Be More Bullish! OPEN Monad Event Live From Token2049 in Singapore. Big Announcement w/ Agora

Transcript

17 floor. We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. >> I think the rollup is one of the most premier media brands in crypto. >> It's probably one of the first rollup episodes, right? Um >> adding it to my library as we speak. >> Potentially multi-chain deployments. We are at Dev Connect day one here. I'm guessing from base.

Data. Hey JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity,

the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish. He said it. HE FINALLY SAID IT. So bullish. Andy's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. Ah,

The rollup is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> Rollup is my favorite. >> People from all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry come together for the rollup. by Now, the institutions aren't coming.

They're simply here. It's the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. >> Welcome to the next. See you on the show. >> Be more bullish. Be more bullish. That's the theme here live from Singapore. Token 249. I told everyone in this room I was going to come out yelling. Here we are. We're yelling. Be more bullish, guys. Live from Singapore. The entire team flew in. Give me the shirt. Give me the shirt. Toss it in, guys. Are you kidding?

Are you kidding? This is the energy that we're bringing here. Okay, this is the energy, guys. We are on the absolute precipice of the institutional bull market. My name is Robbie. You guys already know that. We're live here from Singapore. Shout out to Monad. Shout out to Monad for giving us an incredible setup here at the open event. You guys can tell I'm here. I'm rocking with Mo there. This guy's got a name. It's his world. We're just living in it. Monad's flying today. And if you guys aren't bullish, well, you should be more bullish at the open event with the rollup. We're live from Singapore. We brought an absolute unit of a team out here. And if you see anyone wearing a rollup shirt, give us adapt, say what's up, and uh tell us how bullish that you

guys are. We're excited. As you can tell, I flew in yesterday. The energy has been palpable. I had a panel. We've seen some incredible announcements still very early in the conference week. As you guys know, we were at Cyos and Robin Hood last week. Now, we're here in Singapore. And so, we quite literally are traveling the world going from the capital of finance, whether that be in New York, whether that be in the Eastern Hemisphere here in Asia. Singapore is one of the centers of capital markets, one of the centers of finance. And it truly is evident out here that we are not only in a cryptonative bull market, but we are also in what feels like a confluence of factors. Just everything

feels as if it's hitting on all cylinders. And so, we've got several reasons uh that this is the case. We've got several things that we're going to be talking about here today. Um but I mean, it's just the energy out here is absolutely electric. And so I'm sure a lot of you guys are here in Singapore. Obviously, this is a little bit of an unusual time for us to be going live. Uh but we are fully adjusted. The jet lag is not hitting. We are fully dialed and we've got a heck of a team out here live in Singapore in the flesh. And we're going to be bringing you guys tons of content. And so we've got a full slate of interviews that we're going to be bringing you guys today from the Monat event. We've got the event happening outside. It is an incredible lineup that

they have. Monad has already had a couple of great announcements and they've got plenty more speakers that are be coming down the pipeline both on stage as well as here with us from this booth. Uh, as you can see, we got we got my homeboy right here, little Momo, the little purple guy, G Monad. Uh, I did a little behind the-scenes content about what it takes for a chain to succeed in 2026 in this paradigm when you've got New York Stock Exchange making announcements about 24/7 trading. They're making alternative trading systems, more tokenization exemptions, more regulation from the CFTC. How do you navigate? How does a chain succeed and survive? You know, there's got we've

got L2s like Blast that are that are winding down. But then on the other hand, you've got absolute high demand for chains. And I think a lot of that, at least at the institutional perspective, is driven by the need for 247 markets and the demand for 24/7 markets is forcing these institutions to tokenize, to go on chain, and to explore more of these alternatives. And so, we've got plenty that we're going to be covering. So many announcements. And that's another exciting thing that happens at these conferences is that teams save their announcements for these conferences. And so there's a ton of announcements, a ton of news that we're going to cover, uh, and a ton to get into here today. I'll give you guys a quick little taste of our lineup for

today. And then we'll get into everything that's coming out, uh, of the week over the next few days. And so Ivan is going to join us from 42 Network in a little bit. Then we've got Alex Watts. He's going to join us from Fast Lane, very ME focused uh, company there. Then we've got Defi Dave, just left Cap. He's going to be joining from UFG. We've got Jordan and TJ Miller. TJ and Jordan were on the show last year from Korea. They're going to be telling us about everything that they've got coming out. And then we've got Gamestock. And we've got uh we've got Tiny.xyz, a bunch of announcements that were going on at the Monad stage. And we're going to be getting from institutional to a little bit more consumer as the day goes on.

That is the vibe that Monad is curating here at Open. Uh very very exciting big week to start the week and uh we're going to get into it. We've got about 10 minutes before our first guest and so why don't we hit a couple tweets and get into it. We've got some videos, some big announcements both from the regulators, the institutions, the New York Stock Exchange, all the way down to the consumer apps. So we're going to get into the tweets for the week or at least for today, October 6th. Like I said, incredible show, guys. I mean, and be more bullish if you want to check in on the markets. Bitcoin hovering 85, ETH hovering 2,700. Uh Zcash hovering around that 1300, 1350

mark, and then you've got near uh around that $5 mark, which is incredible. Monad is surging today, uh down a little bit now, but they are doing wonderfully. And uh and like I said, incredible show. So, we're going to get into the tweets for today. Um, also guys, I was on a panel earlier and the way that these companies are starting to think about themselves, starting to handle themselves. I mean, the best example of this was this morning. The first event that I went to was OKX. They had a banger announcement with the New York Stock Exchange parent company ICE. They actually had Andrew Como, former governor of New York, make the announcement on their behalf. You

know, obviously New York, financial capital of the world, roll up goes live from the Empire State on a daily basis. And so, it was very serendipitous that they were making this announcement today because when you go to this event, they also had Vitalic speaking at this event. He was dressed in all black. I think it's indicative that these companies, Ethereum included, are starting to take themselves much more seriously. Okay? You know, it's not all rainbows and unicorns across this ecosystem anymore, whether that be Monad or Ethereum or across the industry. These companies are taking themselves a lot more seriously.

There's reason to believe that the rails that we're building now are the plumbing for the next financial system. There is a tokenization super cycle underway. We're seeing this get built out in real time. And it's very important if there's companies and asset allocators that are deploying hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars onto these rails that they take themselves seriously and that security is of the utmost importance. These are very resilient and very secure protocols and that is a prerequisite a necessity for these companies to be deploying large sums of capital onto these chains. And so Monad is no different. There were some announcements coming out of Monad this morning that indicates how Monad is

handling themselves. Like I said, a theme of this event I think is open and permissionless building. And that is why we're seeing both institutions, right? Some of the most creative financial experiments and DeFi applications that have been announced and launched on this chain exist on Monad. They're adding things every day. They announced XTOX is coming natively to Monad. So, you're going to see a large swath of new tokenized equities on Monad and then we're going to see a lot more consumer-based applications that are built around some of these native assets that are being issued on Monad, which I think presents a very interesting dichotomy for the Monad economy.

Meaning, you're going to end up with institutional grade assets, whether that be, you know, S&P 500 equities or that be other tokenized RWAs. you're going to end up with those assets right alongside some very viral consumerf facing applications. That's what I think it takes to survive in 2026 as a blockchain. There will be winners according to the power law. There will be sort of these shelling points for institutional liquidity, institutional grade assets. These things will exist. But at the same time, there is going to be ne there there's a necessity for retail flow both in these institutional grade assets and beyond. And so as we think about how

these two worlds collide, Monet is a great example of a chain that both caters to the retail institutional uh and alike. And so they're going to be, you know, able to cater to the re retail volume and and and flows, but at the same time service some of these institutional grade assets that everyone is looking to trade on. And so we're expanding the pie. This is the result of the tokenization super cycles. We're bringing more of these asset classes on chain. This is going to create new opportunities for both retail and institutional alike. So we're very very excited. I believe we've got some uh some headlines uh that we're going to play for you guys and we're going to get into our guest in the next 5 to seven

minutes. We're going to get him set up behind the scenes, but there was a couple of things that are very relevant to this convergence, right? And Monad again is one of the places where the convergence is taking place. So, let's go ahead play a couple of these videos. First one is going to be Mike Celig, chairman of the CFTC that has a video about how the regulation is going to be coming about and some of the things that he is excited and interested in deploying from the regulatory format that uh frankly was not the case in the prior administration. Let's go ahead play the video. You guys will hear it, you'll see it, and you'll get up to speed on everything that is coming out of Singapore today as well as back home in New York and the United States. News overnight. Sam Bankman Freed is now in

custody in the Bahamas. >> His $ 32 billion cryptocurrency exchange FTX goes bankrupt in a matter of days. $ 8.9 billion in customer funds are missing. >> I think rules of the road that are there at the beginning that people say, you know, we got a cop on the beat. >> The CFDC is well suited to play an increasingly central role in overseeing the cash digital asset commodity market. I believe that this is an industry that absolutely positively has to be regulated and has to protect consumers. >> Well, I think that it's very much now the the time for the CFTC, my former agency, and the SEC to step forward in the gap year and write rules for this new innovation the same way that I was

able to do when I was at the CFTC. >> It's absolutely critical that we have federal standards for crypto assets. And right now, we've dealt with a patchwork of state laws and regulations. And it's really been bad for business here in the United States. The United States has a choice. We can either write the rules that define the next generation of financial markets or we can let other countries write them for us. The CFTC will utilize its existing authorities to begin establishing a regime for crypto asset markets. We owe it to the American people to do so. President Trump's promise to deliver a crypto asset market structure and we will help him deliver on that promise.

>> Clear rules of the road start now. Mike Celig is signaling that there is increasingly this sense of regulatory innovation coming out of the CFTC. We've already seen everything that's coming out of the SEC as they think about stock tokens, debt issuance, as they think about tokenized equities. All of this is starting to roll out again fueling the tokenization super cycle which is ultimately going to create this flood of assets into some of the protocols that have been able to establish resiliency and a Lindy effect in the DeFi world. These are now going to start to accept a a new asset class which again is going to rise the AUMUum, rise the TVL, increase across the board and grow the PI for investors, traders, institutional

allocators alike. This truly feels like a PVE moment for the pie to be grown, which feels like why we're now on the impetence for a renowned start of a new bull market. So, I'm extremely excited. As you guys can tell, couldn't be possible without the regulatory innovation coming out of the CFTC. I think this week we're going to see more on pers. You guys saw the hyperlquid event took place yesterday. We're going to be at D Asia tomorrow talking with some of the leaders in the perpetuals market lighter hyperlid variational all these guys doing incredibly well. Uh perpetuals is one of the big five. And so as you guys have continued to watch the rollup, you know that we've got five key themes that we're focusing on for this next cycle. Per is one of the

leaders. Then you've got stable coins, you've got vaults, you've got prediction markets, and you've also got um you've also got tokenized equities and tokenization in general, which is also just the lifeblood that is fueling one of these, you know, all of these big buildouts. And so we're we're seeing this take place right before our eyes. couple more headlines that we're going to get through before we bring up our first guest. Let's keep cycling through because we've got a lot of big news and we have not had a chance to explain all these things that are going on for you guys. Um, and so we're going to get into the next one. Let's keep things rolling here as we go live from Open 2026 in Singapore at the Monet event. We're going to get this slotted in uh the next

one. And just to give you guys a sense, we're at open today live Monad hosting this tremendous event. Tomorrow we're going to be live from D Asia. We're gonna get started a little bit earlier. Thursday out here today. We're going to be live from the Near and the Quantis event. Next video we've got is from Quantis, which is a new quantum secure encrypted money protocol. They're working closely with Near. Let's go ahead and watch this video to get a sense of what they're doing on the Quantum side of things. Quantum field reel. This This is

something that I'm very excited about. I tend to think that this is one of the new inflection points as well. We're going to have to prepare more and more for this reality. So again, very excited. Not a whole lot to say about the quantum side of things right now, but we've got a very exciting, very highly anticipated dinner and meeting with the Near and the Quantis team coming later this week. So stay tuned. We've got plenty more coming out of there. Let's hit rapid fire now. Couple quick more headlines before we bring up our first guest. And we're going to keep things rolling here as we get into it today.

big start to the week out here in Singapore. We're going to keep things rolling. We're going to keep things rolling here. And uh again, we've got a few more very, very exciting things for you guys here today. Uh they've got more speakers coming out. I'm sure you guys saw this as well. Uh, one of the big announcements that came out earlier today. This was an update that we saw uh, and this was from uh, one of the recent vulnerabilities, Zack XPTt. I mean, he's been one of the heroes of the cycle. Uh, he has a thread that explains how he infiltrated a Chinese organized crime syndicate that has laundered over

a billion dollars across exploits for the Lazarus group. I mean, look, the most recent one was Bit uh, $380 million. again suspected alleged the Lazarus group was behind this and obviously there is several uh people and parties that are involved in actually taking this from an exploit into laundering the money and making it usable. And so Zack XPTt has been able to put his own money at risk, put himself at the center uh of a lot of these discoveries and ultimately uncover uh so much information that has been relevant to ultimately bring this to justice. I do hope that as we become more ingrained, the digital asset

industry, the blockchain industry at large becomes more integrated with the traditional financial system, the Department of Justice, the regulatory bodies take this risk more seriously. Uh cuz right now it's Zach XPTt running a one-man ship uh and trying to protect the entire industry, put it on its back uh and protect us from uh some of these malicious forces at the Lazarus Group. And so we are very very grateful and thankful for him uh and uh and the work that he does. Couldn't uh really I mean one of one of the most uh helpful forces in the space. So guys I think uh we've got one more that we're going to get to.

Let's go ahead cut to the next one because this is out of Monad. It's a great segue. Uh and this is Kone, right? One of the the head Monad chief Monad uh personnel announcing Monad private settlement. We've seen privacy just at the heart of so much happening in the industry these days gives banks and enterprises the best of both worlds. Sovereign execution environments with privacy and compliance by default. Compliance such a big prerequisite in order for these companies to come into the space. This benefits not only from the openness of Monad, which is key theme of this event, but also the composability and performance of Monad.

Again, as we integrate more asset classes and we tokenize more of these asset classes, the composability and performance is going to become ever so important. I heard this was a huge theme at Cyos for some of these regulated institutions. They now have a fire under their ass to get 24/7. This is being lit and this is something that they are now being forced to take very seriously. They have to do go 24/7 or else they're at risk of falling behind. The only way for institutions to get 24/7 is to be tokenized and onchain and maybe even a Gentic, which is kind of the last pillar that they're looking at knocking down.

But these are all pre prerequisites in order for these institutions to go 24/7. that is now table stakes and in order to do so they do need to be tokenized and onchain and just so happens that we've built the chains and now we're well in position to capitalize as these institutions come on chain and so guys we're going to hit a transition maybe a quick standby maybe a quick flip to the live stream that's happening on the stage outside this room and we're gonna get our first guest in here uh our first guest uh is gonna be Ivan of 42 Network. And so we're going to bring him up in just a moment. He's been sitting waiting patiently behind the

scenes live from Open 2026. We're going to get you guys a quick look at the stage that's happening right outside this room. Big event, really well put on. Monad did a tremendous job putting this together. Again, bunch of great events uh and great announcements that are happening here from Monad. It's a tremendous way to kick off the week and uh we're very very excited that Monet had us out. Uh and so we're going to hit you guys very quickly. We're going to flip over to the main stage happening out there as we get set for our slate of guests and then uh we're going to be back and we're going to be live for the next few hours here. And so guys, strap in. It's a big week here in Singapore.

We're just getting started. It's only Tuesday out here in Singapore. They're talking about the future of the EVM from open infrastructure to open money. As you can tell, openness is a huge portion of what's happening not only on Monad, but also uh at this industry live. So, let's go ahead cut out there. Joe Luben and Kone are on this next panel. So, why don't you guys >> um cool. Um so, today we'll be chatting about the future of the EVM uh from open infrastructure to open money. Um maybe to kick it off, uh Joe, uh when you were helping to build Ethereum, what did you think the EVM would be and why has it endured as an open standard?

>> Um uh so it goes back um pre- Ethereum. Uh so for various reasons I was disenchanted with uh the financial industry as many people uh were. Uh maybe that's the uh uh the entry story of many people uh just uh something bad happened or or just general disappointment with uh um with the economy or the financial system and uh um in that period of disenchantment um I read Satoshi's white paper um and I thought holy um this is going to change everything. Satoshi invented this

new powerful form of trust, decentralized trust. Um, and instead of um living in a world in society uh that had uh pretty much um top- down command and control trust as the only powerful technology that could enable collectives of people to build civilization scale infrastructure. Um we now had this new construct uh where we as engineers have been shown by Satoshi that uh we can just build this thing. We can build a um a bottomup trust system um in a a new kind of database um and have a trust foundation upon which we can start to

build things and sort of think about how to rearchitect uh the world systems on more sound infrastructure. And so, uh, when I, uh, when I met Vitalik and read his white paper, um, I was already pretty convinced, uh, that this is going to be the, um, the most powerful statement of Satoshi's vision, uh, and a way that, uh, that we as engineers around the world could actually, uh, go ahead and build it in a reasonable time frame. Uh, and so, um, I guess that within that is the answer. uh new trust foundation uh new global decentralized integrated financial system and then once we get this financial system

humming uh once it's really fluid and very very inexpensive so that microtransactions are even uh can be really really small uh and still economically um viable uh then we can start building social networks and all sorts of other systems on the layers above that. So I would say I was locked in when I read Satoshi's paper and it it seemed like QED we just got to build this thing uh when I got involved with Ethereum >> Q&A now you could have built a new execution environment. Why was preserving and continue to work on the

EVM so important? >> I think that the EVM at least in some of the discourse that I've seen in the past um was definitely unfairly maligned. Like you had people in the Salana community or in other communities that were saying that there was something wrong about the bite code standard or they didn't like uh you know they they didn't like the fact that everything was like 32 um byte storage slots and they didn't there are things they didn't like. Um, but I think fundamentally the EVM is a great standard. It's really, um, you know, it's got great, uh, sort of quoteunquote front-end languages, most notably

Solidity, um, but some others as well that are really easy to read and understand. And the understanding is incredibly important to writing secure code because you need to be able to quickly reason about what's actually happening and um, you know, defend against invariance. And then there's just such a rich ecosystem of libraries, builders, applied cryptography research. Um, and it's really very powerful to build for an open standard that is futurep proof and where anyone who's building using it knows that it's going to always continue to work and they're not going to have to randomly port their code to another language the way that um they might or

they might feel vendor lockin effects if they were building uh for example on on Salana or some other language. >> Yeah. and and in most technology ecosystems you have um some All right, we are back. Hope you guys enjoyed a little bit of that panel from Ke and Joe Luben. I've got Ivan here, CEO of 42. We're going to be chatting a little bit about Swarm Inference, which is exciting because AI agents are running everything now it seems running not only our lives but also our company.

Uh swarm inference is uh when you coordinate many small models on consumer hardware through peerranked reputation weighted consensus. Ivan, I'm sure you can tell us a lot more about this. Welcome to the show. Of course, >> first off, and what are you doing here at Monad? Why as an AI company are you here at a digital assets event? >> Sure. So, first of all, thanks for having me. It's such a pleasure. Uh the thing with uh our approach to uh scaling AI, we really do not believe in the general um idea that the only way to build AI is where you have the large data center. You can control the whole vertical, the energy supply, the chips, the training. Because what we've been uh

seeing is that maybe the pursuit of the large almighty model is not the right one because the smaller specialized models are uh so much more efficient. So we started 42 with the idea of actually creating a protocol and network where we can combine the capabilities the expertise of multiple models and enable them to work together. And what we're seeing through this collective effort, they can easily outperform the frontier without the need for vast data centers, lots of compute chips because the small models well you can run it on your laptop, you can run it on your home machine or whatever. So um that is where

the web 3 stack comes in because >> decentralization is very in intrinsic to this swarm. >> Exactly. Because uh in this case we rely on uh people. Well the idea here is to build intelligence uh similarly to how knowledge has been built in the case of Wikipedia where people from the internet contribute a little piece of their own expertise their own knowledge and we got the kind of like default source of knowledge on the internet. Um and with intelligence we believe something like that is possible where people contribute specialized models different kind of fine tunes. One model could be a specialist on civil engineering. The other one could be a specialist on Delaware corporate law, on jazz history

or something like that. Something like that. And together all those models uh combined can actually uh scale infinitely and be able to achieve um well kind of like um capabilities uh that are going to be exceeding what we're currently getting even from the best frontier models. And the application of the swarm intelligence here this goes beyond finance >> of course. Yes. So it's applicable in all domains. Uh so um as of today we built our own inference engine that allows us to run multiple models simultaneously and uh those models are continuously looking at each other's

work. So it's kind of like a group of experts working together and steering the collective reasoning towards the most efficient solution. So uh we are soon going to be announcing our uh results with this new approach and uh so far what we are seeing is that uh it gives a quite substantial boost on the benchmarks like uh up to 7% on most benchmarks which is uh quite uh quite a lot but what makes me most excited is that we are seeing that when we have mult multiple models working together this kind of like peer pressure makes so much more consume% less tokens.

>> Wow. >> That means is that even if we serve say a swarm of Quen models uh and serve it at the industry standard customers are paying is going to be like 25% less because the swarm ends up being so much more efficient that uh to get the task done it's going to consume uh less tokens. >> So more intelligence for less tokens. I mean that it it feels like the technology it's starting to matter again. Like for so long you know we were focused on things like you know kind of making the narrative work. We were focused on the perception of AI. We were focused on all these things but you guys are really pushing the frontier. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about how it works right? How do you use a blockchain stack right? Why is it

important that this is decentralized? You talked a little bit about how this will run on local machines. Earlier today, I saw Vitalic talking about, hey, for a long time, it was not your keys, not your coins. Now, not your silicone, not your keys. So, a lot of this is moving onto the local device. When we're thinking about sovereignty and we're thinking about ownership, it has to be to our local machines. How are we going to enable our local machines to to retain sovereignty over the over these models but also use our local machines to connect to a decentralized network where all of us are contributing intelligence to this collective swarm.

>> So last year we've been running uh DevNet and uh thanks a lot to Monet community. We had a lot of interest uh and I believe about 40,000 people applied to run the nodes as part of our network. uh and we have about like three or 4 thousand concurrent nodes live uh at any given moment. Um so the thing with running um the way we've been running the network is um we don't know what models people are hosting >> and that is the whole idea that uh to incentivize people to actually create uh specialized model to do the finetunes for certain domains. uh we uh want to keep the well of um every node on the

network. So creates the best >> um I don't know um medical model >> okay >> for a certain domain or or something that's very valuable um in in certain area that person might not be interested in uh necessarily uh open sourcing the result of their work right they might want to first benefit directly for all the effort all the data all the um talent that they put into uh creating this model. So um the way we're running it, we don't know what people are hosting, right? And uh for that we need a reputation system because how do we ensure that with more participants the

quality of the inferences only increases and it's not possible to kind of like a game the uh system by plugging in a really weak or like a spamming model that just generates nonsense tries to uh get like a slice of the uh pie for all the um answers. So with the reputation system uh people kind of like uh um with their models are mining their own reputation uh with all the right answers their reputation increases. But if at some point they start uh providing nonsense like incorrect answers or just something that's uh not relevant to the uh question or to to their original

prompt, they quickly lose the reputation. And that is where the blockchain and the web 3 stack comes in because how else would we create uh a system like a truly trustless system where um there's like zero knowledge of what people are actually running as part of the network without decentralized ledger where we keep history of everything that's been happening of all the results uh and by results I mean not the actual outputs but uh the kind of like the consensus of models uh whether someone provided a good response or a bad response. And u this is the ma the primary decentralized part of uh the stack the reputation system. We've long

said on this show that blockchains are one of the best technology tools to coordinate humans but really coordinate anything. I mean blockchains in general are such a they're they're they're such a an effective coordination technology because that's effectively what they do. They have validators and everyone is able to come to consensus. This is a consensus engine and we're able to coordinate different actions whether that be for humans or for bots. And so in this case we're coordinating intelligence. We are arriving at a truth and we're able to crowdsource very specialized specialized agents that are able to come to the truth about a very you know v various uh various topics. And so you know you've got this reputation

mechanism. It's built on monad. coming up with these different layers that are able to coordinate amongst each other in order to arrive at a consensus. How much do you think this is going to start to take market share and adoption away from the frontier companies? I mean, you already said, you know, that's a pretty good value proposition. More intelligence for less tokens. I think people will realize that once it starts to really take hold. How much market share do you think you can take from the frontier companies? I' I'd imagine that, you know, when we hear the rhetoric of an AI slowdown or pacing the frontier, that's got to be music to your ears because to your side, like we're not slowing down. This is open sources is out in the open. You guys are just

continuing to accelerate. If they choose to pace the frontier, that is just going to put open-source, decentralized, and crowdsourced intelligence in a better position. Yeah, I would say uh for the last year the market has been moving in our favor because um even one year ago we had to go do this um uphill battle of uh trying to prove why is why there would ever be a need for AI other than uh what is being offered by anthropic or open AI. And now suddenly uh with all the uh recent conversations about about the privacy concerns about uh some uh um questionable ethics coming from some of

the frontier labs um there's a s uh sudden rise of interest in alternative solutions and uh 42 is definitely uh with us going in a very different direction um is uh definitely uh one so in as part of our go to market strategy we are launching our API in uh about two weeks and uh the way we're doing it first we're going to be applying our technology for existing open weight models so when we launch our API you would be able to get access to uh the already popular Quen models uh followed by GLM and DeepS running on our inference engine. So this would be a way

for us to prove the efficiency of our engine to demonstrate um those uh uh improvements in accuracy and as well in uh token efficiency and moving from there like the next step for us would be um following our vision for the decentralized network where we actually start gathering uh more custom models uh having more variety of models and uh moving from there. So it's it's going to take us several steps to get to that uh vision. But uh gladly with uh uh by us demonstrating that this tech works and it brings the kind of improvements that we've been talking about uh we expect to

get additional traction, additional interest from the community that uh we believe will help us accelerate the progress on the decentralized network. when you look at some of the existing you know crypto AI onchain AI projects like Near and Venice and TA Bit Tensor I is 42 just pushing the needle just continuing to squeeze as much performance as possible and more efficiency or is there something fundamentally missing from the existing solutions? Yeah, I would say the existing solutions they all have their uh merit but uh what we're doing is uh fundamentally different because we are uh AI first. So we built the inference

engine. We uh did the u whole pipeline of the way we can adapt the models to run efficiently because uh you know when we started 42 it was a more kind of like um clear multi-step process uh that did not necessarily it it was an interesting architecture. It was a novel architecture but uh on the technological level it kind of like used what's already been out there. So the models would have generated their inferences. Then they would go to the next step where they would check and evaluate each other's work. Then they would aggregate the best outputs for the final answer.

So that is what we started with. That's what we've been running as part of the DevNet. But currently since we kind of like rebuilt the stack from the ground up, we uh as I've been mentioning during um this session, we build our own inference engine which actually allows the models to continuously do all the steps. So we don't have the added latency and uh the way we run the inference is fundamentally different from the way uh inference is being run by any um pretty much any company in the industry. So um this what sets us apart from the existing um crypto AI or inference companies it's in the

fundamental different approach to running the models >> that I mean that is the main question right is latency when you're orchestrating intelligence across a decentralized set of participants you know the the idea is how are you able to orchestrate intelligence or or you know build consensus uh or coordinate across many participants when the frontier model companies you ping one entity maybe that's a data center and it sends it right back. How are you able to reduce the latency so much so that you're able to compete in terms of speed? Because that's been table stakes now. You know, we've come to accept that look, you know, especially some of these instant models that maybe don't have as much reasoning baked in. Are you primarily

thinking that 42 will be used for you know very in-depth workflows very specific you know use cases and latency isn't as much of a priority because right now some of these instant models they're so fast when you're coordinating across you know disperate actors how do you reduce latency to acceptable rate >> yeah so that was the concern with the original architecture so uh running the devet we realized that hey we demonstrated that boost in accuracy we do well on the benchmarks but at the cost of um um at the cost of speed performance. So we've been talking that hey uh there'll be maybe additional 4 to 7 seconds for you to receive the

response which is good for like deep research software engineering tasks but maybe not if you want to like summarize text or do some uh work that maybe agentic workflows that requires a lot of back and forth. So at at that point that extra seconds of latency would become annoying and uh that is part of the reason why we rebuilt the uh stack. Um so now with the added um efficiency of uh uh reasoning and the fact that this is no longer a multi-step approach but rather a continuous one. So the models again they're not taking like hey here's my response now let's do the ranking

let's do all the other kind of work no they are kind of like uh it's like a hive mind they're like um multiple models which are collectively thinking and um uh seeing that hey maybe this model is currently proposing a better and more efficient solution so let's steer the entire swarm in that direction then maybe another model catches up and says hey we should go in that direction and then the swarm goes in that direction. And if you've ever looked at the chain of thought of deepseek or um proprietary models where you see how the model reasons over uh your prompt, you might have noticed that sometimes models get

stuck. Sometimes they say, "Oh, I missed that." Or, "Oh, this is wrong. I should redo this part." So this kind of uh solo reasoning the inefficient inefficiency of solo reasoning is what causes um longer kind of like um time that might be needed to solve a task. But in our case because it's a collective reasoning effort, we kind of like um cancel out those uh directions that lead to repetition that lead to models getting stuck. And this is uh precisely how we gain that 25% boost in uh efficiency on tokens and uh uh time uh through the

continuous steering of uh reasoning. So in our case with a new uh approach we finish the task faster compared to a solo model and we also uh as I been mentioning consume less tokens along the way. Yeah, I mean it's very interesting. You know, it's not quite the orchestration between the specific models that you're talking about. It's a collective intelligence, which I think is a very different paradigm and perspective in which, you know, you you've been able to build this inference engine. Um, Ivan, just a few more questions. It's been this has been a really great chat. Uh, rapid fire. You ready?

>> Yes. >> Most overrated model. >> Um, deep. Most underrated model. Quen, >> what is the weirdest thing you've ever used AI for? >> Um, >> the one you can't really share, but you you know, you share on this show. >> All right. Uh, fix fixing my VPN through Hermas agent running on a local model uh uh 2,000 miles away from where I was uh currently located.

That's correct. I I'm gonna I'm gonna need the specifics on that one. We're gonna save that one for a follow-up combo. Um, best harness >> ours. >> Can we find it >> soon? Soon we'll be available. >> And uh, how can be connected and uh, follow you for when it gets released? >> Uh, sure. On we're mostly active on uh, X. So for at 42 network uh and uh we are relaunching our website so there will be a lot more information on our new approach and the new products that we're releasing.

>> I man appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. >> Appreciate it. Absolutely. Yeah. >> We'll uh we'll see you again soon. Enjoy the rest of the event. It's uh I I uh I think there's a lot going on up out there. We're going to keep things rolling. >> All right. >> All right. Appreciate it, man. Yeah. We'll see you again soon, >> guys. That was that was Ivan uh from 42 Network. And uh I mean I think I think this I think Ivan's used AI for a lot of fun stuff. No. Uh fixing the VPN from 2,000 miles away. It's just scratching the surface. Uh so we're going to we're going to keep things rolling. I think our next guest is going to be uh with us very shortly. Uh Ivan appreciate you coming. Uh we'll see you next time. And uh we're going to keep things rolling.

We've got Alex uh of Fast Lane uh is going to join us up very very soon. We're going to get back on the finance train as uh the Joe Luben panel continues to rage on out there. Friend of the show and uh man I mean Monad is uh you know what what what better uh project company organization in the space to bring together some of the brightest minds in AI. you know, it it it takes a a very an especially low latency blockchain in order to coordinate an AI swarm. Uh and then also uh have uh the financial components. Uh so we're going to get our next guest up.

Alex from Fastlane is going to join us. Uh and uh we're going to keep things we're going to keep things dialed over here. Yeah, we don't we don't need the uh the name tags. We we know what's going on. Alex, welcome to the show. What's up, brother? >> It's a pleasure to have you, man. Uh the last combo was good. Yeah, feel free to come come on in. Uh we'll get you up close and personal with the mic and uh yeah, the last guest was good. You know, we we were pretty uh pretty dialed in on the uh on the AI side of things. Uh but we're going to get back to our roots here onchain uh MEV and uh and everything that you guys got going on. I mean, you guys have been, you know, building in the space for a while. I remember when you guys were pretty

dialed just on just typical MEV, you know, Ethereum L1 land and uh, you know, trying to just make DeFi a little bit more smooth and effective and easy to use. Um, you made the transition to Monad. >> Yes. >> And so maybe you can talk us through, you know, kind of the chronology of Fastlane, you know, where you guys started, where you're at now, and we'll talk about, you know, everything that the the Monad DeFi landscape has to offer. >> Yeah. So, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. Um, Fastlane, we're about four and a half years old now. So, we've been very involved with MEV, uh, very involved in trading and our our whole our whole core thesis as a company has been let's just move stuff

on chain. Yeah. >> And it's like people say that, but with us it's not because of some like, you know, vague, you know, claim of like, oh, decentralization like that's important, but like why is that important? And for us, the main reason is that when you move stuff onchain, what you're doing is you're removing intermediaries. You're taking out, you know, these these back-end servers, you're taking out, you know, these uh like in between like entities that slow things down, right? If if you've got something in between you and the blockchain and you're settling on the blockchain, that's going to be slower than if you just go straight to the blockchain, you know, like we can't time travel. And so for us, a core part of fast the fastline thesis has always been let's take away all of these like servers that are set up in between the

user and the blockchain. And this was very very relevant in the MEV space where it's like you know you've got stuff like on Salana there were these like speed bumps where there would be these servers that would just slow everything down just so they could run the MEV auctions. >> On you know Ethereum you've got like PBS where you've got like layers and layers of separation. And is that to try to get a more just a better price by running some of these intermediate auctions? >> Usually to get a worse price actually. Usually it's so that the people that are bidding in the auction could actually take advantage and extract value. You know, hence maximum extractable value.

And so there have been a lot of innovations in the space since MEV first came around. Like one of the things that Fastlane is known for uh was being the first team to ship application specific sequencing. And so we got very involved in that. And the way that we did that was actually by taking all of these auctions that a lot of people are running on these, you know, back-end servers and realizing like, okay, if we're running these auctions on the backend servers and then sending in these transactions, like validators or uh block builders or whoever, you know, the sharks that are out there can still intercept, pull it apart and inject their own answers, which would be, you know, usually to the detriment of the user. And so what we did is we would just make like dude like the fattest

transactions like these are these little like monster behemoth transactions, right? >> And we would just take like all of these different things from different users, different solvers, different market makers, and we would just have each of them put together these uh like different components that would just be fit into a single transaction. >> And it it did. It used a lot of gas. That's like the the main uh thing against it. But it was great. It worked. And we we ended up partnering up with chain link on that. And so now most of liquidations on a lot of the top apps like a and morpho actually use that system. And so it >> is that the SVR kind of like or the yeah the the um maybe you can explain this in in better depth but essentially when there is a liquidation uh you again you

run kind of one of these auctions if I'm not mistaken and that is able to create less slippage as you have to kind of fire some of this collateral to repay the balance and fulfill this liquidation. You have a better pricing mechanism to fulfill those liquidations. >> Yes. And and a big part of that is like where is this value that going to that's being captured by the liquidators. And so when you're looking at a standard like MEV auction, you have these entities that are bidding, but they're bidding so that they can get the like primary like the top sequence in the block. And so when the validator is the one that's choosing that, then the bids have to pay the validator because

otherwise why would they, you know, pick something else? And so that ended up taking a lot of this value that should have been going back to the users. It should have been going back to the apps, learning protocols, and it was just going to the validators, which would then go to the stakers. So it's like not all that bad, but it was suboptimal to say the least. And so what we ended up doing was running these uh auctions where rather than having multiple transactions where you would have like an oracle update and then a liquidator, another liquidator, we would just jam all of this into a single transaction. >> Right. Yeah. And what a lot of people used to do beforehand is they would have to simulate the outcomes, right? Because if I get like a a liquidation order from somebody, I

don't know if they're actually going to fulfill it. And so like when you're when you start like dealing with the validator who could be adversarial, you never really know if what you think is going to happen, especially on faster blockchain. we started doing was rather than just picking a liquidation matching it with the Oracle update is we would take a whole bunch of them like 10 of them and then we would send all 10 of them and again this is just inside of a single just mega fat transaction just sending it all on chain and then our smart contracts on the blockchain would go through and they would say okay which one paid the most and did this liquidation actually go through

>> and if it did great if not like all right screw this guy what's the second highest paying one did this go True. Yes. And so it worked, >> but there were some and still are some some drawbacks. And this is one of the reasons why we ended up going to Monad. It's that, you know, take the Hyperlid blockchain for instance. >> You know, Hyperliquid's cool, like I don't want to bash on them too much, but their blocks are they're they're little baby blocks. You know, they're they're the smallest of blocks. You can barely fit like, you know, more than a handful of transactions in there. And so when we were doing like these liquidations on Hyperlquid, you know, we had to be very careful like we could only really fit like two or three different uh like liquidations in there. And so there was

this huge capacity constraint like if if 10 different things needed to be liquidated like there really just wasn't even enough room in the block for all that. Mhm. >> And so as we started like see that and this was I think like three years ago as started to see that really appreciate the need and the need for just really just big block just do more of this stuff on chain again it's like you can do stuff offchain but when you're doing stuff offchain you never really know if what you're seeing is what you'll actually get because chains are moving state moves like slippage happens and so a huge reason for like you know why Monnet was it was the the first chain where we had big enough blocks to just like

really do like robust like auctions robust like everything >> fully on chain just using so much gas like you know we we just gas guzzlers >> and just having a lot of fun doing that like solving a lot of problems and these are things that would have cost like $100 on Ethereum you know but just on Monad super cheap >> and it was just extremely fast fast finality Right. And like one of the other questions we get a lot is like why not Sal the M is a very like when you're dealing with Salana the the transaction really needs to be told exactly what it's going to do at the time that the transaction is being

created. >> And so for us a big part of it is liquidation. You know we don't really know for sure which one of these liquidations will be actual liquidation because things could change. maybe the AMM that this liquidator wants to use is, you know, had some price movement or whatever. And so on and like we tried like we we we genuinely tried like I I really like the Salana team, some of my favorite people in like all of crypto. But a lot of the technology that we were trying to do just genuinely didn't work on Salana because the blockchain is just on very very rigid rails where you have to know what you're going to do entirely before you do it. you can't really discover stuff during execution, >> right?

>> And so, yeah, like with with those two, you know, Ethereum being too expensive and Salana being too inflexible, >> right? >> Monad was a clear winner for us. >> And so, give us a sense of the DeFi landscape as it exists on Monad today with with a little bit of pre-context. I was kind of walking around the event and I was thinking to myself, you know, what's the value proposition for a chain like Monad to exist today? On one hand, you know, you've got these somewhat obuscated uh alternative trading systems coming out of Tradfi like New York Stock Exchange. You know, they're looking at pushing 247 and getting tokenized equities, you know, live on a chain, right? Albeit somewhat of a private

permissioned environment. On the other hand, you've got, you know, L2s like blast that are winding down. And so, where does Monad kind of fit, you know, in this in this new paradigm and it feels as if Monad has been able, they've got kind of they've put their own spin on this barbell where you've got, you know, XOXOs just announced that they're going to be natively, you know, coming to Monad. So, you've got institutional grid asset classes in in, you know, stock tokens and tokenized equities. At the same time, you've got a very consumerfriendly retail facing brand and consumerf facing applications. And I think there's value in having these things natively on the same chain and natively composable together when you've

got retail flow and institutional grade liquidity. Maybe you can speak to the landscape of DeFi on Monet today. Do you see value in these two worlds? This barbell as it exists on Monat. Does it exist on Monad and ultimately how you see this evolving into a fullyfledged DeFi liquidity ecosystem? >> Yeah. So, I I like to tell people that the the bull case for Monad is that they're good at everything, which is a very hard thing to pitch, right? It's it's an L1. It's got fast finality. It's got, you know, very large blocks, a lot of gas. It's EVM, so it's composable.

Dev tooling is extremely well built out. Uh very decentralized. It's never been down, but I think that like when it comes to the the DeFi ecosystem, um, is it as developed as I would like it to be? No. I I think it still has a lot of room to grow. And I think that like for me, especially with RWAs coming on chain, like you were mentioning, like with Xtocks, you've got like,00 different equities or RWAs are going to be tradable. You know, one of the things that I think is really interesting is like asking the question, how can DeFi beat Tradfy?

>> And I think a honestly, this is like kind of Can can I swear on your show, please? So, like a lot of people have just like given up like trying to deal with that. And it kind of pisses me off because like like I don't like decentralization because it's some vague platitude. I like it because it's genuinely something that helps keep servers robust. You know, decentralization helps with livveness. If you're decentralized, you're less likely to crash if you do that. >> Exactly. And it's like, you know, the the fast finality of Monad means you can deal with like, you know, bridging and everything like that faster. But like with Monad, the reason why I really got into it is because I genuinely believe it's the first blockchain that has a genuine shot, not even a shot because we've actually already done this, but like of actually beating Tradfi. And so

my go-to example is routing. Um, have you read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis? >> No. So the the premise of the book is that somewhere around like the early 2000s, these traders, these brokers uh at different uh like brokerage houses would start sending these trades and they would notice that they would get filled way worse than what they were expecting. >> And so what was happening is, you know, the exchange that they were going to, they they pick the exchange and then they send the order. But in between when they pick the exchange and when the order actually executes, like whether they're going to like Chicago or New York or whatever, in between when they pick the exchange and when the order executes, the prices would change. And they started to notice that it was

almost always to their detriment because highfrequency traders were starting to get really, really good at like latency games and things like that. And it was a huge problem and it still is a huge problem to this day. Routing is a huge problem. If you look at Salana or even Robin Hood, uh you've got these proprietary AMMs, which is this like, you know, new style of AMM where people have proprietary capital and these prop AMMs are like tricking the aggregators. They're tricking might be a little they're not intentionally doing it for the most part, but they are showing prices to aggregators. The aggregators being like, "Okay, I'm going to route this user's trade to this venue." And then by the time the trade arrives, that price is no longer the best price. And so with Monad, we ended up actually

building an aggregator. It's called Moose. And we have enough like block space, enough gas to actually have all of the routing and all of the aggregation take place fully on chain. And this is this is not just like a a DeFi problem. It's like a lot of people on Robin Hood like a week and a half ago were having their trades fail. But like that's not like that's not the scope of the problem. Scope of the problem is like all of Trafi, like all of the change, all the routers. And it's because, you know, the speed of light is a is a thing. Like if you have to choose between New York and Chicago, like you can't you can't solve that problem.

>> But blockchains solve it. Yeah. Because on a blockchain, every single one of the AMMs is they're all colllocated. They're all atomic. They're all there. >> And so by handling the routing onchain, >> like you can genuinely beat Trady at getting like users the best price. And that's something that like, you know, we were very bullish on that. That was part of our original Monad thesis. And so then like we we waited a year and no one built it and we were like come on guys. So we ended up building it ourselves just because we got like impatient. But um yeah like like I think that's like amazing. And then I think there's a very similar style of uh opportunity that's available for I don't even want to call them vaults but like for for anything

that's like yield bearing any sort of like fixed income instrument >> where you know with atomic composability there's just a lot of stuff you can do around like risk management like imagine a vault that's just extremely levered and every time it's about to be you know liquidated it just automatically delevers like every time guaranteed programmatic you know uh that's where the fast finality comes in that's where like the fast black times come in but the programmability of financial instruments I think is a very underexplored space and I think that as people start moving more and more of this stuff on chain whether it be for trading for earning for even like social and stuff like that you just can unlock all of

these new primitives that'll not just solve but like make irrelevant all of these problems from tradi that a result of the fact that, you know, these things don't talk to each other. They're not always colloccated. Whereas on a blockchain, everything is colloccated. Everything can be programmed. Everything can be talked to each other as long as you have big enough blocks >> to make room for it. >> Yeah. And and I think you're getting at to the the heart of something that's really really important, which is, you know, right right now, I mean, you're you're talking about very sophisticated market infrastructure for this order routing landscape and problem. And right now, if you look at where I mean, we believe a lot of the next wave of activity and

liquidity is going to come from, >> we're we're probably going to get a lot from tokenized equities. I I I think that is, you know, trillions of dollars of assets that are coming on chain going to flow into DeFi. We're going to see a lot of that activity. And when we think about DeFi beating trad volume and where price discovery happens, I think, you know, when tokenized equity started to come on chain, you know, we saw maybe it was AMC or it was, you know, HIMS, right? Because these were kind of picking up a lot of activity on Robin Hood, right? And we I think at peak we saw like 2%.

Right? And hyperlid was another good venue for this because it was oil and we started to see weekend hours right where where oil trading was happening on hyperlquid but again it was like 2% or 3% of global activity was happening on chain that I think is the mark the the metric to watch because as we think about defi beating tradi at this game we're just going to see that number increase and once we start to see 50% and more that's when price discovery happens onchain and then that's when we're going to have a ton of momentum right now I think that incremental, you know, dollar or price discovery that we're losing out. You know, look, Hems traders and AMC traders and Robin Hood, like they're they're thinking about, you

know, pairing this stuff to memecoins and getting a board seat, right? >> A little bit, DJ. Yeah. >> Uh, totally, DJ. So, they're not really thinking about the level of sophistication of market structure that you're thinking about. I'd imagine that you're going to start, you personally are going to start to and Fastlane is going to start to get pulled into some very important meetings with some very highlevel executives at some highlevel banks, right? those who are, you know, the citadels of the world, like those who are trading, you know, the most activity and volume in in the securities world, if you're not already, I'd imagine that they're now going to have to t start start to take tokenized securities trading very seriously and

they're going to be looking at doing so at a sophisticated level, not pairing it with memecoin type activity. How are you prepare, how are you thinking about this? How are you preparing for this? And generally, you know, what do you make of this opportunity as we get into an institutional DeFi world in 2027 and beyond? >> I mean, so I think that a big part of it is just education. So like I actually learned market making from a dude who's a trader at Citadel and before DeFi, I worked at uh Merrill and and City Bank and so I'm somewhat familiar with how the uh structure of this goes and I think like the biggest thing is is education.

>> Yeah. So, in my spare time, um, I run a prop AMM, a propriet proprietary AMM, and I can do things with that prop AMM for market making that like you really can't do with trading. And the way that I'm able to do these things is because it's all programmed. It's all in a smart contract on chain. Um, I'll give you an example. So, if I am market making uh like man USDC, I'm also market making uh man tether and I'm also market making man uh let's say Bitcoin. If someone buys a lot of man like the the Mana token from me with USDC, >> my prop AMM is programmed to all of the sudden start quoting higher >> like or like widening the spread for all

of the other MON pairs >> because it's all just this like onchain matrix, but like it's all programmed. It's all like programmed and self-referencing. So if I'm selling a lot of MON to USDC, all of my other MON pairs are also going to widen whereas and that happens automatically. I don't have to send in an order. I don't have to even be there. I don't even have to know that it's happening. The smart contract itself is doing that. It is immutable like blockchain logic and there's no way around it. And so my risk is much less. Like if my price for man is off, I only get hit once. Whereas in Tradfi, I would get hit on like every single one of the the pairs that I'm market making. And for the Tradfi, I mean, you would have to send in orders to like update all of those prices. is

you would have to do the collocation stuff, but you've got a lot more exposure because you don't have this >> I don't like I don't want to say like uh like uh funge build but like you don't have this like self-reerencing programmability on chain. You have it in a backend that's then sending stuff in hoping it gets there in time. But like I can quote narrower than than Tradfi and so well I personally can't because I'm not like tra with Tradfi's capital you could quote narrower onchain than offchain.

>> Yes. With the tools that I have and with you know their brains I'm good but I'm not great but like they they like you know these tools they don't know about. And so a big part of like getting tradain is first of all showing that yes spreads actually are narrower here. actually there is less risk actually like being able to program in like you know slightly wider spreads for slightly more toxic people based off of looking at like who's interacting with like this kind of stuff doesn't exist in Trafi and it's all derisking for makers. >> Yeah. >> And it's like we saw how like you know maker priority was good for hyperlid debatable but like let's assume that that's correct but it's like that kind of thing is amazing. That's like a very basic thing. Like once you start dealing with programmability that always updates

on time that it's never late like you that isn't a thing in trad like I'm already doing all this in DeFi you know it's like you could like vibe code it in like a week like it's not it's not hard but like that's the beauty of DeFi and so I think that education is like the number one goal we also need to make sure that the like onboarding and offboarding of the RWAS has like a very low spread if there's a lot of friction going onchain or going back offchain that kind of would hurt things. I think that's something that the Monad team is very very very focused on cuz they understand like the importance cuz like Kon is a a quant like like they they they get it like they they know the game and so like when I look around and I look at like all the different

blockchains >> you know I the the Salana guys are amazing engineers like amazing engineers um but they built like a very rigid blockchain because that gives like fast engineering but it doesn't really handle adversarial edge cases or like you know finance as well as it could. Ethereum very big on the game mechanisms but it's slow all these layers of separation right >> and so like when I look at monad like it's it's it's a bunch of quants like quant traders from jump >> and they're really going like out of their way to just build like the future of of finance and it's like it's not like you know just saying that it's like I know that it is because I'm already doing these things on chain like you can trade on my prop amm right now if you want to like the aggregator for onchain

routing is live like all this stuff is already live and it works. >> Yeah. >> And so, yeah, I think just like helping people learn, especially with like, you know, Tradfi, um, like helping those traders learn that like, you know, you can save so much, like you you can you can narrow your spread so much just by putting all of your defensive logic into your actual smart contract onchain rather than having to just back in and then ye it and hope it arrives in time. Like, it's it's so empowering. And I think once that that starts to catch on, it's just going to be a title wave.

Yeah, and they're they're coming. Alex, man, appreciate you coming on and uh helping us really think through the uh the onboarding flow and the the adoption of this system. Uh you're the man. We'd love to have you on again real soon as this, you know, continues to get built out. Um we're going to keep things rolling man. >> Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, absolutely. It was great. >> Guys, that was Alex Watts on the future of onchain routing. We've got our next guest, DeFi. Dave is going to come on and we're going to be chatting about UFG. Uh big shout out to Alex. Like he said, the Monat team is quants and uh they're building for a quant future. So uh we are we are very excited to see DeFi get built out in real time. Uh DeFi Dave, go

ahead. Come on board, man. Give us a give us a retweet out there. We know that uh you're big crypto Twitter uh big crypto Twitter guy, man. It's appreciate >> Thank you for having >> Thanks for having on coming on, man. We're going to keep things rolling here. We're squeezing you in, but we're we're happy to do it. We love having you on. >> I love coming on. Yeah. No, I was just, you know, came through here, was wandering around. I saw Alex when I was getting food and he was like, "Oh, hey Dave. You've been on the show before." Like, "Yeah, I have." He's like, "Do you want to come on again?" I'm like, "Of course I do. >> We're making it happen, man. We're shooting from the hint out here in Singapore." And uh I mean, just tell us a little bit about, you know, your your

most recent move. Uh what is UFG? And uh I mean just give us your sense of the space right now cuz it feels like we're on the precipice of uh something real real fun. >> Yeah. No, I think everyone who's been around through the bare market, through all these cycles for the past 5 years, the ups and downs, they're going to be rewarded for their patience and for their perseverance. And we're seeing that now uh with all these different builders coming out with all these new primitives with that with all this uh with all these new you know different protocols coming out whether it's like unis swap v4 whether it's stocks whether everyone's voting around uh these primitives and we're seeing uh some pretty cool stuff being cooked up >> uh especially with all these like launch pads coming out but anyways with UFG

this you know this came about uh pretty organically like a friend just reply got me like hey I'm working on this new project and I checked it out I was like oh this is really sick this is actually like a novel DeFi primitive and I didn't realize what it was at the time, but once I like looked into it more, was writing about it more and talking to people and getting their reactions to it. So, UFG is basically a new type of treasury. It's a new way to align communities with their teams because a lot of times the incentives have been misaligned uh with tokens. Tokens, let's face it, they're broken. uh for too long uh when they launched people like you know whether it's you know founders and VCs they were you know dumping secondaries or you know exchanges getting uh allocations uh the stack the

odds were always stacked against the community and the token holders and they always left holding the bag. Uh 93% of tokens since 2024 that reached 100 million are down from their all-time highs. And so how do we fix what's the problem here? Well, the problem here is that tokens are based on attention and once that attention is gone, the token dies with it. Uh, but attention can be used as a tool and a lot of times when these tokens launch, there's a lot of momentum. There's a lot of trading volume. Uh, but that trading volume just, you know, it just goes up into the ether, no pun intended. But what if there was a way to capture that initial energy, that initial spark, uh, and store it for later and back it for later? So you put the power to cap uh to use that in the hands of the holders

instead of you know just going out in the ether in the hands of like a privileged class. And so at UFG we're building the immutable treasury that initially takes those trading fees from launch especially well we're launched on ponds um it takes those trading fees from launchpad uh and goes and puts it into our treasury and with our our token the UF token is the first showcase of this immutable treasury. And so how it works is there's trading fees goes into our treasury contract. Uh the UFG token is a claim on that and when you claim it burns the token. You can receive your share and there's an exit fee out. So you can think of it as a reverse ohm because M is inflationary. Meanwhile we're deflationary. There's a billion token of fixed supply and it goes down

with every burn and there's a permanent floor. This is the most important part Robbie. There's a permanent floor and every time there's a redemption that permanent floor goes up. So there's always backing. Uh, and as a token holder, uh, and as a community member, I'm much more likely to stick with the project that puts me on the same equal footing as the team. I think this is why people love burns so much. Like, yeah, burns have an effect on like lowering supply and helping the price, but what burns actually do is they take control out of the team's hands and gives and gives it to everyone equally. And so, you can kind of think of the immutable treasury as delayed burns in a way.

Instead of it being an automatic mechanic, it puts in the hands of token holders themselves. So I view this as a way to establish trust uh between communities and their teams and leaders. >> Is this something primarily for new launches or is this something that if you have an existing project and you do have trading activity you can implement even after the fact? >> You can implement it after the fact for sure but it's primarily for new launches like let's say I'm a you know an upstart like a memecoin or a dowo or celebrity coin and I want to establish trust and equal footing with my community. It's a lot easier for me to do that this with this immutable treasury than it is um you know than it is after the fact. like you I think I was uh I wrote an article recently looking at mother uh and if

they would have implemented something like this like using ponds if hypothetically if with the 7% creator fee were there they would have uh like millions of dollars in their treasury and and it would have been a lot easier for them uh to both you know it would have been a lot easier for them to energize their community to do things and also if like things hit the fan the community can just go ahead and redeem. So there's always a backing and also it uh what's unique about the immutable treasury it's a alternative uh to the standard market. So let's say if I'm a team and I'm looking to you know you know if I need cash and I have like $10 million in my immutable treasury and I have 10% of the supply instead of like dumping my token on the market I can just redeem from the treasury burn the

supply and get that a million dollars. >> Yeah. >> And so it's a it's a unique tool that could be used for treasury management as well. man, you've been around a long time, so you've seen how some of these, you know, financial experiments tend to play out in the wild. Like a >> a as you've gone on, >> what gives you conviction? Like what gives you conviction that this is a new primitive? This is something that's going to win. This is something that's going to last and ultimately it's a piece of market infrastructure that new launches can use to ultimately, you know, give themselves a better position in the market. >> Yeah, I think it's in its simplicity. It's simple yet powerful. like it's really not that complex of a con.

There's no management. Uh and it puts power into the token holders hands. And I think you know the most successful primitives we see are the ones that are fair and actually egalitarian. Uh and the ones that are like most likely to survive and thrive in the future. Um I mean we saw with uh Bitcoin when it I mean Bitcoin it's been like almost 20 years 15 20 years. Uh we see we saw that with hype like things that are fair and launch and put powers in the people's hands and people feel like they have a stake in the success. Those are the ones that go on and survive. And this the immutable treasury is basically infrastructure to help uh tokens that are interested in going that path that think for the long term to make that happen.

>> Yeah, I I think it's extremely important especially as we get, you know, new entrance into the market. They are always thinking about simplicity. Those are the things that are going to, you know, in incept into people's minds and grow. >> Yeah. And we've seen Dows before and I think the issue with Dows uh is they relied on voting and no one wants to vote. Uh it made things too complicated like no one wants to keep up. I mean it was like it was novel but uh at the end of the day Dallas Dows failed because no one wants to no one wants to manage anything at the end people just they just care you want to make things as simple as possible for people they just care about like okay like what it's worth like when can I uh enter where can I exit and what can I contribute

>> and I'm all and I'm all about contributing so yeah absolutely I kind of view this as a lore building infrastructure in a way >> yeah well uh it feels like DeFi's like got a resurgence obviously we've got you know a lot happening in the trady world regulatory innovation is happening. You know, you you've got, you know, New York Stock Exchange and everyone pushing 24/7 markets and so all of this is converging, but there is still a wild west out there. There is still a thirst for financial experimentation and creativity. >> I think for a long time, people thought it was over. People are like, "Ah, you know, DeFi's dead. It's time to like, you know, welcome the suits, the institutions. I mean, hell, I was trapped by Dave for a little bit, but now I put the suit away and now I got the cherry blossoms back on." I think

there's a lot of room still for experimentation. And there's a lot of room for growth and a lot of room in the design space to actually like make these egalitarian primitives and make primitives that put everyone on equal footing. And immutable treasuries are in that spirit. >> Yeah, that's uh that's exactly that's exactly what we're doing here. So, you're leading the way. >> Thank you, Robbie. >> Appreciate you, man. Glad that we can make it happen. And uh best of luck with UFG. We'll see you again soon. >> Sounds good. I see you. >> All right. All right, guys. We're going to keep things rolling here. Uh we've got our next guest and so we're gonna get the get the newest headline going.

Let's go ahead. Uh it's going to be Michael uh from uh Xcurve now yield basis and uh we're going to get him up in just a moment. Uh and so we're going to uh we're going to keep things rolling. Uh we're going to squeeze him in and uh make sure that we rock and roll. Mike's a a true OG in the DeFi world. And so uh yeah, Mike, come on. Uh we'll we'll uh we'll get things going. Uh I think our team is working on your headline right now. So we're going to get that going and then uh we're going to keep things cranking and I'm excited uh because uh we're going to I mean we've had a lot of very interesting DeFi conversations here. Uh we were just chatting with DeFi Dave about his new uh

UFG primitive and then uh we just before we were talking with Alex from Fastlane about the way that MEV is starting to reimagine itself. I mean they've done a lot of good work on the MEV front especially as tokenized equities come on chain we get more tokenized assets a lot of the principles that we were using and starting to build for DeFi are now becoming even more important as we bring new tokenized asset classes on board and so this is again something that we're working on and continuing to reimagine. Um, I mean, you've been a legend in the game and so we're going to cover maybe, you know, some of your history at Curve, but then also the things that you have going on now at Yield Basis, uh, because

they are again increasingly important. Uh, and so I mean, one of the things and and we're just going to give our team a little bit more time to get things, >> I guess, just to clarify, it's probably not correct to say Xcurve because curve is still going. Curve is still going. I'm still uh with curve and uh moreover some of the well I mean uh curve pools which are used in yield basis I used in curve as well for foreign exchange which are very real world assets and uh it's uh yeah so I have to oversee both.

>> Yeah. Well you've been extremely busy recently. >> Oh absolutely. >> How does it compare to like the old you know DeFi summer 2020 days? Are you more bit like is it is it more complicated because now you've got sort of multiple protocols these things have as they've grown they've continued to grow in complexity or have you learned enough from the experience of running the protocol that it actually is a little bit easier? Well, I mean there is a lot of experience of course. Yes. Uh but things seems seem to be a little different these days because well exactly as you said uh lots of new assets are coming in and they are well the the whole way how uh how DeFi

operates it it has to interact with real world now. >> Uh even if the assets are still um uh still decentralized you you kind of well we we get new users from real world in defi in 2020 these were I would say dans right and now I think that probably the risks become smaller right um I mean whatever the headlines say risks in 2020 were uh probably two orders of magnitude larger than now right and u maybe that's why we started getting those people and uh it's it feels different.

>> Yeah, it it it really does. I mean, it feels like we've Yes, we've got these new entrance, you know, there's this tokenization super cycle, if you will, where a lot of these new assets are becoming tokenized, and they're leading to this incoming flow into some of the protocols that, you know, have been resilient and Lindy for a long, long time. Curve being one of them. And so now it's as if you know we we've got uh an opportunity here. Um and so I'm I'm curious how you're seeing kind of this new entrance like where you think the most important points of differentiation are like what where where are you spending the most time to just

continuously push the needle find more efficiency? Is it is it around kind of decreasing the risk profile and the surface area for vulnerabilities and smart contracts? Are you seeing more efficiencies in gas? What what are you seeing as the most lucrative opportunity to spend your mind your effort and resources? Uh yeah, I think as usually it's uh coming up with uh new um algorithms or the ways to use old algorithms to suit the assets and needs which we have now most right. So it's it's really inventing things not something else. Uh well safety yes but

safety was always uh always the case. We now have new tools to make uh code safer. >> That's good. So we can use AI. We hopefully can use formal verification with the help of AI again. And that feels different. But this is uh something which every protocol should do, right? So it's not a point of differentiation. It's the must. >> Got it. And uh gas efficiency is much less important today because uh gas on Ethereum is well very low because Ethereum apparently improved, >> right? Uh so apparently apparently

Ethereum Foundation was doing something. Yeah, devs did something and uh yeah, so gas on Ethereum is much closer to one cent than $100 per transaction. What do you think about Vitalik's latest paper where he goes and describes his vision for off-chain computation or arbitrarily complex computation that rolls up into a ZK verification verified on the L1? >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean it makes sense because it uh extends into into the original vision like why web 3 is called web 3? Why is it web at all? Right. Uh right now Ethereum is absolutely suitable for onchain finance but it's uh well so I would say Ethereum is finance too right yeah

>> but uh somehow it was called web 3 and uh Vitalik is pushing on like yeah why we we we really want this to be web 3 it does make sense because um a lot of value is created uh in uh not just in web companies there are AI companies now right and it does makes sense to connect them to Ethereum to verify something they are doing in a decentralized way and have this infrastructure fully decentralized. >> Yeah. So I think that's that is where it is moving.

>> Yeah. I think but like it it helps the new finance built on Ethereum as well because you instead of tokenizing I don't know stocks you can have natively tokenized shares of onchain companies which we somehow called called right and they can be of a non-financial origin because right now the you know defy is kind of kind of financial so it's it's financial tool tools. They can be financial tools which are not controlled by anyone.

>> Mhm. >> Mhm. >> But yeah, it's what's you need some extra value inflows. That's why we are talking about RWAs now. But with Vitalik's vision, we don't have to bring RWAs from externally. They can be built on the chain. >> Yeah. Yeah. That that feels like where we're headed. And we've seen so much, you know, on the terms of tokenization exemptions. There was a an, you know, several announcements around, you know, how this is going to look and what it what is the right way to do this, you know, with regards to the regulation.

You know, is it native tokenization? Is it doing this through some proxies? But I think regardless, the powers that be are are really interested in putting this on chain and eventually we will get price discovery on chain. And so as that continues to evolve, there are certain adaptations that I think we're going to continue to see. So as as we think about how the DeFi landscape might look, I think especially in the near term, there is some interest in composability between maybe say a permissioned environment and a permissionless environment, especially as these these equities continue to come on chain. How do you think D5 mechanisms can compose between permissioned and

permissionless environments? >> Oh, they quite can. Like for example, in uh curve pools, imagine that you have one asset permissioned by itself. You don't have to do anything with the pool uh you if you deposit u you know this asset and another asset, you cannot withdraw if or you cannot even deposit if you cannot hold this asset, right? And uh if uh you exchange between this asset and I don't know USDC, right? You cannot exchange if you are not I don't know not allowed to hold this asset. So you don't even have to do I don't know any hooks or whatever you the asset itself can enforce this and defy already

works for this. >> Uh but of course yeah you can have some extras of course. Okay. And uh as you're thinking through the next DeFi inventions, I mean this is where you're spending the most time. What what catches your eye? What what are you spending most of your attention on? >> Yeah. Well, so um one thing is I'm thinking of usually is how to make uh liquidity efficiently managed for different asset types. Right? So yield basis is a result of thinking how to um get liquidity managed for volatile assets like Bitcoin. Um, but I don't know is it possible to do something similar for stocks?

>> Maybe not as naively as for Bitcoin. Maybe something should be done differently. Can this be done for foreign exchange for foreign currencies? And well, I mean uh curve pools are trying to do exactly that. And uh it's uh well there are similarities but there are a few differences and uh yeah maybe some other assets. So it's like uh how to apply AMMs there to uh to do better than whatever exists today and uh the same is actually about um about lending like in curve lending we have reversible liquidations which are done by AMMs right so it's applying AMMs to do

something I don't know to do liquidations better right so uh >> well you you can apply all sorts of AMM magic to different sorts of things and uh um well just uh just solve things better than today. And so yield basis for anyone who is unfamiliar is uh kind of this uh uh lending protocol that's built on top of uh >> not lending no it's uh pretty much >> well it's a yield it's a yield product based on >> it's a yield product based on uh based on curve pools and um curve pools with automatically managed concentrated liquidity. So what uh yield basis makes it into it turns pools which have

impermanent loss and whatever you heard of into yieldbearing bitcoin for example or yield bearing ethereum. >> My mistake. So the the yield comes from the impermanent loss that is >> the yield comes from earning fees in the AMM but to turn it into a product like that you we we had to solve impermanent loss right and that's what yield basis does >> but I guess what what I what I was getting at uh is that the technology around Bitcoin and yield basis to turn this and productize it that's extensible beyond Bitcoin. into essentially any >> any tokenized asset.

>> I mean with a caveat that you need volatility profile to be good for that or you need we need to figure out how to better harvest volatility than we are doing today because for Bitcoin it seems on average well suitable for it but for other assets it could be a little bit more challenging. uh but you know we have uh plenty of uh well we have Bitcoin and Ethereum where we can test these technologies and then we can apply to other more challenging assets like stocks are more challenging right or gold is more challenging.

>> Does the volatility profile of equities >> naturally lend itself to a protocol like yield? Not not trivially not trivially you can do something but it's not just like put your Nvidia stock in yield basis and it works right I think the biggest uh challenge is the same as defy lending is facing today uh discontinuity of the price which you can get in stocks especially after weekends like they do some big announcement and stock goes up by a factor of two or down by factor of two. How do you handle that? right?

>> Especially down, right? So, lending protocols have a problem with that. And for yield basis, it's essentially the same problem. And how do you handle that? You need to do something, right? And there are some ideas how you handle that, but it's not as easy as just plug and play. >> And this is sort of the the vision around the multi-asset profile of yield basis. How do you think about the multi-chain basis? Will we see uh will we see yield basis on monad anytime soon?

>> Well, not shortly. I would say it's possible to launch on different chains, but uh the the view which at at least I tried to do so far is to launch uh kind of a separate instance on every chain. Right now, it's just on Ethereum, right? But let's say um well there should be some business case for that of course but it's probably better to isolate one chain from another because I don't know or you you probably heard about many hacks bridges have right and if you embed bridge inside your system and it gets hacked it's going to be pretty bad.

If something lives natively on some chain and doesn't use any bridge whatsoever it's much much safer. I mean, I wish it was not like that, but it's it's like this today. >> Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we're we're evolving as uh as this space grows uh which is very very exciting times. >> Michael, thanks so much for joining. Appreciate it. >> And uh glad we could uh have you here at the Monad Open event. Uh we're going to keep things rolling. >> Absolutely. >> Appreciate your time, man. Uh one of the OGs of DeFi, uh Michael, the founder of Curve and Yield Basis. Guys, we're gonna hit a quick standby. Let's go to the uh stages uh out in the event and we're going to get things uh we're going to

get things sorted for our next guest. We'll see you guys real soon. >> You know, instinct views are not available for enterprise purposes, but they will be, right? It's just a matter of time where every institution is going to have access to those capabilities and they will want to call um those APIs in a way that's very bespoke to them. So what used to be impossible um the headless APIs are going to make that uh possible in the future from a user experience perspective. >> Excellent. Thank you guys. Okay, so let's go on to the trend on neo banks, right? So it's increasingly easy for them to get spun up short period of time. Um do you expect this to continue and how is it benefiting or hindering your business?

>> Yeah, definitely. I think there's there's a two-way street there. Uh you see neo banks obviously embracing this whole technology because uh for all the reasons we just touched upon. But also something that's quite interesting is we're seeing a lot of the non-custodial or originated as non-custodial wallet solutions. Also having that access to a customer base where they go this transition into a neo bank type of thing makes sense, right? And in order to do that they need the kind of solutions that would afford them to to to offer a compelling product and uh which is competitive in the market right so uh we don't see any signs of that slowing down at all on the contrary it's not just the neo banks wanting to expand their

offering it's also people who aren't neo banks wanting to transition into neo banks and I think that's where the there's a there's a big play happening as we speak >> okay Adam >> we see it globally right the the trend of neo banks going to continue to rise and I I agree about neo banks looking to get into crypto but for I would say for two real drivers is why we're seeing so many neo banks come in and one of them is the technology is getting better and better and simpler to use and the second is regulation right the the tech is a global phenomenon regulation obviously depends on the jurisdiction uh but it becomes much easier for institutions to lean into the web 3 tech and stand up that next generation technology you're hearing from D now thinking about

standing up a but being able to do that with fiat and digital asset and that similar thing is what we're hearing from our clients in many emerging markets that might be underbanked or the level of banking is just not as good as you get in some other markets. Uh and now with regulation increasingly leaning into all things onchain, it's making it that much simpler for innovators and startups to say yes, I could launch a bank. I could do it smarter and better than what the old guard has been doing. >> Yeah. So uh I built a neo bank in the 2010s. Uh I was the co-founder of money line and it was tedious in the in the US. You had to partner with other banks.

You had reliance on other people's ledgers. You had uh to orchestrate payment processing. Um the United States is 50 each each state has its own regulatory framework. So you sometimes have to get MTLS or lending licenses in each state. So it's really difficult. So I think the only thing I have to add on what was already said is that regulatory alignment is probably what's driving um the ability for these neo banks to be stood up. I think a lot of the governments uh globally are seeing that the stable coin is a interesting mode to drive adoption of local uh government debt. Um, so you know, I think that that is probably the biggest macro driver

that's causing alignment on hate. In the past, in the US, you had to be Fiser or FIS or Jack Henry or Q2 or Galileo um to be the core of a bank. But now the regulator is saying that wait, you don't have to have we're not going to regulate what software you use to build a neo bank. we're going to regulate the outcome and we're going to make sure that there's no customer harm and that there's safety and soundness checks and there's cyber security uh checks. So I think really it's you know what we're seeing is really an alignment by not only the US regulators but uh across the globe a um a a desire to get to more efficient cost of capital and then again the benefits of 247 365 settlement. If I

could add something to that, I think uh one useful thing to to be aware of is the accessibility stuff that people like Adam do and at at the entity and what we do at BBNK and Mastercard and it's that infrastructure play, right? The the stack to build these neo banks is more accessible than ever, right? Whereas before either people had to build it themselves uh but now it's accessible that kind of pipe where you have the the ability to have orchestration layers you know trading engines you plug into compliance for for plug and play um is far more accessible. So in answer to your question that's another reason why we don't see this slowing down. We're just seeing more and more interest in that space.

>> Great. Thank you. All right. So moving on to where the next drivers will be. We've had a lot of institutional adoption in the past couple of years. That's clearly a driver of growth in the crypto industry. Is that going to continue or do we have to find the growth somewhere else? And if so, where is that growth going to come from? >> Yeah, look, I think we touched upon genius and clarity which was coming but hasn't come. Uh but we know there's there's other kind of uh angles that we the US in particular is going to play, but I think it's not slowing down. I think the enterprise adoption hasn't really started yet, right? We're seeing the interest from enterprise because it is uh no longer a question of burying

the head into the in the sand. Look, just ourselves, right? The fact that Mastercards are now part of the cryp crypto ecosystem is a huge statement for the entire industry, right? And more of that is happening. uh they realize that this isn't going away and they have to play in this game. But they're starting to really understand that it's not just uh being scared of missing out but they start to understand the use cases which do bring a value proposition to the entire offering which is in many cases you know being a to be more efficient on on their payments how they can move money. What we are seeing is uh most enterprise customers are converting to fiat right at the moment. That's the

that's the process. That's the fund flow. Um but uh they're using those stable coins and crypto as the pipe. Let's say the pipelines behind it to kind of move the money around and bring everything T plus zero, right? So at Mastercard for example, how can you ask all your merchants, do you want instant settlement? Pretty much. and most people are going to put their hands up, right? Um, and now they can offer that under one roof, that type of thing. So, that's just moving in one direction and all the enterprise uh customers are now realizing they have to do it. >> Excellent. Adam, >> yeah, I'd love to disagree just to make it more interesting. Um, look, the I'll give a slight twist on it. The the institutional adoption is definitely be more impactful, but I think it's the the

individual users that have had the experience and the retail experience that are driving it, right? the institutions can go to their bank and say, "Hey, what's all this noise on stablecoin?" And the bank are likely going to say, "No, we move funds in real time, and that's just a lot of noise." But when that same person that works at that corporate said, "Yeah, but I just paid my sister in fill-in-the-blank country in stable coins in moments. I know it works. How come it doesn't work institutional?" Right? That's when it starts to to make the trigger where I think people have had the experience increasing on the retail side where now they're saying to their institutional service providers, I know this works.

How come you don't have a solution? And they look for providers that can offer that solution. But the it's very clear the institutional money is what's going to take the industry probably two steps above. >> Interesting. I like it. D. >> Yeah. And I guess to double click on the institutional use cases, right? If you bifurcate payments, which I completely agree with what was said before, but you know, capital markets are in the trillions of dollars and we are very early innings of here. We are Tien Wee live open 2026 from the Monad event. Tienway is our local Singaporean expert.

You came home. You were working in the Bay Area for six years. You came home to Singapore >> 10 years ago. 10 years ago. >> 10 years ago. Now you're home uh as of a few years ago. And so you were just on stage. Uh you were you were chatting it up with our uh our Monad crew. We were here in this room. So give us a little bit of insight into how things are going out there and uh what you were chatting about. >> Sure. First, thanks for having me here. My name is Kenway. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Straight X. So heard of it. We are a payment company. So we have been around, we're actually a Y cominator company out of YC um for the last 10 years mainly in acquiring across Southeast Asia. Um Singapore is our base and of course Indonesia and the greater

part of Southeast Asia have been a big part of our market right but uh what have really transformed us in the business side for the last four or five years is that we also are known as the regulated stable coin issuer out of Singapore. So under the straight X brand we have issued the S dollar stable coin XSG uh that itself is already on Coinbase OKX and we also have the US dollar stable coin uh on Binance and by bit itself. So all reg stable coin are actually um you know recognized by the local regulation as the in early compliance of the upcoming stablecoin framework itself and that has really catapult things on the growth perspective right after the clarity act passed in um you know in the US site last year itself >> and what we're trying to see here right now as a the core DNA of the companies

we're sharing on state itself is all about you know stable coin rails for real world payment >> because we are a bread and butter payment company right been acquiring business for the last 10 years almost right so we know what merchants want we know how payment actually have to work to pix and we're excited to be here. I was sharing on stage that sometimes the stuff that Monet can do was what I I as engineer I started as an engineer when I was in Bay Area I was a software engineer at Amazon. So um know problems that we always talk about from a payments perspective is that error rate is zero. The tolerance for error is almost zero >> and uh we're joking about that the hardest problems that you have to solve from a acquiring perspective is not the million dollar transaction. It's the $2

or $5 transaction. you're buying a coffee and there's a problem over there because the customers get really cranky >> and then you have to debug that live and they will not have been like the the patient to deal with like errors that the transaction will take like two days to settle you know it'll take like uh 10 minutes for finality to be achieved so those are the real problem that we have been seeing when we're trying to adopt stable coin for real world payments and that's what monarch saw we are very excited that you know the TPS can be up to 10,000 transaction and the finality is sub 600 millconds right and that's a game changer in this field >> but then we have all about application here and one of the category we're on stage with uh Daniel from Visa as well that what we have start to see in Asia

Pacific is that with you know clarity coming from regulation um there has been a big push for real world usage of stable coin in everyday life >> right u we are one of the major acquirer in this part of the world but what happens here is that not all merchants accept stable coin payment >> the biggest um you know merchant acquirer globally is still probably Visa and Mastercard about 175 million merchants >> and We're very fortunate uh since last year we we also became a global stable coin card issuer out of Singapore itself uh a regulated uh jurisdiction and allowing us to do crossber issuance of stable coin back card >> and very fortunate to be you know used by many programs such as like radar pay uh as a partners to basically issue their card as a white label solution out

of Singapore >> and we see really crazy adoption over the last um 12 months itself like we're probably hitting close to about $500 million of stable coin back card spend right now on a monthly basis on a monthly basis 500 million. >> 500 million on a monthly basis. This year we'll probably do about 6 billion in total in the last 12 months. If you just look back 12 months to 18 month like the entire year we probably do 20 million. Yeah. >> Right. So that itself is where we start to really see the global demand for this kind of product is actually underlying we distate down is first a global demand for you know the the dollar. Right.

>> What stable coin have actually really helped to solve from an emerging market perspective is accessibility to the dollar right? uh we have been in a you know in the emerging market over the years and we always say it's about financial inclusion you want to figure out how to solve the last small problem but one of the biggest challenges not just you know being able to give them e-wallet and stuff right is actually giving them access to a currency that they might not have access easily yeah >> and the the the growth of stable coin over the last year itself I would say is the global demand for that catalyzed by the um clarity act passing is actually a global demand for the US dollar >> the genius act >> the genius act yes um sorry yes the the passing of the genius catalyzed this

whole entire adoption curve, right? And the global demand for the the stable coin is actually a global demand for the US dollars because a lot of folks in a lot of emerging market outside of the US, especially in Asia, >> uh it is not easy to get access to a US dollars account, right? >> A US dollar checking account is expensive to get even in Singapore is I always joke about it. It's almost like a privilege, right? Because you have to go through a lot of farms. You have to pay a minimum fees. Transactions on the swift is like $40. Like who actually use that? So only because either you are investors or you're trying to you know get exposure to dollar to T bills and stuff right but stable coin have democratized access now uh what we're seeing our clients and partners like OKX

and stuff is doing is that people can download an app on the app store e KYC in 5 minutes immediately deposit a stable coin hopefully on monarch chain itself and then get themsel a v a visa or a card on apple pay google pay and spend it real time immediately >> that conversion is um a gamecher right so now they are able to start to see the dollar excess not just as an investment product. It become a saving account, a daily spending account. So we were always joking on stage as well that people used to think that hey you have 500 million a month it must be all the crypto bros but I was saying the numbers are not showing like average transaction that we're seeing is sub $50. Okay, >> weekly spending is top $200. Like this the kind of usage that is real world

usage. People literally buying grocery. And if you try to think about it, it makes sense. The product market fit here is in emerging market where folks are trying to get exposure to the dollar because they want to hatch themselves against inflation deal with depreciating currency >> and then be able to link it to a cut a product that they can spend at 175 million merchants worldwide. That is the kind of >> and and so the US government is I mean is happy >> around the proliferation of stable coins because they are seeing not only you know the the widespread adoption of the US dollar but also adoption of US treasuries buying of US treasuries as sovereigns have started to decrease their holdings of US treasuries stable coin issuance companies have started to

increase their buying of US treasuries. I I I've got a question for you that just kind of occurred to me now. Do you think we're on track for one world currency? >> You know, because I can't help but think obviously the US government is is very happy about the proliferation of the US dollar, but you know, as a local Singaporean, you spent time in the US, you came back home. >> How are regional uh currency starting to react to this? They must see, oh, stable coins make it so much easier for our local citizens to get access to US dollars. we're going to see the collapse of local currencies.

>> Do you think the US dollar is going to be the one world currency in a matter of years? >> Um actually I feel that it's probably a trend. So first I think the global currency is always a dollar, right? I think predominantly like all the trades and crossber trades like 60% or even 70% is still primarily dominated by the dollar itself. >> But you take a step back is something that we've been saying for many years right now. Actually we are regulator sing dollar stable coin issuer >> when we were first on embarking on this project we've been trying to advocate and talk to our regulator itself is that we believe that there will be a lot of stable cocoin issuer globally >> and with this technology what have really brought about is accessibility inability and ability to just make things more programmable and more

efficient. So if we believe that the tech is here to stay then the right way to think about it is first there will be a lot of stable coin issuer which is what we already start to see a lot of dollar issuer yeah >> but every nation will start to think about it from a sovereignty perspective there will be local regulated denominated currency stable coin issuing happening and this is the trend we're starting to see right so Singapore was ahead of the curve we started doing this so xsgd the one to one back sing dollar stable coin was launched about four years back we one of the first and probably the only ones right now still running it but then beyond that itself you see the regulation catching up After the Genius X pass, HKMA have the similar licenses, you start to see like Center

Charted issuing the Hong Kong dollar pack stable coin. you will probably see a lot of local currency coming out because the way that they will have to defend their currency and to compete is to have a local equivalent stable coin that again I think for retail use cases for domestic transaction it just make a lot of sense that it will be priced in local currency and this is where laws comes in right you will see that uh Singapore is a free country we have free trade so moving of funds in out is easy but if a lot of markets especially in South Asia where the currency is rather weak itself currency control is still a problem that they would look at and they'll primarily make that at least on a local basis their good and services are priced in local currency >> right >> so then that's where the efficiency of a

local stable coin world comes in right because you don't have to keep converting you if you want to deal with the FX spread so I think the market will play it out itself and we definitely see that you know for sure there will be a lot of stable coin issuer and definitely one for every single currency that is out there if the country want to defend their sovereignty >> yeah ten way I uh I appreciate it man you're obviously very very well positioned and very knowledgeable about this particular you know area of the space and I think it's important because We've heard so many mixed opinions and perspectives on regional stable coins in particular. I mean the the billions of dollars of adoption that you've got $500 million in recurring monthly volume is massive. Uh and you mentioned how this is not just crypto whales couple of

people. This is a large swath of people that are moving money this way on a regular everyday basis. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's very very important. You've got a lot of people last question here. I mean just a little bit off the wall. You've got a lot of people that are here for the first time. maybe just come here once in a while to Singapore. You were telling us about the chili crabs. What do you think is like, you know, when you see people from the crypto industry coming into town, what do you what do you think to yourself? What is what are some of the biggest misconceptions about Singapore that you've heard? >> Uh, well, Singapore itself is uh, you know, a melting pot for, you know, the Southeast Asia, a lot of different culture coming together. So, one thing you shouldn't miss out is definitely the

food. And if you really want to get the right food, like I said, you should go to where the local goes to, right? That's why I was talking to you guys about chili crab and the common folks that that talk to you about chili crab will tell you about jumbo seafood. That's where all our foreigner friends goes to. I would recommend that as well and you have might be suited for your pallet itself. But go to where the local guys go to, right? Hang out with a local guy who will bring you to where the where I eat at regularly, right? You'll get local prices and you'll definitely get to try out what we actually, you know, do enjoy. And I I think it depend on your pallet preference. >> It might be a very enjoyable or pretty interesting night. >> I love it. That's where we want to go.

Tenway, thank you so much for h uh uh coming on the show, man. Really appreciate it. >> And uh man, we're going to we're going to keep things rolling. So, let's let's hit a quick standby uh out to the feeds outside and uh we're going to we're going to keep things chopping up. It was a pleasure hosting you and uh congratulations on your work with Monet. >> No, no, having a lot of fun and uh do let us know and I will send you the Chitty Krabs both addresses so that you can check it out. >> Absolutely. There we go guys. Tenway live from Monet. >> Clearly, it's going to be a bit bumpy in a variety of markets along the way. Australia is taking a more conservative view than other places, but at least they're trying to regulate in a way that makes sense uh from their perspective as

opposed to just an outlandish like no this is all bad. So I think we'll see it bumpy for the next few years but broadly moving in a helpful way. D. >> Yeah, I think the Genius Act now is uh a year old, just over a year old, and that's given a lot of time to not only the US regulators, but global regulators to say, okay, if the US is actually going to adopt stable coins as a primitive inside of regulated institutions, we will have to align our um financial markets to accept that as well. So, I would say all of the regulators we deal with are incredibly sophisticated about um the existence of the blockchain inside of um the surface

area of what they will regulate. Um I I think one of the challenges is going to be over time um things like the travel rule. Um, I think those will be attack vectors of potentially, you know, uh, administrations that may, you know, may have a different kind of view on the blockchain. But I I think we're getting to a point where, um, the toothpaste is out of the tube. And I think the scale that we'll see come on over the next two and a half years is going to make it really hard. I get the question all the time, hey, the US, if the administration changes, does that really impact the rate of uh, the rate of growth and the rate of change? And my answer uh having spent 17 trips this year in Washington

DC is that it is very unlikely. There are a lot of folks on the other side of the aisle that understand that uh for national interest and for global interest um this is just a upgrade path. It's a modernization of a very old and rickety uh technology stack and it has to happen every 10 20 30 years and this is again the blockchain and the adoption of it is just an natural change agent that's a necessary um ne necessary advancement for innovation. Okay, >> I just want a quick one on that. An example of what I was mentioning there uh is you know Europe's take on the CBDC stuff, right? And you the US has kind of

taken an opposite uh view on that. So that that's even though at a regulator side there might be sophistication in some of the areas and I'm not doubting that in those particular markets like in Europe and US they've got the right people as regulators in the right place I'd hope but politically what's the will right and then there's a there's the whole political question of do you want to have programmable money in Europe where you know you go and fill up your petrol or buy something and you've hit your carbon credits and therefore you have money in your bank but then it says no you can't spend money on that type of thing is that where we want to get to and and of course there's everything in between and let's see where where the world takes us but um it's interesting to keep an eye on that I would say.

>> Yeah. Okay. Um I think we need to leave it there but thank you guys. Really appreciate it and appreciate you being here. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much guys. We have a quick video before we transition into a very very very anticipated panel with the FOMO team and a few celebrities. Thank you. We'll welcome out the Straight X video. >> Money is global. The infrastructure behind it isn't. Across borders, money still moves through different currencies, financial systems, and

payment networks. At Straits X, we're connecting the infrastructure that makes global money movement possible. Operating upstream in the payment stack, we bridge stable coins with the financial networks that move money around the world. As the issuer of XSGD and XUSD, we combine stable coin issuance with regulated settlement infrastructure, bringing digital value closer to the financial system that moves the world. Our roots are in Apac where we've built direct access into local payment networks and financial systems across the region. Today, that makes Straits X a gateway to APAC for global businesses, making it easier to enter and grow across the region. Now, we're taking that foundation global by

bringing Straight SEX stable coin rails to Monad's open global financial network. We're extending that connection between APAC, the US, and beyond. Opening access to new markets. Connecting the financial rails that move the world's money. Unlocking the global economy. Welcome to Open. Okay. Okay. Okay. Everyone, for those walking in, we are about to get started. So, FOMO has been really the talk of the town. We are really honored to have Paul co-founder of a FOMO and also Jordi CEO of Seleni to join us today. In addition

to you know the the title of the panel today is traders are they the new celebrities. So obviously we kind of need to also have some traders and celebrities on stage. So we'll also be joined by Minx Dynasty and this panel is going to be moderated by Marit. So, this is highly anticipated. I know the live stream has been really waiting for this one. Please welcome up our next group to the stage. Hello. Hello. Thanks everyone for

coming. Uh I'm going to be moderating here. I didn't know till about 5 minutes ago, but uh we've got a great panel of people here and I think it's uh going to be a great conversation. Uh first I want to talk to you Paul. You know, building FOMO and the the rise of social trading. Do you think this trend was always inevitable? >> Yeah, 100%. And I think a lot of people have tried it for the past decade and everyone knew it'd be done. So you saw like e Toro and Weeble and Public and it was tried in a bunch of different assets, but I think what was always missing is the community aspect. So I actually just realized this in the past few weeks, but Robin Hood, which launched in 2012 through 2020, only had 5 million funded accounts in the US. And then during the whole Wall Street Bets

thing, when the GameStop thing happened, in one year they over tripled to 17 million funded accounts in the US. And that was spurred by this whole GameStop, Wall Street Bets movement. So the goal is to build a platform where that can happen organically. Um, but I think like over time the onchain community, which is the best place for this to start because it naturally happens, will kind of spread to other assets. But I think it was always inevitable, but the missing piece was the onchain piece. >> And Jordy, you have a extensive poker background. Uh, how do you see the ties between social trading and and trading in general and poker?

I mean, we're all kind of competing for resources, right? When you're at the poker table, you're trying to win each each other's chips. The good thing about trading, which I've always liked and why I've gone from poker to trading, is that there's sometimes there's not just a fixed amount of chips. You can find chips outside of the table and it's such a bigger game. There's a lot of, you know, player versus everybody games, and those dynamics are much more positive. That said, you know, I I like having that competitive aspect to it and both are relevant. >> I mean, you've uh had some massive hits on on FOMO. You're towards the top of the leaderboard. You've had some big round trips, some big wins. How does it change trading in public versus, you know, trading on, you know, unduck

swallows. >> So, uh I roundt $500,000 a couple weeks ago. Um from 20,000. So, it wasn't that bad. >> I think you started at 1,000. >> I start So, I'm doing a challenge. It's like 1,000 to a down payment for a house in LA. >> Insane. >> Pretty cool. >> But how does it differ trading in public? I've always traded privately privately before. >> Um I think it just really shows like the way that people just move onchain. So really everybody that is trading onchain right now is kind of doing exactly how I thought they would move. So not that much different. I I think it's super cool where we're talking about like traders are the new celebrities and these social platforms like FOMO, you know, give them the place to show how much they're actually making and put

their money where their mouth is. I think a lot of us that have been in the space for a while, we've always known like, you know, there's people making serious money, but for outsiders looking in like now they can go to the leaderboard and see, wow, like this person has turned this amount of money into this amount of money in public. It could have been them. Do >> you guys think it's celebrities or >> I mean, I know I know Paul has an opinion here. Are they celebrities? I mean, in their own right. Yeah. I think I I feel like we were talking about this before that celebrity is a little bit of a cringe term, but I think there will be people who build personal brands around trading. I mean, if you think about Michael Bur when the big short happened, he didn't become famous

after the trade. He became famous after the movie. And like Warren Buffett wrote the intelligent investor. He had his own investor letters and all these things. And I think they had to build their own media channels to be able to distribute their personal brands, etc. But there's never been a platform for people to do that. And I also think like it might be either like a utopian or dystopian take. But I think in the world of AI where everything is commoditized um because you can make deep fakes for content and you never even know what's real anymore, the only thing that's left is what people are holding and where their actual conviction is. So if you create a media platform where people could build their personal brands by actually having a real opinion backed by dollars and then you can see the outcome of that then I do think that is what the

next celebrity is >> and and also getting paid for it. I think maybe quickly touch on the the creator awards how you build a following and paid natively. >> Yeah, the creator rewards are good. So um we b we did about $15 million in payouts in September alone and you could imagine as the platform grows a lot we'll do more and more payouts. There are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a week on creator awards on FOMO. And basically how it works is there's people with close to million followers on FOMO now. They built an audience and it was usually just based on social status, right? So you're on the leaderboard, you get paid to speak on panels, you get to like grow your personal brand, etc.

>> Where's my check? By the way, I'm not getting any checks. >> Um yeah, Jord's moving to New York and that's going to be expensive. So we got to start getting paid for panels. But um but anyway, like you get paid to provide information on FOMO, right? So like you have 100,000, 500,000, a million followers. You're providing information. You're writing thesis and content. And then on the demand side, there's people that have no clue how to access these markets. And it's not even just onchain markets. People are worried about AI and they don't know what to invest in or they always thought that investing wasn't for them. But now they have a platform where the education barriers are lowered. They could come on, learn things in seconds. And then Min and the bigger traders on FOMO get paid for supplying that information and builds

even more than like a year salary, right? It's pretty incredible. >> And Jordy, do you see this as like a competition to the big sexes? Do you think more and more people are going to choose to trade onchain natively with greater UI or do you think the bulk of the trading is always going to happen on the the big sexes? >> Uh you'll definitely have people that will end up trading through, you know, backended RFQS. I think at some point it just that order flow becomes very valuable as what we've seen with Robin Hood and then in terms of do traders want to be online. I mean I'm wondering, you know, it's one thing to take three-point shots at the gym with no one around and then if everyone's looking and you're making trades, but they are judging your downfalls and your upfalls,

does it like change how hard it is and you make bad decisions? >> You have a poker background, >> correct? Yeah. How do you feel like when the lights are bright in a real setting versus when the lights are bright on a >> We're live. >> Are we allowed to cuss? >> Let's go. >> You can absolutely curse. >> What the is that? The is that thing? >> Why? Okay. Sit for me. I don't give a What the is that thing? All right. Sorry. Go ahead. We're live. >> We're live and uh we're here with TJ Miller and Jordan Jefferson, in case you couldn't tell. And uh this is >> Doge OS.

>> Doge OS. >> Yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you >> on >> on Doge OS. >> Thank you. >> Uh are we is dojo s live? What's the update? >> The public test net just went live. >> Public test live. It's cooking. >> The ecosystem is here. It's happening. Yeah. >> Uh super exciting. Yeah. >> Yep. And uh and TJ, how do you feel about Dojo public test net being live? >> I'm bullish. I think it's exciting. I mean, you know, I was just telling Jordan, we were uh at another event and I explained Dojo S to another lesser uh broadcaster and is that what you call yourself? What do you call yourself?

>> You don't have to put him down. I like to my I'm a I'm an everyday philosopher. >> You don't have to put him down. I consider myself the greatest thing that's ever been streaming. I'm a philosopher. Uh well, you're not exactly na but uh I explained this thing to and it was very I like that one. She's like I'm well read. Um you know I explained it to him and you get this click. You can see it click in someone's mind. Oh my god, what if there was an an OS on the Doge blockchain? What if you're using this for it? Just all comes together. And so, uh, I'm very excited about it because I got that pretty early

on. Not as early as Jordan, but, uh, yeah, I I'm I'm beyond bullish about it. I just think there's nothing like it. And at the same time, it's like really funny. >> Yeah. >> Like your show, there's nothing like it, but like it's pretty funny. Like that a person would call themselves like an everyday philosopher. Like that's ridiculous. >> What do you call yourself? >> What? >> What do you call yourself? uh a broadcaster. >> That was great. Sometimes it's funny for me too as well.

>> Um well, I told you guys last time we we did the show was in Korea and uh I told you that you know I was long-term bullish on Dogecoin and Doge OS because um you know I foresee a world in which >> Can you tell them to shut the up out there and that main panel part of token? Yeah. Thank you. Go ahead. I didn't want people to interrupt you. You're a philosopher. Um, yeah, guys, we've got some very important uh conversations and philosophizing that we're doing in here. True.

>> Yeah. >> And uh and so the background noise is not not tolerated, but as uh as I was saying, I'm long-term bullish on Dogecoin and Doge OS for for for the reason that I do believe in a multilanetary world. And uh I do believe that the human race is going to go interplanetary very soon. We will make it to Mars depending on your timetable and AI and how fast that'll accelerate. But eventually with people are on Mars or any other planet, we're going to need an interplanetary economy. And it just seems as if digital currencies will be the currency of choice to move money between planets in an interplanetary society. TJ, I didn't know what the

you were talking about for the majority of that last little diet tribe, but I think uh I think yeah, I mean, you know, on Pluto to be certain, which is a planet. Pluto is a planet. Uh yeah, I I can see that. Absolutely. Um Doge. Yeah, Doge is the currency of the universe. What do you think, Jordan? >> Look, never bet against Elon. It's never worked out for anybody ever in the history of the human race. We're definitely going to Mars. If you can't see that Dogecoin will be the currency of Mars, I mean, you're not going to make it.

>> Yeah. And so this, you know, SpaceX is accelerating now with super intelligence and like it seems like we're going to get to Mars faster than, you know, anyone previously thought. Elon is obviously probably the first president and governor of Mars when we get there. if he chooses to accept, you know, that title and and so how tightly integrated is Elon in the Dogecoin Cabal because I think there was a lot of, you know, speculation that he was very tightly affiliated, kind of a big proponent of Dogecoin. Is there anything that you could share about how affiliated he really is?

>> Yeah, great question. Dangerous question. Um, I want to, you know, maybe not go to Mars, but I'd like to go to the moon one day, play basketball. calls your like low gravity something like that. I don't want to you know dulge uh too much Elon Alpha. I think look most of the conspiracy conspiracies are not true. I can say that most of the conspiracies are not true around Elon and Doge. Uh I think he's been pretty upfront publicly and uh I I can just say I believe what he says. Usually he's a pretty straight shooter all his public statements. So I mean that's a political answer. Um there's no crazy conspiracy.

the world's richest man is not like pumping Dogecoin to get even richer. You do the math, it's not even worth his time. So, that's out the window. But, I think it's pretty clear. I mean, he likes the meme. He likes the meme. At the end of the day, what else matters? You know, >> and he gets the joke. >> Yeah. >> I think that's what's important and different is he gets the joke. It's kind of nice that someone at that level kind of, you know, is in on the joke. I think that's fun. And we've seen how powerful jokes can be, especially when they're very they're very funny. And so, >> or running the country.

>> Or running the country. >> Whoa. >> Who said that? >> I don't know. >> TJ, how do you feel about Elon? >> Elon Musk. >> Yeah. >> Um, I'm fine with him. I mean, I do I I will say I think he's kind of funny. Um, and and I love that he loves Doge. Um, but yeah, he's, you know, he's a futurist. I can respect that. But it's also been funny to watch him do some power grabs that just did not work out.

>> Mhm. >> So, that's kind of funny, you know. Um, but I also, you know, when people are buying um Cyber Trucks and um defacing them, uh, I thought that was pretty fun. And what what are you know Dogecoin is a really funny thing and sometimes you know the most the funniest outcome is you know the most entertaining one is the one that ultimately you know kind of persists and happens. So, Dogecoin being the interplanetary currency, I think, is very funny, very entertaining, and has a very high likelihood, but non, you know, it's a a very possible outcome.

>> Extremely. >> And and so, as futurists and, you know, enjoyers of entertaining outcomes yourselves, what are some of the other things that you guys find funny that you think are funny and powerful and very possible outcomes for the future? I mean, I think it's funny if, you know, Dogecoin actually wins all, you know, this whole thing and the whole industry. I think that's funny. I think it's funny if not only the funny stuff, but the serious stuff ends up on Dogecoin. And I think it's also there's just one blockchain that's extremely different, that stood the test of time, the only meme cocoin that stood the test of time, the only one still

kind of in the hands of the people. So, I mean, love it or hate it, I think people are people are starting to get it more and more and believe it when I say crazy like this, but uh you know, it's actually possible in a world very much driven by the a guy like Eli um whose crazy predictions are coming true as we can agree like we'll probably go to Mars. I mean, I think it's very possible Dogecoin just kind of like, you know, melts faces and everything comes to this one chain at the end of the day. I don't mean there's no Bitcoin, there's no nothing. But I think um I I think we could live in a very silly, ridiculous world, and I'm I'm just trying to play a small part in it. You know, >> our local silly and ridiculous correspondent, TJ Miller, how do you how

do you feel about this? >> See, that was great. That's hilarious. Uh the broadcaster just called me a silly correspondent. I'm trying to save face for I just came from Korea. Uh, I actually think and I am a Bitcoiner, but and my wife's a maxi. I I think it's funny how self-s serious this entire ecosystem is. I think that it makes me laugh how seriously everybody takes themselves, not just in crypto, but in blockchain, in digital assets. I It just makes me laugh how serious people are about this thing.

And that again is the reason that Doge is like so refreshing, you know what I mean? But I'm doing I'm doing a roast uh of uh of Anom the Black Bull. Yeah. Here at token. Last year we roasted Justin's son. Yeah. He is a Chinese criminal. But so and as a billionaire I don't it's totally fine. It's he got it. He he got the joke. He knows I'm joking. Justin, roasting is really important because um it's such a funny idea to for a moment

be like, "What could the CCP do to me?" So, uh but I I think it's the idea behind the roast is to tell people to hold up a mirror to them, which is that's what a jester does. I'm a jester. to hold up a mirror and say, "Look how ridiculous all this is. Look how ridiculous you are." And you know, Anom, who we really like. We met him also a criminal. For me, it is really fun. We're not really making fun of him as much as we're making fun of this world, right?

>> And so that to me is the most interesting thing that I can do, right? I do a rose to every single conference. There aren't really enough like crypto celebrities, but I would go everywhere and do and even Michael Sailor kind of I think is open to uh not a criminal at all. Uh he's on the up and up. I'm quite serious about that. But there are many people that are open to it because I think they see how ridiculous this world is and they would like to be made fun of. We would like to see everything lampuned, you know, and that to me is is is really important and it's the main reason that I'm here, you know. I'm fascinated by all this. I really like

Jordan. I think he's got great hair. >> I would Should he let it grow? I don't want to talk about it. Okay. I don't want I don't want to talk or get into it, Brick. And so, you know, I I'm fascinated by Dojo. I'm fascinated by blockchain technology, all of this stuff. I love being everybody in this world, they're all futurists. You're talking to people who are the only people that understand what you're talking about and vice versa, ideally. Um, but I'm a comedian and so the thing that I think is most interesting and the thing that's most helpful is to satarize this entire sort of world.

>> One of the things that I I I think is extremely true about what you're saying is that you have >> I'm sorry. Can I just do the joke I was going to do, but I now of course it won't work. But no, >> it'll work. >> Um, >> we'll see. >> Uh, you know, to satarize this entire world or if it's interplanetary, even Mars. >> So, it didn't work. It didn't work, but let's let's go forward. I'd be thinking about it tonight. >> When, not if. >> When? >> We're going to cut. >> This is never that. >> We're going to cut that out. But, um, >> god.

>> No. All right. Leave it in. But um can you cut out all the Chinese criminal stuff? Also, >> IS THIS NOT LIVE? >> UHOH. >> LIVE ALSO. >> I like saying what? Um, so one of the things that I find so enjoyable about comedy is that it it's what TJ, it's what you're saying about, you know, when you get the joke cuz you have to understand something so deeply in order to land a successful joke about it. And I think people like the ball knowledge. They like You want to see yourself or me? you they they want to know that someone gets it and they can

speak to it at a level that at at which they can navigate the edges of it. They understand it so well that they can kind of like pick it up and look at it and they can see what's funny about it because they understand it so deeply. And so we're here at Monad. >> It's a snow globe. A snow globe is one things you know that you could Well, why don't we pick up another thing that Jordan, you mind passing me the uh >> So, why don't >> Why are you watching yourself when you're talking? Why would you look at us on the >> fascinated that we have the program or TJ's fascinated we have the program feed?

>> But we're at Monad's event and so I think it, you know, it it's relevant to maybe roast this little guy right here because this is Monad's ma mascot, you know, as we prepare for this guy on Mars. I think >> I thought that was a shitfaced Pokemon >> stoned out of his mind trading what appears to be privacy. >> Well, that was pretty good. That was a pretty good That was a pretty good roasting line. That's all you need a sentence.

>> There we go. >> Brick knows. >> There we go. Brick knows. And so I mean maybe you can just help us with some material as you're thinking through you know the Anomro you've done Justin's son we're at Monad's event just help us satarize the digital assets world for >> oh the digital assets in general >> I mean this guy's pretty much you know a stone Pokemon he's a basically an epitome of this industry so yeah maybe we can just use this guy's little How to The second piece is that businesses need

tokenized money and the high-speed blockchains on which that money lives. Agora is building the bank of the future based on these trends. building the full stack to bridge traditional finance and the next generation of financial rails. Stable coins are internet native money and the ultimate financial plumbing for all of global money. You can see here we're talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. For some of us in the room, this may feel like old news, but the truth is that the the AUSD, the stable coin issued by Agora, is bringing institutional grade assets and plumbing onchain, reducing friction when accessing markets and

operating global finance. Today, traditional rails are inefficient and slow. They drive value to incumbents and friction prices out entire segments of the market. In the future, money movement and the transfer of value must move faster with lower friction. High-speed blockchains like Monad combined with tokenized assets and stable coins like AUSD are a perfect fit. AUSD moves instantly, operates 24/7, and earns rewards intraday, both in motion and at rest, which fundamentally shifts the economics of money.

But the race hasn't even started yet. It may feel like old news to us, but the truth is between 2024 and 2025, even with an 8x increase in volume, we're only at less than 1/100th of 1% of global payments penetration. We are still incredibly early. Even in these early stages, we're seeing global businesses building on the Agora stack. AUSD, white label issuance, on andoff ramping, and soon custody, US dollar bank accounts, Swift and AC, the full stack solution for internet native money.

Many of us are familiar with two-sided marketplaces, things like trading where you have makers and takers, or something like Uber where there are riders looking for drivers and drivers looking for writers. Money is a multi-sided network. There are a bunch of participants each of whom provides value and some and some which also take value. This provides and creates a flywheel effect and the composability of blockchains accelerate this process by reducing friction for growth and driving more and more value to consumers.

I'm excited to announce that Agora has received conditional approval for a bank charter from the OC. This means we can serve entirely new markets and bring new products to bear designed specifically for finance 2.0. The OC charter ultimately unlocks the final piece of the Agora vision. A single platform where you can get everything you need for your internet native business in a single place. The charter means that we can now serve US businesses. It means that we can offer additional services like US dollar bank accounts, payments, custody, and other fiduciary activities to our customers globally. We're working to further erase the gap between traditional finance rails and the ever

growing onchain financial world. Stable coins are global money. Agora is the platform to serve global businesses. Agora is building the single and final entry point for internet native money. AUSD is the bridge between legacy rails and the traditional finance system and high-speed blockchains like Monad. At each layer of the stack, we build and we give services to our users. Whether you're building at the application layer close to the users or you're building as infrastructure, Agora is built for you.

Agora is the bank of the future built on Monad. Thank you so much, Drake. Okay, we've had a huge day today. We only have two things on the agenda. So, for all of you who want to actually catch probably one of the most exciting presentations today, please come on in. And thank you to I think the seven or 8,000 now on the live stream. So the experts at Category Labs, they have been busy. They've built what Monad is today and now they're pushing the frontier. Today all day we have had the experts at category labs in

the builder room running technical talks and actually answering the real questions from developers on how is manad technology breaking the frontier of the EVM and also I hope all of you today have been able to meet someone new. Hands up if you did. Hands up if you did. Okay, for those of you without your hands up, we still have Burningmon after I wrap up the main stage in around 30 minutes. So, that is your chance. The Cadence Room and the ecosystem lounge, you know, is the place where you can not only meet new people, but you can see the ecosystem activations going on. All right. And today on

I would like for the the production team, thank you. Sorry, I'm waiting for my speaking notes. I also want to share with you guys today that we have had a huge round of announcements. Not only has it been Xbox coming on Monad, the unveiling of Monad Private Settlement, and also new teams coming out of Stealth, but also that we've been able to see today that there's not only been a huge amount of institutions, all of the biggest names across crypto, finance, payments like Visa and Tether and Open Reserve and Straight Sex, but also you know the traders who are innovating for the future and also So

the celebrities that are changing the future of trading and also the culture. I know that we have covered both the left curve and the right curve. So one thing I just want to warm up the stage for today is the one of the one of the people that I think you all know who put your hand up if you have met or spoken to James Hansucker. Okay, that's who we are all here for. I want to say a little bit about um the background of Monad and its story. So back many many years ago there was a team at jump trading who you know

met it was Ki and James they built and also traded on highfrequency trading systems where nanoseconds were what mattered not just seconds. And what brought them here today to build monad after 3 4 years since 2022 was looking at the existing systems that prevailed across the EVM and then also in the non EVM and realizing that it's time to build the EVM from the ground up which is why today we are very very excited to announce that there is going to be monad next which is going to be unveiled by

the one and only co-founder and also CEO of Category Labs. Everyone give it up for James. Hello. Can you guys hear me? Okay.

Uh I'm James Sunaker, work at Category Labs, co-founder of Monad. And today I'm going to talk about Monad Next. Uh this monet next is actually a constant in the C++ code. That's where this name comes from. Um so there's a little this is actual in the execution client. And what it represents is the set of features that we have built but we haven't released yet. And so when we release features we we switch monad next to the next version of monad and then monad next rolls to the new features.

So, um, yeah. So, what's next for Monet? What's coming up? Uh, block times right now are 300 milliseconds. Uh, you've probably seen, uh, some discussion of this on, some of you may have seen on Twitter. Um, the 300 milliseconds is a pacing timer, uh, where we intentionally slow down the Monet network. Um, but the block times right now are there we go 300 seconds. Uh, and finalization it takes 600 milliseconds to finalize a block.

So in our new consensus algorithm, we're going to lower the block time to 100 milliseconds. So a block will be new block will be produced every 100 milliseconds and the finalization time will drop to 300 milliseconds. Um, we will have uh MEV protection. Orders will stay or transactions to stay encrypted until they're included in the block. And then finally, censorship resistance uh via MCP, multic concurrent proposers. Um, so this is this is sort of an example of uh what the new speed will look like. Like basically you get uh for example, you get a market uh feed update

from let's say Binance, right? it comes in uh you encrypt the order because you don't want to be sandwich attacked. Uh the order gets sent there's 100 millisecond proposal time and then it's finalized. Here we put 400 uh seconds which is including the proposal time to be finalized. Okay. So here's sort of the order today. Uh monitor transactions just timing uh RPC to proposer. That's when you decide to send the transaction.

Uh it sits in the me pool uh of the leader 150 milliseconds. That's on average. Uh it can be at anywhere from 0 to 300. And then the consensus takes 600 milliseconds to finalize. Okay. So here's the uh cadence version. Cadence is the name of the new algorithm. Um and you can see this is sort of at scale. the RPC to proposer is a little bit faster. So why is it faster? Because there's multiple proposers and so you potentially could be sending to something uh to a proposer that is uh geographically closer to you and so it'll actually cut down the time that it takes for the RPC

to send to the proposer. Um the mempool time the blocks are produced every 100 milliseconds. So the ninmpool wait time on average will be about 15 milliseconds and then as I mentioned before the consensus finality drops to 300 milliseconds. Um so here's the current consensus algorithm. It's a monf is still pipeline. Uh but you can see the like the leader proposes it sends the block to all the validators.

The validators send all their votes back to the leader. the next leader. That leader includes those votes with the following proposal of the next block again votes leader three and this is when finality happens um down here. So that's why that's how you get up to the 600 milliseconds. So cadence uh what you can see here is each each proposer follows sequentially one after another and they're building off the previous proposer's work in cadence. Since the block times are so low 100 milliseconds there's no way

globally that you can communicate uh across the entire globe amongst all the validators within 100 milliseconds. the longest the shortest like latency between or sorry longest latency can be like 180 or something like that. So there's no way if you wanted to lower the block time down to 100 milliseconds that you could have that you could um go through this sort of sequential process and still be a globally distributed network. And so what cadence does is it kind of severs the dependency between sequential blocks.

And so um you have proposers that are proposing blocks when they have not yet seen the previous block uh from the previous proposer. And so uh this is even more extreme pipelining than what we sort of have in moni whereas this proposal is happening before uh it's even seen the the previous proposer uh block right so finality comes here you have speculative finality after the first round of votes which will be at 200 milliseconds. So after you see that you could react you know if you wanted to react in the market you're trading um

you could react within that time frame um and then final commitment happens at 300 um yeah I think this is talking about the uh encryption so we're also introducing encrypted transactions so you have your wallet public transaction encryption gets sent to the RPC. Uh we have a number of proposers here. The transaction is crypted. None of the proposers can see the transaction. It goes through consensus.

And then at this stage there's a you have since you have multiple proposers at this stage there's a translation layer which takes the um multiple proposals and combines them into one block. It also is able to decrypt that encrypted transaction. So the the key for the the basically the private key multi-party computation is happening here. And so you get this transaction that was encrypted over there gets decrypted here. Everything is ordered. And so the sequence is basically filtering. So sorting through transactions, removing duplicates because you might have duplicates in the proposers, decrypting and then ordering those

transactions and then that box finally block finally flows through execution. Okay, so that's the translation layer. Um so some of you may know that we have reserve balance already in Monad because Monad is a pipelineed architecture execution is um happening pipelined with consensus. And so in order to ensure that someone cannot take advantage of the protocol by basically sending transactions that they can't pay for, we have this concept of

reserve balance. Um so that concept is still present in the new consensus algorithm, but it has to take into account that there might be multiple concurrent proposers. And so um one of the considerations for inclusion is basically how do you desire how do you divide up the reserve balance amongst multiple proposers. Okay, this is introducing uh so stable leaders. So for a given um I think what I should have mentioned before is these these are basically lanes proposers and stable leaders means that you'll

have the same leader will be able to propose multiple times back to back and so uh that gives a little bit more um simpler logic to how you process transactions. If you included transaction from an account in the previous block and then they're sending you a new transaction, you already know what the nuns is, so you can include it. If it was a different proposer, you wouldn't know what that nuns is and so you you wouldn't be able to include it, right? And then dduplication.

Uh so as I said, because we have multiple proposers, if somebody sent the same transaction to multiple proposers, it could be potentially included multiple times. Obviously that transaction can't be executed. You wouldn't want the same transaction with the same nuns executed multiple times. And so during the translation step, we would filter out that duplicate transaction. Okay. Yeah. The um fees in Ethereum are sort of uni-dimensional. uh you can pay a priority fee uh for ordering and that also serves as an inclusion fee.

In cadence, we're separating the concept of inclusion from ordering. Um the reason is ordering happens later during the translation step. And so this is really like an auction that's happening um you know to order the transactions. The inclusion fee is to pay for your transaction to be included in a block to begin with. And so um in in the case of the inclusion fee, it's it's you're paying the proposer that includes your transaction to have it included.

Um this would go to part of it goes to the proposer and part of it's burned. Then the multiple proposers are translated and compressed into one executable block as I mentioned before. And the ordering fee then determines the order of the transactions in that final block. And so why is it this way? Because uh with MCP you want um you know for sensitive resistance and so forth you want the ordering to happen after the fact. the it prevents somebody from bidding within one proposer to be at the front. And so you need something

that can sort of like sort the block from all the proposers and that's the ordering field. Okay. So new transactions fields. Uh so here's an example of the encrypted fields. So on monad the transactions are only partially encrypted. If you wanted to encrypt the entire transaction, that would require a little bit more complex work, which would require like ZK proving that you have the funds to pay for it. And ZK is really slow. And um this is sort of the first iteration that makes sense.

And so in the encrypted transaction here, in this case, we're not hiding the the from address or the nuns. And so then the system is able to at least determine, you know, does this account have enough to pay for this transaction? Does it is it in the right order and so on? Is it a duplicate? Uh but the fields of like what is getting called? So who is this sent to? What what smart contract is it sent to? What what's the value? You know, what's the input to that smart contract? In this case, a swap. Um all that is encrypted. So uh with MEV you know you would not mostly not be able to sandwich attack

this transaction. Um going back to the MCP fields which were a couple slides ago uh we're adding fields which is ordering bid. So this is you know what is your bid to order within the final block. Um again we're taking that unit dimensional and turning it two-dimensional problem and so we have to add an extra field for that. Uh eligible proposer eligible proposer indices is the set of proposers that a transaction could appear on. So one way to guard against your transaction being included in multiple proposals is is to put a specific indicy of the proposal

that you want it to appear. Um, so here's uh what you pay. You pay an inclusion fee, which is the base fee plus priority times the gas limit. And then the ordering fee is the bid times the gas used. Okay. So, what happens to my transactions? Uh, so does current transactions still work? Yes. Uh, legacy transactions, legacy being the standard Ethereum transactions that everyone's familiar with. Um they have no ordering bid and they will they can be included by any proposer.

Um what do you pay? I think this was the same as the previous slide. Um if you want to put a specific ordering bid uh you would need to use the new transaction type. Can I pay for a transaction doesn't run? Uh rarely you might pay the inclusion fee. So if a proposer includes a transaction that uh for some reason can't execute due to the nuns gap or something like that, you would just pay the inclusion fee. And yes, nonses are still applicable here for monet for this consensus algorithm.

Okay. Demo. Okay. So I'll walk through the encrypted transaction case. Um so this is Mon BTX. Uh let me kill this. Okay. So this is the public public transaction. So in other words, plain text transaction. Um so you want to swap

USDC Vermont. Um so you sign the transaction and your transaction ends up in the meool. And now you have this uh sandwich attacker who's basically looking at everyone's transactions. It sees that you want to swap because it can see what you're doing and it places a buy uh right before a large buy right before your transaction and a large sell right after your transaction.

So the proposer of the of the block is going to order this because the sandwicher paid, you know, a tip to basically paid them to order it this way. And so you get this sandwich attack here in the right order. And what this shows is basically the uh the sandwich attacker raises the price and so you get filled at this at this higher price, right? And so you get filled at this price which is bad. And then this and then the sandwich attacker exits their position and sells and so they make a profit.

Okay. So let's look at the encrypted transaction case. Again, you want the same swap 10 10,000 USDC. Um, so what happens here is the wallet goes and it fetches an encryption key from the network. And so this encryption key is a public key. This is telling the um the wallet what key to encrypt the fields against. So the wallet encrypts the transaction. And so now those fields that were originally that I mentioned before, the the target, the the mon sent the inputs and so forth are now, you know, encrypted fields.

That transaction goes into the meool. There's your uh sandwich bot looking to make some money. He looks, he sees a transaction. Uh he doesn't really know anything except that the you sent it and uh what the nuns was. So he he can't react. There's nothing for him to there's no orders for him to insert. So here we have a a block that's been built. It has some plain text transactions. It has some encrypted transactions.

Uh that block is proposed. The proposers, the validators network communicate and they come up with a decryption key. And so this is showing the communication of the computation of the decryption key. And so once they've all communicated, they're all able to individually compute their decryption key. And so now the transactions are decrypted. they can be executed by the uh execution engine and uh you can see that you get a much better price. Before the price was like out here that orange dot you know after

the orange dot so the price is better um further this way is worse price so you got a better price in this case. Okay. Uh let me just give you sort of a a simulation demo here of of uh cadence. So on the bottom we have block interval which is 100 milliseconds. Uh this is playing at.3x speed uh with five proposers.

See there was supposed to be a graphic here which is not loading now. Let me try to reloading. Okay, that's better. Okay, so this is this is the graphic similar to what you see on gmonads.com. You can see the network communicating with each other. Uh, and this is intentionally slowed down. If we put it at you know, full speed, then it's just going so fast that you can't really tell what's happening. But these are 100

millisecond locks. Um, and we're back. Our last guest was a little unruly. We had to get him out of here. But, uh, we are back. Uh, and better than ever. Drake Evans of Agora is here with us. And, uh, congratulations is in order >> on the OC approval. So, congrats. and uh you had a little talk, not a little talk, you had a great talk earlier today on the main stage here at the Monad Open event. Uh we've been cooped up here in this room doing live stream. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the OC charter and how that talk went?

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean the the the talk is really about what we're building at Agora and what the OC charter unlocks, right? >> Um which is primarily one, you know, operating in the US, of course, a giant market. We're so excited to be there. Uh and the other piece is you know US dollar bank accounts, thirdparty payments, custody, fiduciary activities and that's you know serving globally. Um and you know it was also about how we're seeing two really big trends that I think everyone is sort of you know acknowledges which is tokenization >> and AI right? Oh yeah.

>> And if you, you know, no one everyone knows what's happening with tokenization, but with AI, I think what we'll see is a ton of new entrance to the market because the barriers to entry have dropped and we'll see that basically tokenization and the high-speed blockchains that those tokens run on will be like fundamental for sort of internet native uh money movement. And so, you know, Agora is ultimately building the full stock solution at the intersection of those two trends, right? So, you know, the charter really unlocks, I would say, like the final piece in the Agora vision, >> um, which is a single place where you can get everything you need for an internet native business, right? Whether

it's your first day starting or you're doing $100 million a month in revenue, uh, Agora is built for you. And so as we're thinking about the intersection here between AI and tokenization OC approval, right, we'll we'll get into how that helps you to accomplish these goals. But I'll tell you, I was at uh Cyos before this week >> with, you know, several banks that were out there. Saw JP Morgan, talked to, you know, Mastercard and, you know, City Bank and all these guys. And >> one of the things that I heard was that, you know, I kind of was talking primarily about their stable coin strategy.

Right? Because we've heard a lot of mixed perspectives. Some of it is like, hey, you know, we're seeing banks start to embrace tokenization and stable coins and consider launching their own stable coin. And then the alternative is like, hey, stable coins are a serious risk of capital flight out of, you know, US depository institutions. >> And so, you know, given that we're we're really, you know, far out and extreme on both ends of the spectrum here, I was kind of like, hey, like what is the reality of the situation? And it sounds as if uh the bank's primary focus and concern is on 247 markets for better for worse. That is seems to be driving a lot of the decision-m where it feels like they've been now caught behind whether

that was a regulatory impetence or a competitive one. Now it feels like all of these institutions are starting to develop a 247 strategy. everything else feels downhill and and downstream of that meaning that you know they've now h they now have a mandate of get to 247. >> One of the primary ways that they're going about doing that is hey in order to be 247 we need tokenization >> onchain >> and we need it to be monitored we maybe even need it to be agentic. >> Mhm. And so that feels like the the path of which these institutions are thinking about getting involved into this industry. You know, 247 need to be

tokenized, needs to be on chain, needs to be agentic. How does the OCC approval fit into that and ultimately help you kind of move up the partnership stack so that you're now servicing less of the cryptonative world because you know that >> is more familiar to this customer segment and more of these institutions that are a little bit you know higher up and just now getting started at you know kind of embracing and and and breaking the breaking ground on their 247 strategy. >> Yeah. I mean, I I think that like it's interesting because the 247 thing and like some of the concerns I think with Capital Flight are a bit um you know, overblown to be frank.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> But but not completely without merit either. >> You know, really the charter for us opens up um you know, US credibility. It standardizes collateral backing, right, which I think is is beneficial. um it allows us to to offer, you know, more bank-l like products and also gives us a great entry point to connect deeper and deeper into the financial system. Um in in the US where of course we were US dollar stable coin. I think you know we've always believed even before AI that being close to the metal um we know we started with a stable coin which is a lot of times people would say is backwards um but we felt very strongly we wanted to be close as we could to the metal. That's even more important with aentic, you know, AI and things coming

online, I think. And the reason I say that is that it's easier than ever to build your own thing and that'll just get easier and easier, right? Even over the last year, we've seen massive improvements in AI's ability to, you know, build stuff and that's just going to continue, right? So, what does that mean? It means that the one-stop shop or like the the the like easy to integrate for a developer, like that's dead, right? what I need is the the Legos, the little granular building blocks that I cannot get everywhere else and I cannot build myself.

>> And that's ultimately what the stable coin and what the license and what the banking system is. And so like what what we're building around is this new world where >> there's basically it's sort of like a barbell right? >> Right. >> Where you have a ton of new entrance who are just like starting businesses left and right. Okay. They need something where it's like a single place to go and I can get everything. Mhm. >> But then you're also building for all of these middle market businesses which used to just get SAS products. >> They want the building blocks now. So our whole pitch here is we have everything you need and it's granular. >> So you can orchestrate it and combine the pieces in whatever way you want and that's how you build your application or you can use our like pre-built stuff but

at the end of the day whether you started your business yesterday or you're doing 100 million a month in revenue Agora. >> Yeah. That's really, you know, >> Yeah. And and and like you're saying, I mean, this this barbell approach allows you to serve multiple different customer segments because you've got some product verticals that apply >> 100%. >> Um, when I when I think about the new entrance into the market, I do see this institutional adoption and and tokenization super cycle >> and I can understand how the OC helps you appeal to those who are are federally licensed and registered with, you know, a lot of these. And it's actually not what people uh you know when we first started the business we thought we would need to go to 50 states get all the licenses to do anything.

>> And what we found was customers didn't care. >> The people who did care were the banks >> right? So you need to get a bank account. They're like are you regulated? Well no we don't have to be because of XYZ. We're offshore whatever. The truth is um and look we always believed in building the bank building towards this sort of uh US level of you know operations right and was part of the reason why we were the fastest in history to get an F license in Bermuda. Um but but ultimately um lost my train of thought. What was I just saying?

>> Uh you were the fastest ones to get >> Oh yeah yeah yeah. Um uh oh we were talking about Legos and building blocks. Yeah. and and how a lot of these institutions are now coming, you know, and and entering the market. Uh they need federally licensed, you know regulations. >> You're right. Sorry. That's what it was. The banks, uh the banks were really what drove us to get the license faster and faster. And I think those are the situations where you're seeing people who care more and more about being regulated. Yeah. >> Um and so as you you know, because because the way it worked for us like typically was, you know, a big business comes in, you don't have a license.

Okay. um let's just do some technical due diligence, right? And they would come in, look at our stack, look at our compliance program, be like, "Okay, great. Thumbs up." >> Now, it's just a stamp of approval, right? So, it really opens up um a lot more. >> And and like you were saying, you don't need to go to 50 states in order to do that. And and so now, you know, you you've got the charter that allows a lot of these banks to to look at you with favor favorable eyes. Um and and you were kind of talking about the barbell new entrance and then and then some of these businesses that are now looking to accept you know more stable coins and integrate it more peace meal rather than this full suite approach. The other barbell that I that comes to mind is you

know kind of the institutional new entrance right but then another segment of new market participants are AI agents. Vitalic was at this OKX event earlier today and he was kind of describing how okay right now on average or at least in the next two years a bot might be the primary your primary counterparty. >> Absolutely. But that counterparty and you might be transacting on an exchange and that venue might be primarily written by AI >> and then in another couple years we might just be at a point where there are no applications and there we've got this entire financial system that is just bots just serving quotes and streaming

quotes to one another. And so my question is like okay you've gone if if we've got sort of this barbell of new entrance into the market on one side you've got an institutional approach they're primarily looking at accepting and utilizing a stable coin that is federally regulated. >> You you've gone you've got the charter to do that. Then on the other side of the parable you've got the new entrance that are primarily bots and they're AI agents and and my question here is what makes a stable coin good for bots? It's like what is an AI agent going to look for in a stable coin that is going to say, "Hey, I'm going to, you know, I'm an AI agent. I'm going to use this stable coin rather than a different stable coin as my main mode of transaction."

>> I mean, in some ways, I think it's it's one, do they have the tools to operate it, >> right? So, like from the very beginning, we've had all of what's necessary for X42 and aic payments in general. >> I think um it's also going to be is the person I'm purchasing this from accepting it? Yeah. Right. And I think I think there will be a world where there's tons of different stable coins and you know if they're all federally regulated uh exchanging between them should be essentially free because there's essentially zero risk and you know markets will continue to get more and more efficient. Um and so I you know it's hard to say. I also I also don't know I I think it'll compete on economics and I actually think that this will happen

across a variety of things, right? It used to be that you could compete on user experience or you could compete on the user interface, right? You have a better app, you have a better experience, there's less friction in onboarding, etc. Bots don't care about any of that, >> right? >> They care about the the price. That's it. >> And so it'll be a race to see who can grow the largest to provide the best. It's like asset management in many ways, right? Where >> you know, it used to be two and 20 on mutual funds. Now it's a few basis points on ETFs, right? And they're fundamentally the same product, right? So, so I think that this will happen a lot and this is going to crush quite a few businesses, right? Um across and this isn't just for for economies of scale and they just

>> it's economies of scale and you know it used to be that you couldn't onboard to 20 banks or you know you just get fatigue all that stuff. But bots don't get tired. >> They go all the time. >> And so they're going to just find the place that's actually the best. And so I think you'll see uh people having to compete on and that's why we, you know, believe so strongly in being close to the metal, which is like, okay, you're a bot. You can't you can't compete with us because you don't have a license. Right. Right. >> And so um you you're going to see a lot more competition every piece in the stack. And I think you're going to see stuff pushed away from marketing, user experience, everything else towards economics. Marketing is a weird one.

It's sort of a double-edged, right? Because because agents have to get their information from somewhere. >> And um but we'll see. I mean, like we're so early. The truth is like things are changing so fast. >> Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're going to see marketing to agents. >> Who knows? Like I don't I don't know. You know, it's so easy to sit here and say, well, like agents have to do. It's like maybe they don't, right? Maybe it's all part of the training. Jada, >> what what does close to metal mean in for for a stable coin? >> So to me it means, you know, if you think about something like uh like today you have like a swap widget.

>> Mhm. >> And under the hood there's like actually a bunch of little pieces that are going right and maybe it's even crossing chain, right? Being close to the metal to me is as you take these systems and you break them into smaller and smaller pieces, right? So like for an onchain swap, it might be each hop is a piece and the bridging, right? Okay. And then you get to that level and you break it down a little further and and when you get close to the metal, you can't break it down anymore. That's like one way we think about it is just it's like the fundamental building blocks, right? Um and then uh the other piece is just stuff that can't be built or replicated um by software or AI, right? And so it you know licensing right it's like you

you can't licensing is not an agent problem right so there's something we say internally is like every software problem is sort of a token problem right with enough tokens you can solve most problems >> that's not true with a license right no matter how many tokens you have you're not getting a license unless you you know go through the right process so so I think um that's what we mean when we say close to the metal is just >> it it's it's I think that like this middle you know deeper in the stack is just going to get eaten Yeah. >> And the competition's going to be too hard. And so that's really what we we mean.

>> Yeah. I I think that's right. And I think, you know, there's only going to be so many stable coins that are able to get the licensers and own the most of the stack. And those are the ones that are going to proliferate and reach economies of scale through which they can compete on economies. >> And that's why we're building sort of the horizontal platform, right? So, it's it's the banking, the stable coin, the the rest of the platform, everything you need for your internet native business, KYC, fraud monitoring, cards, like the whole thing, right? Because the point is that you're going to have to compete on economies of scale. You're going to have to be able to have the synergies with the stable coin. It's like the stable coin, you're going to have to pay out 100% of the revenue, but you can build a

better financial platform because you have the stable coin, even though the stable coin doesn't make make any money. Yeah. Right. And so I think you're going to see companies doing more and more of that. I think you're going to see you know you're even seeing it. It's really I mean fascinating with like I don't know if you saw the Muse uh got booted off Amazon. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Facebook agent. You're right. It's not able. >> So Amazon like block them which I think was really bad >> because um like this is the future like you're saying there's no applications. You just ask your agent to do something >> and the agents like I said they need the tools to actually use your product and if they're blocked they can't. They're going to go somewhere else. So, you know, and of course, Amazon wants the

user coming to the site and they want the behavioral data and they want all that and that's fine, but >> um you know, you're going to see the aggregators getting aggregated is maybe another way to put it. I think there's been a big scare too about just banks as well. And and I think it's this one's actually like kind of legitimate, which is just you can have a bot every day check your checking account and move it to the highest yield checking, right? You don't there's no like the stickiness is no longer a thing. There's no stickiness, there's no loyalty, there's no UI, and it's uh it's a crazy world. We'll see how it goes.

>> Yeah, man. So, we we've got this segment on the show called Be More Bullish. >> Okay. >> In which I'll uh present a bullish take and uh I'll challenge you to be even more bullish. >> All right. >> And so, uh recently there's been, you know, big talk out of the the US Treasury Department around how stable coins are a national economic priority. uh primarily driven by the reduction of US treasuries owned by sovereign nations uh and how stable coin issuing companies are going to be sort of this you know stop gap solution that are going to come in and swoop up and buy up all the US treasuries >> y >> um and especially because we need to you know kind of twist the duration from the long end it's the short end and stable

coin issuing companies can be the buyers >> of the short-term US treasury not >> um >> this presents an extremely bullish outlook because well uh if stable coins sort of you know absorb all of that liquidity uh we issue more stable coins that ends up you know I we tend to say that a dollar onchain tends to stay on chain it'll it'll you know sort of flow into the rest of the onchain economy presents a really bullish outlook uh as stable coins grow the rest of the onchain economy grows >> very very bullish you know Besson is uh projecting three trillion dollars in stable coins I think by 20 originally it was by 28 then it was by 2030 I think >> okay

>> be more bullish. >> I mean I I think I think it's easy, right? Like I I actually think that people are completely underelling this opportunity for so many for so for so long we've heard it's it's the euro dollars euro dollars. I don't even think that's true. I think it's all money, >> right? Foreign currencies are are at almost more risk than euro dollars, right? Because euro dollars means you have access to dollars, you know, out offshore in some capacity. But what's really interesting is the fact that I think stable coins will replace local foreign currencies. And that's like one of the trends we're going to see in the next little bit is like governments being like, "Wait a minute. I'm losing my sovereignty because I no longer have a central bank that can actually function because everyone's just

adopting stable coins." And what's interesting is there's not a lot they can do about it, right? You can ban the apps, you can do this, but at the end of the day, the internet's the internet. And so I actually think they're everyone's completely underelling this because the TAM is not I mean we did this originally with our seed round, right? We was like talking about well how big is the Euro dollar market. That was the wrong metric. It's how big is all money globally. That to me is where where the stable coin opportunity is. So so I don't know 10 trillion in 2028. Who knows? What are we in now? 2026 >> maybe 10 trillion in 2030. Yeah. I'll do the best the best adjustment.

>> Wow. Drake Evans is bullish. Uh appreciate you coming on man. That was uh it was a pleasure. Uh you guys know your stuff obviously and uh Agore is crushing and so congratulations on uh all the growth, all the adoption and then also the OC charter. >> Yeah, thank you so much for having me. >> Absolutely, man. Uh guys, we're going to hit quick standby. We're going to show you guys the uh panels that are going on out out uh at the event and uh we'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. These are some of the issuers, tokenization protocols, and curators um and DeFi protocols that are building on Monad from Straight Sex and Tether to Janice Henderson and Apollo.

>> Monad as a settlement layer is also growing. Payment apps, on-ramps, custodians, wallet providers. There are so many that are building on Monad including Fireblocks, Rain, Sofi USD, Bridge.xyz, XYZ and abound by the times of India. Today we learned that XOXOX is going live on Monad. That's more than 1,000 tokenized stocks and ETFs on chain on open rails trading 7 days a week. This is also a perfect use case for an open financial system. This also raises the bar. People who trade e people who trade

equities expect fairs. They expect that nobody can trade ahead of their order. So everything that Kony just described, everything that James just described is the bare minimum for this market to work. Sorry. The other thing institutions need is confidentiality. Banks need to protect their customer records. Trading firms need to protect their positions as well. Until now, the answer has been through the use of private chains which offers privacy but doing so in isolation. You lose out on

the composable aspect of having privacy made available on chain or rather confidentiality made available on a public chain. This morning, Yan announced Monad Private Settlement, which is designed to remove specifically that trade-off. Now, a bank, a fund, a corporate treasury, they can run their own private domain and still settle against the same shared liquidity on Monad itself. >> Monad private settlement is something that we've been very excited for quite some time to announce. Um what it really gives institutions is the best of all

worlds between privacy, sovereignty and connectivity and composability. Um we believe that this is a crucial component in delivering ultimately an infrastructure that can serve the needs um of businesses in addition to serving the needs of users from all the improvements we mentioned before. We also on our builder stage today demoed a number of um pieces of infrastructure that um that we've been building and the category labs has been building um that we think are really crucial to delivering um the best possible developer experience and the

best possible user experience. that includes app specific sequencing um pass key accounts via MERA and better queries through the new MIP16 ETH query um proposal that that's uh been made recently. Um and lastly there's quantum security. I think that to go back to um something that we talked about earlier, quantum is a huge problem and um especially with the advances in AI, it's very easy to imagine that um you know there could be breakthroughs that are completely unexpected. Um right now the quantum doomsday clock is set to

mid2028. That's actually not a lot of time. >> And we're back. Monad open event token 2049 here and we've got Antoine. Welcome to the show man. It's a pleasure to have you to meet you Robbie. >> Absolutely. It's a pleasure to meet you. Good to host you. And uh we're going to be talking about tokenized stocks. Uh you are CEO of Gamestock. It's a take on GameStop, I'd imagine. And so uh we're we're uh we're gifying the stock market. >> Absolutely. >> Tell us tell us a little bit more about GameStop and uh what what you're doing here at the Monet event.

>> Yeah, absolutely. So, um, Gamestock is essentially gamifying the stock market. We're focusing on real assets that we think bring real value to society. And so, we wanted to bring them in new form factors, whether that's ripping of packs or being able to, you know, compete in trading tournaments and and uh compete against your favorite creators in the in the financial space. So, for us, it's all about gamifying the markets in a way that's easily digestible, but still focus on the highest quality assets. >> It sounds like this is like the app layer for the stock market. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys don't you're not at the na the tokenization layer, right? You're a you're downstream of this, right? And so we heard uh the X stocks uh are going to be natively launched and tokenized on Monad. So

Monad, you know, now has access to,00 tokenized stocks. And it's not just Monad itself, it's the application layer on Monad of which Gamestock is launched. And so you now have this swath of assets, right? And it is your job and Gamestock's job to now combine these stocks in a variety of different ways, make it fun to interact with. And so ripping packs, financialized applications, gamifying these things, how do you foresee this starting to progress? Maybe you can just give us a sense of where you're at in development right now and how how you anticipate the go to market going now that you have,00 different stocks live on Monet.

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean for us it's all about the the end consumer. We want to make this easily digestible for the consumer that doesn't know what blockchain is. They don't know what tokenized stocks are. They barely know what stocks are to be honest, right? Um for me and the reason the vision for what we have is like my background started in professional sports. I played in the Mariners organization and I think for a lot of guys even that play professional sports a lot of them make great money but they don't necessarily invest. And so what that told us was that at least for me as I progressed throughout my journey and shifted careers was, you know, there's so many people out here that want to have access to these platforms and now they have access through companies like Robin Hood and and others who made it easier uh for

people to now be able to invest but they still don't know what to invest in, right? And so now how can we make it even more digestible, give them these different gamified modes where you can learn but also earn at the same time. And so that's really what we built. So we're at the stage we've raised $2 million in capital was led by Peak 15. Uh some of our earliest angel investors were early investors in Robin Hood and Euro and Alpaca. Some of the really leading fintech platforms of today's day and age. And so for us, you know, we're at a stage now we're live. We're available in 44 different countries. And we would just want to keep progressing the idea and the notion that you can also own assets uh specifically stocks that you want to hold that ideally it turn into generational wealth for your

family um and ideally it starts on GameStop. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I I think tokenized stocks is such an important concept for everyone who's maybe looking at the onchain economy and they're looking at some of the different ways in which they can get started in their financial journey. And frankly, man, I mean, there's so much financial nihilism out there, right, that I think giving people a platform and an opportunity to to invest rather than gamble is such an important concept. >> 100%. >> And and so you mentioned you're live in 44 countries. What is the journey been like? What what is what are some of the trends that you've started to identify the different access points through which you see users starting to get involved?

>> Yeah, I mean, people want to be able to create financial wealth for themselves. They want to be able to do that. And just like you said, I think when it comes to certain applications, our our belief is is that they're they are gambling. They're degenerate. You know, it's crazy. We actually did this activation at Arizona State University and the question was, would you rather have an only fans daughter or a memecoin trading son? And you wouldn't be surprised how many people actually chose the only fans daughter. So, unfortunately, meme coins are now kind of in the same regard as only fans. And and and when you kind of dive a little bit deeper, the next question someone might say or the next answer someone might give when they're answering that question is, well, at least the guy's trying to make money, right? But you

could also say the same for the only fans go, right? So what I mean by this is I think that we're honestly at this stage where a lot of people have definitely gone further further degenerate and now we're starting to see people start to have some push back towards that and kind of want to build outside of that. So for us specifically, we want to build ass on on assets that we think are going to continue to move the needle, continue to gain value and compound over time. And so a lot of the users that we're seeing are those people that probably touch some of these other apps where they're trading meme coins or they're gambling on sports apps or they're gambling on on prediction markets and now they're saying, you know what, I'm kind of over that. I want to go and actually invest and trade. Let's

make sure we clip Antoine talking about the divergence between uh uh Only Fans and Memecoin traders here. But I I I mean, look, I think you're you're touching on something that's extremely important. It's relevant to a lot of people that are growing up. They're, you know, somewhere along their financial journey because people of all ages fall into this mindset. And so, you know, a lot of this is is really rewiring the mindset here. And so one of the things that I think captures people's minds is like look, you know, they they maybe even start from the right premise, which is that inflation is eating away at purchasing power. But the conclusion they draw isn't, hey, I need to find a way to protect my purchasing power over

time. It's I need to find a way to make money so much and so quickly that I no longer like I I escape the permanent underclass, right? How do you rewire people's brains and flip their mindset so that they start to incorporate a longer term approach into their decision-making process so that they're not thinking on, you know, hitting 100x on this parlay or on this memecoin, but they're thinking, okay, I can build structural wealth over time to protect my purchasing power.

>> Yeah, it's a great question and I wish I had the full answer to that. The reality is is like, you know, our generation spec specifically has definitely dug ourselves in these holes with the social media applications and the creators that we're following. Um that it's kind of led us to a point where now we feel like the only way to get out is to get rich quick, right? And the reality is is if you look at the best, most qualified, most respected people in the world, specifically in finance, um, a lot of those people understood what it was like to build long-term wealth, compound over time, be patient. And so, I think there's ways that we can bottle these same products in a way that feels more gamified. and it still gives you that same euphoria that you get from these other apps while also not putting people

in a position where they're losing all of their money and then now they have no life savings and then now if anything they're worse off than they were beforehand right so I think in a lot of ways we're continuing to want to focus on you know building products that still allow for gamification still allow for people to get that sense of euphoria but ideally focusing on assets that really matter and are high quality >> so we we've already seen some very creative financial experimentation uh financial experiments on like Robin Hood chain, right? Where, you know, they've gone and tokenized a ton of stocks. Um, and obviously they've got, you know, really, really native uh, mechanisms that allow them to bring a lot of tokenized stocks to market, but I don't think anyone really expected

people to pair these stock tokens with meme coins and then start to do all these funky things, right, where, you know, they've got these liquidity pools that start paying themselves in these tokenized stocks. And so after you've seen sort of the financial experiments that have found some product market fit with this crowd on Robin Hood chain, what are some of the lessons that you learn that say to yourself, okay, we want to incorporate some of these gameplay modalities into what we're doing on Gamestock? >> Yeah, I mean obviously anytime there's there's new opportunities, people are going to try and find a way to gify, create something around it that creates excitement. Um, we're not as as as bullish probably on the the memecoin to pairing of of stocks. I've seen some of it, you know, whether we're seeing

certain companies like HIMS and what they were, you know, uh, you know, obviously um, >> what they were tied to. So, some of that stuff I think exists more from entertainment purposes and for some people it's working, but I think over the long haul we'll see that a lot of that stuff ends up kind of dying out and we've even seen it a little bit already, too. And so, you know, we really want to continue to focus on what are the things that actually can continue to compound someone's um, ideally learning. So, trading terms are a great example of that. They're actually one of the greatest ways for people to learn how to train in these shorter duration time periods and you can do it in a way where it's not, you know, all or nothing, right? It's not this like zero sum game.

And so those are the types of things that we want to bring and and those are the things that we're seeing that we think will continue to compound. >> Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, how how >> There we go. >> Yeah. We're I mean, we're having fun again. It also feels like we're on the precipice of uh you know some some positive market >> when you when you compare memecoin traders to only fans models. You know it sparks a little bit of controversy. So >> yeah, you did say you were going to bring the clips. I mean look man, I I I think you know there's a very noble purpose to what you're doing which is very similar to what we do with this show is we want to educate people. We want to empower them and ultimately help them on their financial journey. we, you

know, this given that it's media and then very similar the way that you've gone and structured GameStop, you can't help but think that there is an entertainment angle and purpose to what we're doing. >> This is insane. I mean, what what do we have what do we have going on out there? >> I think we've got a whole drum drum team. >> There's there's there's no muting that, by the way. >> No, absolutely not. >> There's no muting that. we're we're just gonna we're just gonna we're we're gonna bring this in. And so >> I mean there there is entertainment to what you're doing and and you know you almost have to incorporate that into the application and think that people are going to be substituting what they're

typically spending their attention on. Now they're going to be looking to something like Gamestock for entertainment even as much so as it is to to learn and make money. And so h how do you think about that when you're now competing with some of you know the applications on a phone screen that are drawing attention and entertainment? >> Yeah. I mean for us it's about creating stuff that we think will create stickiness and retention, right? I think there's a lot of platforms out here that to be honest, right, they're focusing on that quick dollar, right? So yeah, you can create the highest level of entertainment from day one and then by day three they may no longer be there because they've lost all their money, right? And so, how do you create an application where maybe the entertainment doesn't feel as high on day one, but it's enough that keeps them

around for day 30, day 60, day 90, and then all of a sudden they continue to be on the platform. Robin Hood was was exceptional at this, right? Creating these abilities for people to, you know, earn rewards and stocks and that's if you invite friends, you can open this mystery box and get some stock, right? That's a positive entertainment loop that we think keeps people around. There's also negative entertainment loops where, hey, buy this pack, this Pokemon pack, spend $10 and get 30 cents back. That's a negative entertainment value, right, that's being created for that user. So, I think those are two different ways of of providing entertainment to the end user.

>> Yeah. Ultimately, you're you're curating an experience, >> which they're certainly doing out there, too, man. Um, I appreciate you coming on. It's been a pleasure and uh I hope to uh have you on again real soon. >> Absolutely. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Leo, why don't we cut to whatever's going on out there? We want to curate this uh this entertainment experience for all of our listeners uh as well. So, uh we're going to show you guys what's going on. Got a whole drum roll going on out there. So, let's give give the people a look and uh we'll we'll show them we'll show them what's up. But you guys have been uh incredible today. This has been our first day here at uh Token 2049. Uh, and we're here from the Monad Open event. And so we're having fun.

Like I said, we're on the precipice of what feels like an institutional community. I mean, there's a confluence of factors here that leads us to believe that animal spirits are back and the bull market is on. And so, we are uh we're very excited. We'll just start just keep dancing. I don't know if you guys can hear what's going on out there. >> Is there fireworks? What What do we have going on? traditional dragon. >> Oh my goodness. There's a traditional dragon dance happening. >> We lost the feed.

I think we're done. I think that's it. I wanted to get a word from Kone if possible. Why don't we hit Leo? Let's hit a regular rollup standby for uh for just a minute, guys. Don't go anywhere. We're going to We're going to keep keep uh we're going to keep it rolling. We're going to hit We're going to hit a real quick standby. It's been insane out here at the Monad event. Yeah, go ahead. We'll be right.

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deep. We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. You know we get deep we get deep know we get deep know we get deep we get deep know we get deep know we get deep we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep >> yo yo yo what's going on guys this is itan with the rollup we're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in?

How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212. We get deep. We get deep. You know, we

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do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets. We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212. We get deep. We get deep, you know. We

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>> Yo yo yo. What's going on guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? >> Last but certainly not least, back live. Kone, >> thank you for having us out. It was a pleasure. >> Thank you for being here. And uh I mean what a great event. We uh we kicked it off. This is uh this is our start to the token 2049 week and uh no better way to start it off. So uh you threw a great event and now we've got uh we've got some base kicking uh out there. Uh I mean several people that came off the stage, you know, you you had them up

here at uh kind of announcing partnerships and and uh you know, doing quite quite a few things here. They came right off stage. They came over here, shared it with us. Uh and so thank you so much for having us out. >> Thanks for uh being part of this. You know, this is our first this is our inaugural open event and we hope to be doing this for a long time bigger and better every single time. But yeah, thanks for uh kicking it off. Really >> absolutely >> set a high bar. >> Well, it's a it's a pleasure to be here. I mean, we talked a little bit about, you know, the permission permissionless nature of the ecosystem. my, you know, I I spoke with several founders that are in the ecosystem talking about how, you know, we've got both a very consumer, you know, centric vibe to the brand and

some of the applications in the in the app layer, but then also a deep institutional liquidity focus and we've got tokenized stocks and and it feels like in order to survive as a blockchain in 2026, you need both sides of the barbell. You guys have been been able to master this approach. Maybe you can just speak to the vision that has brought these these communities together. >> Yeah, for sure. I think um you know the Monad community has played a huge part in um the success of the project and that's you know very you know in touch with the culture of crypto. Um but at the same time I think it's also

you know at the end of the day deliver value to users value to businesses and um you know that have that means interacting with the real world and a lot of the real world is people wearing suits or at least people you know very rigorously about slippage and liquidity and those so I think it's very possible to blend the two together. there's no contradiction. Um, everyone wants good execution. Everyone on their trading. Um, everyone wants access to the best opportunities. And I think, you know, right now the Monad network is just starting to accumulate some network effects, but those come both from institutional adoption and from retail

adoption. And and I take it there's probably some through lines here. Openness being one of them, permissionless, you know, some of the principles and the core tenants of the industry of digital assets, of finance in general, and of of sort of this upand cominging wave of adopters. Maybe you can just speak to, you know, what what are some of those core tenants that you've held right through your journey of of starting, founding, and and now building Monad that continue to proliferate and guide you through for the next, you know, decade of Monad's journey? What are what are some of those core tenants?

>> Yeah, we started Monad in early 2022. Um, at that time, I think there was, you know, sort of a different market feel about the direction of the industry. there was um you know everyone was just saying the rollups are going to be um the the big thing and I think there's definitely a place for um rollups in the overall crypto ecosystem but there's much less like unilateral you know banging the drum all in one direction um when we started monad the goal was just to deliver a really performant and decentralized system and we thought that the engineering challenges of solving those two problems together were just exciting and compelling and um you know

we never wanted to cut corners. So you know what that meant is that there was a you know a longer development period um from the time of starting to launching the mainet about 10 months ago now. Um but the good news is that now we I feel we have just very strong foundations moving forward where the system is built completely from scratch. Um the core engineering team knows it like the back of their hand. Um there's a lot of improvements that we think are sort of the right way for blockchain architectures to work. Um and that includes decoupling consensus and execution. It includes parallelizing the work. It includes um you know kind of rebuilding like the database from scratch and all these other things. But

now with that really solid technical foundation, it actually allows us to do a lot more and to um solve other really fundamental problems that I think are still outstanding in crypto, including um solving MEV and um sort of squaring the circle around the seeming contradiction between privacy and um composability that currently exists right now in the space. >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's something that we've we've heard a lot about, we've talked a lot about on the show, even just throughout the day today. And so there's some very uh uh interesting engineering problems that are out there still to be solved. Those will guide kind of the the next developments of Monad. Um like you said,

you launched mainet 10 months ago. >> Maybe just for our audience and for the monad community, some reflections. What have been some of the lessons that you've learned, some of the greatest takeaways from the first 10 months of mainet? I think speed is everything. I think that, you know, there's there's many um uh asset issuers, u many exchanges, many banks um that are excited about coming on chain, but um you know, so the the opportunity, the potential is all there. Um but it's just on us to move really quickly to solve their problems and um for example for asset issuers to help them to um get their asset distributed and um getting more utility from being embedded in a decentralized system where users can use

leverage and there there's just um you know there's a lot of pro little problems to solve. The faster we solve them the better. >> Yeah absolutely. Well Kone like I said this was a fantastic start to our token 2049. We really appreciate you and the entire Monet team. like you mentioned that I mean this was a whole orchestration uh in order for the team to you know kind of put all of this together uh and it's been a fantastic event really well well thought out well put together well curated and uh we've had a lot of fun doing it and so I hope uh you've had a lot of fun here at uh at open as well I know we have and uh it it's the conclusion of our open stream but uh you know one one door closed another one open so G monad uh for the next for the

next chapter and uh we'll we'll see everyone again soon. >> Yeah, one door I like that one door closes, another one opens. >> I love it. Well, Ke, thanks so much, man. >> Thanks, Robbie. >> Appreciate it. And uh be more bullish, guys. Gonad, we're signing off. That's the end of uh our our open stream. That's a wrap. Thank you so much, guys. And thanks, K. Love it.