Are DATs Sustainable, Stripe Launches Tempo & WLFI’s Token Launch | Weekly Roundup

Transcript

I've said it time and time again. Um, distribution is incredibly important. Um, it's no surprise Stripe has incredible amount of distribution. Uh, they have all these clients and they've been super bullish on you know, acquiring assets that position them nicely to to transition into um, you know, leveraging stable coins. And so I think it's a natural evolution. Like logically, if I were in their shoes, I would have done the same thing. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only. And the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of

Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. What's up, folks? We're live. What's up? What's up? We'll wait for like two more people to get in. Um, yeah, I was catching up with Thread again. I was like, I just can't compete with you in the live stream game. You are just you're built for this. You are you're a live stream machine. I I went on I went on shout out to him because I went on to on his show like a week or so ago and he has like a nice setup. He's like phantom neon lights, like this green like looks like a putting green. It's kind of kind of Yeah. I went on in July and like I didn't really like know his like audience and like what the the the vibe of the show was and I got hit up by a

bunch of people and they were like you don't seem right for thread guy you know and I was like gray hair for thread guy Rob yeah I enjoyed it you know and then and then I think in the chat the the whole audience was basically like who is this boomer like what's the CA what's a price target you know when you also go on on on Ryan's show it's it's you know I just feel like out of Who's Who's Ryan? Oh, N Ran Nuner. Ryan. Ran Ryan. Yeah. Yeah. Um Rob, dude, what's going on? How are you?

I am sleep deprived. I'm working working a lot these days. It's good though. You better you rather be busy than not busy. And so like when the market comes to you, you've got to you got to take a hold. You got to take advantage. Why? Why? Yeah. Why are you so busy? Um well I think as you guys know the things that I focus on are a lot of the call it like you know crypto traditional finance crossover payments stable coins traditional capital markets and I think that part of crypto right now is just ripping at the moment. Um and we're just seeing a lot of deal flow a lot of new entrepreneurs a lot of people that are really excited about building the space.

Um we're also you know all of the DAT stuff. uh there's some work that you know we've been doing around that specifically um and so that's been uh I think taking up some time uh for my me specifically and and and I will say that a lot there's been a lot of stuff happening in the DAT space because I got to be honest there are so many people in this space who do not understand public markets and they're just like doing some like wild wild west stuff that makes no sense you know I saw a wall cross script from one of these things that was It's got known falsehoods in the wall across the script. They don't like it's just craziness.

Wait, what say what that means? Say what that means. So when a digital asset treasury company uh wants to go and actually market the equity and so they want to tell you like okay this is the public company that we're putting in the pipe into or this is you know maybe the spack that you know is helping take this thing public because it is already publicly traded. They have to go through what they call a wallcross. The wallcross is has a certain compliance standard to it and the lawyers um actually agree on what the script will look like so that when the bankers or the placement agent goes and they send that to potential investors, they make it very clear that they understand they're getting non-public information and that they

will not be trading in that public equity. But there's a a whole standard around the way in which you market these things for public company equities that has to be done. And the stuff I am seeing from some of the crypto natives who are like you know think that they're trying to make a bunch of money is um uh you know unsophisticated at best and in in many cases just like I got to be honest just um complete um just haphazardness and you know and put it in a nice way. Yeah. All right let's I mean let's dig into that. So there's a couple things I want to talk about. One is World Liberty. Uh their their token became tradable. There's some I feel like shenanigans that are happening there.

There's uh tempo. So, Stripe and Paradigm just launched Tempo uh chain. Um I want to talk about that. I want to talk about stocks in crypto are really starting to converge. You had Galaxy um listed on Salana. Uh so Galaxy listed their their stock on Salana. Uh you had Coinbase list do some crypto uh stock stock crypto convergence thing. So we'll talk about that, but maybe we can talk about DATs first. Um, MNAVs are doing what I think we've been saying that they would eventually do on Empire for a little bit and it's it's starting to happen, right? Which is the the MNAV is going subzero on many of these. So, I can pull up the chart.

Hopefully, not subzero. Subzero. Yeah, exactly. It's going negative. It's going sub uh sub sub one for many of these. So, if we look up the look at the Blockworks data here, the basic MNAV is Yeah. 0.95 0.91 77.89.97.9 89, 0.97, 0.93, 67, and you got a couple of these, you know, strategies still at 135, game squares at 105. Some of these are still above one, but a lot of them are sub one now. So, ju just to give you guys a little like a little feedback on this, I think the ones you have here that are spacks are wrong. Like the 0.11 from Ether Machine, I think they're actually trading at a premium right now. Um, and the uh the 21 Capital is the same thing, the 006.

You know what? I wasn't going to the right enough. It's I was looking at the basic MN looking at the MNV enterprise value MNV makes sense. Yeah. But yeah, I mean you're you're not wrong that the MNAVs are collapsing which we expected there, you know, for the best ones, the strategies like you know the maybe the aspects you know maybe 21 you know a few of these others that have best really good management teams have good capital structures that um are able to continue to you know increase that token per share and potentially also have you know really good um ways to interact with the ecosystems like they will probably do Well, but do well means trade at like

like a really good REIT. And what does a really good REIT trade like? A really good REIT trades at 1.5 times its NAV, right? Or they, you know, we saw some of those REITs when the um uh like in like uh in the data center REITs when AI was really starting to pick up the pace. Some of those traded up to, you know, over two because there was so much excitement about AI. But these things aren't supposed to trade at three, four, five times. And that's just not going to be steady state in any way. Yeah. Santi, have you been paying attention to this or you staying out of it?

Uh, you're muted, sir. As I said, I have some exposure to some of these stats. Uh, oh, so you ended up doing some of them. Well, I I did uhupexi way back. Um, contributing cash, not inind. Uh, so that was kind of the early ones. Um and then yeah, so naturally paying attention for the reasons that we've talked about it here, you know, even even if you're not investing in Dows, it just it's one of those things where you have to pay attention. Uh there was a good thread by Galloway Galloway's Capital. I think he's generally a smart guy that maybe we can pull up and it anchor the discussion around that. You know, again, we're not a the point that Rob made, which I think is is not just

related to DATs, but just generally public markets. I think it's a a theme that we should continue like if we think about the major themes this year, public markets are because of the regulatory environment clear more crypto in public markets uh from the Robin Hoods, Coinbase of the world, more public companies. Um so DS obviously fit into that equation. Um and we've kind of the the lurking question that one might have is if if some of these debts that are poorly structured or trade really poorly because they have some debt and force selling how much of like cont like how much of contamination risk does that have and I think it also

fits into world liberty to some extent right uh because I've been hearing a lot of chatter around you know that potentially being detrimental to crypto long-term potential after four years. And so, anyways, back back to this thread of of of Kevin. Um, so what's Kevin saying here for those who didn't read it? Rob, do you want to go or should I go? I I didn't read this, so you you please fill me in. Yeah, if you want to pull up higher. Um, I think you're Yeah. basically saying I mean, I can skim it if you want me to and say it out loud.

It's basically saying like some some some folks think that the data to the next Luna. It's not. Others are saying there's nothing to unwind. There is. think carefully about the mechanics. Um you can skip this part. Um basically says imagine an underlying where the distribution of DAT holdings isn't as extremely skewed towards one mega holder. There's one small handful of mega dats for a single underlying. This becomes a prisoner dilemma coordination game where the good outcome is possible to some extent. At like 0.9 MNAV, it's conceivable that none of the players go for the ARB. But if MNAV drops to 0.5 um uh now the ARB profits are much bigger and could outweigh the negative consequences of underlying market cap compression reflexive selling

reputational considerations etc etc. So in other words the gain in our value is individual while the compression of the underlying market cap and hence all DAT market caps for the same underlying is socialized all else being equal more big DATs is worse than fewer big DATs for this game. Yeah. So I think I mean I do think you said a lot there. Some of which I agree with, some of which I don't. What I would say I do agree with is that especially when you go beyond call it like Bitcoin, maybe Ethereum, you don't want a lot of debts, you do want call it, you know, one per token uh for that call it next group of people that you think are probably big

enough. When you go beyond the 15th or 20th biggest market cap token, you probably don't want it that at all. It probably doesn't make a ton of sense for there to be a lot of liquidity in the open market. I think there is a lot more risk around like just liquidity fragmentation, but also lack of liquidity generally and so you're going to see a lot more like volatile price swings that don't necessarily make sense. Um, but like if you look at that group of okay, let's go to the next group, whatever it is. What is your threshold? Uh look Salana, you have Sooie, you have Athena, you have like what is your threshold of of fully diluted or or circulating market cap for a crypto project to say okay makes sense because you've seen like

stories story protocols of the world also launched. But did you see what happened with Story, right? How did Story get funded? Right. It was a $360 million uh I believe in total value. Uh I believe only 100 of it was in cash. uh the vast majority of it was bought from the founder himself which looks a lot like you know exit liquidity and then they NASDAQ has not allowed them to um end up delivering the shares. Why? because it was all in kind and they didn't get a proper shareholder vote in place, right? And what we're going to start seeing is these like listing rule problems.

Wait, wait, I didn't I didn't know that, Rob. So, what what happened here? They because I this was this is what this is what I was seeing is like NASDAQ is now na both both exchanges are now tightening DAT listing positions where it's like I think na I was just reading NASDAQs where any inind contribution of digital assets um it's a it's it's a long update I won't read it here but can you can you maybe give an update of what that really entails yeah so what what it really means is most of these pipes into these operating companies um so specifically so let's put away this acts for a second, right?

But the pipes into the operating companies, they're doing these pipes at with very little um if if any shareholder votes. And then often they're doing it with no shareholder vote. They're just, you know, maybe getting the majority shareholder or shareholders on their side and then, you know, call it after putting the pipe in, massively diluting everybody. They're just getting those people um additional equity to make them whole. And those people are giving the thumbs up and saying, "Hey, listen. We control the shareholder vote. So, so we're okay with um with this deal." But the problem is they haven't gone through the proper full shareholder vote where they have to go get a quorum of shareholders to say, "Yes, we want you to do this deal. We

want you to" and then the there's a threshold for how much equity you can uh you can issue to be a without needing that shareholder vote. Typically, usually it's over 20. it's between over 10 and 20%. Um what the the NY and the NASDAQ have been saying is they've been saying well these deals as they've been done haven't gotten the appropriate shareholder votes and so we are not going to allow them especially if it's inind right so this is not the SEC pushing back yet it's the listing it's the exchanges themselves and they're saying we think that you need more appropriate shareholder governance before you go and and take basically stuff a micro cap company with a bunch

of ink kind tokens. Like imagine you're an investor and and I forget what this company did that story put money uh that the story protocol one um you know was put money into, but imagine you're an investor in some some company that is a you know some of these are like cannabis companies or they're biotech companies and all of a sudden and you're not you know large shareholder you said hey listen you're going to get diluted by 300% or a,000%. And also now you're this entire company just holds this IP token and you're and you have absolutely no idea what's happening right like that is clearly not potent they're potentially not good for that shareholder. So the NY and NASDAQ are saying listen you need to go through the right shareholder voting rules to be able to allow you to do this. And so what happened in the story

protocol deal is they didn't allow the company to actually um issue the shares that the investor should have gotten because they said you have not gone through the right vote now. So now what they're doing is they have to go through a shareholder vote. It's going to delay this for for many for for probably a couple of months and it um potentially could even cause an unwind of the transaction if they don't get that vote done. Wait, but then how does this work in Oh yeah, go go go. Well, I was just going to say you're going to see more and more of this specifically in this this focus on shareholder governance at the exchanges.

The That's a good point, Rob. I I this is something that I paid a lot of attention to. Is there is there a stated threshold um for the locked portion? So, the threshold is 20% of the asset value in kind. Uh but they're they're I believe what is happening is they are being more strict and giving kind of a discount to the the locked in. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah, you could game it in some. Correct. Yeah. What? Yeah. Wait. So then what happens, Rob? Like let's keep using the story one as an example. What happens where So Story I think just started buying on the open market. They just started their purchases.

I don't know where the purchases are to be honest. So So maybe maybe so like don't use the story one as an example, but like what happens when All right. So this thing gets cash and then it starts buying the token on the open market. But then what if there's an unwind? How how does that work? Then they would have to sell, right? So let's say that NY and NASDAQ came out and said actually a leading question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these uh the way it's structured, if you look at the docs, they they they spell this out, which is there's like a 90day period and and if there's if it delays after that, there's some sort of compensation or return kind of um um mechanism on that point. Rob, I'm curious what you've seen on your

side. Um if for instance there's an unwind uh and you invested in this uh cash, do you get back the cash? you get back tokens because then it couldn't you protect it uh where if you if it doesn't get listed and if they end up buying the tokens like you just return the tokens uh returning kind versus cash. So what most of them are doing, not all of them, is they're saying you have the right to receive your Pratta portion less expenses of the token that we've bought or your cash, right? And so I it depends on who your investor base is, right? But like if in if this thing unwinds Andre

will take their story tokens back because they were already a large investor in I mean I assume right that they will take their story tokens back but call it will um some trady investor who maybe put some money into this thing want to take their IP tokens and figure out how to custody it? Probably not. Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But uh so I was having this long discussion with someone that um was at a trad and now in crypto super bearish on debts and they're like I was in a I was in a pod with Avi and and he was like well this is good because hedge funds can't buy ETFs which is no not necessarily true.

Um a lot of hedge funds can't touch tokens. My point was couldn't you get like a waiver or I guess the question is out of all tradi is it still true that like 90 plus percent of tradfi can't touch tokens or do they can they structurally buy tokens per their LP agreements they just don't want to do it themselves and prefer to just buy uh stock I don't know what the number is but uh the mass yeah but I I would guess that 80% still uh cannot on paper cannot touch tokens.

So it's a it's a mix of two things, right? So one is a it's a mix of okay, my LPA doesn't allow me to buy tokens. In most cases, my guess is that the LPA doesn't actually contemplate whether or not you you are touching tokens or not. And most of them, they really wanted to get around it potentially could, right? But then it goes, okay, well are we comfortable doing that or not? How risk on are we? or do we think the LPs will come back and if they find out we're doing this we'll you know potentially you know uh raise a fuss but then it's also okay well like are we comfortable with the counterparty risk of you know a BO or an Anchorage or a Coinbase and a lot of people still are not right like you and I look at those companies and

we're like okay public company you know um I don't know what Coinbase's equity value is now but you know tens of billions of dollars right like you would think that some people would be comfortable with that and a lot of people aren't They're and they're still very concerned about it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, even as a fund, right, they're there. I remember in my days of Parafi, like it was always an issue, right? If you're an RAIA and you're custodying like assets that are, you know, you invested in a project it listed, it's still not supported by a custodian like Anchorage, it's it's a challenge, right? It's sort of a Well, it's it's definitely a challenge when you go beyond, you know, Bitcoin, ETH like right? And so, like, you know, when it it also a lot of it matters, too. and and people I think underestimate how big

of an issue accounting is for these guys, right? And especially if you're a taker who it is not so a lot of like the quantitative makers like the the Cumberlands of the the DRWs of the world and the chain streets and you know the jumps and all these guys like they've been working on this for a while. They want to get involved in every market in the world. They and they employ a lot of engineers. If you're like you know I'm just going to throw out a fund. I have no idea what they're doing. But if you're Bali, right, or like you're one of these guys, like you don't employ, you know, half of your your your employees as as engineers who are like comfortable with like understanding how to operate, you know, any sort of, you know, wallet infrastructure and then integrates with into, you know, their, you know,

accounting system that they were sold by FIS, right? And FIS like, you know, they don't really know what they're doing there either, right? And so it becomes and do you really want to like go through the headache for what would be probably a 1% position in the fund? But if you can do it in a ETF or in a publicly traded equity and it works with everything that you have already that's much easier conversation. Yeah. I know we got through it now. Who is the biggest winner in this game? Is it a Fidelity? Is it the New York? Who's the biggest custodians in Trouty? State Street, BNY Melon, BNY Melon, or Fireblocks, Anchorages of the World, um, insurance company, like who are the biggest winners if you take a view that

like crypto is going to continue to proliferate into the mainstream? I mean, I think it's definitely the crypto natives, right? Who are the biggest winners because like, you know, you have the the tailwinds of like the whole market. I mean, Coinbase clearly like they're trying to become the everything app. are trying to do a little bit of of all types of of different types of businesses. So, I think those are the biggest winners. But, is State Street also going to build a you know, a bigger business on the back of this? Absolutely. Like, this is good for them. This is growth for them in a way that State hasn't grown in in years.

Let's uh guys, let's pivot. I want to talk about World Libertify and uh on a semi-related topic, let's do a quick ad break and then we'll be back in a minute. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy nononsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. And that's where the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise comes into play. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's chief investment officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one. from the Bitwise weekly CIO memo is really worth the five minutes of your time. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com/cio memo/mpire

or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Oh, quick ads today. Quick ads. No, not bullish. Damn. Kind of a bull market. Not a big I was ready to go get some water or something. Wait, on the other side, maybe it's just you're making so much money now, y'all know, you don't need to sell so much ad space. Will always be bullish. Bullish lack of ads. Bullish unlocks, baby. Bullish unlocks. Um, all right. Let's look at world world liberty. So, um, there's like two stories here probably. One is like a story about world liberty and one is just a broader story about like the Trump's involvement in this and we can go anywhere we want to go or we can not

not touch the hot button. But basically um so World Liberty Fi token began trading on uh Monday I think it was. Um so it's World Liberty FI is World Liberty Financial very associated with the Trump family and stuff like that. Um, it began trading with 20% of pre-sale tokens unlocked. Got listed on a bunch of things. Binance, Bybit, Coinbase maybe. I forget where exactly it listed, but a bunch of the exchanges listed. It had like a six or seven billion dollar market cap. Um, and uh, it started falling. Um, volume is pretty big, couple billion in volume. uh a day later, which was I think Tuesday, they announced they were going to use trading fees to repurchase and burn the World

Libertify tokens to obviously reduce supply, stabilize prices. Then you start getting these like big funds that say that they're investing more. I think there was one called Aqua One Foundation in the UAE investing 100 million. Um and then as of today uh like an hour or two ago they just said that uh trying to find the headline but bas basically they're uh blacklisting I think Justin Sun from being able to sell something like that is the headline. So, Rob Santi, thoughts on just like I don't know, World Liberty Fi in general? Like, I don't know. I guess my skin kind of crawls when I say I'm just like, oh man, I'm not touching this with the 10-ft pole, but you know, obviously some people are making a lot

of money on it and I don't know. It just feels kind of like, well, feels a little grippy to me. But let let's let's start objective and then introduce our own opinions. Like, what does this thing actually do for for someone waking up like like what's primarily what we're libertify as I understand it and and I've um there's two things essentially right so there's the lending app uh which is uh I actually people call it a fork of a I think as I actually understand it they are actually just sitting on top of a so is actually fork go ahead I think the a treasury got a decent amount of the supply because they sit on

top it's my understanding yeah it's on top right it's not even actually a fork right so you've got the world liberty Ify app, you've got a mobile app, right, where you can like deposit crypto. It's like um Yeah, it's a mo It's a mobile app where you can do that. You've got USD1, which is the stable coin. And then you've got lend and borrow. Yeah. So, the USD1 is the one product that's live essentially, right? So, you can mint USD1 right now. Um if you're, you know, I think Bitco is actually person who is minting it. Um and, you know, they've they've, you know, publicly announced that they funded the um the MGX Binance uh transaction in USD1. I think there's maybe been a couple other announcements specifically around you know USD1 and um you know what them getting involved as you know

kind of a funding partner for some of these deals. It's about 2.7 billion outstanding right now of which over two billion of that is that MGX transaction which I think after they funded the deal hasn't moved since then. Um then they they had originally you know before USD1 they had you know talked about the A um uh kind of application or the lend borrow application. Uh the app is new. I guess it's going to be a direct consumer kind of crypto wallet. Um but I'm I'm I'm not quite clear on exactly uh you know what it'll look like or you know what what it'll offering it will have um or or when that will even come out. But I don't know Santi if you know anything else. Look, I think you generally true only in crypto do you see three people

that are doing this full-time struggle to articulate what an $18 billion project does. Um, but look, I mean, of course, yeah, it's it's a wallet infra. It's like Trafy meet DeFi. It has a stable coin component. It has a wallet component. The W, what's it the ticker? The World Liberty token is a governance token. And as you alluded to or mentioned, Yano, it will receive some fees on from trading. So yeah, the the question I think it's uh if you work through like how are people valuing this putting aside kind of the political affiliation or connection, would this be like competing against uh like Ripple is the comp? Because I think the way crypto markets trade is like you have um

Bitcoin and you have Litecoin and and everything is a comp to something, right? And so what are people comping this thing to? Is it a or DeFi protocols? Is it more like Ripple? Um, Coinbase? I think I think it's a memecoin. I think it's a memecoin. I mean, I think Hib said it right. It's like world world liberty is a$22 billion token. 5.6 billion to the Trump family with token buybacks yet no revenue. You don't have to like it, but it's here. It's like I think and I think it's this, right? It's um there's a New York Times article about just like how much of the token is owned by the you know the Trump broader family and agencies I guess I'd call it.

It's like the Trump family itself controls about 22 billion of the world liberty token suggesting that its holdings as of Monday afternoon were worth about five billion making world liberty one of the most valuable Trump assets worth far more than their real estate holdings. I'm gonna read to you a quote uh which I tweeted about uh yesterday which is from Russ Russ Hanaman from Silicon Valley show which is revenue. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Why would you go after revenue? If you show people revenue, they'll ask how much and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer or the thousandxer becomes the 2x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can go say your pre revenue and you're a potential pure play.

That to me summarizes world liberty and and a lot of stuff in crypto uh and AI, which is you better off staying generalist. And this is a pure play on long stable coins, long DeFi, and long Trafi adopting crypto rails, which is Ripple. To me, the comp here is Ripple. and you know think how that's I wonder if the comp is just the Trump token to be honest right well okay because I looked at so I ladies and gentlemen 2x the Trump token right now I bought the Trump token uh and I was public about it and whatnot I don't own it currently when it traded all the way up to 70 bucks or whatever I my immediate thought was let's go look

at Liberty because it was doing a pre-sale or um and the terms were like very funky. It was locked and and then they like since I think revised we should have Mike Dudas on the show because I think he he kind of was participating that has some good insights I think but I I didn't end up investing world liberty. I probably should have in hindsight but nonetheless that was like my I I do think Dudas and the investors in World Liberty did make a lot of money. So yeah. So, so what what happened is uh so a lot of people had the same I think thought process that you had Santi which is they they they put out you know the announcement I think yeah but you probably had it first but other people had the the thought process as well but but I'm sure you had it

first but they put out the you know announcement of world liberty this was you know last summer right and they said they were going to go raise $300 million at a $ 1.5 billion valuation that $300 million got like you know over the first few months basically got like 40 to 50% filled. Uh there wasn't you know a lot of excitement around it. I think it was unclear how close it was uh to the Trump family. A lot of people were you know saying oh like this is what you know Baron's doing it but um you know not necessarily Donald the president or or Don Jr. or anyone else in the family. Um, and then immediately what happened after the Trump token launched is everyone said, "Okay, this

just traded at a $70 billion valuation and there's still a bunch of capacity for WLFI at $ 1.5 billion. It immediately filled up in the next couple of days. They then opened a new trunch at a $5 billion uh valuation and that filled up uh as well. We know that people like Justin Sun and others were were a big part of that. Um, all of the people who put money in either of those rounds made more than their money back just on the first unlock. So if you put money in that $5 billion round uh when it like launched at, you know, 30 and they they made it tradable on the first, you could have sold your initial unlock of 20% for, you know, call it like 1.25x

your um your your your investment. And so like people did make money. Um, but it was, I think, a flyer for a lot of people because you did have to KYC AML upfront. Uh, and you had to pay for your own KYC AML upfront. They actually, yeah, you had to like put in your credit card and you had to send in documentation to, you know, some like lawyers I had never heard of. Um, and and do this whole thing. And they were very unclear about family also own equity in the law firm that did all the KY. I don't know. Um, but but they but they also like they didn't tell you upfront what the vesting was going to be. They didn't tell you when it was the TGE was going to It was very When did they define that?

Because I looked at it when the Trump token launched and it was not defined and that was a big question mark for for me. It's it's still undefined. Oh okay. Yeah, they they they announced that they were going to have this first unlock, but it is still undefined when the other unlocks will be. Uh and you know, but they did they announced the token economics like who has what amount of the token, but they they have not announced like when all of the unlocks are going to be. Mhm. What? How does that tie to Justin Sun and him being his 100 million bucks or so being frozen? Janna, do you know it was I mean he was just I think he was the largest holder of World Liberty Fi.

He bought the tokens and then I think he started selling them or transferring them and then they just froze his funds. So I'm pivoting us. I'm We got to get some We got to get some positive news and conversation. We're 30 minutes in. This is Maybe just like before you pivot us just super quickly. Um, so the there was also I think it was Zach XPTt put out a tweet that was basically like we're watching the USD1 minting and a bunch of uh holders of USD1 are buying WLFI, right? And so they, you know, I think the implication was is that the WLFI team itself was buying or trying to, you know, absorb the sell pressure um of uh of WLFI. Um, and the biggest seller was

of course also the biggest investor, Justin Sun. And then it comes out super quickly that they, you know, for whatever reason, um, froze his funds. So, um, just an interesting tidbit. All right, pivot positive news. We've got, uh, Stripe finally came public. So, this, uh, so Stripe and Paradigm have been building this thing called Tempo for a while. It leaked a couple weeks ago. Now, Matt and both Matt Hang and Patrick Hollison uh, came out with their statements today. So, this was kind of the the the announcement, the launch day for them. Um, so let me just read a little bit from Matt and a little bit from Patrick's and then I'd love to hear your take. This feels like the most like formidable quote unquote corporate chain. Uh, Google also had theirs last week that we didn't even talk about. Goo

GUPP I think it's called or GC Google Cloud Universal Ledger, GC UL I think it is. So, there's all these corporate chains, right? This feels like the most formidable one. Uh let me read uh Matt and then I'll read Patrick's. Matt Hang from Paradigm. Introducing Tempo. Uh a payments first blockchain incubated by Stripe and Paradigm. As stable coins go mainstream, there's a need for optimized infrastructure. Tempo is purpose-built for stable coins and real world payments. Uh skip skip. Tempo's payment first design includes predictable low fees, payments gas, and any stable coin via enshrined AMM, payments first UX, opt-in privacy, scale, 100K plus TPS, subsecond finality, EVM compatible, um,

embedded financial payments, global payouts, agentic payments, etc., etc. Patrick Collison added to that. He said, "At Stripe, we care about high throughput, low latency payments. As the use of stable coins grows across stripe, bridge and privy, we found that existing blockchains were not optimized for them. So we decided to incubate Tempo in partnership with Paradigm. They also partnered with all these big companies. Anthropic, Deutsch Bank, Door Dash, Mercury, New Bank, OpenAI, Revolute, Shopify, Visa, Standard Charter, etc., etc. 15 person team. Matt Hong's leading it. Jents, give me the thoughts.

This feels like the Libra announcement of of the cycle. U given all the partnerships. Um it's very interesting. I think it uh Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um look, I mean, I've said it time and time again. Um distribution is incredibly important. Um it's no surprise Stripe has incredible amount of distribution. Uh they have all these clients and they've been super bullish on, you know, acquiring assets that position them nicely to to transition into um you know, leveraging stable coins. And so I think it's a natural evolution. Like logically, if I were in their shoes, I would have done the same thing.

um different perhaps than other corporate chains like maybe you should juxtapose this relative like circle arc for instance and there's I think like that's I'd like to just get your guys' thoughts I think it's very different in my mind circle arc is bearish circle uh because it sort of puts them in a weird position with their clients in this case stripe already owns a lot of clients uh and they're just rolling out this infrastructure like why would you leak that value if you have all these customers ers on the fintex side and they're going to adopt stable coins and use bridge and use privy.

Why would you settle to I don't know some other chain if you can use your chain and they have you know a ton of users and and and enterprise customers right um so so I mean not knowing much about it but there's a couple of things that you mentioned there about features which is you know high throughput and all that stuff but privacy opin privacy that's something that I would be really curious of how that's going to work but um yeah you know it's something that is probably is not surprising for for anyone which is that Yeah. Yeah. Rob, what's that say at you, sir? Yeah. I mean, I've been publicly saying for I mean, a few years now that I thought that a lot of these um you know, call it large companies and and corporates were going to want to own

their own execution environment. Um I think for a long period of time that was really out of, you know, the general mainstream thought process. I think we've got attacked by a bunch of people from a bunch of the different general purpose chains saying that for for a long period of time. I it's clearly now all happening and we're starting to see right. So, you know, obviously this is an L1. Um, you know, we're circle building an L1. We're seeing, you know, Robin Hood build an L2. Okay. Well, so it's a different, you know, way of which they thought about coming and building their infrastructure, but it's still like, hey, they want to own their own execution environment. they want to build their own product like full stack, right? We're starting to see, you know, people announce things. The we saw like,

you know, Toyota talking about building an L1, right? There's like all of these corporates that are talking about doing it. You know, it does feel a little bit like, okay, the Libra days or 2021 where we saw all these like announcements. We'll have to see what actually gets launched, but I think the time is now. And when you have regulatory clarity well on uh if we get the Clarity Act or some version of that, we're going to see more and more of this continuing to happen. When you have the Genius Act, we're going to see more people wanting to issue stable coins um on public chain. And if you look at what Stripe has been doing for the last nine months, you know, 12 months, it was clear they were building a network, right? Like they acquired a bridge that can do the orchestration. They already have the

merchant endpoints. They already have the ability now to issue a their own stable coin. They're also issuing their own stable coinbacked card. They launched uh accounts in emerging markets with stable coins. They've acquired Privy to allow them to people to launch uh B2B TTOC accounts as well, right? and you look at it and you're saying, "Okay, well, they own every part of the stable coin stack from the issuing bank all the way through the the PSP and the pay and all the way to the end to the merchant." And the only thing they don't own is the settlement layer. So, why wouldn't they own the settlement layer when they already are operating as a network itself? And it allows them to do things like opt-in privacy. I mean there there

was a lot of things around the payment design that um I think we've seen in a lot of these stable coin chains the the low fees you know the the gas and stable coins um the you know payments first UX you know whatever that looks like but the optin privacy that's the one where people haven't really been able to solve yet and so I am really interested in what that looks like specifically but this is not the end of these types of you know corporate chains uh I want to just the elephant in the room is for more of the crypto natives the the question is how is this any different than database because if it's you know they talk about the validator set being you know all these big companies it is owned by Stripe but they have it's a consortium so of course

they're going to push that narrative which is you know aligned with the crypto ethos of open source and permissionless so to speak but how do you guys think about the argument that like a codeex or some or like a more cryptonnative project would say listen you need to you need to be Switzerland you need to be public infrastructure with a token which allows you to monetize relative to the internet. Okay, like you get around that argument, but does that actually going to hold? Like if you fast forward 5 10 years from now, like is that argument going to actually hold? Like what does that mean for Ethereum? What does that mean for all the other chains out there? Um, and is there a version of this world where that doesn't matter and and you just have a chain like Stripe that they use their

distribution and their muscle and because I can imagine the cryptonatives saying only Stripe customers are going to use this chain and the reality is it it might not be the case. So, I'm curious to get your thoughts on on how you guys think um this is going to play out. I I think this is a a line I mean 2025 is a line in the sand moment and you're you're seeing I think in 10 years it will be very obvious that there was crypto from 2009 to 2024 and then there was 2025 and then there was everything after and there's a group of people that will be uh very upset about something like this because they're saying why why would you build this on Salana or Ethereum or a a because you know a chain that can't roll

back your transactions or something like that and then you on the hand, you know, I'll pull this up. I was just looking through. You've got um you know, the CTO of Door the co-founder of Door Dash. You've got the COO of Shopify. And the the reality is they they don't really care about that. They don't really care about someone, you know, maybe the the ideology of someone who was building in crypto in 20 in 2013. They just kind of say what, you know, uh you know, Andy said, the co-founder of Door Dash, which is the pace of crypto innovation is incredible. We're ready to learn. We're ready to build. And Andy is not going to go build on some L2, but he will go build on tempo. And this just I think increases the pace of innovation. You'll have people who are really really

focused on uh kind of the existing original ideologies of crypto. You'll have a group that's focused on just like pure speed and innovation. And I think both sides will make both sides better. That's my that's my take. Yeah. I think listen you know Shopify and Stripe basically made each other or Shopify basically made Stripe right you know they were their first customer they grew with them it's clear that one of the things that they've done a very good job of today is they've gotten these CEOs all that tweet about you know uh Tempo do I actually think like Door Dash is going to build an application on top of Tempo like absolutely not to be honest um you know maybe maybe I'm wrong but I I would be shocked but do I think they're going to continue to be a big

Stripe customer and does that mean that they will flow on this chain if it makes sense for their merchants. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think this gets to Santi's point which is distribution matters that these stripe stripe already has these relationships with these customers and if this is a better product for them they will use it and I think it's the same point that you know maybe Santi you were saying earlier which is there's two things right so you you mentioned codeex right which we're an investor in who is you know and and there's like plasma and there's a couple of these other like stable coin chains who are saying okay well we're you know Switzerland in some way but I don't think those guys that's really what they're saying. What they are saying is we're building a better product. And if we build a better

product, a payments product that utilizes a blockchain that since we own the full stack, we're able to build a product that does meet those needs in the same way that you saw Matt talk about here and things like privacy and programmable transactions with, you know, gas paid and uh and stable coins, etc. Then people will use it. And so like Codex obviously it's not linked to you know uh like somebody who has a distribution like Stripe but they're also basically thinking about the world in the same way but then to your point then we get to Salana and to uh you know Ethereum and to Sweet and to Aptos and all of these guys right that's different because they've really been pitching that you will um that that that they you need a general purpose chain with

liquidity and users already to make it worthwhile for other people to do transactions on this chain and that is clearly being disproven by the day right or at least it's being disproven that the CEOs of these companies don't believe that maybe they will be you know later be proven wrong but they don't believe it today right and so uh when you look at that that's I think that has to be the concern especially for people who don't have a robust ecosystem already and I actually had a um a founder of a general purpose chain that you know people love and has a robust ecosystem already you tell me this week that they're worried about the future of blockchains uh for general purpose blockchains because they they wonder if they need to be more opinionated about

product. Do they need to build product? And that's where everybody's trying to figure out right now is do you need to own the end customer? And I think we're at least seeing that probably that's true or at least people think that's true in the near term. User aggregation theory is not going to change anytime soon. Um now I know we got to go to ads soon but I got to draw up and one question u that I have for you guys um particularly you Rob is um around this so like say that tempo works really well and Stripe acrews you could be in a world where tempo is worth more than stripe equity today like could be a $200 billion chain and stripe is right at 100 salana not to pick on Salana NASDAQ on

the blockchain tokenized stocks I know you want to talk about that and I'm just going to set you guys up and then I'm going to rage quit um because I got to drop. What does that mean? Like does NASDAQ then wake up and say, "Whoa, hold on. Wait a minute. I'm not going to use Salena. I'm just going to go the Stripe route and launch my own purpose purpose-built blockchain for tokenized stocks and maybe partner with Superstate. Your point around product, Rob, we thought about it on the emergence side, which is how much do we build and how much do we partner?" like maybe you built you own the execution layer, you own the user aggregation layer and then the middle layer, you know, you're open to partnering, right?

But I'm curious like um yeah, if if you guys have an opinion on like what does that mean for NASDAQ on the blockchain? Is that going to be done by NASDAQ or one by Salana who's been at it for a while? Yeah. I mean, I think if I just said everything I just said, you know, in the previous response and, you know, changed it for NASDAQ, it would still be true, right? which is that yeah I I think it is a really um interesting point in time and line in the sand I think as Yano said earlier for general purpose blockchains and how they think about serving corporate customers who who potentially already own you know a distribution channel that you know they

don't want to necessarily give up to somebody else right I I do think for NASDAQ well you know what is NASDAQ right it's an exchange has a bunch of member institutions. That makes perfect sense for their own blockchain actually, right? Because like you could think about a blockchain as somebody who has a bunch of member institutions or member applications, right, that serve their end customers. And you know, we were we were seeing um you know, maybe not NASDAQ specifically, but like the DTCC for instance has been talking about like a tokenization standard that other people could potentially use to plug into them for tokenized equities. Well, will they maybe allow somebody like a dinari who announced their own L1 on Avalanche or you know Robin Hood who's talking about doing it settle to their standard? Um

maybe they will. But does it also make sense someday for them to say we want our own blockchain as well? Maybe, right? And I think we're going to, you know, learn a lot more. What I will say is not the vast vast majority of corporates will have no interest and are unable to roll their own L1. Like that's just not going to happen. So they're going to either, you know, do some sort of fork or they're going to do kind of an out of the box like, you know, maybe a rollup as a service type provider or an avalanche L1 or, you know, one of these guys because they're they don't have paradigm essentially doing all of the engineering for them. And so we won't see I don't think we'll see a lot of L1s from these corporates. La last question I'll leave. Does that then

mean invest in middleware in sorry invest in connective tissue like something like layer zero or bridges or um crosschain communication standards? I not financial advice uh but it seems clear that we're we're in the we're in the unbundling phase or the fragmentation phase and when the unbundling happens eventually some sort of rebundling happens and how that rebundling does end up happening who knows. Yeah, Santi know you got to jump. Let's do one more ad break and then we will be back. Have a good weekend.

In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy nononsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's chief investment officer. He's been on the show before and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one. The Bitwise weekly CIO memo is really worth the five minutes of your time. Check it out at bitweisinvestments.com/cio memo/mpire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started.

Carefully consider the extreme risk associated with crypto before investing. Mantle is pioneering the blockchain for banking, a bold new category combining traditional finance with the power of web 3. With UR, the world's first onchain money app, users can manage fiat and crypto side by side using a Swiss Ibon account in Euro, US dollar, Swiss Frank, and RMBB, all posted to the blockchain. Backed by the Mantle network, UR is the access layer that unlocks a purpose-built vertical platform for onchain payments, trading, and asset protocols. All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle network to further drive value to Mnt token holders. Follow Mantle on X at

Mantle official for more. Corporate and protocol treasuries face a major challenge today. Cash and traditional instruments are losing ground to inflation. A new industry report from liquid collective and iigen cloud lays out the next evolution of the digital asset treasury moving beyond just passively holding Bitcoin to actively making digital assets like ETH and soul productive through liquid staking and restaking. For CFOs, DATs and corporate treasurers, the path to integrating liquid staking and restaking should be riskmanaged and aligned with long-term strategic goals. The productive treasury report outlines practical adoption and a forward-looking vision for the role of

the modern treasury as a strategic enabler of new technology. Read the productive treasury report today by following the link in today's show notes. All right, back. We lost one man down though. Yeah, we lost one. It's all right. Got the better crew here. Don't we don't need Santi anyways. No, I'm just kidding. Um, all right. Let's talk uh let's talk Galaxy. So, I want to talk stocks on chain. So, there were um three three things that happened this week. One is um Coinbase announced a product that gives you exposure to I'm not sharing my screen, am I? Here we go.

Coinbase announced uh I'll just read Brian's thing. We're launching the first US futures that give exposure to the top US stocks and crypto at the same time. We'll launch more products like this as part of the everything exchange. I would expect that we start seeing this marketing tagline show up everywhere, which is the everything exchange. I would guess Coinbase starts using it. I would guess Kraken starts using it. I would guess everybody starts using this. Um, so that's interesting. Mag 7 plus crypto equity index futures coming September 22nd. All right, so there's that. Then we also had um an announcement that I can't find which said something along the lines of NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange are reviewing whether or not you can trade

tokens on the exchange. Can't tell if that was real news, fake news, or like what the what the second order impact of that actually was. Um, but the real thing I wanted to talk about was this, Rob, which is Galaxy announced that Galaxy's class A common stock is now on Salana. I think Alex Thorne, uh, who's a stud and also their head of firm research, uh, shared, uh, their their take on it. He said, "These are real Galaxy shares. These aren't rappers. These aren't synthetics. These aren't shares in a foreign SPV. We're the first ever publicly traded company to tokenize our SEC registered shares on a public blockchain." I think Exodus did it first, but Galaxy is second. Um, so they partnered with Superstate Funds. This is how it works. Um, which we can I can, you know, if you just pull up it,

intangible intangible coins is Twitter and you can see the thread. It's Alex Thorne. Um, basically said some DeFi companies and exchanges have tokenized US listed equities without knowledge of or permission from the issuers themselves. Thus, all they can offer are wrapped equity structures. Basically, tokens that are shares in a foreign fund structure. Wrapped equity structures obiate the relationship between the issuer and the investor to the detriment of both etc etc. Onchain Galaxy is real Galaxy class A common stock. If you hold the token you own common equity in Galaxy the same as if you bought our stock through in your traditional brokerage account. No publicly traded company has ever done this before in the US. Future of equity tokenization is native on chain. It's in the US etc etc.

You have to KYC with Superstate to add your salon address to an uh to an allow list. We haven't yet allowed for AMMs, though bilateral trades through allow listed addresses is possible today. We expect to allow onchain Galaxy and AMM pools on Salana in the near future. The SEC is grappling with how to account for the existence of AMMs and other forms of dexes. And it goes on. It's a really good piece. You guys should read it. It's long long piece. I won't read the whole thing obviously, but good piece on Galaxy and why they did this, how they did this, why they chose Salana, big picture for onchain securities. Um, Rob, I would love to just get your take on Yeah, probably probably this news specifically before going on to the Coinbase thing.

Yeah, on this specifically, so I'll I'll um just put a disclaimer out there that I'm uh personally an angel investor or shareholder in Superstate. Um that Dragonite funds aren't, but I am personally. I think I've I've long been a believer that this sort of like wrapped secondary tokenized equity conversation that we've had with like X stocks and even a little bit of what like Robin Hood has announced that they're doing. I don't think that really works. I don't think you get sophisticated market participants who can operate in the way they need to to do appropriate hedging to allow for appropriate levels of liquidity to take risk you know uh in you know 247 type markets that we're talking about here.

Um there's a lot of just kind of inelegance in those structures where you're you know potentially minting and redeeming from something that is you know maybe an SPV that you know exists in you know some like lightly regulated jurisdiction that is then also have a relationship with a broker dealer in another jurisdiction and you can only mint redeemed during you know certain periods of time. Um and then you know potentially there's um uh this um potentially like maybe it's like in some ways fully tradable on chain but not on you know and call it centralized exchanges etc. And there becomes a lot of like dislocation and just friction in those markets. So, I just don't think sophisticated market participants will um participate in them. And and we've

seen that with like Xtocks for instance, they do a really good job marketing, but if you go and look at their DEX volume right now, it's like less than three million bucks a day, right? Um so then you get to the Superstate and Galaxy announcement, which is hey, like we understand that these wrapped versions, which by the way, they being a wrapped version of an equity that exists in a lot of markets, right? So things like ADRs or like EFT ETFs are really just themselves rappers. So rappers by themselves aren't necessarily bad, but the way you do them, the amount of friction, the way that the market participants can interact with them relative to other assets or the underlying that matters, right? And so when you have a um a nativelyisssued primary issuance onchain, it opens up a new world because you no longer have all

of this friction to go from tracking the underlying or keeping the underlying and having the legal exposure to that underlying and what you have happen on chain. And so that I think is the unlock for equities on chain because when you talk to the large sophisticated market makers, you talk to the large sophisticated takers who want to interact, that's what they are looking for. They want to be on chain. They believe if you want 24/7 trading that you need to have an ability to manage collateral uh uh programmatically and um in a way that you know can happen over the weekend and uh it can do margin calls quickly when banks are closed etc.

And so if that is allowed on chain then they want to be able to trade the equities on chain that will open up new novel products. It will open up better securities lending it'll open up longer uh trading hours, but you need the the primary issuance in my mind and that's what this is. And so I think it's really Yeah. Yeah. It's something that I've thought about a lot as we think about like what the future of block works. I mean, we're a few years away from an IPO obviously, but it's like if we if we went public, what does that actually mean in this future in in this world where you have two markets now, right? You have the onchain markets and you have the off-chain markets. Offchain markets would be NASDAQ and NIS. Onchain would be on a blockchain. It's like our our buyers of Blockworks equity. There's

probably more of them on chain, right, on Salana, on Ethereum, than on NIS and NASDAQ. I'd have to go do a big road show. So, it's like, could we just list our shares? You know, you list on NASDAQ, but at the same time, you list on you list on Salana, you list on Ethereum. Yeah. Uh listen, I think listen, if you want on a road show, you're going to get a bunch of traditional people to buy your equity. don't don't uh don't don't play down like your your ability to go sell some equity. But listen, I I think um I think that's right. I also think you know the interesting thing for Galaxy and you're going to see this with I think a lot more companies is that they might start by saying okay well we're going to do a traditional listing but we'll put five or 10% or 1% of our

float on blockchains and that actually allows for really interesting like ARB to exist between the two, right? And so I think we're going to see a lot more of that and that's what's happening here in Galaxy. Yeah. what uh say more about the ARB. Yeah. So, right now the what you see is there's like a lot of dislocation like so I'll keep using X stocks. There's a lot of dislocation between the the offchain and onchain asset. That's fine, right? because you know that that's kind of meant to exist. But that has more to do with the friction than anything else because the it shouldn't actually be happening in that case because your your legal right in the Xbox case is to get the equity back at the price the equity trades offchain. So if it's onchain, there's like this this dislocation. But

if you do primary issuance onchain and offchain, then what you have is you have actually two different securities that can trade at a different price and don't have like a legal right to each other to to track each other's price, right? And so there's actually times in which like and you see it already, right? That so on a weekend when there's like macroeconomic data, Bitcoin trades up or down and then the market's open and the futures open and like the markets go trade up or down, right? you'll start to see that happening between these two different products um in a much more interesting way that doesn't have to track each other in the same way because they're not legally linked.

Yeah, that's a good take. Yeah, I think what you'll end up you know how right now you um so like if you if you IPO, right, you have to give you you all lot a certain number of shares to each person and to each to different platforms, right? So like Robin Hood has been an interesting to one to watch. I was looking at um Bullish who just the crypto exchange who IPOed they gave an outsized number of their shares to Robin Hood. Now there's probably a couple strategic reasons that they did that. Um but you al when you IPO you allocate to different groups and existing investors get some and new platforms get some and things like that. Your banker at JP Morgan gets some. Um you this will probably be just part of the mix is you'll say I'm giving 2% to Robin Hood,

5% to my JP to the you know head of listings at JP Morgan and you know 6% to uh Superstate to go put it on Salana. Yeah. I mean I I I think this will be for all the crypto companies. My opinion is they should be doing some you know small portion probably at first but some portion of their their shares to you know onchain and some portion offchain. Yeah that's a good take. I like that. Do you So, Coinbase rolled out this thing. I'm guessing right now they're essentially operating as a brokerage fir a broker, right? They're operating in the exact same way that Charles Schwab and TDmir Trade are operating. Could those could that will that ever will they is that do you think that model exists in perpetuity where they're basically just a broker on these stocks

or do you think the stocks ever come full I'm trying to use the right words here, but like move full-time onto Coinbase or onchain? Well, Coinbase is never going to be an equity exchange. Uh why not? Just because that is the Yeah, they're not gonna replace NASDAQ and IC, right? Uh but could you get another license? Like there's been new licenses that have been issued for I think the what Eric Schmidt tried to create one like the American Exchange or something. Yeah. So when I say never, it's not that they couldn't try to go get regulated. It's that then you have to do things like compete for listings, right? And it's just like a whole brand new business that I actually don't think benefits them.

Why get into that? Just be a broker. Correct. Just be a broker dealer. be a member like that is fine, right? I think in the announcement that they're actually said they're doing derivatives though and not spot, right? And I think that's because they don't have the Yeah, they don't have the the the right regulatory licenses to do spot, but regardless and and typically derivatives are easier and it's easier to go through the regulatory process there. I'm sure they'll try to get uh spot eventually, but regardless, I think your point that you made in uh in the beginning around, okay, well, everyone's going to be the everything exchange or the everything app. Like, you're completely spot on, 100% correct.

Every single crypto exchange or broker is saying, "How do I offer all different types of products, all different types of assets, how do I do it in one place?" Yeah. Yeah. Hm. Anything else on this? No, I don't think there's anything else to talk about here. Yeah. You know, one thing I was thinking about just following up on that corporate chain, the stripe thing is I think as these corporate chains start emerging and come I mean basically it's incumbent what's the there's a battle between startups and incumbents.

Startups need to get distribution before incumbents can get uh can figure out innovation. Um, as the corporates are now, you know, 15 years into crypto, they're finally figuring out the innovation. Took them 15 years. That's about kind of maybe what you'd actually expect. They're coming in. They'll actually, I think, do pretty well. Unlike when they tried to get in in 2017 and 21. I actually do think they'll start to do decently well. I think what it'll do is uh push the risk. The way to compete in crypto is you need to keep pushing the risk spectrum. So, I know people don't like the meme coin mania and all that kind of stuff, but like if you are crypto native and coming up, the way to beat the incumbents is to push push the risk spectrum further and further. More trading, more degeneracy, more per

more threading the line between what is legal and what is not, candidly. Um, because that's the way you compete with something like tempo. That's my quick I need to think about tempo. I haven't it just came out this afternoon. and I need to spend more time thinking about it, but that's my quick take from our conversation. The history of startups is is littered with startups that took rag risk or took, you know, legal risk or took some sort of risk to go and compete, right? I mean, even like Revolute, which is now a regulated bank. They took uh they basically went and took a really novel uh reading of the you know the banking regulations of the time using like a a Lithuania license that probably didn't allow them to do what they were doing and they went and grew into you know the

behemoth they are today and then they went and did it the right way right like that's that's not a new story and I'm sure it'll be a story and on blockchain as well. Yeah. Yeah. Rob, anything else man? You tired sir? I I am tired, dude. It's lock in. It's lock in fall, baby. I know. I've gota I've gotta sleep better. I've got to look as refreshed as you do. Like, you look great. Trying, dude. Content Rex, you go first. Uh, I'm second my second pass at reading House of Morgan, which is a beast of a book. I did not I made it about three chapters last time because I just got too intimidated. I'm a slow reader, so

taking my second pass. I'll I'll I'll update you guys in like four months when I get through it. But House of Morgan. Okay. You know what it was? I listen to Jamie Diamond on um I went to the Acquired podcast. It was like a live podcast. Jamie Diamond did it and uh he just talked about kind of the history of JP Morgan and I was like wow that's a I mean I just got I I spent a bunch of time reading about the Gilded Age and did a bunch of Gilded Age books and uh yeah and everything from reading about like Grant to um to Lincoln kind of like really early kind of kicking off guilded age post civil war stuff into like Rockefeller Carnegie Vanderbilt and then the last big one is is Morgan. So, that's my that's my project for the

fall. All right. I'm excited for it. Um, I'm going to say two things. First is did you did you watch my Ohio State Buckeyes on Saturday? I was thinking about you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah. Let's go. Bucks. Um, the also US Open week like I think my my TV on the US Open. Jookovic. Djokovic Alcarez coming up tomorrow 3 p.m. tomorrow. I'm going to the to the open tomorrow night and I was looking and I was like I can't believe three. No. No. I'm going to miss it. I'm gonna see the I'm gonna see S run through the 25 ranked guy instead. So, yeah. Tough.

Um bummer. You buy the tickets or you get the invite? I got the invite from somebody else. So, tickets are insane right now. Yeah. I have I I think the tickets that I we have probably cost like you know thousands of dollars a piece. So, uh thank thank you for my benefactors. Yeah. Um, and so so that's that's the big one. And then I haven't seen it yet, but I'm I'm going to give you a movie that I'm excited about as the the the fiction guy on the podcast, but House of Dynamite. It's like a political thriller. Katherine Bigalow. It's her newest movie. Um, really it's a kind of about a the how the US government responds to a a nuclear missile attack.

Um, not a lot out there about it, but I I see everything Kathern Bllo does, so excited about it. All right, let's go. Thanks for listening, folks. Good to see you. Enjoy the US Open. We'll see you Monday. Thanks Janna. Cheers. [Music]