be honest like it got wiped out of my memory like it's so long back. Which one was that? >> Um what it was man I think we were talking about L2s and interoperability like composability with L2s Ben from was on there. >> Which month was that? Which month was that last? >> Oh KBW was it October? November. >> Oh my god. It's like only two month two months three months only. >> So much so much happens man. You've been busy. [laughter] I almost feel like I'm thinking like was it in April, May, June, like you know this is October.

>> Yeah. >> KBW was back in October. What what have you been up to since then? You've been busy. A lot's been going on. >> Yeah, I mean uh lots of stuff. Uh you you guys also must be watching on Polygon. we, you know, just uh did two large acquisitions uh for around $250 million and uh you know like going deeper and deeper and deeper into payments and uh you know trying to create a new paradigm like just like Ethereum and consensus and consensus added a lot of value back to Ethereum by building like a you know wallet and a lot of peripheral infrastructure on top.

So same thing like I'm uh you know converting polygon labs uh from like a pure play you know kind of uh uh you know kind of a cost center which is simply building the protocol itself because the protocol is by and large built. So now start adding doing more profitable uh activity building middleware building providing services with which polygon labs can make money >> and then it becomes less dependent on the protocol and the token treasury sales to fund itself. So you know I think like you we are going to see a lot of uh protocols uh and projects going to do that.

>> It's a more pragmatic way of thinking about things. It's like thinking about it more in terms of a business and a company with product market fit rather than this new tokenpowered like economic zone. I think it's a much more pragmatic way of doing things. >> Look, we uh we spoke with Mark and John from the Polygon team. They're doing great work and and you know, we were chatting with them about the acquisition of Coin Me and Sequence. So, Sandeep, today I want to talk to you about sentient uh because by the time this airs live, the sentient token will be live. tell us about sentient and tell us specifically about why the token is so important uh to sentient protocol and and the mission that you guys have with AGI.

Yeah. So basically u I mean the the mission with sentient has been to empower the open-source AI development because you know by by now it is very clear with everyone that you know we don't really want these you know AI super powerful AIs to to lie in the hands of or rest in the hands of few individuals uh as well as individual organizations. So that has been the mission of sentient right and then since then sentient has done a wide range of research like uh our uh reasoning framework called Roma became extremely viral for many weeks.

It was the the most uh visited and the most trending uh repository for open-source reasoning across the globe not in crypto but like the overall AI space and uh you know multiple research papers from fingerprinting to watermarking to various different things um you know to culminating in new rips I think in November December which is the largest AI conference and where like I think we had multiple uh papers and conferences and everything on that. All of that research being you know trying to consolidate into a framework which kind of using the using the the the token incentives uh with the people and

the institutions building on it creating a creating a system where all of these individual parties can come together and contribute into the open-source AI. So you know I I'll give more concrete example right because it has taken us also a long time to to to reach a place where we can say okay even though we have built a lot of open-source work but how how all of this gets combined into let's say one single product or one single offering which can actually create a synergistic uh you know and self- sustainable and and growing um you know kind of subeconomy within this within the sentient ecosystem. And so

where we have like now landed with all of these research is essentially obviously the whole world is becoming the agentic world, right? >> Mhm. >> And what we realize is that like the way you have seen hugging face, right? >> Hugging face is for models. The way hugging face became the go-to platform for models where everybody you know the bpoke uh engineers building the models and then you know people can test those models and all that and this is was hugging face has been the place where you go and check out what is happening in the model space and the world is moving from now models to agents right so essentially where because sentient reasoning framework allow agents to become more powerful more accurate less

has hallucination and all that. And so now we are building the the sentient arena which is basically you can almost think of as a hugging face for agents because where we provide we have done a lot of like hackathons like werewolf based hackathons and all that where people will bring in their agents >> and then there will be a lot of like AI based personas built over for example let's take a customer agent uh you know uh customer bot agent right uh for a for banks let's say and then you know a lot of people are building those agents That's that is not of our interest, right? What we are interested is that how can you build an arena where all of these you know kind of agents are battle tested against each other against the

automated AI bots with different personas. Let's say there is a persona of a end customer which is very angry and persona of end customer who's broke and how do you deal with this let's say you know the the credit card uh calls like how do agent work on that and so all of these things improve the agents and then everybody can take home the learnings from there they don't need to share their user data they can anonymize the data and then the overall sentient economy the way we are thinking right now these models are still evolving but probably you know once the data this open source probably this will be BSL uh kind of business license data where the large entities of the world and we have like some of the biggest names in the

banking in the AI world who wants to you know want to do individual specific campaigns there and they kind of like either buy uh or stake sentient into this in order to get the rights to the data or they pay some fixed amount to get the data and all those things all those business models are on the cards but that is what the sentient research team has been doing like my role at sentient is more of a you know high level strategic level things like how this economies economics make sense and and you know this while the sentient has three full-time co-founders professors who are doing all of this research and all that and I think like I I now feel at a very much you know comfortable place where I think uh this whole all of the sentient research is culminating

into one single product which is connected to the token economy and then you know there is uh virtual cycle uh which can uh which can reward all the participants of this token economy. >> Absolutely. And this is something that you've had a lot of experience with at Polygon. And so you know how these token economies tend to work. You know how developing a product getting product market fit getting adoption for that ultimately is going to power the token and the token vice versa is then going to power and fuel a lot of the uh adoption of the product itself. And it creates the virtuous flywheel like you said. um what when you're thinking about the AI space because you know we've seen a lot of like talent vacuums right we've seen AI suck a lot of talent out of

crypto and crypto take a lot of talent out of Silicon Valley and AI how do you think these things ultimately go in terms of AI onchain like why is it so important that a lot of these AI agents and personas like you mentioned you know the ones that are able to train banks and help with customer service and these far reach into every facet of the economy And you mentioned earlier like watermarking some of these things that blockchains are able to help with. But why do you think it's so crucial that we implement blockchain as a fundamental piece that powers a lot of these AI agents?

See I have actually I've always taken the other side of this like I don't think that apart from like you know you doing payments which is which has nothing to do with AI like payments are payments whether it's AI payments human payments >> apart from doing payments and some very niche smart contracting behavior I don't think that the AI and crypto per se has a lot of overlap right you know crypto you have to see crypto as a horizontal which is financial rails your trustless financial rails and you have to also see like right now AI is a sector right eventually AI will not be a sector it's the same the example is cloud computing right do you say that

you know oh you know cloud computing is taking away resources from you know like if I convert you like it's taking from like you know VMware or virtualization or some other like server technology it's a server technology now healthcare transportation finance everybody uses cloud right Same thing is going to happen with like right now that is happening with crypto and the cryptos this thing is crypto has major implementations and applications in the financial sector only and this is what you what I'm seeing at polygon for example the major segment has become the fintex and the and and the banks and and these large uh you know institutions using uh crypto for payments and their other financial needs right because in finance you need custom business logic

and all that but same way I I feel that you know AI will be one more horizontal which will use uh you know uh uh crypto for payment rails for like creating some sort of these economies where people can stake you know let's say people can stake scent and get access to uh you know like a license data and things like that right so but it is it is going to be one horizontal which is used across the industries I think the same is going to happen with AI also so this the these boundaries between crypto people becoming AI people or AI people becoming crypto people will be blurred and at the end it will be a business build like poly market is an example right poly

market is poly market doesn't say that we are a blockchain based you know prediction market poly market is a prediction market ki is a prediction market right and underneath rails don't matter underneath technology gets uh commoditized same is is going to happen with AI >> yeah and and there is strong overlap in the in the ethos right because uh despite the infrastructure and the technology underneath the mission of sentient is that AGI is open source and it doesn't fall into the hands of you know uh one single entity that's able to control and control public perception and so I'm curious how are you guys affecting this what is it that sentient is able to do and what do you see out there as the as the biggest threat is there a particular company entity person

or concept idea that is misunderstood what is the some single biggest threat to openour force AI right now and how how do you prevent that? >> Yeah, see the the single biggest threat and which has remained the same is is these some of these models becoming ultra powerful and then you know they and that risk is still there right like everybody says that is like you know I say it as you know Elon Musk says 8020 I say 99%. 99% AI is going to be benevalent only in the sense that AI will not take over human race and will have brain of its own and you know they will start ruling over human beings.

know but 99% AI is going to be a extremely powerful tool which businesses and countries will use to propel their strategic adv strategic advantages and the goal for for sentient and anybody else who is building in open source AI is that this access to this technology should be available for everyone all institutions all individuals all sovereign countries right so that there is a balance of power and that is the sentient mission like so you know it's It's not like sentient is only going to do this like there are multiple institutes which are doing this open source. We work very closely with the universities. We having like two very reputed and you know like uh pretty you know fairly famous professors you know

running this gives us the access to that you know especially US you know university circle uh India University circle and China university circle some of these stock people are working there. So all of the like-minded people who want to create a level playing field for uh everyone in the world in different different forms. So you know we realized that you know with this kind of funding where uh you know like the AI AI model companies getting funded $1 billion in one single day right like you know at the day zero the seed round is a billion dollars right and you know with that we we can't compete with the crypto kind of race to build a open-source model right so we realized that you know that is not

possible so we initially started with some sort of fine-tuning and creating like the domain specific opensource models then making them public but then Eventually we realize that our strength is you know being is being creating and we are compounding on reasoning and and we want to make reasoning available. Just to understand reasoning. What is reasoning is that you can almost think of you know the model is like a very vague analogy but the model is just like your CPU maybe combined with your with your RAM right like all the way you can assume that's the RAM but your computer is not CPU and memory your computer also has a GPU your computer also has various different kind of circuitry with it which actually makes it a computer.

Similarly, if you want a business viable outcome, I'm I'm being very careful in business viable outcome, not like a fancy outcome where you know AI writes a story for you or creates a image for you. If you want a business critical outcome from this, you need to have the model and then on top of that you need to add reasoning. You can also apply to yourself like when you think about it like if I told you that you know Robbie how will you post this video onto your channel, right? your your mind will immediately start thinking of steps that okay I will you know like I will finish this then there's you know I will go to my video recorder there will be this thing uh the the version of this I'll go to YouTube I'll upload at Twitter like this is a whole planning that you did

right so but then if you think like meditate over deeply you will realize that there are two parts of your thinking on this >> you know your one is there is a there is a end goal function where we you know that okay this is where I need to reach and you will realize there is something in the in the background which is thinking that okay if I need to reach there what is the first step what is the second step what is the third step which is planning right so this part in the middle is actually something akin to reasoning right like you have a base computational brain you have the brain but the brain is actually thinking and our brain if you see like you know with different different regions of it they have all of these different activities different kind of contributions to it so

right now sentient is razor focused on this reasoning part of space because we can't you know because building the core brain the CPU requires billions of dollars to build and so we can there are other people who are contributing in the open source world for that we are contributing in how do you build a reasoning frameworks which anybody can take any model and then can apply on top of it so right now like there is a ecosystem team which is building a co-pilot for trading and these things um you know prediction markets and all that by applying the reasoning on top of cloud code right okay so >> similar kind of things like we will provide like this you have the reasoning framework take your you know whatever model you want to use maybe an open source model apply this reasoning you

get better results makes >> sense take it to enterprises and all that and that's the and then then you go to the arena like now you have this reasoning agent how do you make it better so that it can achieve 99.99% >> uh you know accuracy for business critical stuff >> right and you can have it compete against other agents that are also in the open source world that are reasoning and you can figure out which one better and then they can learn from one another and It it makes complete sense and it it also generalizes sentient to this reasoning framework which is something that I heard you mention that you can then apply to all the different agents. Look even if I take it that even if you have a closed source model you can still apply the reasoning framework on it and that is when we can start to build and

expand some of these models so that they have far-reaching implications in agents in in like you said clawed code and and and the entire AI world so that we can really harness the the depth of its power. But obviously we want you know the entire stack to be open source so that we have full compatibility full control over that and it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Um Sepeep before we wrap up. >> Thank you. Thank you. Um and very well built. You guys got to give you credit. You guys built this and it's it's very forward thinking. Before we wrap up I want to bring it full circle to the token economy. uh because the token um for Sention is is out there and you know you also have Polygon that's out there

and so could you help bridge these two worlds in our mind? How should we think about the the full token economy? You know you have the Polygon token world, you have the Sentient token world. Will these have any overlap and and if so how can how can we think about value acrrual when we have the payment blockchain world on polygon and we have the open source AI world on sentient. Yeah, see definitely there are overlaps as I said that the crypto is just a rails for AI. So when sentient actually launches the the like you know right now there is like a lot of tidbits of these open source reasoning and everything available but now we are launching the sentient arena sentient arena will have these staking you know things payment

related thing you pay for pay for the data that is you know being generated after those arenas have concluded and all that. So that will be the revenue model in some sense for the sentient uh economy and that will be built you know using wherever polygon rails can be used they will be used uh you know they'll be used there and then sentient was already prepping up for launching a chain built on the polygon a layer itself and as the arena and all more transactions come and when the need be then they will launch like it's not like launching the chain for the sake of launching a chain so when the transactions achieve a certain level of threshold then sentient is expected to you know launch that chain.

And uh the other part is like you know otherwise these economies are fairly you know acting at different levels like polygon is purely acting at the transaction provisioning block space level. Sentient is more of an app protocol. Think about like Ethereum and unis swap or ae right like so polygon is basically the base underlying rails and sentient is one kind of app that is being built uh on top of it and whereas sentience you know token economy is is is also like with this arena finally it becomes even more clearer that you know anybody can come and participate in these competitions and all that and whatever data gets generated either they pay to the protocol and that that exactness into the model has to be done but once the arena goes live somewhere

where you know February mid time frame or end of February at that time like once the whatever data gets generated either you get access to data by staking a certain amount of the send tokens and be a participant in the economy or you you know pay a fixed price and then buy that data and buy the license for the data and uh and do that. So that is the sentient simple economy and then those tokens and all that like whoever are contributing open source participants and all that they get rewarded in the send tokens hopefully enough amount of data gets created that more and more enterprises want to come and stake and then get access to that data.

>> Yeah. and ultimately providing this value for this entire economy this entire ecosystem you know provides a lot of value um and then there's a lot of stake uh in >> absolutely and not only in the crypto ecosystem by the way like I you know this is avail this will be available to everybody every AI company literally banks are now getting onboarded to it as we speak that there is a you know like a large probably hundred billion dollars asset in management and all that like bank which is right now testing some of these things and all that so as these things proceed Um, you know, Sentient Beam is going to talk more about these things.

>> Incredible, Sandeep, always appreciate you joining us and and uh, you know, you you've been really busy, man. You've been sentient polygon making moves all across the map. What's up? What's up next? What what >> it's been 8 to 10 years in crypto like there is nothing like that's the thing like you know with crypto I think for me having both polygon and sentient like fully stand on their feet because you know crypto like I have seen the crypto crazy cycle like with polygon all that what I really really yearn to build is these self- sustaining multi-deade companies that is what inspires me to do like so I am more focused on systems thinking strategic moves and you know creating an environment where these entities can build sustainably over time not like a flash in the pan two years

your token pumps like you know this thing after that you are like nowhere to be seen that is my biggest uh you know fear basically that oblivion of of my companies that are building in the space I hope that they stand the test of time and became become a part of the fabric >> the walk away test right that's what Vitali calls the walk away and uh and uh man you're you're not going away anytime soon continuing to build sand deepep absolute legend thank you so much for joining Always a pleasure, man. And best of luck with sentient token launch. >> Cheers, brother.

>> Thank you. Thanks, Rob. Thanks. Byebye. [music]