The Token Revolution | Roundup

Transcript

Quick shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. We'll hear more about Katana's 1 billion CAT campaign later today, but for now, let's get into the episode. Hey everyone, quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode. Nothing said on Bell Curve is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Our guests and I may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Bell Curve. This is a solo roundup today. So, Michael and Vance are out there traveling. Uh, RIP fellows.

We'll see you next week. Uh, but for now, couldn't leave you guys without a week of content. So, we'll just go run down a a quick bunch of stories. And I actually wanted to start with not really a story, but just address where we are in the market today. Uh, and I think this was summed up really well. This is a tweet from Quinn Thompson, one of the co-hosts on Forward Guidance, the Blockworks podcast, but he tweeted out, "Anyone want to run the math on what percentage of negative 30 to 40% open interest crypto liquidation events was it a good idea to get bearish after it happened?" And someone put together these charts which are awesome which is uh Bitcoin open interest with drop events. Uh Bitcoin price at open interest drop events. The distribution of forward returns after uh uh open interest drops. And the average forward

returns after open interest drops. This is great because he does it after 10, 30, 90, and 120 uh days. And the average after 10 days is 3.4%. After 30 days it's 8.4%. 90 days 25.9%. And 120 days 33.8%. And you know, I'm sharing this because um we're at this moment where everyone I think was very bowled up before that massive $19 billion open interest uh drop that that wiped out a huge amount of um market cap over the last week or so and you had alts like Athena plummeting, you know, 80% or something before recovering uncertain venues uh like Binance. But yeah, I I also get the sense that I mean this was that was some

empirical data that shows you how the market tends to perform after there's a massive uh liquidation event and historically this was you know it generally performs pretty well after one of those. Um but also you know generally the people that I follow and trust on the macro side of things are quite bullish at this moment. We're still in a rate cut cycle. Um I I think that actually on the macro side of things what seems to be driving the market here is AI capex and um there's also some of the actions that are taken by the government these equity investments that are being made uh into companies like Intel but now more recently into quantum. I think that what it's pointing to, this is just my opinion. Uh it shows you that the the United States now views

us as being the the government, it views the United States as being in existential competition with China. And so I think that what they're signaling to the market is that they're willing to backs stop um some of this investment or you know quote unquote you know buy the dip or support this type of investment. So I think the big risk would be if AI expectations were priced in that, you know, Michael and I talked about that on a roundup like a month or so ago that it felt like AGI was getting priced in which either means if we don't deliver AGI um then that was going to lead to a sell-off or if we are delivering AGI what is humanity look like after that.

So it's a little bit of a funny thing to be positive on. But I think that the government I think that that is still the risk factor that there were to be a hiccup in AI but it seems like that's probably less likely than it's been in a while. So that combined with more recent movements in markets I think means that we're in we're on pretty solid footing in general uh for the current time being. Um I think if we were to go one layer down the other uh question that I'm trying to ask myself um you know as we end as we begin to uh you know near the end of this year is how is this market going to look differently in 2026 than it did in 2025. I was speaking to uh an investor friend of mine, so this is not my quote, but she said uh I think

we're going to go look back with retrospective genius as being, you know, the second most important event in crypto behind the white paper for Satoshi. Uh and I really agree with her. Um you know, I I think that we haven't fully it's we talked about it on this podcast before. Everyone in crypto likes to quote uh Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant when he describes, you know, some between three and four trillion dollars of stable coins um being issued on chain by the end of the decade. But I don't think that people have fully groed just how important and impactful that is going to be because once you have a portion of your stack, which is a very important part of your stack, treasury payments, that type of thing on a blockchain, um it really ends up kind of

Trojan horsing a lot of other activity because if you've already committed to holding dollars, dollars on blockchain rails, kind of like, well, now this is so much more convenient. Why wouldn't I do a whole bunch of other stuff as well? And I think what it's going to to do actually is force a whole bunch of workflows um and processes on chain as well. And yeah, I I think there there are also kind of whispers of big uh fintech investors getting back into the market that haven't been here for a while. And these aren't the tigers and the cotus of the world that kind of invested a bunch of money and then kind of got burned and haven't really been back. Um, you know, even if you were to just look at, you know, the Thrivives of the world, uh, that got interested in the, uh, the Tempo investment, I think

that you're starting to see those guys come back into the market, which is super super positive, um, in terms of what it says for, uh, in terms of what it says for this industry. I I do think actually there will be a little bit of a change in the scene for crypto funds um in general as well where you know if you have more sophisticated uh you know fintech investors coming into the space um and at the same time trading is getting more difficult because you have more high frequency traders that are moving in. Um, I it's already been a pretty tough year for the liquid funds of the world, but I think it's going to kind of get even tougher from here on out because you're probably the edge on especially short-term uh, you know, time horizon trading uh, is going to continue

to evaporate. Um, and so that that really leaves uh the investment style of helping to scale companies. Um, and a lot of funds I think in crypto currently aren't necessarily set up to do that or you have to find a different uh, way to trade liquids. Um, one obvious edge there would be duration, the willingness to hold, you know, liquids on your book for a longer period of time. Uh, which historically hasn't worked, but I think there there might be reasons to believe that that could change soon. And one factor that I've been thinking about is the idea of there being barriers to entry. And uh, historically, barriers to entry have been famously low in crypto. Um so the the beauty of crypto is that with a very

limited team and budget you could spin up you know a token a financial product and compete with incumbents very quickly. The the downside of that is because the space is very open source uh because people are willing to accept tokens as payment uh because these tokens can get insane valuations very quickly uh is that the barrier to entry is so low that uh capital but also human capital doesn't congregate. Right? It's very difficult to company build when you know Joe Schmo who just has an idea launches launches a token worth a billion dollars and starts handing out massive pay packages. It's very difficult to you know bunch human capital and actually solve big problems in that type of environment. But that's beginning to change. One because people are less willing to buy vaporware than

they have been in the past. But the other reason is because it's actually the the the barriers to entry for certain more mature sectors has gone up quite a bit. So I think exchanges are a really good example of this where there always were uh regulatory costs and high barriers to entry for exchanges in general or centralized exchanges. But even on decentralized exchanges it used to be relatively low um and you could you could spin up a DEX there auditing costs and all all of the costs that exist with um you know spinning up any sort of protocol but it's still pretty manageable um and you could attract a decent amount of volume. You could just wall off US users and you know try to compete for the international market.

And over the last couple of years, that was a pretty good strategy. You had the hyperlquids of the world that pursued that on the prediction market side. That's what poly market did. But now that the US market is open for business and everyone's really excited about excited about it, you have Asian exchanges or you know offshore exchanges that are moving into the US market. Uh Poly Market and Khi are both regulated and can now um US users can use them. And so I think that that old playbook of start really cheap, go the unregulated route, get a bunch of volume and then and fees and then try to leverage that position to try to become regulated. I just don't think that's going to work anymore. I think US regulation is more table stakes. Um and then I think for other categories like more mature

categories like L1s, um same thing, right? You could famously just spin up a token. It's much more difficult than this, but you know, make some tweak to a consensus mechanism, attract a bunch of validators, spin up a token, pay the validators with that token. Um, and hopefully the token went up a lot. You could use that as a currency to attract new developers. That that's much harder than it used to be because you have increasingly costs like you have to pay external oracles, um, you have to pay, you know, the ether scans of the world. U, there's just a lot more infrastructure costs that you have to manage. Andre Cronone did a did a a long tweet on this um I think a couple of months back now. But anyway, you you you need to raise a significant amount of

money at a time when investors are probably less interested in funding those ideas than they have been in the past. Uh and same thing with borrow lend protocols as well. So now suddenly you know from one hand on the one hand you could look at that and say oh that sucks you know startups can't compete. I would say that there's a happy medium where barriers to entry are um not so high that incumbents can do whatever they want, but they're not so low that you know anyone can spin up a billion dollar token and you know attract a bunch of talent and then it goes bust in a year. I think we're approaching this efficient frontier which is actually quite good for value creation in these more mature categories. And I think the implication of that is that these winners should tend to compound quite a bit. And I

think the categories that are particularly interesting here are exchange tokens and there are some publicly traded stock like hood or coin but also you know assets like B&B and by the way uh Trump pardoned CZ uh that was a headline that came across today and uh and you also have if even if you were to look at the some of the Asian exchanges like uh Bitfinex so the LEO token or OKB from OKX these have been really solid performers over the last two years. So, while many of these very overvalued infra, you know, kind of VC coins have gone down and bled out, you know, 70 or 80%, it's kind of been the opposite side of the coin. And the the LEOs and the OKBS and the B&Bs of the world are up

anywhere from 130% to 390%. Um, so I think that there are these categories, the the three categories that I would that I would watch here, um, are I think L1's are this way. I think actually borrow lend which should see a huge amount of inflow um in in demand from Genius uh and then also literally just exchange tokens. It it might just be that simple. And the challenge there is a little bit different than it's been in the past. You don't just buy the new thing that goes up and then sell it. You have to pick the right winners that are going to compound. Um so it's much more of an like kind of a traditional stock pickers game I think that this is going to turn into. This episode is sponsored by Katana. Katana is a DeFi first chain built for deep liquidity and real yield

by redirecting chain revenue back to active DeFi users. The 1 billion KAT campaign is live. Bridge and deposit directly into vaults in one simple click and start earning immediately on your Ether, Bitcoin, [music] USDC, and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Maybe one contrarian thesis uh that still exists here is when there have been these overfunding cycles in crypto. Uh so that's um it used to be L1's were were like this um infrastructure. It used to be off-chain infrastructure like custodians. There was this massive wave of custodians uh that got sky-high valuations. They tried

to do prime brokerage. Some of them kind of succeeded. Um some of them did succeed, some of them kind of succeeded. Many of them just died. Uh and then and then onchain infrastructure. So all of these, you know, MEV protocols and uh stuff like that. Um historically what ends up happening there is there's a mass overfunding event. Valuations get crazy and then there's this long period of time where a couple winners can grow into their valuations, but there are also um new entrance that emerge that are hungry that have they don't have the same morale or tech debt overhang that the incumbents had. So, I know it's such a hated category, but I actually think that there probably is going to be a next wave of infra companies that do

quite well here. Um, and they're going to be starved of capital because probably everyone's, you know, all the VCs are still pretty overweight infra. So, I think it's a pretty interesting opportunity for some new upand cominging fund that's willing to sift sift through the rubble, you know, uh, uh, as it were. So, I don't know. I think that should be pretty interesting over the course of the next couple years or so. Uh, changing tax a little bit, there was a really interesting piece that came out from Ribbit Capital this week. Um, so Ribbit, uh, I'm sure most of you probably know who they are, but they're really, really sophisticated, really good fintech investors and also crypto

investors. Um, you know, they've crossed the chasm quite successfully. Uh, you know, they backed protocols like the Morphos of the world. I've actually heard nothing but good things in general from the founders that I've spoken to. And they came out with kind of this 40page uh opus. Uh and it's all about the token revolution. And they start with this pretty interesting insight which is they connect the idea of tokenizing um like you've seen in crypto and like we talk about on this podcast all the time with LLM tokens and you know just to walk through the world in the way that they see it is in LLM uh to in LLM tokens are basic units of understanding. So when

you talk to a model like chat GBT uh everything you write gets broken down into these tiny chunks of text that are called tokens. These could be full words, they could be part of words, uh they could be individual letters. Uh but the model doesn't actually see sentences. It sees these long strings of tokens and then it learns patterns between those tokens to protect uh predict the next word. So tokens are how machines um make sense of the world's text. Uh they're kind of the language of machine understanding. In the real world, tokenization is kind of doing that same thing but for everything else.

So, it turns these very messy, you know, off-world or um uh off-chain things uh like human things that are kind of analog uh today like money or identity or contracts or ownership into these discrete digital objects that computers can process and they can reason about. So, in other words, uh tokenizing the world means turning a house deed into a blockchain token or whatever. Um and tokens are how machines make sense of the world itself. So the connection in between these two ideas and what Ribbit is pointing out is that uh these it's the same concept. It's just seen from different angles. So LLMs think in terms of tokens of little packets of meaning.

Um and when you tokenize everything uh machines will have more real world tokens to think with. So in that sense tokenizing the world is extending the LLM paradigm beyond text into life. Um, and it's essentially making everything from thoughts and ideas to individual assets machine readable. Um, and and it's very cool because I think a couple months ago or maybe a year ago, everyone was very interested in this intersection in between AI and crypto. But, you know, mostly what that meant at the time was we're going to find a way to train models um in a distributed way. And there were a number of reasons that just

made that totally impractical. Latency is one. There are many others. Um I think there was a there was a kind of a next generation which which is still going strong. Um which is the attempt to bring inference on chain. I'm still a big believer in that by the way. I think if you can put um inference [clears throat] on chain, you can you can update workflows for for protocols in in a much quicker way um than they've done in the past. And I think that's pretty cool. But anyway, I want to I want to summarize that that's kind of the core thesis of the token revolution in general. Um but they they have this concept of uh you know token factories um which is core to the piece and these token factories um their their idea is that eventually every single company is

going to soon supply build or manage um manage tokens. Uh so uh token factories convert data into more valuable tokens or intelligence and the modes of these businesses are going to change uh in the future and they're going to depend on the proprietary token supply. So, identity memory context they're they're really big on memory, which if you're a user of Chat GBT, the the longer memory window has been massive. Um, at least for me, uh, trusted user relationships and compounding trust flywheels that reinforce data and personalization. And they make this interesting, they they spend a lot of time talking about why now, why are they so interested in this? Um, and a lot of it has to do with cost. So, the cost of

inference has gone down. um like they say a thousandx um in the last three years or so. Uh there's much better infrastructure to build AI agents. Um so things like lang chain, crew AI, that's now plug-and-play. Uh there's an explosion in raw data inputs. Uh this comes from sensors, APIs, synthetic data. To be honest, I'm sure many of these foundation model companies are much better at crawling than they used to be. Um again, the tokenization, payment, and blockchain rails. Um things like that have matured. Um and frankly, there's just so much momentum. There's so much entrepreneurial momentum behind the sector and you know what it actually reminds me of? It reminds me of okay an analogy would be uh 2004 in web 2 and the analogy there would be the dotcom

bubble had just rolled over um there was a lot of uh but but and so you were going through a sense of disillusionment which admittedly you aren't right now in AI at least but at that period of time you're going through a sense of disillusionment at the same time where you had an enormous amount more bandwidth right because all of those telos had invest in invested and laying massive cable to support what they thought were going to be these big internet use cases. Uh so you had disillusionment but you also had way more bandwidth uh and infrastructure and a lot of key problems had had actually been solved and that laid the groundwork for the next big wave of companies to get built like the Ubers of the world um

etc. And I think we're actually at that same moment in crypto um where again a lot of the infrastructure problems have been solved. we have way more availability uh around block space than we've had in the past. The regulatory uh you know uh hurdles have been cleared you know etc. But they they actually see this the same moment happening in AI and it has to do with cost reduction and the reduction of key frictions like the ability to easily build AI agents. Um and so yeah, I think that um the interesting thing for this ribbon piece was me that it connected this moment in time in between crypto and AI. And they had a couple of uh key ideas. So their key ideas, strong beliefs uh loosely

held. They broke it into different categories. So one was sourcing tokens, which is how we feed the machines. So tokenizers is killer apps. So if you use something like granola or something like that uh notetaking and data ingestions um which would the analogy would be basically there's an intern uh but instead of you taking notes the intern is taking notes and they get to build a patient um things like that. Um you also have um you also have or the next big idea is proprietary token suppliers. So firms that control identity, context, access and memory. Uh this would be like a stripe, a plaid or a persona. And I I actually want to take a moment here uh because Stripe at the same time that they're you know kind of talking about

this um Stripe as being a supplier of tokens is also the same time that Stripe is moving into the world of crypto. So Ribbit thinks that the next Stripes or Plaids of the world will be the ones who own the keys to our digital identity. One of the quotes on the piece that stood out to me, uh, it's like these companies have built private mints, but instead of printing money, they meant tokens that say, uh, who you are and what you're allowed to do. And I find this so fascinating because Ribbit is approaching this from the perspective of, uh, tokens, you know, solving problems for LLMs, but at it's the same time that Stripe is moving into actual tokenization of dollars and solving problems there. uh and indirectly it might actually end up solving this

massive issue that we've had in crypto forever which is um how do you get digital ID right and how can you build up things like a credit score on chain and so I I think that we're not far away I know people are reticent about the stripes of the world coming in and I think some of these corpo chains might not do super well but one benefit of the [snorts] groundwork being laid on some of these core core issues is it will build build the building blocks uh or it will create the building blocks that people can use to build um massive companies after this. So anyway, I don't I don't want to summarize the entire piece here. Um I I'll just I'll just kind of uh conclude um with some of their own inclus uh conclusions and um

their investment outlook. But where Rivet is is hunting and where they're in uh interested is their enterprise AI platforms. So vertical token systems for compliance, tax and wealth. Uh identity and data ownership for uh tools for human and agent authentication. Agentic finance and personal advisors which bring advice and execution. Uh tokenized asset infrastructure uh information markets around prediction, content and reputation. Uh and a real world token factories. So hardware comput and energy infrastructure enabling AI. And you know generally I I really like this piece because one it helped me understand uh it it provided this kind of very neat framework which encompasses why AI and crypto are um super interesting and also

how they're related. And also I would just respond to I mean I think there's so much doomerism and gloom in the world that it was really great to read a piece which made me think quite a bit uh like more than I have about um anything in a little while uh but was also so optimistic about the future um and what's happening. So yeah, I'll I'll link it in the in the in the show notes, but yeah, this was a really excellent piece. Shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. Katana is a DeFi first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield.

No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana is launching with notable ecosystem of primitives, [music] assets, and partners like Morpho, Chain Link, and more. Katana's 1 billion KAT campaign is live. Bridge and deposit directly into Vault in one simple click and start earning immediately on your Ether, Bitcoin, [music] USDC, and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Okay. Um, last story that that we can cover I thought was pretty interesting was there was an acquisition uh uh Coinbase acquired Echo. So, this is Kobe's uh platform for um uh

investment platform which is uh crowdfunding. Uh but it's also uh Sonar which is their ICO uh platform as well. So Kobe's been building this for the last two years or so, the acquisition was for $375 million. Uh Coinbase also importantly for listeners of this show, not to advertise another podcast here, but they bought and burned the UP only NFT. So the UP only that cost 25 million. So Ledger is having an extremely good day. Shout out Ledger, who's the real winner here. Um but uh they burned it. So that also means that uh Kobe and Ledger have to produce I think it's 12 more episodes of Up Only or maybe it's eight. But yeah, so if you if you're a fan of Up Only um back in

2021 2022 time frame, then that's really exciting for you. The reason that I think this is interesting is Echo is a Echo and Sonar are are launchpads and you know we've seen an enormous amount of um we've we've kind of seen the launchpads duking it out in the Salana ecosystem. So famously Pump Fun um you know is an example of that but Radium also launched their own uh launchpad. We've seen a little bit of it in the Ethereum ecosystem. So, Zora is is you I really consider a launchpad um albeit for creator coins. Um but I think there's a there's a natural connection um in between exchanges and launchpads and where people used to debate about

this was uh it was a risk for radium uh that eventually ended up materializing which was pump fund is the launchpad but they have the relationship with the user. So if they were to ever to launch their own exchange, which they eventually did in the form of Pump Swap, then they could actually eat a lot of the volume that they're sending to Radium. Now, Radium responded and it moved further up the stack with their own uh launch lab. But yeah, they've been kind of duking it out there, but I think it was what what that showed you was I'm sure many exchanges, and now this this kind of proves it. Uh they were thinking, huh, um maybe there's some natural synergies here. And the question is uh that at least I was asking myself is will it be easier for the launchpads to go down the stack and

launch their own exchange or for the exchanges to go up and to create their own launchpads. And funnily enough, when the debate around Radium versus Pump was going on, it felt like it would be easier to move down the stack because so many people had this relationship with Pump Fund and that's where you went to launch tokens and be in the trenches and do a bunch of silly stuff. But I think that and Metadow is also a part of this story. It at least seems like that era of trenching and memecoins is is changing. Um, I would argue for the better if it were to permanently change, but you know, either way, um, it it seems likely that we're moving away. It seems likely that we're moving away from that. And it sounds

like probably the ICOs of the future might end up being a return to how we originally conceived of ICOs, which was instead of going to venture capitalist for VC, you can raise capital permissionlessly online. Um and in incidentally I think meta is pretty interesting because it provides at least a huge piece that was missing from those token which was uh or those ICOs at the time which was investor rights. Um, so that didn't exist. But, um, anyway, getting back to the relationship here between exchanges and launchpads, it it feels outside of that narrow context of Radium versus Pump Fun, it feels like the exchanges, the big exchanges like the Coinbases and the Binances of the world are the ones that have much more leverage here because let's say in this new model of ICOs, okay, I'm actually a

I'm a founder. I've got an idea for a business. Um, I I initially want to ICO here, but then what I would like to do is I would like my my token to trade on exchanges. Right now, if I'm a good founder, worth my salt. I want to be trading on Coinbase and Binance and OKX uh or whatever. And so, the advantage that I at least see from the Launchpad perspective is, okay, if I have the original what what my real advantage is is probably not the traders, uh, it's it's the um it's the issuers. And what I'd like to do is uh the the scalable business model around exchanges is you want to be the dominant pair for or you want to be the dominant venue for a pair that gets a lot of volume and you can charge a lot of fees for that. And so if

I were one of these early launchpads, I'd be hoping, hey, if I can get to the issuer first and build a relationship, maybe my exchange can it has that much of a better shot of being the dominant trading pair of the next hyperlquid or something like that. Um it just seems unlikely to me that let's say Pump Fund was successful here and they get every next big hyperlquid you know style or uh you know scale coin those those founders are still going to want to launch on every other exchange versus if you were to launch on let's say Coinbase uh Coinbase's launchpad so Echko or Sonar uh it feels likely that Coinbase could lean into that and they could provide

some early incentives, maybe listing it earlier than other exchanges or, you know, providing incentives to trade or something like that and they could actually build and become the dominant venue. So eventually you'd list on Binance and everywhere else, but Coinbase might be might have such a big advantage by that that point that um it doesn't even really matter if they list on other exchanges. So, you know, I think that Coinbase has built something really I I think they've I think frankly they've done uh really really well for themselves. Uh it seems like they're going on a bit of an M&A spree. There was a rumor or there was a Fortune article um that they were going to acquire in the in the the uh late stages of potentially acquiring BVNK, which is a stablecoin infrastructure company

between them and Mastercard. And so I think they're I think they're expanding quite a bit at the moment. But yeah, I thought I thought it was a pretty interesting story uh for and and a pretty big win for Coinbase that they were um you know that they could acquire this and and also it's probably pretty good for them uh to have Kobe uh to have Kobe working for you as well and on your side. I mean that guy's just so um so critical uh to to what crypto's become. Uh and finally, this is this is firmly in the rumor mill. Um but I have heard there there was a flurry of activity. So there was a um you know this uh sort of private uh you know event hosted with the the Federal Reserve uh this week and you had a bunch of industry luminaries

um I saw Kyle uh speaking down there uh Kyle Smani uh but the the word is actually that um clarity um which felt like it was completely off the table by the end of the year um the Democrats have actually turned around and are feeling much more positive to it and it feels like I've heard that there are a lot of calls coming from the White house regularly to uh check up on and get this passed and you know these things swing around and it was looking really good for clarity for a little while then it was looking quite bad but it seems like it's actually looking uh relatively positive again and so yeah I I just I cannot understate how important already I think genius would be and I think clarity will essentially do the same thing for for tokens. Uh, so yeah, I,

you know, I guess to wrap things up, uh, because I don't want to yammer at at all of you for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for too long. Uh, I know that it's just such a funny divide and it's gone on for so long now, but the vibes on crypto Twitter are not super great. Um, to the point where I think it makes less sense to spend time on there than it has certainly in the past for me. Um, but I think that we are really on the precipice of of growth and less of the speculative capital. Pull a whole bunch of money in to buy this thing that might go up 100x, but then it's going to dump and everyone knows it's not valuable. I think the groundwork is being laid here for, you know, the multi-deade run that we've all

been waiting towards or waiting for. And there are going to be winners and losers in that because when you have an industry like that, I think the competition will get more fierce and that'll happen across founders. It'll happen across funds. Uh people will have to change their strategy. They'll have to grow. Some people that did really well in the first 15 years of crypto might not do as well in the next 15 years of crypto. But I also think it's going to create so many opportunities. And I think many people got into this space. I mean, one note that's a little bit bittersweet is and a prediction that I would have is I think some of the early ideologues are are probably going to churn in the next maybe five years or so because we're at the point where the industry is reaching mainstream adoption

and there are going to most likely have to be compromises made. Now, I would argue there already have been compromises made um if you were to just look at the architecture even of open source uh you know platforms like Salana or Ethereum. uh but they'll definitely have to get made increasingly as we onboard institutional capital and activity. But what we'll get for that is well I think finally people are excited about creating products that touch people's lives and have a meaningful impact on the world. You know much more so than even what we've been doing in the past. Arguably Bitcoin is really the Bitcoin and stable coins are the two things that have done that. Um I would argue more so than than really anything else so far. So, but I but I think that the compromises that we'll need to

onboard these these new entrance and that activity will offend the sensibilities of uh some of the earlier stalwarts of this industry and people can decide for themselves if it's worth it to stay or not. Um but I I think that we'll probably see some people question crypto and why we're here at the same time, you know, that we really start to win as an industry. um which you know it happened in the internet and it will most likely happen in crypto too. But I mean that in in a really positive way because I I feel like we're absolutely on the verge of just a really really exciting couple of decades um working in this space. All right guys, I think

that's that's all for this week. Uh Michael and Vance miss you guys and we'll see you all next week. Cheers everyone.