Unmasking Crypto's Anonymous Actors | Arkham

Transcript

it's possible to audit people in real time unlike in traditional Finance on chain but the reality is that if you don't know all the addresses and you don't know what belongs to whom is you know it's useless right and so with Arkham that's actually what what we're trying to do we're trying to tie those two things together and actually make what is already transparent and auditable actually useful by tying all of the relevant information to those pseudonymous like alphanumeric pseudonymous addresses all right everyone welcome back to another episode of Xerox research today is March 20th and I'm joined by Westie in effort capital from the blockworks research team to discuss all the craziness that's happened over the last seven days since we talked to you last

on the previous episode we've got a really good interview today with Miguel Morel the founder and CEO of Arkham intelligence they specialize in on-chain data analytics and really help connect the dots on who the entities behind specific on-chain addresses are so we kind of really dive into why Arkham was founded and really what it's doing in the space as well as hit on some of the recent events and some of the findings that Arkham has found about those topics but before we get into that we got a good little discussion here coming up and I'm gonna throw it to you effort first you know it's been a crazy last seven days I think Bitcoins up like 20 26 percent eth is up only 11 what's going on I think a lot of this is driven

by the macular climate and that's definitely not my area of expertise so I'd love for you to be like a shining light for us there what do we got going on yeah yeah I appreciate that I'll try my best um yeah so it it really comes down to uh starting back like in 2020 2021 with covid uh you know the FED decided to money printer go Burr they decide to put uh stimulus checks in everyone's pockets they led to a zero uh interest rate uh environment um and really what happened was Bank deposits because there was all this liquidity in the system Bank deposits went exponential uh and really what banks are in the job of doing is taking your bank deposits and they do this kind of financial Alchemy where they borrow short and then long they're taking your

deposits you you know you see the number on your on your screen when you log into your bank account that number of dollars is actually not there sending the bank at any given time they're lending that out to uh to people that want to take out mortgages they're lending that out uh to um you know deposit that into 10-year and into your treasuries so pretty much what happened was Banks got all this liquidity sitting in in their on their order books or on their balance sheet and their job was to really earn yield on that so in a zero interest rate environment the yield curve is essentially zero in the short term and it extends out and goes up higher on the long end or tail end of the the yield curve so in order to make the best yield possible Banks took a bunch of duration

Risk by taking your cash and depositing that into 10-year uh treasuries which is at the time was the best risk-free rate um obviously we know what happened with the zero and straight environment coupled with increased liquidity we saw inflation absolutely go to the highest levels that we've seen since like the 70s like 50 60 years ago at this point and the FED had to do something in order to combat inflation and really the only tool at their disposal to to combat inflation is increasing interest rates um and we saw the FED obviously increase interest rates at the quickest rate ever uh in the history of of you know I guess U.S economic system um and this and impacted the bond prices so if you don't know when interest rates

go up bond prices go down that's how you actually calculate the yield of a bond um and what happens is all these Banks were sitting on a lot of duration risk and a lot of interest rate risk uh where because they're they bought these bonds at lower interest rates back in 2020 interest rates are higher now their bond price the actual par value or the price of the bond itself was much lower than that than they bought it for and because of this uh banks are sitting on a lot of losses the problem the good thing is historically Banks can sit on these losses for a long period of time until these Bonds mature uh and smart money managers what they typically do is they try to hedge their interest rate

exposure by uh through interest rate swaps but what we saw is uh certain Regional Banks like Silicon Valley Bank for in particular uh and and First Republic Bank uh did not do this um really what they were doing was in my opinion was they were kind of fighting the FED they were calling the feds Bluff and saying at a certain point they're gonna they're going to either cut interest rates or pivot to some degree uh our bond prices are going to appreciate back to the levels that we originally bought them for and then we're gonna be able to sell these bonds at at par value uh the problem is that somebody I guess in the latest uh earnings report for Silicon Valley Bank um people realize that Silicon Valley

was holding on to a lot of unrealized losses that they were actually going to have to start realizing because people were starting to pull uh their deposits out of silicon Bank this caused a bank run which made their Bank go from real unrealized losses to to realize losses and ultimately this affects like the fundamental valuation of banks because it's the fundamental valuation of banks is all about how much AUM are they holding at any given point and how much yield are they actually generating on that AUM when I start pulling money out of the bank their AUM goes down that leads to less potential yield that they can make on that and then you pretty much saw Bank evaluations plummet like 50 60 70 in some cases to the point where Banks like Silicon Valley First are public and then most recently Credit

Suisse are were essentially like negative equity or the shareholders were really hurting uh you know again valuations fell precipitously in a really short period of time um what changed was that the FED came out with a new program called btfp which essentially allows Regional Banks to borrow against the par value of the Securities that they're holding on their balance sheet so instead of having to liquidate Securities to pay depositors that are you know starting this Bank Run instead of having to liquidate it and realize these losses what they can do is go hey the hey fed I'm holding on to 100 billion dollars with the Securities I'm they're currently only valued at 70 billion but when these Securities go to

maturity they will be valued at 100 billion dollars can I borrow against the 70 billion dollars of Securities uh and you give me actually the par value at 100 billion dollars so pretty much these 70 billion dollars of security is they're borrowing at a hundred billion dollars so they don't have to realize these losses um and I think the problem with this is the borrow rate that these banks are borrowing it from the FED is actually higher than the yield that these banks are getting on the treasuries to begin with so banks are are lending or I'm sorry banks are borrowing at a higher rate than the markets actually pricing these Securities with to begin with so in the short term they're actually losing money but it does allow them to survive in the event of a bank run uh

we're really just kind of kicking the can down the road um and because of you know QT because the the interest rate hike except the FED is done this has led to like a overall U.S dollar security uh liquidity crunch not just in the United States but globally as well like what we saw recently with with credit Suites this past weekend um and over the weekend the European Central Bank and a couple other central banks in the western Nations as well as Japan had decided to uh increase a frequency of U.S dollar operations from weekly to daily so this is kind of very similar or analogous to the repo markets where Banks uh borrow from the FED overnight they pledge their their Securities on their balance sheet as collateral they get US Dollars and then

they're able to do whatever really they want with those dollars in order to generate yields or meet uh liquidity demand um but now we're actually taking this repo system and scaling it out on the international scale where the European Central Bank can now take their Euros let's say give it to pledge it to the FED is collateral the FED will print dollars give it to the central bank in Europe to then send that to the individual Banks throughout Europe um to meet whatever liquidity demands there are uh really what we're seeing right now is just like a drying up of liquidity in the system and we're starting to see things Break um and really this is the first time since the 2007 2008 financial crisis

that we're seeing like a really big confidence killer like in the banking system and this is the first time an internet native population is seeing the risks uh with the fractional banking Financial system um you also saw the FED funds Futures go from five and a half percent uh just this past week uh to four percent so the the market was pricing in an additional 75 bips from now until the end of the year in rate hikes just because inflation still has you have to cool and now the the Market's pricing in actually 75 bips uh cuts by the end of the year um and these are like some of the largest swings in interest rate or fed fund Futures movements like historically you're seeing like three sigma moves in

interest rates and typically interest rates are supposed to be like relatively steady but because of the overall uncertainty in the banking system and I think the global economy right now people just don't know how to price risk and what you're seeing as a result of this with the internet native population seeing like all this uncertainty in such a quick period of time that our banking system is extremely fragile and Bitcoin there's a lot of narratives about what Bitcoin potentially could be but I think it can be seen as like a put option on the on the US and the global banking system um when fed funds Futures uh decrease that leads to a risk on environment I'm sorry a risk off environment and you see risk assets like Bitcoin and crypto in general kind of move up higher and on top of this not only are fed funds

Futures and interest rates uh Futures decreasing you're specifically seeing like the banking system like partially collapsed whether or not it's a long-term event or a short-term event remains to be seen but I think people are kind of hedging their exposure to the the Fiat or the fractional Reserve banking system and seeing Bitcoin for like the first time ever like as a safe haven asset uh in this uncertain period yeah that makes so that makes a lot of sense and to try to Briefly summarize that up I guess so uh for one reason or another we had a bank run that started with svb uh that kind of transpired into some serious hesitations around the safety of the U.S banking system so the FED kind of came in was like Hey we're going to be the lender of Last Resort here give us the bonds we'll give you

face value in cash so that kind of like put a patch over everything and then macro economists macro experts and Twitter experts alike both debated over whether or not this was QE for uh what seems like the last 72 hours straight and you know at the end of the day there's new like cash flowing into the system uh that wasn't there before is kind of how I'm thinking about it which I know will piss some macro experts off but that's that's where my head's at um and then we see you know this new effect has happening kind of like Rippling into the European markets with the you know the recent announcements today they're facilitating what's similar to like this repo overnight system so we see like this rise in uh lender of Last Resort activity or things

that look a lot like QE but maybe aren't technically QE and that's kind of like putting disbelief in the traditional Financial system and we're seeing you know equities are pretty flat today I think the nasdaq's like basically flat at the moment um it's about 2 30 p.m Eastern and you know Bitcoin is is up 26 over the last seven days eth is up 11 over the last seven days it doesn't really seem like it's a risk asset thing to me and it more seems like for the first time in history when there is a serious fissure or crack in the infrastructure of the traditional Financial World there is for the first time a viable alternative to the current rails

um and that is crypto and so you do see Bitcoin getting favored quite heavily here which I think is a really interesting takeaway you know my personal view is like eth as a whole is far more interesting especially for something like recreating the banking infrastructure but at the end of the day people are like looking for hard money is what it appears yeah I'll say you also see it's not even just Bitcoin right it's like gold is also uh Eclipse over two thousand dollars for the first time in I mean I don't know exactly how long I want to say five years plus I don't quote me on that but you're seeing even goals like physical gold actually increasing value to the highest levels and at least a handful of years to my recollection so people are looking for like hard money uh whether that's

Digital hard money or or physical hard money in forms of gold um this like this store of value narrative is really starting to pervade and again whether or not the the banking whether or not this is QE or not I think that's obviously like a question for for real like macro and then macro experts macroeconomists but I think what this is showing is that at a certain point in time like maybe sooner rather than later the FED will have to Pivot whether they hike rates or not coming up Wednesday I think his remains to be seen uh I I would say that what we're seeing right now is probably not QE because if this is like short term daily to weekly borrowing by central banks and by Regional Banks uh so it's not like dollars that are gonna sit staying out

in the system uh into people's pockets uh you know moving forward but this could be like uh the a pre-qe leading up to QE like later in the year or sometime next year and crypto is like the furthest out on the risk curve possible you saw crypto Peak and then start heading lower while the s p and while the equities Market was still going and making all-time highs um in in late 2021 early 2022 and crypto is typically like the most reflexive asset class it's the first one to move up and it's the first one to move down and this is really the market I think front running what it thinks the market the the banking infrastructure the

banking system is going to do along with the FED obviously in six to 12 months time so there's a really good chance that you actually see this kind of decoupling or it's decoration kind of like what we're seeing now at Bitcoin where crypto is going to move up just in anticipation of QE and the equities Market still could either go flat or down for the next six to 12 months and people are going to call it like the great decoupling but in reality what it really is probably is just the crypto markets move quicker and eventually the equity Market will follow when QE actually is like officially restarted if it is restarted um but it's just really interesting like the overall liquidity flows and people think the moment that QE or the moment that new liquidity is entering the

system crypto markets think that oh good we're getting some of that new liquidity that's new capital infusion into the system let's pump let's pump our bags kind of thing so it's really interesting like psychology yeah and one of the other interesting takeaways I've had from the price action over the last seven days is really how the major is Bitcoin and eth have like they've got some serious momentum behind them but then you look at just other like Blue Chip D5 uh tokens not a lot of movement there so like those are trading more in line with with equities which I find is pretty interesting like the capital is really flowing into the majors which uh probably is a as a fair reaction given the the hesitation uh you know the questions around the the macro condition at the moment but I don't know just just

thought it was pretty interesting to see the majors really taking the hold and leading this rally I mean I do think that OG D5 does get a bid I mean going back to what we said earlier like this bid on bitcoin and why Bitcoins outperforming is it's sort of a hedge on the chaos in the banking system and ogd5 is sort of recreating our banking system but on chain and so once I think people start to realize whereas now I think a lot of the macro Focus funds they like they understand Bitcoin but don't they don't really understand what's going on with Ethan with D5 but once they eventually do and people do want to hedge the the traditional banking sector they're probably going to do so through D5 so I do expect it to get a bid at some point but yeah it's been

interesting that's been pretty flat over the past few weeks the 2020 2021 cycle you saw like a capital rotation it was large caps to Mid caps from mid caps to low caps and low caps to like really like you know I don't know dog coins and then really the coin like Psy like the ultra risky end of the risk curve um and I also think it's the different there's different participants that like to invest in this asset class there's a lot of crypto native funds that might think that this is obviously a bulk case for defy but I think the the largest money Capital inflows are coming from people that might be using Fidelity crypto that just opened up their own uh their own crypto product that allows people to invest in Bitcoin and eth

um and not necessarily other riskier assets so this could be like a macro fund Capital infusion where they're seeing Bitcoin as his hedge against the financial system uh and maybe these non-cryptonative Capital inflows are just not privy to what D5 can offer yeah what's what's great about this I think at the end of the day is for the first time you know if you manage any kind of money you had to for like either you've seen it before if you haven't you now it was very much so in your face like the value of what having an open permissionless system can can add uh really to the world so you know that I don't know there's a lot to take out of that but that's kind of my biggest takeaway but you know let's get into the more crypto native stuff Westie who you got in the hot Cedar cooled

around this week yeah guys I don't know if you've heard but roll ups aren't real um yeah in the hot seat I got roll up so I don't know if you guys are in the same Corner as a CT that I am but I saw a lot of discussions on Roll-Ups in the past week so I think it started with Kelvin Fitcher of op Labs who gave a talk titled how Roll-Ups actually work and the subtitle was DK Roll-Ups don't exist they're not real um so you basically his argument to sum it up was that a roll-up is not defined by the proof it uses in the validating Bridge the proof is only needed to get a view into what the roll-up is doing it's completely separate thing and so his eyes like an optimistic roll-up or like

a ZK roll-up aren't real like a roll-up is just a roll-up and they just happen to use a certain proof for someone to get a view into the roll-up that was sort of the talk he gave and toe girl's scroll completely disagreed with that and then he went to eat Dubai and gave a talk called Howard olives actually actually work as a rebuttal and he said that Roll-Ups are actually defined by the validating Bridge it's not just a view into the rollout but it actually defines what the roll-up is because for example let's say you wanted to move funds from the the L1 to the L2 you can't actually mince the funds on an L2 until you prove to the L1 that like things are good to go and so like through the validating bridge is

where that proof happens and so the the roll-up is explicitly defined through the valley and ridge and so there's a cool disagreement there and then you had John Charbonneau who basically said all Roll-Ups aren't real at least not yet um and released another one of his novels specifically looking at um how to decentralize sequencers within Roll-Ups because they're all centralized at the moment and that's sort of one of the biggest points of contention within Roll-Ups and so I mean it makes sense that ropes are at the Forefront of the conversation um within infrastructure but like the really technical people in the space I mean ZK EVMS are set to launch pretty soon yeah proto-dink sharding and Q3 and then yeah more and more roll-up

Solutions are going to keep popping up and then yeah in reality like a lot a lot of people don't really know how they work under the hood like people are just kind of figuring out as we go the ones that exist don't even really have fraud proofs they're controlled by multi-cigs and they have like a centralized sequencer and so there's a lot that needs to change and so it's good that we're getting this discussion now yeah I think that's the the most interesting point for me was really just the lack of centralization like we've done so like you know the space was born out of uh being truly decentralized and so it feels like the l2s just haven't got there yet and a lot of people look at that as like this like death sentence for ethereum is like oh they're not centralized and I

don't know like I've I've written this uh this sentence a couple times in many reports that we've I've written but you know decentralization is is not uh something that you start with it's it's something that you build towards you don't just inherit decentralization on day one uh you you very much don't need to build into it and so like yes we start with centralized roles today uh but tomorrow we work towards building the decentralization factor of that so it's exciting to see uh that projects are actually working towards that um you know that's just not an easy task I think there's a recently a a flow chart of like how the sequencer it was it was one of the it was optimistic ropes either Arbor trimmer or optimism I can't remember but it was like a flow chart of how their sequencer functions and for like people who think

decentralizing sequencers is easy like look at this and you know it's just like a page full of different interactions with different parties and different smart contracts and infrastructure it's like yes we built this system it's not just like something we can immediately really put like flip a switch and like oh no now token token holders control how this thing works like it's not that simple um so yeah I don't know Wesley what's your takeaway like where do you land on all this like do you think Roll-Ups are real what do you think the future holds yeah in terms of like the conversations I agree more with togro and that like devouting Bridge especially for a smart contract roll up as opposed to a sovereign rope it it defines the roll up and so on that like specific conversation but yeah like you said like

I'm a strong believer in like Progressive decentralization where like at first you can't really be decentralized because it's not really efficient you need to work towards a certain goal but eventually your goal should be too decentralized and if you look at like vitalik's roadmap like he he even he said like looks at this stuff as training wheels and is actually like part of the road map and having like things being controlled by multi-sig um things along those lines where like it is like a necessary step to eventually get to the decentralized Future and I do think like teams should be focused on getting a decentralized sequencer um getting their fraud proof enabled because obviously it makes things more

secure more decentralized better censorship resistance I'm just overall better but yeah it's something you get to over time is decentralized sequencing like the last the Last Frontier of decentralizing the stack uh it's probably the the thing that people like it would take the longest in terms of like decentralizing the stack because I mean a lot of the ropes are like controlled by multi-sig like optimism and arbitrum are both controlled by multi-six so getting that into like a more decentralized alternative for for governance and like controlling things I think is another thing as well but decentralizing the sequencer is extremely hard as as Dan's alluded to earlier like even centralized sequencers are pretty tough like

actually making those truly decentralized is something that's going to take time and I would definitely recommend reading John charbonneau's piece on decentralized sequencers how we can do it how we can Implement them um because yeah it's a really important thing and it's going to take a while to actually Implement yeah absolutely and uh I guess moving on there it's still on the same vein of l2s uh Global or Global arbitrim day when we finally get the airdrop as in another three days for from today so uh let's see I guess that's Thursday um so the day after this this recording Comes live uh everybody will receive their sweet sweet arbitrim airdrop uh so if the arbitrum is obviously in the cool

Throne this week there was no getting around that one uh they had an airdrop with 12 and a half uh 12.75 percent of the initial Supply was airdropped to ecosystem participants and that was split between 11.6 to users of the protocol and 1.1 percent to Dows that have built on top of the protocol um so this is a massive airdrop allocation that was spread across 625 000 different uh wallets and so there's definitely some users that have have cybled this thing uh I know I've heard some pretty crazy numbers floating around some of these group chats where people managed to rake in like six figures worth of our tokens um for better for worse you know they

they tried to mitigate that I think they brought in nanson uh to work alongside to do some data analytics and kind of try to link different walks together that were assumed to be determined to be you know the same entity behind them and kind of remove those from from the process so at least they did make an effort to remove some of these side bling wallets of course it does appear that some have slipped through the cracks so the our token airdrops range between 625 tokens all the way up to 10 250 tokens per wallet and on average there's about 1800 ARB tokens per wallet um and so if you make some easy comparisons between the other optimistic grow up optimism you know this we can look at the market

cap and the fdv of that token it's been liquid for you know quite quite a few months now and if you look at the market cap you could get to a number around 60 cents or if you look at more of the fdv of the two uh you can kind of Base around a token price of 1.1 uh one dollar and ten cents and so you know I've seen some pretty crazy Twitter threads that are suggesting like a 15 token price or even a forty dollar token price personally not not pricing that one in I I do understand that arbitrim has more activity and more tvl than optimism by quite a significant margin if we look at total transactions happening on arbitrum even today uh a week after the an airdrop was announced you're still seeing way levels way above our optimism and even on par with

ethereum the base layer itself so arbitrim does have a lot of users does have a lot of activity does have a lot of TBL does have some very popular apps built on top of it such as GMX and it I would probably personally expect it to get a little bit higher of um evaluation relative to our optimism personally because it feels like the timing of this airdrop is just impeccable markets are hot right now feels like number go up technology is back we just saw blur do its airdrop and that was a money printer for everyone so there is some free money already floating around airdrops are hot the conditions are hot and so the question revolves may be like where does this money flow like let's say we get a

dollar token price and that's like you know about a 10 billion dollar fdv then everyone there's about you know quite quite a good amount of of funds that have just been airdrops to all these users that are now can be basically slush ones like everyone tries to double their airdrop pretty much so I expect these arbitrim ecosystem tokens to pump and we've already seen some of that uh with some of the smaller cap projects you know just having insane runs over the past couple months um so you know I guess the next question would be where does this money flow I definitely want to take a quick second to shout out our Dune Dash that me and Dan built um it's going to have a lot of charts that auto populate as soon as the the airdrop goes live and I know I'll be looking at the percentage of the airdrop

that's been claimed over time because as that reaches more and more towards 100 you're more likely to get a bottom on the token price so definitely want to shout that out um yeah in terms of like where the money is going to flow obviously arbitrary ecosystem makes sense but I just think that the bigger question is like what is the ARP token going to be valued at because as a result like that's the amount of money that's essentially given out to people to then um flow elsewhere and yeah like you said there were a lot of really like bad takes on Twitter like some people using like tvl over circulated Supply multiplied by 10 like some really crazy like equations to get a super high evaluation for me it really comes down to to cash flow of the sequencer fees

like at this point um arbitrum has like two to two and a half uh times the amount of sequencer fees that that optimism gets obviously in some cases you need to price in like the future fees that people expect so with something like the op stack maybe they get a shared sequencer with some of the the op stack chains and they get morphees that way but looking at sort of right now two to two and a half times if we assume on FTV that that'll have a token price of around like two to two fifty for arbitrum and as a result this airdrop would be two to two and a half billion dollars just fallen from the sky which I think is pretty pretty crazy but

I don't know if you guys have different valuations yeah wait quit real quickly Westy run through the like what's the actual calculation that gets you to the the sequencer cash flows so there's a we have a dune board that looks at the the revenue of each um of arbitrum and optimism ours looks at the sort of like the estimated L1 fees which I need to change to the actual one fees because you can actually calculate those through Dunes so there's another one like Kofi made that um Compares directly arbitrum and optimism sequencer fees and you can see I forget what it was last week but yeah I was like 2.2 x I believe from optimism to arbitrum and yeah it's on it's priced in

eth um since they both settle down to eth and so that's how you would get sort of the the difference between the two and so that's just the amount of gas that users on the L2 are paying versus the amount of value that the L2 itself needs to pay to the L1 ethereum to settle those transactions right exactly yeah good clarification I agree Westie that you're gonna see I think you're going to see a lot a higher FTV for arbitrum than optimism I wouldn't be surprised if you see two to 250 um not even just speaking fundamentally but like I guess it's fundamentals but arbitrum ecosystem had like an organic usage there was there was like a cult following everyone and their mother

traded on GMX everyone was building on top of GMX it kind of like I would say it was the first D5 ecosystem out outside of ethereum base layer may not that had like D5 Legos actually building on top of each other to create like this cohesive defy ecosystem and this overall like really strongly felt Community um not to say optimism doesn't have a community I do think they do but I think if you track like the comparison and transaction uh number of transactions in how many daily active users there are um arbitrim just had it and and it was clearly like the front running leading Layer Two in in crypto um and I think if they kind of have like

this cult following and what we've seen especially in Bear markets whether or not the markets are hot right now or not like we've seen in in Bear markets like the projects with the strongest Cults following like chain link in 2019 2020 like had an insane run right regardless of fundamentals um and there's really not much of there's really not a stronger Community today I think than the people that were uh in in the RB ecosystem and we'll see if that stays we'll see like how much of that was organic and real or if it was just people trying to get the the air drop and run um I wouldn't be surprised if you see a lot of this Capital stay inside the RV ecosystem you're obviously like you said Dan you're seeing Grail pumped like 130 140 this past week Radiance pumped like

50-ish percent this past week um and there's like a flywheel effect all this airdrop money stay if it stays in the ecosystem you're gonna even see arbitrary ecosystem even even go higher than potentially two dollars I don't think you can get the 40 and I would love to have people that were claiming 40 RV and Balaji claiming for one million dollar Bitcoin in 90 days like they're 100 on the hot seats I think people get a little too ahead of themselves but um but regardless like the arbitrary ecosystem like feels like they have something going they have more momentum I would argue than any other ecosystem in the space including base layer eth like this this is it's an exciting time for the layer 2 ecosystem uh in crypto yeah Arby's Arby's hot well it definitely wasn't me that sold a

fat bag of radiant like three weeks ago though definitely it wasn't me all right but that's a great spot to end it here I think we'll uh we had a great discussion today and you know I think the the key takeaway is be sure to check out our uh our RB dashboard arbitrum dashboard uh it's it really is gonna it's gonna be sweet you know we really built it into the the nature of the Revolution will not be quarterly reported and like the second that transactions start emitting from the airdrop contract that dashboard is going to start updating uh so it's pretty sweet really excited about that as a day to nerd nosd is too so go go give that a check uh we'll put the link in the description to that and now on to the interview with Miguel Morel the founder and CEO of Arco I cannot recommend

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the topics we're writing about and get a little bit of a brief insight into what the contents of the report is about if you want to know a little bit more how we think on the data side of things head over to our Dune public account we have four dashboards live there for free the revolution will not be quarterly reported so definitely check those out and let's kick it over the interview all right we've got a great interview set up with Miguel Morrell the founder of Arkham intelligence a crypto native intelligence tool to analyze on-chain data Miguel thanks so much for coming on oh thank you for having me yeah so I I just want to get the back story on Arkham like what is it what led you to start it why did you think the market needed something like this in general I

was working in in the cryptocurrency industry working on uh building some some cool products related to stable coins um and uh and in general what struck me was that there was so much infrastructure that existed in in the traditional Financial system uh as well as in normal software development and software management uh where you could understand your user like as well as as well as you wanted to you can understand uh the user demographics um you could understand what they were doing on your on your application what actions they were taking uh and uh and how they were using it but the reality was that with cryptocurrency uh if

you're building a project where you know the token was the product uh or at least part of the product um you didn't have nearly as much uh information on who the people were who were using your your product you didn't have as much info about the demographics of your user base you didn't have as much info about who they were sending the money to or um or or for what purpose as opposed to say like something like a venmo or a PayPal or a cash app where they have tons of information about what they're using are doing all the time and can do targeted ads and UI ux and stuff like that and so the original kind of inspiration for for Arkham came from wanting a a deeper understanding for cryptocurrency users and very quickly I

realized that you know that didn't just apply for uh token projects and and startups who also applied for trading firms and uh and investors looking to understand who was moving markets and so I saw it as a kind of bigger opportunity um that I wanted to take advantage of and that's how I got started what are some of the bigger challenges that you've seen thus far in trying to identify who these wallets actually uh are operated by right so you know when you just see a wallet address that's that's a pretty Anonymous uh Anonymous you know set of numbers right but how do you draw parallels to who the entity behind that address generally is our technology for the first I would say two years of the project we're about three

years in we started the company in in Jan 2020 was really when we kind of like Incorporated and got like very very serious about it um and uh and and now we're in March 23 and so the first two years um that we worked on the company uh we basically exclusively worked on back-end engineering and and data infrastructure uh in order to do two things uh number one take in as much information as as possible from public data sources in in a way that was very fast or as close to real time as we could possibly get from as many different sources as possible the second would be actually creating

the algorithms and heuristics that could match you know uh entities um so you know particular kinds of trading firms funds exchanges individuals doesn't matter um entities to their cryptocurrency addresses uh based on a number of different you know heuristics and and understandings about what is likely to be true so for example like with exchanges you know it's no it's no secret that one of the best ways to get access to exchange addresses is just to interact with the exchange right you send money to to The Exchange uh in in some way shape or form um and uh depending on the

infrastructure it probably has a deposit address structure which means that you send money to an address generated by The Exchange which is uh appointed to you the individual and then the money moves from that deposit address into an exchange hot wallet and that's like one of the best ways of getting access to the information about which exchanges own which would which addresses right and so that's one heuristic that can be used which is you know wherever the money flows from that deposit address uh after money has been deposited belongs to The Exchange uh and whichever address actually deposited into that deposit address either you know belongs to the person who owns the deposit address or belongs to an associate of there's that they're receiving money from right and

so you can kind of begin narrowing down uh based on you know just these two things um who is likely to to own an address um but when there's thousands and you can do it in an automated way uh then Things become more interesting because then you can actually start to do the autonomization at scale uh and so that that that's what we were working on and uh and continue to work on until the point where we felt really comfortable with with our technology and uh and thought that that it was great and and ready for launch um and then and then afterwards we started working on on our front end and uh on the the design of the product itself and then ended up launching our private data uh in uh August of 2022

um so we've been running that for I guess it's been about seven months now and uh and that's been a whole lot of fun and we've gotten significant traction so that's been wonderful so I'm a user of the beta platform as well and I've loved it so far but I'm curious when you uh log into that portal like what what do you find is one of the most interesting things to track well on our home page um in the bottom left-hand Corner we have a rolling slideshow of the what we describe as the top entities and that top entities list is basically just a calculation of uh the list of uh entities on our back end who across the chains that we support uh have the most money and so that's kind of kind of like

uh you know I don't want to say like a Forbes list but it's like the Arkham list of richest in crypto our most active in crypto and so you can just wait for that slideshow to keep rolling on by until you find somebody interesting or who holds some interesting assets click on it and then like go through their entity maybe throw in the visualizer in order to see who who they've interacted with in the path uh try to get a sense for their connections look at their portfolio look at their trades see what direct you know what direction they're likely to take their their balance in in the future um and you know I know many people try to use as the kind of like source of alpha because you know some of the most important people in the in the space um so I I think that's probably one of

the most interesting things as soon as you log in now something that stuck out to me in the beginning when you said originally we were thinking man like Dows would probably love a tool to kind of identify cohorts of users that maybe would be primed to Target for an airdrop or maybe um looking at retention analysis different things like that has that actually ended up being one of the core use cases of Arkham like do you have dials like kind of like a Consulting business where you you help them do these kind of things or is it uh more so retail focused in your mind so I don't know about Dows um but uh but definitely we have a number of people who try to uh understand user bases uh both internally

so you know you can imagine being a startup and wanting to understand your user base of who's using your token but also externally which means actually being an investor or being a trading firm and then analyzing a particular project ecosystem in order to understand if it's growing or slowing down if you should invest if you shouldn't invest how active they are so we have plenty of those um in terms of the the market itself right now it's it's it's currently quite uh retail heavy um and uh but you know we I would say probably it's like you know 60 retail uh maybe maybe a little bit less 50 um and then the rest is kind of you know actual full-time in an institution professional Traders and by the way when

I say retail many people often take the word retail to mean dumb you know that's not true at all right like with our with our private beta it's not like we're just letting anybody onto onto the Arkham platform every single person gets reviewed by our team before being let in uh into the Beta uh and and a lot of these people like especially within crypto they just don't work for an institution right they just don't work for a large training firm they don't work for an exchange whatever but they're still at home trading full-time on on binance as as if they were right and so there's plenty of people who are very professional very like sophisticated uh investors and Traders who are working this Market uh full-time and they're still considered retail

because they they're not part of an institution right and so um for the most part like you know all of the users are are very smart but I would say the breakdown is roughly you know 50 of people just being you know not affiliated with an institution as far as we can tell and then the rest actually you know are part of the of an organization where they're using Arkham for a variety of different reasons of with many of them are analyzing markets or analyzing for for different kinds of trading and investment opportunities yeah that's actually a good flag retail Tech typically comes with like kind of a negative connotation around it so I I think it's safe to assume that the uses your platform are likely on-chain Solutions as people like to call

themselves but in terms of supporting new chains like how difficult is that for you guys what goes into that decision process and like what's the underlying infrastructure are you guys running your own nodes or um are you plugging into a lot of different data sources how does it kind of look and operate underneath the hood our process for actually implementing new chains well for the for the most part we were very focused on on ethereum in the beginning mostly because that's you know the ecosystem with the most kind of active uh users for the kind of thing that that we're building um but over time obviously um we started the process of adding additional chains why well because of user feedback right so we had a bunch of

people who were using our product and then they were like hey you know I don't just want ethereum I also want you know X Y and Z and so that's when we we started building those out and uh and the the reality is that every kind of uh blockchain you know they can either be extremely similar to one another or they could be completely different um so for example like evm chains very similar all very similar to one another even though they all have their own unique quirks um but you know something like like Bitcoin then is going to be very different from the structure of of ethereum and so so the number one thing that that we're doing now is adding support for the things that are very close to what we already support but

additionally have a good amount of demand already so some examples of that like projects that we have already partnered with and are currently live include B and B chain and and polygon um others that you know many um uh people requested um that will be live very soon would include like Avalanche uh optimism uh and then we actually announced a partnership with coinbase uh for for the base uh Layer Two uh and so we'll be adding some more for that as well on the coming weeks awesome and and one of the cool new features that you have recently announced was the ability to like search a user's Twitter handle and then be able to like find their address and query you

know an assortment of transaction history and set alerts on these transactions basically so I'm just curious like how does that product work what what is the what what is like linking the Twitter handle to an actual wallet address on chain oftentimes it's people themselves right so many people now there's kind of like this culture of even wanting your on-chain activity tied to your online Persona maybe not tied to your let's call it real world like government ID um because many people you know on on Twitter especially are in on or have some kind of like pseudonym that they go by but they'll at least want to tie their kind of volunteering activity to that student even if they don't go all the way to to the real name and so oftentimes we're just working on again

like I mentioned finding new data sources seeing where people are you know talking about um you know Twitter and talking about their cryptocurrency activity and uh and try to find as many sources as possible where people are linking and making a direct connection between themselves and their cryptocurrency addresses of which one of those is Twitter um and so you know given that so many crypto people uh live in the Twitter ecosystem all the time you know this is is like one such way in which we can help you know kind of connect that Loop uh and close that off where now it's like okay well now you don't have to just search people by you know their real name or an institution by their real name now you know they go by a pseudonym you know on Twitter or

something you try looking that up instead so I think it would be helpful to take the most recent event that happened over the last weekend with usdc debegging how were you able to use Arkham in order to kind of dissect the situation and see uh where the d-peg began potentially or maybe if if there was a certain force behind it what were your takeaways from the usdc dpeg well the number one thing was obviously the the the exposure to to svb um so analyzing what what actually occurred uh with the d-peg as somebody who who has money in in uscc and had money in uscc

um what ended up happening was for for background for for the listeners right you you have a coin uh and that coin uh is not sufficiently decentralized right it's decentralized in in the sense that you know the money isn't in a single place um but is spread out into into multiple places but is centralized in the sense that that multiple places is now on chain on the blockchain uh it's actually in a physical Bank um well held digitally but in a bank um and so you know when they announced that you know they they have a bunch of money locked up in in a bank that that was failing there was kind of this broader question of okay well what is the what is the exposure um to this right because many people

were looking at the list of banks that uscc had had exposure to because they published it publicly um and then it was just a waiting game to see okay well how much exposure to do they actually have to to this right like there's like 12 banks on this list is it like 112 maybe they had a little bit more maybe they had a little bit left let's figure out how how bad you know exactly this this actually is um and so what ended up happening was that you know they announced that they had three billion dollars plus uh locked up in in in um in Silicon Valley Bank um but the total kind of outstanding amount was more than 40 billion dollars um within the coin so it was under 10 it

was like you know an eight percent kind of uh uh lock up on that um and then obviously the market freaked out and that's when the Deep Peg actually began uh because especially on a weekend if people are just selling a bunch of this currency you know markets at the end of the day the price of an asset is just how much people are willing to buy and sell for right it's a bid ass spread and then where it meets in the middle is the price uh and so if you have a bunch more Supply than demand no matter what the the asset is uh the price is going to is going to fall unless there's some mechanism to keep it pegged and the mechanism to keep uscc pegged is the SD Redemption but the problem is that again because it was

like late on a Friday night you know banks are closed and so you can't you can't redeem so there was no way to actually close that Loop and it was just all Supply flooding the market not enough demand price goes down and there's no mechanism by which you can Arbitrage it with the Redemption to keep the price at a dollar uh and so in my mind immediately what I was thinking about when when that happened um was okay there are two worlds here world number one is uh where usdc reprices to a so-called fair value right so this is the idea that okay well if there's a hundred dollar outstanding um but only 98 or 90 sorry 92 dollars in the bank

um then maybe the thing isn't actually worth one to one maybe the thing is worth 92 cents right and that's and that's the new fair value and a bunch of people were doing some math on that for usdc it's like okay well you know they have eight percent uh in Silicon Valley Bank um but you know well you know it's not like Silicon Valley Bank lost all the money right they probably have uh some money left or if not the majority of the money left though let's say they they have eight usdc has eight percent locked up uh in svb but svb still has you know 50 of the money left then maybe the fair you know discount is actually only four percent not eight percent right and so there's all this kind of math that you have to do to try to understand uh the

risk and and manage the the risk that you're taking on additionally obviously there was there was the fact that there could have been you know a rescue which obviously there ended up being uh and so pricing in odds of a rescue maybe the discount should be less whatever what ended up actually happening was um it people kind of fairly priced it at that 92 Range it actually fell below even 90 cents at at one point but that was one such possibility one such world the other world was one where there is no fair value because the true equilibrium point could have possibly been zero for uscc how well the answer is if you have a bunch of tokens outstanding right and uh and a certain

amount of money in the bank which is less than that number of tokens outstanding then rather than there being a fair price it all just Trends to zero because a bunch of people rushed to the bank to try to pull money out or sell as much as they possibly can of this uscc uh then a bunch of people get one dollar and a bunch of people just get zero because it Trends to zero because there's not as much money in the bank as they're supposed to be right and so that was the thing that I was actually afraid of thankfully that did not end up happening there wasn't enough of a run on the bank on usdc to where a bunch of people got one dollar and a bunch of people got nothing um but some people did end up selling out what ended up being the the fair

value at like 92 cents or 90 cents uh up until the point where they said okay come Monday like we're gonna do the redemptions one for one and then the rescue came and now we repacked um so it was a pretty kind of dramatic situation mostly because I don't think people are expecting there to to be trying to manage their their risk on usdc in the same way they had to do with other kinds of assets um definitely a scary moment but that was kind of my My overall high level view on on what happened yeah that was a great analysis of of the the overarching situation it's kind of funny Sam and I were debating about this as it was happening and I was a camp one guy he was a camp two guy so he was uh you know he's kind spreading that that Doom and

Gloom on me that you know someone's getting zero and somebody's getting one you can have both you can definitely have have both right I mean I I think it's it's a probabilistic bet it's like imagine you have a hundred worlds I think in like 70 or 80 of them you get the fair price situation but in like 20 to 30 of them you get ufcc going to zero and it's just a question of which which world do you think we're in yeah that was a scary weekend for sure because like I ran into the same math like kind of backed into it the same way you just described and I was like all right 95 and a half cents I think it's time to move out of this like just in case you know they do honor redemptions come Monday one to one there's a run on the

bank then you're left as the bag holder the risk just like didn't make sense there for me plus even if you would get let's say 8 or 95 96 stencil and dollar if there was like some bankruptcy proceedings of some sort like I I didn't know all right how long is it actually gonna take until I can actually cash this usdc out out because there's pretty much no on-chan liquidity left so I don't want to be stuck holding this for six months or something waiting for all that to to pan out so I was in the Doom and Gloom camp but I just remember UST far too closely and I was just like okay I'm not risking this one this time yeah and so it's essentially what then happened was usdc became this like

bridge between an off Bank off-chain banking crisis uh and kind of like spread that on chain because much of uh D5 today relies on the use of usdc so we saw some protocols that were uh kind of came out came out of this on tops like such as maker Dao who ended up acquiring two billion dollars of usdc essentially being like a lender of Last Resort and absorbing this yet usdc at a one-to-one rate for die um which you know probably not the best long-term bets that you want to be making is acquiring a deep pegging stable coin in real time um however you know now that we've been repegged it ended up being very beneficial did you see any other protocols that kind of had an interesting Dynamic play out not that I can recall

um directly I know for for you know others kinds of um protocols they also have very similar similar stuff I think we wrote a thread on uh on compound and uh and the fact that compound was was using a bunch of uh uscc related uh information and uh and um you know for example like if you have a more kind of decentralized system that's using something like a price Oracle uh in order to make decisions uh about about how the protocol works then if something is not behaving as it should be right like you could imagine programmatically setting usdc to one dollar and you'd like build a bunch of code assuming that usdc is always one dollar because that's what it should be

and then it like depegs then in that situation you could get some kind of protocol mishap um where you know the thing's not functioning as it's supposed to because one of the things that you assume to be true is no longer through because the world is weird um and uh and uh and I think like one such thing of that you know happened with uh with with compound and we wrote a tweet through it about it on on Twitter um but I don't remember the exact details at this point yeah D5 definitely was not operating uh up to par over that weekend with with everything going on and heavy Reliance across defy on usdc so it it's a lot to to kind of digest but there's been a ton of different

interesting events over the past year between you know three AC Terra Celsius Alameda like you name it it's pretty much happened at this point has there been any other interesting takeaways that you've had over the major events that have occurred over the past year by using Arkham well number one I think it just highlights like most important of all it highlights the importance of on-chain analytics uh and why cryptocurrency was made to be more transparent and audible uh one of the things that kind of harp on a lot is just the fact that you know while blockchains and cryptocurrencies in general have been treated as transparent and and auditable as they are they are you know transparent and

auditable in some sense uh the reality is that the information isn't actually useful because as we discussed earlier on this podcast is just a bunch of random alphanumerical numbers all interacting with one another and it's difficult to know you know which two addresses are are related to one another are they not related you know what belongs to whom you know you're operating in an environment where you know even if a bunch of the assets are held on chain for a particular kind of exchange and you're that exchanges customer like you have exposure to those people you have exposure to them uh as a service as a counterparty and if it's cryptocurrency related then as we learned back in November it's very important to understand that all of the

money that is supposed to be there is there and it's not being used uh for for other kinds of stuff for other for other purposes uh and so that is only possible you know on chain right like you can't do this for example like with a bank right so um it is uh it's possible to to audit people in real time unlike in traditional Finance on chain but the reality is that if you don't know all the addresses and you don't know what belongs to whom is you know it's useless right and so with Arkham that's actually what what we're trying to do we're trying to tie those two things together and actually make what is already transparent and auditable actually useful by tying all of the relevant information to those pseudonymous like alphanumeric pseudonymous addresses so

another interesting thing that we could dive into was you know of course everyone by now has heard way more than they would like about the FTX implosion and the death of that exchange and so one of the interesting things that you guys actually pushed out a report on uh was how the Liquidators that took over those funds have been controlling them in like some of the on-chain activity they've done so uh we've seen a couple different blunders around like failed transactions and scraping dust tokens out of wallets and paying more in the gas to execute those transactions and the tokens they're receiving but um how do you think about like you know put like and this is exact scenario we gave you know more people more on the traditional Finance World a very crypto heavy task like do you think that's

something that makes sense going forward and what are some of the things that you saw throughout the handling of these funds there are two comments that I would make with with respect to this so number one um you are dealing with a incredibly Technical and insensitive uh you know piece of piece of tech right when you're operating on chain and when you're trying to you know collect uh all of this uh all of these user funds across like you know I mean I don't know how many blockchains FTX needed to support because they had so many different assets that that were tradable you know some of those assets which are are on their own chain a lot of them are erc20

but some of them are on their own chain so you you need a ton of that infrastructure in order to find those assets and and figure out what's going on with them um and uh and as you mentioned you have a bunch of a bunch of people who aren't necessarily crypto native needing to operate like in the depths of the belly of a cryptocurrency exchange misappropriated funds you know D5 protocols there's so much there's such a steep learning curve for that if you're starting from zero and you don't already have a bunch of crypto native people um mostly because crypto native people are working in crypto they're not working for a you know a consulting firm or any kind of like bankruptcy related Law Firm

um and so that was issue kind of number one I think having people who who are not necessarily crypto focused working on something where being crypto focused is like a prerequisite it's like necessary the second thing is you know skill aside I think it is possible that there is a substantial amount of bureaucracy at play as well so you know one kind of way of thinking about this is it's incredibly important for you know uh every single uh now kind of creditor to the FTX estate every single like user who ended up losing money it's

incredibly important for these people to all receive as much money back as possible and uh and that's the metric by which these people are measured I think unfortunately that is not true in most of these kinds of in most of these kinds of cases that's not actually the number one objective um but rather I think the number one objective is just to like account for everything that needs to be accounted for and attempt to collect everything that needs to be attempted to be collected right which is a little bit different and can lead to situations like the one you just described where you know if there's somebody you know if there's a creditor's user funds on some wallet in some protocol you know whatever it is and we're

talking about five dollars but that is somebody's user funds and you've been given like got fees in order to you know try to collect as many user funds as possible then that is where you get situations where somebody ends up spending you know thirty dollars to interact with a D5 protocol just in order to collect five bucks because then you get to check the box that you know everything that needed to be accounted for was accounted for even if it's not necessarily the most efficient way of going about doing it um and so that's kind of like the second uh big piece of of what I feel like is possible went wrong um but yes we've written a number of Twitter threads about this which you know people can read at Arkham Intel on

on Twitter um where we kind of go very in depth on a bunch of the actual specific liquidations uh many of which as we were discussing before like how do you actually tie the addresses together uh came from just the fact that like every FTX related address is now sweeping funds into like one Liquidator account right and so you can just assume that that's kind of the FTX and they're trying to play as many of the on-chain funds as possible uh into that address so that's like one of the ways in which this kind of sleuthing occurs yeah this feels like another one of those those opportunities or moments where the off-chain Playbook that you know we've historically relied on is the traditional Society just doesn't exactly map over to our on-chain world you know

we see this with Securities laws and how it's really just not a one-to-one fit for most crypto assets and again we see this in like uh bankruptcy uh like clawing back funds like it's it's it's it's not always the the one-to-one mapping that we would love to see um and one of the the more interesting findings of this report that you guys put out was actually they were the Liquidators removed um some collateral from a lending protocol before they had closed the loans actually resulting in liquidating the funds and one of the quotes there was the Liquidators themselves were liquidated which I just loved that piece there but Sam I know you had a couple other things you wanted to hit on yeah I was just curious because I have a lot of troubles um I guess just trusting uh the tags of a lot of these different sources like

it's got to just be such a monumentous task in order to accurately do this but you mentioned an algorithm that you guys use can you kind of I guess just shed more light on how you actually tag these wallets and how you ensure their accuracy so every address basically goes through um some kind of automated detection uh in Auto lead link um in many cases maybe we're we're not able to like tag something but the reality is that when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of labels and uh and millions of entities um you end up having to do a bunch of that in an automated fashion because people can't go through and like buy themselves try to label all of that you

know you can't you can't have a human try to make 100 million labels it's not possible and so you have to use the computer and so the the the algorithms that we have developed essentially are able to you know based on our own uh history confirmed addresses back testing variety of different things we are able to assign a a label with a confidence level um to any given you know address in an automated fashion right and so uh in some cases it can come back as no label you know there there's no information here that's actually like relevant for being able to assign a a particular entity uh in other cases you know like for example when something is a

um you know deposit addresses that only send to a single hot wallet and we know what the hot wallet is because we've confirmed it itself right then in that case the label of this is this exchange's deposit address you know like this is a deposit address belonging to this exchange is very high confidence right um so we kind of can range from anything between zero percent and you know near 100 confidence depending on the structure of the address the kind of information we have the activity of the address Etc um anything kind of greater than 95 confidence goes up for review and so basically you have this massive pool of

information and of addresses that are all being updated in real time for their confidence level anything that is very high confidence that being like 95 plus then goes for review by one of our like analysts so then that means like a human sits down looks at the information looks at the label looks at like the evidence and you know reasons why it tagged it as it did uh and then the human confirms whether or not it's it's correct and and to the best of our knowledge is is right in which case it then goes up to get staged and then pushed to production uh or they say for whatever reason like no the algorithm fumbled this one I I can see why it thinks that it's this person

but actually like it's not totally clear maybe this is their friend um and then it stays just in our database uh and until so it gets new information then goes up for review again uh and so that's kind of the basic structure in in which we do it so you can kind of think about it as a really big uh automated top of funnel uh that kind of comes down as its confidence level increases until the point where a human it's like good enough for a human to review and then it eventually gets pushed interesting okay so you guys are putting in a lot of the legwork to tag a lot of these wallets add all these different features uh but as of today it feels like the primary use case of Arkham is kind of flow flows essentially

and different wallet tagging so that's like a critical piece right there on its own but I'm curious what do you envision Arkham ultimately be coming in the future and how do you all plan to monetize because I know now it's a beta and you're not actually charging customers um one thing that I was going to note uh as well by the way uh is um the the fact that users cannot only use our labels but they can also use their labels as well right so any address that remains untagged users are able to add a a tag based on the information that that they have directly to our platform in a way that is not viewable by us and is not

viewed by anybody else in the Arkham ecosystem so you have your own private version of Arkham that you can then add as many labels as you want that belong exclusively to use it to you and will never be shown to anybody else in order to augment our system and if at any point you believe our labels are incorrect you can update them and delete them as well right and so we give the users a ton of flexibility uh on our platform and you know if they want they can just use it as a guideline right you don't have to use it as um you know direct truth even I I think it is but you know that doesn't mean people have to necessarily use it in terms of um where I I see the the business going um and where I see Arkham heading in in

the future uh I think right now we have a very kind of broad user base of uh of consumers who who love using the Arkham platform uh I think over time we are going to continue adding additional institutions and training firms um you know we already have several hundred who are using the platform on a weekly basis on a daily basis in order to do their work um we're going to build significantly more infrastructure tools so for example you know it's not just via our front end that you can interact with our comp platform we also have a back end and we have a ton of data right and that can be accessible by our API and so that's another kind of like big thing that

we're intending to to to do um and to and to make widespread so in general I think we're going to continue building more picks more shovels uh and a better way for people to continue to to interact with data uh in the cryptocurrency ecosystem that's great and I gotta ask this because I've I've heard it floating around as a rumor but is there a token coming out in association with Arkham or uh not ready to disclose that one yet no comment on that at this time but um but I think you know it's definitely very interesting I consider myself quite crypto native and so I think that having something that can really help us uh developing an ecosystem and is sufficiently decentralized and has you know very good utility I think I think

it's an interesting idea for sure absolutely and then this will be my last question but I'm just curious personally speaking um because I know you are a pretty crypto native guy so where did you find or where do you find yourself spending the most time is it in evm uh chains and ethereum specifically l2s like what projects kind of interest you are you a D5 guy a GameFly guy I'm just curious your take I think for the longest time I've been very interested in Bitcoin uh and that's sort of to me still the the number one uh you know heart of crypto I think I think that can't be taken away it's the first it's the largest the network effect is super powerful uh and most of all I feel like people in places

like the US don't necessarily fully understand it because they don't understand that world of like high inflation where something like Bitcoin even though it's volatile it can be a lifesaver like when you live in an economy where everything is actually down only due to the inflation something like Bitcoin like despite the the small volatility volatility um can actually be you know a lifesaver uh and so for me I still I still think you know Bitcoin is like my favorite cryptocurrency personally still um but uh but yeah I think in general I spent a bunch of time in the Ethereal ethereum ecosystem I think that's the the number one place where where I've spent time that was the first place where we started developing our our product I think there's a bunch of other

interesting protocols and ecosystems that I really love um but the majority of of my actual time trading and uh and doing other things is spent in uh in the ethereum ecosystem awesome well we really enjoyed this and we appreciate you coming on Miguel I don't know if you want to tell the audience a little bit more about where they can find you or potentially sign up for beta access for Arkham yeah definitely so you can always follow us on Twitter at Arkham Intel I'm uh real Miguel morale and uh in Additionally you can go to www dot arkhamintelligence.com in order to see some more information about us see some wireframes understand what the product looks like uh and naturally you can sign up for the wait list in order to join our our data program uh and then afterwards you can

find us on platform.orgcomingintelligence.com