Token Transparency and The Hot Ball of Money (Hyperliquid/Circle) | Weekly Roundup

Transcript

Hyperliquid is the best trading venue that people to your point has captured the mind share in this rerun of a cycle after the last like year. So can this approximate Salana as 100 billion fully del market cap? Absolutely. This is 3x from here. Hyper liquid at 100. I wouldn't flinch twice. This episode is brought to you by Geodet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network delivering real time centimeter accurate positioning around the globe. You'll hear more about them later in the episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial

advice or necessarily the views of Block Works. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds or projects discussed. What's up everybody? Happy Friday. Welcome back to the roundup. We got Santi and me. How we doing Santi? Uh doing good. you know, uh excited to finally uh see the what you guys have been cooking there for a while. Launch day, baby. It is launch day. The best day. Actually, we're recording this on Wednesday. So, you're listening on Friday, two days after launch day, baby.

But yeah, we just launched the token transparency framework today. Um, pretty cool. What do you think as an outsider? I mean, I can I can share, but what do you think? I mean, I I saw it immediately. My my you know how I feel like we've been talking about this for a while. I think it is one of the biggest opportunities in crypto because it is probably top two or three problems that we have as an industry. It's almost like we're open source as an industry. We but we do have a lot of room to grow in terms of standardizing reporting and disclosures to create market integrity and fairness. And that's like the most important thing. If if we really want to grow up as an industry, you need to have that. And I'm so happy to see you guys deliver on that. I mean, we were talking

about it earlier this year and you know, um, yeah, I think it it's one of those things that can can have so much potential. Uh, and I I don't think there would be anyone out there that would disagree that it is needed. I think some people might argue, hey, other people have tried to do this before, like why are you guys why is it different this time? I think like when I initially tweeted about it a while ago, everyone's like, oh, Misari tried to do this and so and so and so. I I do think that um it is a great framework um and it has the potential to truly at the right time you know what I mean like this is very much needed where we are as an industry but uh yeah why don't you tell us more about it I mean what went into it what do you

guys see the amount of I did see a lot of really good projects initially get behind it which I think is one of the most important things yeah so we launched all right so we launched this thing called the token transparency framework this is um so the the problem that we saw in the industry is that there's um there's all these backroom dealings, right? There's backroom dealings. There's no um uh here the better way to describe it is there's there's kind of a mistrust of tokens at this point in the market. industry's been around for 15 years and I think pe if people are investing in tokens there's this underlying feeling of like mistrust in the tokens and mistrust in the markets and everyone just kind of says like ah yeah these markets are kind of you know the information's hidden like people do backroom deals like the

OTC deals and market maker deals and yeah I don't really know how much like you know circulating supply really exists like h but it's crypto and token markets we just see that as a fundamental flaw in the market today, I'd say. And I mean, yeah, like when you were at the Blockworks office a while ago, we were talking about this. It's like I actually feel like 2025 is a growing up year in the industry. Like there's a real line in the sand, right? There's IPOs happening. There's consolidation happening. And I would say bringing transparency to token markets is another thing that just needs to happen, especially like you have all these public crypto vehicles, which we can talk about more. We've been talking about them a while, but like for a while, but like one of the reasons they're so interesting is you get the

regulations and legal frameworks and disclosures of public of public entities. And so, you know, I'm sure you have a lot of these conversations with institutional investors. A lot of them at this point, I mean, it's very different than when you were at Parfy. Like, at when you were at Parfy, people didn't like crypto markets. Now, people like crypto markets. they just refuse to allocate to tokens because there's so much um so much like behind closed door stuff. So yeah, we we launched this token transparency framework. Um it's an open source framework uh open source disclosure framework that we created. Um the thought is like you want to so we we launched with six tokens six projects aerodyome Jupiter morpho radium and stride and what it looks like I can show you this

uh this is what the framework looks like. So it's a 12 12page report. This is the one for jetto. So we're judging them on 18 different criteria des uh you know disclosure of revenue streams what's the relationship between the equity and the token disclosure of advisory billings to the foundation governance and token documentation provided vest insider vesting initial allocation. So like we go through all these different things and and we give them a score. So initially we launched with six people who we thought were doing a really good job. The fun part is going to be there's people who are going to add who are not doing such a good job. uh these people all rated you know 30 you know stride is a 38 out of 40 radium's a 38 out of 40 Jupiter is a 38 jetto's a 39 and we wanted to celebrate

the people who are doing a really good job and very transparent the next thing that will come is people who are not so transparent so that's when it gets fun that's great I mean so what you're going to be Moody's for crypto I mean look you said it yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of business models that you can build on which by the way is a fantastic business model for anyone that doesn't know radio agencies print. Yeah. Yeah. Moody Moody's made seven seven half billion dollars last year alone. Um so yeah there's a lot of business models we are very importantly we actually you know we had a conversation like should we take money to list basically and very very very importantly we decided no um and I think that's key here. So you actually saw this a couple years a you

know probably remember 2017 2018 there were two different types of exchanges. Some exchanges got paid for listings and some didn't. And anyone who got paid for listings, they're they're not really around. Like Coinbase wasn't taking money for listings. And the re and we we feel the same way. Like you can't So anyways, no one can pay to get listed here. You can't pay to have your score changed or whatever. So I think that's very there's a lot of upfront there's a lot of easy money you could make there, but obviously we're not going to do that. So a couple things come to mind. One, uh how often is this going to be updated? like um if there's a material change in any of these categories per project like who's so what's interesting is actually I mean we're updating this in real time so one one of these

launched at a 35 and they they literally go oh my they DM'd us they go oh my god I didn't realize how much traction this was going to get uh we're going to share an advisor to foundation deal that we've never disclosed with anyone before um so that you so that it and and actually that's that pulled their score up from a to like a 38. So look, and that that's millions of dollars in that deal had never been disclosed to public crypto markets before. And now because of this, it's you know, they said, "Shoot, we don't want to be a 35, we want to be a 38." So right, it pulled them up. Um, are you guys going to provide alerts to if you're a subscriber of changes and like because Moody's a lot of what when I was at whatever like you get a report

by Moody's like, "Hey, we're downgrading or we're upgrading the, you know, Mexican government bought and they have like a write up about it. So yeah, we we don't have an API business yet, but I will say that is something that is, you know, probably with a business model like ours probably makes sense. So um this this would be something that would that's that's one business model that could come from this, I'd say. Um there and then and then yeah I mean the the most interest we've gotten is from law firms actually who want to include this stuff in legal documents like when like basically let's say you're setting up your new foundation or or DAO or protocol whatever it is like you should just set think about this framework when

you're setting it up and then actually once you set it up just send send us the info and we'll we'll add it. Uh listings teams at exchanges have been reaching out a lot. um listings teams basically still have no framework for like do we list this or do we not and you've seen folks like Coinbase oscillate between like we're listing everything to like we're not listing anything and we have a listings team that makes decisions versus like the market makes decisions and I think this gives a really easy like third party way for listings teams to be like all right we're just using the block works transparency framework um and so listing teams are really excited about this and actually funds are very excited so you saw we got nice messages from I mean several the top venture funds in the industry. Like if I

were a fund or I'd be dictating terms, I would make sure that it was like part of the docs where it's like you have to commit to token transparency. Exactly. So you're scrolling through this. Oh, there's this is crazy. Look at the response. 220 people like quote tweeted it and said good things. So yeah, here's here's Panta um saying that it's essential infrastructure for the industry. You had DVA Um, uh, you had Dragonfly. So, yeah, people people seem very excited about it.

Yeah. What, um, this was cool. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm just thinking ahead like is there going to be a way for someone to contest the score? Um, yeah, people can cont member, if you're like I don't know if it's people can contest their score. It's a very there's a very easy and if someone wants to contest their score, we would love that because what does that actually mean? We we we rate someone a 20 out of 40. They're like, "Guys, this is ridiculous." We're like, "Great. You rated a zero out of three on insider vesting. Um there's no visibility into your insider vesting. Send us your insider vesting contracts and we'll happily improve your score by three

points." So there there's other things. So um actually this is the first time in history venture anthropologist has uh said a nice thing about Blockwork. Thank you, uh, balloon lover. Um, but he he had a good point. He said, "Look, cool initiative. The next step is some form of enforcement or verification." So, that's that's obviously phase two. Um, that I will say, you know, we hadn't shared this until until today, but um I I sent this tweet. I said, "If you're going to do something, you might as well go all the way." So, we actually met with the SEC on Friday about this. And um you can see the agenda here. So, it was us, uh, Rebecca Reddig, um, and, and and and and and and and and and, and, and, and I didn't go, but, it was Mike, Dan, and Ryan from Blockworks.

And we covered, you can actually see the agenda because it's the SEC, so they have to share the agenda publicly. So we covered like why issuer disclosure, why market maker disclosures, um presentation of disclosures, um C SEC, CTF feedback, presentation of disclosures, presentation of the scoring system, um and then uh and so for both the token transparency framework and then there's actually some market maker disclosure stuff that we want to start to add in here too. Um and so there there's there's a lot coming. So I I will say I think this framework will start to get rolled out across legal firms. um exchanges, venture firms will just request that we're actually seeing our dashboards become a requested thing from venture funds as people are

raising. They're like, "Hey, I don't trust your data. Can you have Blockworks build it?" Like, "Let me see the Blockworks dashboard for this." And so, I think that'll start to happen for uh token disclosures, too. It's like, "Hey, can like I see you're not on the token disclosure framework. Like, just just send me a ping once you're up there so we can see how transparent you are." Right. Let me fire off a couple questions at someone that might be like skeptical or not know much about it. Um, if you go back to like the the criteria real quick, this thing. Yeah. So, say like, okay, uh, market structure like or financial disclosures like what goes into that?

Um, that's a good question. So, let's look at like, um, we can actually pull it up. So, which one do you want? Um, okay, let's pull this up. Market structure. So, do we have information on insider and related person transactions? So, how this actually works is we like a zero would be the project does not commit to disclosing related party transactions within 30 days. A three would be the project commits to disclosing related party transactions. Um, for anyone that doesn't know, related party means anyone that's an insider or an affiliate or Right. Exactly. Um, prior token sales and fundraising. Zero would be no prior sales are disclosed. A one would be all

prior sales are disclosed but terms are absent. A two would be prior sales are disclosed and the terms are provided to us. Um yeah I mean there's a bunch of other stuff. So public token holder relations reports right. So what this means we we define all of these. The foundation's assets or working capital are held onchain and publicly labeled providing the ability to track asset holdings revenue and expenses. Um, so a one would be foundation wallets are not labeled. A two would be treasury wallets are tagged but the revenue and expense flows are incomplete or fragmented. And a two would be wallets that touch any assets or revenue streams are labeled on chain with clear traceable expenses and they

have quarterly reports detailing assets revenue and expenses. So what this does is it forces them to send it to us. We audit everything and then we actually make that information public. So you're not trusting block works like we we we thought about this for a while like because you it feeds directly into a dashboard, right? You can just create a dashboard of all this stuff. Yeah, exactly. Actually, I mean from a I will say from a business model perspective, that's a that is the business model. It it it's uh it's it also gets people to self-report to us. So it feeds into our data business quite well. Yeah. You this is the key. You you you self-report. You want to be you want to be you guys are doing upfront work to rate something for free but of course there are dashboards

there's data that will be constantly provided because of this intake right so here I'll give you a really good example of this so this is the um uh this is the radium see this is the radium report right here so radium reported uh scored very highly they got 38 out of 40 and if you look at let's see I'll just pull up anything like they're sending us a bunch of different they're they're sending us a bunch of different info, multi-IG holders, buybacks, buyback details, treasury information, all that kind of stuff. And then this flows right here's like vest uh insider tokens and like how much they're vested that flows into analytics. If you go into our analytics

platform, Raid Radium, um where is this thing? Oh here finance. I got to make that search better. So then this there it's no surprise the radium dashboard is so so so complete, right? So you can go in here, you can see all the fin. So then we build this dashboard off of kind of what they send us, right? So this dashboard has all the financials, all information on their token, all trading volume information, um TVL of their pools, pool activity, who are the LPs, what are the LPs doing, who are the traders, la, I don't know much about launch lab. Oh, this is like tokens that

are launching and graduating. So anyways, that flows into here, which then drives subscription revenue, etc., of course the big the bigger business. Um the verification um what to what confidence interval to back to that an venture anthropologist post? I could imagine a lot of people saying like hey now we're trusting you guys to do all the verification who like to what degree of confidence do you think like you're able to provide a pretty complete picture? Um, look, I mean there's there's a piece of like people lie and emit info and like look I mean that at some point is I guess could show up in the data in some way, shape or form. Yeah, unaccounted tokens,

unaccounted movements. There's three angles to this. There's punishment by social like you have social capital, there's punishment by the law, and then there's our ability to actually assess this. So punishment by social capital. Um that's kind of just the industry saying look that they they lied or whatever. That's like that's been a thing we but the industry so far has only had punishment by social capital. The next is yeah we are I mean working with folks like the SEC and different you know different people to say uh hey look if if you lie on this it's it's illegal you know it's you're not allowed to lie on this thing. Um and then the third is uh we're actually building out

a team. So, if you think about like an a the probably the best comp here, you have two comps. One is like the Moody's business model, but actually like the audit firms are a decent comp, too. It's like, can you lie to an audit firm? You can, but if it's a really good audit firm, they're actually going to find it because they they're the best in the world at like following the trail of capital. So, we're h we have we're about to open up these job positions for people on the token transparency team. It's a new team we're going to create and we're going to hire cryptonnative auditors. So like an auditor like audit people from big four firms who also are crypto native. It's going to be hard hard people to hire but um so that when someone says hey these are the foundation tokens we can actually see if

those are all of the foundation tokens you know. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And then and then of course like uh yeah I mean like an audit firm would provide like um at the at the beginning of any financial statements audited financial statements they provide like a letter of what is it the where they like vouch to the integrity of the data or sometimes they have going concerns and when they have going concerns like the market kind of like reads that into yeah okay there's something here and they dump the the stock pretty heavily gets impacted by that. Exactly. It's also our trust is on the line, right? So if we are unsure of something, we will just rate it lower and we'll be like, look, it's not clear like you need to make it. The owner is

on them to to furnish more information to Exactly. It's not on if we're like if we're actually we have that right now. We're unsure of something and we gave someone a one out of three and they're like, hey, we it's why is it only one out of three? We gave it to you. We're like, it's a little unclear. Like if you want if you want a three out of three, make it more clear. Give it to us. This is great. Thanks, man. very very good initiative. I'm you know how I feel about this. It's uh it Okay, so now you have six teams give or take. Yeah, we have six. We've received 57 inbounds. Um there you go. In 4 hour in three and a half hours. So uh I would guess by the time people are listening to this on Friday, we'll receive a couple hundred.

Um so yeah, hopefully makes the industry more transparent. Amazing. Uh, how quickly did you guys build this? Um, or or it was a sprint. I mean, you recommended that we do this. That was like probably six months ago or something, maybe four or five months ago. And actually, um, it was really bottoms up initiative at Block Works where I mean Mike and I were just like, we're too busy to take something else on. And, um, we're like, we're too busy to take something else on. Ryan is our head of research. Dan is our head of data. They were like, "We need to do this. The market like needs this." And we're like, "No, no, no. Too many initiatives. Focus, focus, focus.

Let's get like our dashboard. We're launching new things soon in the data space." We're like, "Let's get those shipped, stuff like that shipped." And then and then we can do this. And honestly, this is a lesson learned for Mike and I. Uh the market was just pulling demand out of us here. And so Ryan and Dan basically bulldozed our decision and said, "We're going to we're going to do this. We're going to work nights and weekends and we're just going to make this happen." And you know, Mike, Mike, I I didn't do anything. Mike Mike's Mike was pretty involved in this one, but it was really Ryan and Dan and Mike started to get on calls and people we realized the market really really wanted this. And um yeah, so it was kind of a went from a nights and weekends. It was a couple honestly probably a month

to of just all out sprint, seven days a week sprinting at this. Yeah. Plus you guys have distribution. Again, I'll say time again, once you have distribution, you can layer on more products and and the time to roll out products and and the ability to tap into your existing customer base and develop something is powerful. It's funny, Mike called me today. He's like, can we just because this is this is definitely the best received launch in the history of Block Works. I mean, the the post in and of itself has 200,000 views, 600 likes, like 225 people have quote tweeted or retweeted or whatever. um easily the best receive and Mike calls me. He's like, "Can we just appreciate that?"

Like, you know, we we used to we used to DM like a hundred people on launch day and we'd get like three people to like like it. I was I was laughing with Mike this morning. I was like, I I specifically remember a post in 20 in 2018 where we made an event post and Mike Dudis retweeted it and we were like, "Oh my god, Dudis retweeted it. Like, this is amazing." And yeah, and and here you are, you know, now it's seven years later, but I I you didn't even pick me. I was I was waiting for I'm like I think I heard him say it was going to come on Monday and I I went I was in Amsterdam for a conference. Um I was like where is it? Like why haven't they announced it? Uh and then I saw it like I was at the gym and I saw it like

within 20 minutes of the post. I was like immediate like Yeah, you were like the first person to I appreciate that. So I'm pumped. Here we go. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a very small investor in Block Works. Uh, but I I genuinely believe this this is what's needed. You know, I mean, market integrity. This episode is brought to you by Geonet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real time centimeter accurate positioning around the globe. Powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics. Geodet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By

delivering realtime centimeter level accuracy, Geodet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, nononsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's chief investment officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take

the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one. The Bitwise weekly CIO memo is really worth the five minutes of your time. Check it out at bitweisinvestments.com/cio memo/mpire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. We have permissionless. We'll talk more about it at permissionless. So if anyone's if anyone's coming um we have a booth of like token booth. We have we have a booth. We have a Blockworks booth

or a Block Works research booth. We have like all of I mean we have I think we have like 50 Blockworks people coming to Permission List. So come find us at the booth. We'll be hanging um Yeah. So come did you see our video that we launched by the way this week? No. You don't see every single tweet that we make. Look at this. Um, shaming me public. So, public praise, private shame, sir. Oh, yeah. I'll send you this video afterwards because you can't hear the sound right now. No, no, I did see this. I did see this. So, we So, the Koshi uh the prediction market put out a video and they were like, "We used" They were like, "We used VO, the new um uh we used VO 3, the new Google like

software, the new Google AI thing to create this video." And I sent it to our head of creative. I was like, "Yo, this is dope." And in two days, he created a full video with like sound and images and there's a full commercial in two days. And actually, we'll link to the thread. This guy Reed Hannerford is our head of creative. Um, and he he wrote up like everything that he did, all of his prompts. So, it's it's really cool. People should go check that out. That's awesome. You also launched something that I was like poking around over the weekend, which was the the like the rating tool. Oh, story score. Dude, that was awesome. I was like, I want to know how poorly my delivery Oh my god. Should we Should we do this and Should we do

this right now? Should we um Yeah, let's do it. All right, you're gonna Here, we'll Oh. Oh, YouTube. It doesn't work. There you go. All right. So, yeah, I built this thing using Replet AI. I I keep raving about this thing. It's like a magical tool and uh it rates how good of a storyteller you are. It's better for like presentations, but I just input uh our token transparency podcast episode that we released today with our head of data and some other folks. And uh so it's analyzing the content right now. So basically what it does, it processes the audio, it transcribes it, and then it tells you how good of a story it is. So look at this. So 71 out of 100. The hook is a 20 out of 25. The emotion is a 15. Structure is 18.

Delivery is 18. And it tells you, it says it's a podcast. Here are the four speakers. Um, we got dinged one point for filler words. It tags it token transparency, investment cryptocurrency industry analysis, and finance. It gives you the Oh, I just added this. This is a fun part. What are the drop off points? So, at 11:40, it says the complexity of equity versus token risk may cause loss of attention. Uh, and then at 56 minutes, extended discussion of best case scenario with heavy detail might fatigue listeners. It's pretty cool. And then key storytelling moments. So, it's really cool for like if you give a presentation. I had This is what sparked this. I gave a presentation. I was like, I have no idea how I did. I'm never

going to know how I did. So, I wanted I wanted a tool to put that in. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Should we talk about crypto news? Wait, we crypto podcast. Um, let's talk about crypto news. Strong hook. Strong hook. Poor structure. No emotional peak. speaking. Honestly, I'm like a Yeah, I got I got no emotional hook here. Um, all right. Crypto news. Crypto news. Stable coin news. Stablecoin bill passed the Senate. Um, which is pretty dope.

Genius. Genius bill. Um, I think everyone kind of expected this to happen. So, I'd say like, you know, the price quote unquote was baked in. Although, u, so anyways, Genius Act passed the Senate 6830. Very exciting. Next up is the reason this is exciting is Mark now we can move on to market structure. So that that's awesome. Have you seen the price of circle uh 138 180 182. It's wild. It went public at 30. 30. Look at the look at this chart. 6x. Can you explain this to me?

Like actually what what do you make of this? Why are people I mean this thing's up 6x. It's like what what did we say? Two market cap is 44. What's the market cap of Coinbase? 55 60 72 now. Yeah. I mean it Oh, let's go. 286. Go the same timeline today. Up 12%. Uh tokenized stock. So that that's why it's rallying I think. Go uh monthly. Oh my god. For which one? Coinbase. So Circle is up 6x. Um it was I think it's added 10 billion in market cap a lot of that today. Um but you know clearly I mean I think it's like extreme left

curve. It's like people this is another asset they can add to their crypto public market exposure but starting from a smaller base. They need a way to long stable coins right and there's no way just like it's a simple thesis of long bunch of trad people start buying USDC. They're like, "Why isn't this thing going up?" Like, ah, I mean, look, uh, are people really digging into and doing a lot of analysis on the like the revenue and the contract with Coinbase and their uh, you know, J, it's interesting because JP Morgan lo like was what is it piloting their stable coin to JPMC or something? You JPMD JPMD JPMD. You would have thought that Circle

would have respond like reacted negatively to that right again more competition more distribution of JP Morgan USC's market share goes down and their revenue and profitability goes down and yet the market No but it's validation think of how many people don't believe that we're still in the area where people don't believe so every time something like this happens it's like oh these stable coin things are actually real 100% like that when you're in the crypto trenches for too long you just assume that everyone understands these things and and now it's like you know the logical like response is like no just JP Morgan just validated stable coins the only way to express that view today in the public markets a circle boom up bid bid bid so do you think that

the next so all right so we've got like Gemini filed bullish filed um there's some other people I think about to file do you think these I like let's say let's say Gemini let's say Gemini went public tomorrow. Is that just an auto buy? Is it a trade or an investment? A trade. Yeah. It's got to be just a smash the buy right? Yeah. Yeah. Just get an allocation. Try to get an allocation or buy immediately as soon as the list. Yeah. Not not financial advice, but I mean, look, uh, go back to Coinbase.

Do all time max. Do max. Uh, no, that's not right. Yeah. Yeah, it is. No, no, it's not. The opening day it went up dramatically and then and then I think what I'm trying to Yeah. Like I wanted to look at more precise here. I'll have because what I'm trying to say is I'll open Trading View Coinbase Max. If you look at Trading View all time. Yeah. Here. People are about to see how bad I am at using Trading View. [Music] Let me cut all these things out. Okay.

You have it open there. Where is it? You do all in the bottom. Bottom left. No, I know. I can't see it. Oh, there it is. Oh, you Yeah. Do you do adjust? Go top. Bottom right. ADJ. All then go bottom right. ADJ. Adjust. Adjust. Oh, no. No. Sorry. That's dividend. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, that is that's what I'm trying to say. Like it Oh, yeah. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It went from 300, it popped all the way to 429. That was pretty dramatic because it went down like a circle is only continue to go up 6x. But um look, I mean, you might be in a dynamic where, you know, again, is it a trade or an

investment? Are you willing to hold Coinbase at 40? What is it? 45 billion trading at uh what multiple a lot. I don't know. Yeah. So again, I'm not comfortable at this level. Um I feel better about some like Coinbase more reasonably valued, some like Robin Hood more reasonably valued. Yeah. Um, and but but yeah, look, I think there's a whole set of like just funds that their own strategies to like buy new listings. You know what's funny? I was uh for the first time and you know, remember especially when it was harder to get money on chain, you'd have you'd be like, "Oh man, I need like you'd be like waiting for like a wire to hit into your Coinbase account. Then you

could so you could move money from Coinbase into like MetaMask or something like that." For the first time in history, I was like, I need to get more money out of my crypto wallets and into my brokerage account so that I can start buying these public entities. Yeah. Um, what do you think this does? Because it's interesting because, uh, pick your token of flavor. Bitcoin, maybe not Bitcoin, but like Ethereum, Salana. We're in this like dynamic where like the market's not rallying as much that tokens.

What do I think it does to ETH or just like if you look at the relative price performance over the last since since coin went since uh circle went public and you compare that against like pretty much any token on chain is vastly outperformed right? like Coinbase, Circle, the relative performance of Coinbase, Circle, and then pretty much any token like you would have been vastly more vastly outperformed by having exposure to Coinbase. Public market crypto exposure is outperforming cryptonative token exposure. And and the question is, does that persist? Because we have a pipeline of IPOs, you have

liquidity, you have less like Like I know what you're saying. Does all the return just still stay in these public vehicles? Right. The way I read it is putting aside the public vehicles that are just warehousing tokens. I don't think that persists. I think that there's varying views of how long this persists. I think it's clear to people that like the music will stop for most of them. Absent micro strategy maybe, right? But um um I I think that yeah the as you have more public the public will express their views through the public markets. I think that out vastly outperforms tokens. And honestly this might be like a a same dynamic as

you had the the the grayscale premium but with less financial engineering. There's something so powerful about people reading the legitimacy of being a public market company is strong particularly in an industry that still gets discounted. Right? If you walk into your PM's office and you say, "Hey, we should uh buy Salana." He's like, "What?" But we should buy Circle because these things, stable coins are going to dominate fintech. And so the PM that now covers tech and fintech is very much on board. that PM that allocator is not coming on chain.

Yeah, I don't think they need to come on chain. Um I so I think everyone's about to Hive had a great tweet about like the hot ball of money is now public public equities I guess you would say like crypto crypto public equities and these treasury companies. I I think I think that's true for maybe six to 12 months. But I think I I think the the mania that we're seeing in equities will eventually spill over into the coins. Yeah, that's that's what I think. Uh uh but again, like in what version I guess I guess the temptation in crypto's always been it doesn't take that much liquidity to drive ETH and sold prices.

Uh okay. Set said differently, right? We'll we'll see where Tron We got to talk about Tron Trump kind of like vehicle in a minute. Park that thought. Back to this. How much of billions of market cap has circle added over the last couple of trading sessions? And if you take like public, you know what a good dashboard should be for you guys? give me public market crypto exposure and the aggregate market cap of that and that includes you can filter by pure crypto like that's basically Coinbase uh circle you can have crypto crypto enabled strategies like uh that includes all the public holding like soul strategies and then that includes also like Robin Hoods of the world um and

then you can filter by revenue profitability like that's a good one and then and then you could say how much and and then you could have a really good metric of like like almost like a dominance score which is like um god you can do so much uh but you could be like what percentage of market cap has been added this week in the public markets for pure crypto exposure versus how what percentage of market cap has been added to everything except Bitcoin uh how many flows have gone through like Bitcoin ETFs and related strategies and micro strategy how much flows have gone on chain like I want to know that because that's good I like that yeah that's a good idea we should do that and and then you can have like the 13Fs like major funds holding circle uh major funds holding thing like in the episode with

Rob and and uh and uh Dieago Diego Dieago we were talking I asked them the question like who's buying this thing who's buying the soul strategies and micro strategies versus who's buying Coinbase and Circle and their response which I agree with is is very different very different type of investor so I always want to see like who's buying this who's on 13F who are the major holders what are they doing are they selling positions are they adding um and then do we have any info on on chain analytics and I mean that that would be like I mean you can see in the in the filings who's buying these things. It's like the same funds over and over again.

Yeah. What is it like Black Rocks or the world or I mean your guys have Pary. Well yeah Parifi is very active. Yeah. In the in the corporate uh corporate treasure. Yeah. In the corporate things. Oh you're saying who's buying Circle? Yeah. Like who's buying Circle? Who's buying Coinbase retail? I don't I don't know. I really don't know. But anyways this is Steve. Yeah, I'm going. This was the hive tweet here. Let me share this. He said, "Every every cycle founders chase the fireball of hot money. Last cycle it meant launching a token uh crypto capital crypto capital markets were white hot.

This cycle it's bringing your token to the stock market. All lot treasury companies, but hot money never stays put, which is why treasury companies will not be the final meta. But I'd guess one to two years of this until the heat dies down. I I would take the other side of I don't think it's one to two I agree with this whole tweet until the one to two years thing. I think um markets are just moving faster than ever and like metas don't stay metas for two and a half years. So yeah I I I think this will be like I don't know we got rest of the year basically bunch of companies go public bunch of token structures happen. I mean I saw Hyperliquids doing something today.

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Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Can we talk can we talk hyperlid actually? Uh yep. Do you have takes? Uh, what about the coin? I don't We talked about this last week, I think. Do you own Hype? No. No. Rather, unfortunately to my demise, ladies and gentlemen, uh, I do not currently own Hype.

Would you think about buying Hype now? Uh, I don't have any time. If anyone wants to come manage my public positions, please do. Otherwise, I will just hold for life. Um there's a good there's a good comment. Go to Simon uh from Moonrock's Twitter. And then there's a there's um good response in there. Oh, Anom's response. Yeah, Ansums is pretty good response, I think. All right, here. Pull this up. Okay, so Simon said, oh my lord, Simon tweets a lot. Um, Simon said to the haters, "I love

Hyperlid. I genuinely appreciate everything they've built and honestly believe it's one of the best projects in all of crypto. But seriously, who's buying hype at nearly 50 billion? How is the riskreward ratio still even remotely reasonable here? If you think this is going to 500 billion, so 10x, I'd actually love to hear a constructive take on why you believe it's it'll be worth more than ETH and Soul combined. And even if you don't think it's going to 500 billion, then what the hell are you even doing? So that's the that's I mean that's kind of the question I was cons asking for you like hype is running. He sent this at 45 bucks. It's at like 40 I think it's at 39 today. Um Anom had a good response. Let me see if I can summarize it because it's pretty long.

Uh Anom Ansom I'll summarize this. Anom responded said riskreward is there because it's the fastest growing product in crypto's most profitable vertical and the leaders by comparison make 10 billion a year. Uh make 10 billion a year. So he's talking about the exchanges. He said 45b FDV is approximate 30% of the team 40% future community allocation 30% circulating um something about them not taking outside venture money. He said since the protocol makes a billion a year annualized 97% goes uh into the ecosystem through token buybacks it's unlikely the team will need to exit via selling their token when they've demonstrated doing the opposite. Um so

anyways he said why does it have upside said most dominant per exchange HIP3 um in other markets HIP basically allows external parties to stake a million in hype which means they can then go create their own purpose market on the exchange um hyper gambling culture hypervm which is their L1. So I don't know. I know you're not you don't like um Okay. So So like let's just I I Perplexity was my friend. Uh I said give me like exchange volume profitability and then overlay that with Hyperlid. So like Binance does roughly 15 billion of volume, right? Um you have other products and Hyperlid does um 7 billion. So like half of that

give or take. Yeah. Sure. I was I was trying to back into like because you have B&B, right? B&B captures some Oh, here here hyperlquid is currently doing 90% of all decentralized purchase volumes but remains 10% of Binance volume, 20% of buy volume. Yeah. Exactly. Like Binance. So, so again, you're trying I'm trying to back into like B&M is a 93 billion coin. There is only a subset of the profitability of Binance goes to burning B&B, right? I forget the exact measure that that's a comparison in my mind. It's like what are the crypton native investors, crypto markets valuing B&B relative to hyperlquid and and how does that translate into um like KPIs like volume of Binance and the burn of B&B, volume of Hyperlid and the burn of of um and

the burn of of hype. Um and and I think like again like the percentage B&B is not a direct exposure to Binance, right? because it's only a fraction of in the same way that hyperl only burns a certain percentage, right? But I think that that would be the way I would approach valuing these things and and seeing what kind of reasonable valuation this thing has. Can Hyper Liquid be worth as much as B&B? You'd have to back into that relationship, right? Profitability exchange how much B&B gets in ter via burn. Actually, let me just do that quick while you do something else.

Are you giving me ship or doing something else right now? I was pulling up what the what the pers tokens like dydx did in the last market. Yeah, but there's also scarce seed value. There's no been there hasn't been any breakout per decks uh up until hyperl arguably of like reasonable consistent volume. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. No, there I mean there have been breakout per taxes but no none where they people genuinely talked about them competing with sexes. Okay. B&B. Binance uses up to 20% of quarterly profits to buy B&B. How much does Hyperlid, what is it, 40%.

Um 97%. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Hyperlid's bought back $350 million of hype so far, I think, which is now worth like 750 million. Plus, also like the the operating structure. This is actually quite fascinating, right? Like if you if you compare like uh Hyperlquid cost structure versus Binance cost structure, there's clearly vastly different operating models. You know how many engineers Hyperliquid has? 15 20 10. Yeah, that's like the most efficient. They're like such a crack team. You're right. That's what I'm saying. So like again, although you know where else I use that argument was FTX, but uh I will tether tether to right. video. Uh any anyways like so so Hyperlid is a vastly vastly leaner machine. Fees are so

they're burning fees which um I guess the team retains a 3% and that is used to cover all expenses plus their own token allocation. I'm not sure. I don't know where the other 3% goes. It's a vastly more efficient thing, right? Because Binance has a huge overhead structure is a massive organization has vastly more. So when you think about like BMBB again um uses up to 20. So let's just at face value assume okay they're they're burning um they're buying back 20% of B&B every quarter based on their profits. The profitability of Binance is vastly lower right than Hyperlid.

Um, and so it doesn't take hyperl doesn't need to make as much uh volume uh to to be I guess valued um you know higher than um than Binance like B&B the so so like I said differently hyperlink doesn't have to do as much volume um I guess that would be the math that I would want to do I don't want to do it live my lane can't compute right now but uh that's how I would approach it. So, I have been buying a bunch of Hype um I've been buying Hype all the way in the 30s.

It's now my third biggest liquid holding um non non-stock and uh so a I share that because we're trying to get better about disclosures and stuff like that. So, if I'm like shilling Hyperlid on the podcast, you know why. Um but my the my thesis for this is um there's like the mid-curve thesis I think which is like or there's here here's my thesis. Um they have the two two things the market wants right now. No VCs and a bunch of buybacks. They also if you look at the custodian exchange uh the custodian support and the exchange listings still very early. So like very very little exchange listings hardly any uh big custodians support them. They've got yeah the no VC narrative and the

buybacks. Um, but I think they have this like one intangible thing that very few people in crypto have ever been able to achieve, which is they've been able to make a massive amount of retail users very rich. Yeah. Um, clearly did. It's it's Ethereum did it and Salana did it. And hardly anyone else has been able to achieve that at scale. So, uh, that actually gives me it makes it moves it from a trade to an investment because why did people why did Salana like stay through the bare market like when it went down from like 250 down to like 10 bucks, people stayed. And the reason they stayed is cuz it had at one point in time gone from like a dollar to 260.

And a lot of people made life-changing amounts of money. And you just attach your you kind of not only attach your reputation, your brand, but like emotionally you get attached to the thing. And I think Hyperlid has that and it's made tens of thousands of individuals. I mean, you and I both know people who made tens of millions from that airdrop and that that's life-changing. So, what um what uh is the best the inflation curve for Hyperlquid? Oh, I don't I don't know these complex questions, Santiago. No, like that's what I Like what is cuz again when you this this is the thing that I look as much as I like coin geko like why why can't you show me what is the the of course it's the buying B but like it would be nice to know I know I know I

want to just be able to click something here. Yeah just click like put on your dashboard please. Okay market cap current circulating market cap inflation year one two three excluding burn and then projected at the current pace of burns. What does that look like? Net circulating supply like simple things like that. Like come on guys, you know what? You know it's programmatically built in unless you're like double zero which is not live yet but like you know like we know what the the curve looks like. Show it to me and then give me a reasonable approximation to model out you know what the sliding scale is like volume burn and then you kind of assume okay this is the circulating market cap in year 1 2 3 so I can then start to think not make the lazy assumption which is like oh it's 38 billion. Can it go 3x

from here and approximate salana? Absolutely. Trading is all there is in crypto today. Hyperlquid is the best trading venue that people to your point has captured the mind share in this rerun of a cycle after after you know um you know the last like year. So can this approximate Salana as 100 billion fully diluted market gap? Absolutely. This is 3x from here. Hyper liquid at 100 I wouldn't flinch twice like that easy. Now then then you say okay can it go farther than that? I guess the question always comes down to if you're willing to hold soul, what is the catalyst for holding soul? And if you're going to redraw raw your

portfolio like what is going to drive valuations of crypto assets for the foreseeable future, it's going to continue to be trading. And that's like the killer use case. Who's on a dollar per dollar basis? Which venue is going to attract more trading um in the for every dollar gets invested on chain? Probably hyperlquid more than a third or 40%. How much does Salana capture? Solana ran up from like eight bucks to the current because you know in large part mean trading and on the margin like a lot of community of course it the the whole FTX like thing kind of like went away right same thing. Yeah. Like like tell me why uh you know B&B has 93 billion market

cap. Could hyperl be that? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Can Soul has 70 87 billion fully diluted market cap. Uh yeah, that's there's there's another thing we haven't talked about which is the OTC markets and we're um we really want to get um I'm talking to Omar about this trying to get second lane data inside of the Block Works platform because I think there's this whole opaque OTC market in crypto which like people have no visibility into and we want to add some of that data into the platform to give visibility into it.

There's a If you look at the OTC markets, um, a lot of things are trading at these huge discounts right now, right? 20% discount, 50% discount, 90% discount. Um, hype trades OTC with no discount, sometimes little discount, like 5%. So, if you look at like a lot of the lowflat high FTV tokens, they're trading at these, and I think um, it was like MOSI had a good tweet about this. Vana, Charmer, whatever the guy's Twitter is, a lot of those are trading at these huge discounts, like 50% depending on how much of the float is unlocked. Hype is trading at like Yeah.

5% discount OTC right now. So, I think that's a pretty good signal as well. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stacks and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them. These wallets feature the world's first secure touchscreens, which don't just simplify your digital transactions, but also keep them extremely safe. These wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip. You can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps. Choose the most trusted name in

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Citria is currently on testnet and approaching mainet. To follow their progress, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X at Citria_XYZ. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk, terms, and conditions apply. Other things that happen. Go ahead. The Tron stuff. Yeah. You want to talk about Tron? Sure. What do you think? I don't have an opinion other than like it's getting a bit out of hand, don't you think?

Crypto group Tron to go public after US pauses probe into billionaire founder. All right, let's find another headline. Um, okay. Here's some more details. Justin Suns Tron reportedly plans to go public in the US following a reverse merger with SRM Entertainment. The company to be named Tron Incorporated will focus on stacking TRX starting with a 200 million $210 million investment. Eric Trump denied rumors of involvement in the alleged Tron Inc. Um, so I mean, let me see this. So, this is basically just like it's just giving public markets a way to buy Tron token. And

honestly, I think the public markets want that. Tron is a play on stable coins. Weirdly enough, I was talking to an institutional investor last night. they're allocating to crypto. He's interested in Tron. 60% of Tether moves on Tron. He doesn't know how to buy Tether stock. So, he thinks that Tron is a good allocation. Never would never would buy the Tron token, but would buy this Tron Inc. And boom, there's your there's there's the actual market reason for why this is smart for Tron. Yeah, exactly. What percentage? I actually think it holds up better than most of the other stuff.

Like the Ethereum one like was not very successfully like it was it was a bit of a chaos. the Joe Luben um one um was down like 70% that day or something. I think it went back up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean everything stopped today. Yeah. Um Oh, no. But yeah, like stable coin, like if you look at the stablecoin charts, if you go to our dashboard, what percentage of stable coins get traded on Tron? Like it's like a lot 40% of of USDT is like a a whole lot. It's a primary venue of USDT. I believe Ethereum and Tron are the two largest chains that handle most of the stable coin activity. Yeah.

Um on a number of users, active users, I believe Tron is more. Yeah. There's just like a lot of developing countries retail like it's it's just that's why Tron's strong. I mean this is the bet, right? So there's this um Bessant tweet. He said uh this is actually kind of crazy. He said, "Recent." So, recent reporting, I love this tweet because it's so clearly written by AI, but that's okay. Recent reporting projects that stable coins could grow into a $3.7 trillion market by the end of the decade. The scenario becomes more likely with passage of the Genius Act, a thriving Okay, so actually the other stuff's less important. What he's saying is the stable coin market cap is going to increase 10x in five years. If you're an

investor, boom, there's your investment. When you don't know, SAS is unattractive right now. Defense tech is already overvalued. AI, you can't get into those rounds and they're probably and they're overvalued if you can even get into them. What are you investing in? You don't want, you know, mag seven's out of control. Like, what are you buying right now? Boom. Stable coins. Easy thesis for like senior analyst. Let's just remind ourselves the the absolute left curve, maybe right curve argument. The crypto has always been it's a drop in the bucket in terms of aggregate asset class. It's it's uh you know you're talking about like 60 you know coin coin at what is it 6 billion it went public at

I mean it's I no it went public I forget what it went public at but 15 right I know I know what you're saying I know but you know what I mean it's um but then there's also this dynamic where like Coinbase just got listed in the S&P 500 then there's also like there is a point by which an a stock graduates to be large enough for a large manager to put an opposition Because if you're if your minimum ticket size for large funds is like couple hundred million well you know you can't ever be more than 5%. So if if like you know if your average ticket is 100 million and you can't make it like more than 5% of of the um you know it needs to be at least a what is it? $2 billion no a

yeah $2 billion market cap like equity value company right but you you know or maybe your standard is like 1% so like again I feel like once assets crossed the 10 20 50 100 billion in market cap it unlocks new allocators to that particular um to that particular strategy because you know they have to put in size and if you're too small they're not going to put in they're not going to they can't add a position Yeah. There's all these like weird market structure things that actually funny enough play into, you know, why why why a particular stock catches a bid or not.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, detach from like like fundamentals or whatever. Anyways, this tweet is why Circle is ripping. It's why Tron Inc. could catch a bid. You're buying Tron Inc. I'm buying any token. I'm buying anything that publicly lists right now. I mean, I'm not actually buying Tron Inc., But like yeah, like if Gemini or bullish go public, like I'm just smashing that. Feels like an easy trade. Just like plasma. I mean, I didn't end up doing plasma, just like too busy, but like probably an easy trade. Pumped up fun token probably an easy trade. Like you kind of just What does that say about the aggregate cycle, sir? If it's too easy to trade, too easy money going

around. I I think we're late stage. I think we're I think we're 70 to 80% of the way through this cycle. Feels about right. You know what would be crazy? What? Remember like a year ago was like four year cycle's dead. No such thing as a four year. You know what would be nuts? If the cycle tops in fall of fall of this year and the four-year cycle is just perfectly intact. Such a good meme and you perfectly intact. 2017 tops December 2017. Uh 2021 tops November 2021. If this cycle tops like Q4 of 2025, the fouryear cycle is intact. If this cycle tops in the fall, you're to blame everyone. Unfollow Yano and and

and it's his fault. Okay. No, you blame the people doing these stupid treasury companies. That's who you blame. Okay. That's who you blame. What else? Is there anything else coming up in the hour? Yeah, I've got I got 14 notifications. Hold on. I got to take a quick quick scroll. Quick scroll. All right. He's just He's just flexing, ladies and gentlemen. Look at him. Oh, nice. Where are we? Where are we in terms of follower count? Just just for the record. For Suz? No, but for you first. Oh, for me? Oh, Suz is booming. Nice week for Sue. 1731.

Oh, I'm I'm growing. 124.8. 124.8. And me? Probably less. We don't even need to check. 127. 127.3. Dude, we know you just launched a company to try to boost your your I have actually have not gained inversion cap is sitting at You want to do another parlay like a double or nothing like Inversion Cap. Guess how guess how many guess how many? Uh 3,500. Pump those numbers. Oh, 6,000. Not bad. Oh, you hired you hired a you hired an executive an EA this week. I mean an executive Lindsay. Lindsay, she's great.

She's great. She's actually like also like How did you hire Okay. Why did you make your second hire an EA? I that that sounded like a like I disagreed with it. I did I don't disagree with that. Like why did you bandwidth to like the amount of stuff that I mean she's she's taken on a lot of responsibility. She was um you know we've been able to get um freeing up more of our time is critical to do other functions. Uh but she also she used to work at a recruiting agency so she's quasi people too. So like she's been taking a lot of recruiting like we have oh my god you know what Brian so I went to this Coinbase alumni event last week. Do you want to know what Bri the advice Brian gave to the founders in the room. He said Coinbase's fifth hire was

a recruiter. He said hire a recruiter way way way earlier than 100%. I mean we have had we're going to you're an investor in inversion so we're going to give you guys this data but the amount of inbound we've gotten in terms of applications for all the roles that we're hiring too too much to keep up. And so we've been like we've been like systematically building systems to capture that and like make sure that the right people get you know we we see them and there's a process. So we also have a bunch of interns actually. I know I see them on Twitter. They are great. The energy that they have electric I pick up there's something like I pick up like 2 in the morning on Saturday because yes yes we're like not a flex but like yeah we're we're like doing stuff right. Uh,

and they immed like there's a couple guys in there that like that chat is bumping. 2 in the morning, they respond within 5 minutes. I tag him. They send us weekly memos of like what they're seeing. They're serving people in all across all that America. You want to know what I think of when I think of you and the interns. I think of I think of right here. This is you. This guy is you and this and Gerard Butler is you. And then the interns are just how how just ready to go to war. You know what I like too is um this is a sign that you're doing something right. She's saying these things that that you say like I'll be inverting full-time. Like this is a forever company for A+ talent.

Like you got to get these messages into the into the wild. Yeah. No, it's super honestly I am addicted to hiring super passionate full agency people that are just bought into the mission and are like like well I'll tell you one thing. When I hired Suz, um, we kind of work together for a a concentrated period of time where we minimize the gap between expectation and reality because sometimes to your point, how many times does this happen where you hire someone that is super competent, but like they join the company and they are twiddling their fingers because they don't know what to do and or they don't feel relevant and then that just kind of like, you know, the ramping period takes too much time or they never fully immerse themselves.

They're not a fit and then they leave. Not because they're not smart, but just because it wasn't a fit. And like I think oftentimes I've observed like we overindex on is this person smart and competent, not so much as this right fit. And the fit the unfortunately the the fit part of the interview comes at the end. Whereas I think you almost invert and you say the fit actually comes at the very very beginning because it's like at the end of the day like as as simple as it may sounds like you're going to be spending so much time with these people more so than like other like are you actually going to enjoy working together? Right? And honestly, like sometimes like I think you mentioned this in the prior segment episode which was like that you had two candidates and you picked the one that

like you're like yeah this like so anyways it's uh it's super rewarding to hire good people. So especially in the beginning first people set set the set the tone. Yeah, the other thing is like interns like a great I mean I could almost tell you like it's just a scouting program like I I feel like Yeah. lowcost derisa hire and these guys like we get so much bandwidth out of the entire intern group and let me ask you so you you'd hire interns would you hire there was a thing that I tweeted this week and posted on LinkedIn that people were really not happy about um Jana owns LinkedIn for what it's worth like it is crazy you got him locked in I dominate LinkedIn you truly do I need I need to

level up my game fine my LinkedIn I dominate that platform all right so there's a You got you got to dominate one platform otherwise you do. We're not happy though. Um uh the there's a Wall Street Journal article that said young graduates are facing an employment crisis. Slow hiring is especially daunting for those just starting out right now. Um some entry level positions require three to five years of experience. So I I tweeted I said, "Oh, this is actually really interesting." I said, "Usually this happens in recessions, right? 2001 global financial crisis." Um, right?

Anyone who graduated college in 2008, 2009 has horror stories. Um, but now it's different, right? We're not in a huge recession. I said, 'Now it's happening because AI, I said, if AI can do the job of an entry-level grad and it's 50 times cheaper, this trend is only continue going to continue. Um because if you think about like the slope of the slope of um value that someone could add at an employee like their ROI at an employee at an employer oftentimes it's a negative ROI the first two years because you have to pay to train them and a lot of them end up leaving and stuff like that. So I was saying there's no reason for companies to take on the work of training new grads when they can just give their existing team the latest and greatest AI models. So you hire all these interns.

Would you hire a 22-year-old right out of college? No. Right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Okay. Well, depends. My interns, the prompt for them is always like I they need to send us a memo every week. And what is the thing that you like you almost say like I never want them to send me stuff that I can easily pull in perplexity or chat GBT. Get me data that doesn't exist. What data doesn't exist? Oh, so you go do interviews quality. You do only only user interviews. the they they need to every week interview people across to inform product development that does not it's it's a grind but like you have to go and you talk to users like this is where I think like the

value will really differentiate like I don't ever want to see a perplexity report on like public companies and stuff that you can easily do you could supplement that I I think you showed me over the weekend how you did that website for ranking like you you you asked chat GBT to to give you a prompt and then you input that prompt. Like I think like being able to go through that sequence of like how to how to prompt correctly is is is a skill set that you've developed and I think if you don't have it like you're going to be at a material disadvantage but the real thing is scale AI I think is that company has differentiated so much like meta made a huge investment right on it.

Uh 15 billion 15 billion why because like they focus on data like data is the key to training. Data is the thing that doesn't exist. If you're able to create new data that is actually really differentiated and you own it, that's where that's where the value is. So Sus and I made the conscious decision of saying, "Okay, let's hire like 10 interns across every single Latin American market and let's validate assumptions and use like user surveys, constant constant constants to inform product development." Um, and and we were just talking yesterday to Simon Taylor's really good like he's one of the best fintech guys. He introduced me to this guy because I tweeted like, "Who are the best fintech brains?" like we were speaking to him yesterday and he's like honestly like he was telling me um he's like can't tell you how many Fortune 500 companies ask me about

stable coins want a strategy and then he was talking about Latin America he's like honestly most people bucket the region as a whole and they do not have a single understanding of like fintex in Latin America and he's like the data doesn't exist very few public companies like only new bank and so they only disclose so much and and I just heard that I was like yeah exactly this is why you have to just go there And you could hire Bane Mackenzie to do a million- dollar consulting project for a month that is going to be very cookie cutter or you can hire someone that is there doing actual work. So yeah, I think that to me that's like constantly like what how do you differentiate in a world where everyone has like it's just collapsing the access to information and analysis like that's been commoditized.

I think you have to just create new type of data or or lean into your distribution or both. Yeah, there was a there was a really um I would recommend people go read the Andy Jasse note to the company at at Amazon. Um he just published it yes yesterday. He's it's a just Google like some thoughts on generative AI Amazon CEO AI message or something like that. The takeaway is that um any job it's any job that has repetitive thinking involved in it AI will replace. If your job is just making decks, sending emails, summarize this document, it's it's coming for your job.

So, you need to figure out ways to start new projects, get new get new data. Like, don't don't just if you find yourself falling into repetitive habits. A AI comes for that job. Yeah. Um the last I coming up on time here. The last thing that I saw that was um I don't fully understand it. I'll be honest with you, but a lot of smart people in the industry were talking about it was IGEN layer launched IEN cloud. So again I I haven't read too much about it but um this is like the the oneliners like blockchain secure data rollups scaled execution IEN layer uh introduces IGEN cloud a verifiable cloud that

externalizes compute while preser preserving trustless guarantees. Um so if you look at like some of the people I really respect like um Yuan Lee at blockchain cap talks about uh says not only is this massive for the IE ecosystem we believe that IEN cloud has the potential to shorten the timeline for mainstream adoption of of crypto. Um Joe Luben says the future of internet verifiability is a foundation for trust. Um uh verifiable economy is on the way. This is brother Bing at Mega ETH talking about how uh Shri Ram is gigabrain super smart. This is Uma from Succinct saying the IGEN team deeply understands the

importance of verifiability is a primitive. Cool to see their product steps to further this vision. So anyways this is just like a weekend thing to dig into. Um seems like the TL the summary is this is like a verifiable AWS which could then create a verifiable internet. My problem is I have no idea what verifiability means or why why I need it or what problem it solves. So I was giving a recommendation to the IEN team. It'd be like tell me not to mention A6C put another 60 million 70 million locked into IEN. So that seems like the more cryptonative news of the week.

Definitely. Anything else? No, I think we can wrap. This has been a good segment. Congrats again on the token transparency stuff. It is I I it's one of the things that I'm so so fired up about and I think you can have a lot of a lot of really positive effect to the industry at at the right time, right? And so congrats on that. And um content of the week, anything you Ocean Gate came out. I haven't seen it. Is that the new um docu documentary? Ocean Gate. Ocean Gate like the the submarine that went missing or something. Oh. Oh, you know what's funny? You mentioned this on the last time. Yeah. God damn. No, no, no, no.

You mentioned Ocean Gate that there was a documentary. So, last night I was looking for something and I typed in Ocean documentary and I watched for like an hour this random ocean documentary by um Blue Ocean like BBC. No, it was like uh who's who's the guy who narrates all the nature documentaries? Oh, the British guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. Um, wait. You know, you know who I'm talking about. Yeah, I know what he's talking about. Yeah. David Adenro. David Adenboro. Oh, such. You want to go to sleep or just put your So, I watched like an hour of this David Adro and I was like, I mean, this is fine. Like, it's good. Our producer, our producer's on it. He was like, David Adenboro, dude, yeah. Thank you, Jared. We see

you. We appreciate you. Yeah. So, anyways, I watched I was like, I mean, it's fine. It's like it's like de decent, but like it's not the craziest movie, but Ocean Gate is the documentary. Okay. Noted. Noted. Yeah, I haven't watched it, but um Matt has No, I I listen to the Mark Andre podcast as one does. No, I got nothing. I got You know what I read? You know what I read over the weekend? I've resumed I took my Kindle. Um because I was traveling a bunch for these conferences and whatnot and uh I I read um the Bond King book, the good the story of Pimco and Bill Gross. Really really awesome. I got I mean it's like one of those legendary institutions and like uh it was it was pretty good. Oh, you know what I read? It's super easy to read.

You read it in a day on a weekend. I read uh 24 hours in ancient Rome. Oh, nice. It's it's it's like a fun book. It's um it's not like the best written book, but it every chapter is a different person in Rome. So, it'll be like the baker. It's like the baker. No, it's not like it's like the baker, the the farmer, the slave. like and they and they kind of chronicle their like a day in the life of this person and it's cool. It's like a fun it's like literally read it in like six hours type book. You know we should have honestly the biggest life hack uh is carrying my Kindle with me when I'm at conferences or like uh traveling. My reading rate goes up like multiples because it's just the form

factor. It's so convenient. It's practically indestructible and reading in the sun is great if you're out in beach or whatever in the summer. Um they're such a cool guy. Like honestly, I should just start gifting that. I think it's one of the best gifts. Like you pre-load a Kindle with like a bunch of books or stuff. May maybe maybe maybe we get sponsored and we get Empire branded Kindles. That would be a nice gift. I think we always I think we can do that without sponsors, but yeah, we can do like a like a 10 or whatever. Sure. Okay, so permission list is coming up. Uh we'll be there. We're going to be live roundups. We've got live roundups. We've got a happy hour.

We've got all this cool stuff. So, we'll see you there. And and if people want to get tickets, is there still a discount going on? Empire 10. If not, try 40. Empire 30. Empire. Uh I think I get I think there's I think I get a free speak a free ticket actually as a speaker to someone else. Do you? I believe so. I I was graciously invited as a speaker as a last minute which is like I was like the tenth in line you know like after the fourth round it's like crap no one said yeah all right give it to Santi fine Jared we got cut that cut it cut it I know all right folks great great uh great hanging with you um have a good Friday have a

good Saturday and we'll see you Monday likewise thank you so much everyone have a great [Music]