🟢 LIVE: Apyx's Dividend-Backed Stablecoins, MEGA goes live, Banks Going "0 to 500" on Digital Assets

Transcript

We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. I think The Roll Up is one of the most premier media brands in crypto, and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they talk about, and it's my favorite podcast. Adding it to our library as we speak. Potentially more test chain deployments. We are at Devconnect Day 1 here. I'm addressing you from space. >> JP Morgan, BlackRock, 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. YOU SAID IT. YOU FINALLY SAID IT. I'M so bullish. And he's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. >> The roll up is headed to the top. If

we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> The roll up is my favorite. >> From all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry, come together for the roll up. Survive, do mouth. Institutions aren't

coming, they're simply here. Taste the golden age of crypto, guys. Survive, do mouth. Institutions aren't coming, they're simply here.

Taste the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right, let's go. Survive, do mouth. Institutions aren't coming, they're simply here. Taste the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right, let's go. >> If I do math, institutions aren't

coming. They're simply here. It's the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. Live from Miami, Florida. This is The Rollup, April 30th. Guys, we are closing out a month of absolute insanity happening here in the digital assets. Where digital assets and finance converge, the next evolution of finance happens here on The Rollup, and boy, does it ever. We're going to be covering more exploits than you've ever seen.

We've got exploits coming out our ears. We've got APY X coming at you guys, talking about the stretch product. Michael Saylor is just smashing the retweet button all over APY X. Very excited to welcome them to the show. We've got our friend from Visa. Joshua Moss is going to be on the show today. That was a pre-recorded interview that Andy did before he sent it over to Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador. And to round out the show, AI Supercycle is coming at you guys with Fraction AI's co-founder. That is a more recent team.

You guys are going to want to check that one out here later on the show. Guys, as always, friends of the show, Plume, who is sponsoring the tokenization tower, the nest. They are holding it down in New York as we come at you guys all across the eastern seaboard. From Florida to New York, guys, the roll-up is everywhere and everything. And we are going to be talking about what we've got happening in the situation room today.

As I mentioned, APYX, uh who Michael Saylor has just been all over. Michael Saylor, uh Bitcoin's golden boy, is retweeting APYXs stretch product. Uh APYXs purchased, I believe it was $125 million worth of stretch. No surprise here, actually. The The fact that we have 11% yield off-chain is a new relevant revelation that DeFi protocols like APYXs going off-chain, buying stretch product, and then bringing that 11% yield back on-chain.

We're going to be talking with Parker, the co-founder of APYXs live today. Uh we're going to get our titles back. Can we get Can we get our titles back? What's going What's going on here? Don't have titles in this scene, but titles are going to be back very soon. Guys, then we're going to bring that bring out our friend from Visa uh to tell you guys about everything happening in the stablecoin world, everything happening in the crypto card landscape. So, that is uh that's coming at you guys for this middle interview. Andy was able to do that one before he left. AI Supercycle's going to round out the show. As always, today's topics are powered by the most secure hardware

wallet in all of digital assets. That is Trezor. No surprise there. Shout-out to Trezor. Big fan of the new Trezor Safe 7. It is the hardware wallet. Uh and I mean, look, AI AI exploits are on the rise, wrench attacks are on the rise. You guys don't want to get caught off guard. You want multi-factor, and you want hardware secured wallets. And you can go to trezor.io to purchase your latest hardware wallet. Use the code roll up 10 to buy your latest Trezor hardware device.

Next up, we're going to go over to the weather. But before we do, let me tell you guys about Frax, our flagship stablecoin partner. Uh Frax is doing things the right way in stablecoins. And we've got our flagship stablecoin show later this afternoon with our friend Joshua Moss from Visa. You guys aren't going to want to miss it. Uh he's going to bring everything about stablecoins from an institutional lens. Visa, obviously, is one of the largest payment networks out there in the entire universe. And so, no surprise that we're going to be chatting uh about stablecoins and about crypto cards with our friends at Visa.

As I mentioned, today's weather is coming at you from Miami. A little bit different than the weather up there in New York. I saw a cold front is hitting up there. No cold fronts in the forecast down here. 84° and partly cloudy. Little bit of wind gusts coming off of that Atlantic Ocean coast. And today's weather is powered by Relay. Guys, from the tokenization tower to the oceanfront beaches of South Florida, Relay will take you everywhere you go. Everywhere you need to go, powered by Relay.

relay.link for all your cross-chain needs, all of your cross-Atlantic needs. Anywhere you need to go, relay.link will take you there. And uh and yeah, we're going to keep things moving here. Let's go ahead to the markets. Digital assets today are a little bit mixed. Just big shakeups in the equities markets. Uh uh the S&P I believe was uh up slightly. Uh but obviously we had a whole ton of earnings calls that came in yesterday. We also had macro uh Fed funds rate was held steady. And then we um and then we had you know, a very sentimental last FOMC meeting from

Jerome Powell. Guys, he said he's going to be staying on as governor. He said he's going to be staying on as long as he needs to in order to facilitate a smooth transition. Uh he did he did say that the uh the Fed is under a political attack. And that is why it's important that he stays on until it's appropriate for him to leave. We know Kevin Warsh is looking like he's probably going to be confirmed. That's what's happening in Fed land. Rates are still elevated. 10-year Treasury note at just a under 4 and 1/2% Uh so that keeps pressure on risk. Obviously we want rates to come down. People will allocate out of bonds, they'll allocate into risk such as our

lovely digital assets as well as equities. I saw Brent oil was pushing 120 a barrel. Um topped out around 126. The Iran conflict is not slowing down. This feels like an all-out war. We've got to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East if we're going to bring oil down. We're going to continue to see the supply chain effects, the shocks. Gas uh here in Florida is up. Saw California was topping out around $6 a gallon which is high. Very high and it's putting pressure on the entire transportation system. And so we're going to need to flip the gas prices back lower, back under $100 a barrel,

and lower continuously in order to bring more peace into the markets, and ultimately to bring more favorable market conditions to digital assets. Guys, we're going to be talking about Bitcoin here with our first guest. Then we're going to be talking about stablecoins, and then from there we'll be talking about NEAR and the AI complex in AI supercycle. So, still sort of just feeling out this very hectic week in the digital asset markets. We've been chopping around this mid-75K level for quite a while.

We're going to need something to give. Something to give in order for us to see some more volatility. Otherwise, guys, don't get chopped up. Would advise against leverage in almost every scenario, but especially when we have a choppy market and not a trending one. Markets are basically holding flat, but oil and rates are still the big pressure points. Let me tell you guys about NEAR. NEAR is our flagship AI partner. We are excited to be joining them in Bermuda for the SALT conference. There's some very exciting things happening. You guys will find out very soon why NEAR has a big presence in Bermuda for this

conference. First, we're going to be going down in Miami for the NEAR Miami event. We'll be there on May 7th, MCing the entire thing. We will also be live streaming on May 7th to you guys, so you can stay tuned from home. And then we will be going to Bermuda. And we'll be having a lot more information happening around exactly what is happening out there. So, let's kick it over to our news segment. Guys, this one was making the rounds. Nikita is just Nikita, you're a troll, man.

You're a troll. You just You just love just taking little jabs, just poking. Just poking the industry that has been the most engaged on your platform. That's the crypto industry. Guys, why don't we I mean just take a look at these topics. Crypto politics Iran sports business, and finance. If you take away these things, what are you going to have left? Pretty pretty insane what's happening out here on the timeline. Nikita just, you know, I like he's giving optionality, he's giving flexibility.

Some of the people are going to be on Twitter for the politics. Some of them are going to be on crib crib Twitter for the crypto. Oh. Still getting warmed up here today. Some of them are going to be on Twitter for AI, some of them are going to be on Excuse me, X for entertainment, and you want to mute everything else. So, no no big surprises here. Personally, the algorithm hasn't been so bad. I see a lot of videos out there. I'm getting more sports clips recommended to me than ever. Uh but now makes it very easy. You can just snooze these topics. I've been hearing the biggest complaint here is not with the snoozing itself, not with the selection of topics. You can see here, you can select topics to hide for only 24 hours. People want to mute these

topics forever. They don't want to continuously mute the same things that they had muted from yesterday. Make those mutes carry over, Nikita. Come on, man. And give us what we really want. We want digital payments embedded into X. Build out a wallet. You guys just hired Benji. Come on. We don't want charts. We want to predict things. We want to bet on things. We want to hyper financialize our social media. Let's keep going, guys. In more somber news, unfortunately, the exploits continue.

The protocol has been exploited for about $5 million across multiple chains including mainnet, base, bear chain, and blast. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Obviously 5 million um quite a bit less than the 300 million we had seen from KelpDAO, Aave, Layer Zero. Um good to see DeFi is united, but I don't know if DeFi is united around Wasabi protocol. Obviously our heart goes out to them. I'm very unfortunate to see uh anyone who would have lost money. I heard that this attack was a little bit different than the rest of the attacks.

Um the suspect uh drained via the admin key compromise. Attackers got full control. Obviously Layer Zero uh they had to spoof RPCs, consolidate activity, uh prayed on the one-of-one DVN architecture. It's much more sophisticated attack. I think here you had some compromised keys uh and unfortunately you didn't have the the decentralization in place to prevent uh one set of admin keys um you know, exploiting the entire protocol.

It just I and I mentioned this on a call that I was with uh I was I was on a call earlier today. I just mentioned it it feels like AI um has fallen into the hands of the bad actors and the bad actors are uh just more diligent with their exploits than the good guys are uh playing defense with AI. Um and so obviously, you know, as a protocol, there's so many things to do. You know, you want to grow TVL, you want to get deposits, you want to get revenue, you want to do this and that.

It's difficult to effectively go back into your code base and tighten up some of the things that have been part of your code base since these protocols have been live. A lot of these have been live for four or five years. Don't know exactly how long Wasabi protocol has been live, but I think at least a few years. You know, we have to use these AI protocols to take care of some of the back-end work that we don't really enjoy doing. Um specifically that means, you know, if you're focused on growth and revenue and going out, closing deals, getting more deposits, let an agent just tackle your code base, let it sift through with a fine-tooth comb trying to find exploits, find them before they

happen, patch them before they get exploited. It just feels like we have this has to be a call to every protocol that's out there with any sort of significant TVL, anything with some reasonable TVL should be using agents at their disposal to go back and tighten up their code base. Um it's just it's just negligent to not uh and to put your depositors at risk. And so, it's difficult. You don't want to play the blame game, but guys, we got to take security more seriously. Um otherwise, we're we're we will see uh some of these institutions and some of the large depositors start to slow down their adoption of a lot of this technology.

Let's keep going. Guys, in more positive news, we have uh Mega ETH going live. Mega is live. This one is a launch that Mega did on Solana. I think there was another funny tweet that Anatoly put out about Mega ETH uh effectively being the L1, Solana being an L2 on Mega ETH because now you've got a Wormhole bridge. You know, I think it's important to just reiterate something before we play this video that we heard about quite a bit, which was that there is no such thing as L1s and L2s.

Like the you know, I I might get attacked for saying this, but effectively, you know, there's just there's just assets and bridges, right? You've got different economic zones. Doesn't really matter who's in inheriting what from who. Look, Mega is live on Solana. You can take their at the asset Mega. You can trade it on Solana, and then you can take it back over to Mega ETH. And the Wormhole bridge is going to help you do that. In that way, Solana is an L2 on Mega ETH. Of course, Mega ETH is an L2 on Ethereum. Does that make Solana an L3 on Ethereum?

You can make that argument, but doesn't really matter. The point is there's different economic zones, there's different assets, and there's bridges. Make sure that your security standards are up snuff, uh and you're taking security seriously, and that is going to serve you well. Otherwise, doesn't matter L1, L2, who's stacked on top of who. Go to where there's some throughput. Go to some fast and cheap chains, of which Mega and Solana are both. And really interesting things can happen. And so, very exciting. Shout out to the Mega ETH team. We will be live with seven of the top Mega ETH applications here on the show tomorrow.

We're having a Mega ETH special. We're going to be bringing you guys uh Mega ETH in in the best form. Uh obviously, a chain is nothing without its applications. And so, we're going to be bringing the best applications on Mega ETH and showcasing all of the opportunities available to you right here on the show. So, guys, you're not going to want to miss that one. If you're unfamiliar with some of the things happening on the Mega ETH ecosystem, tune in tomorrow, and you'll find out everything that you guys need to know.

Uh we're going to be talking about all of the opportunities. Uh we're going to be hearing from the smartest founders and builders in the Mega ETH ecosystem, and they will be demoing their applications for you as a bit of a mega ETH launch special. So, very excited to do this. Good Idea Ventures is an investor in mega ETH. So, important disclosure there. We also are owners of Fluffles. And so, we like the mega ETH. We like the bunnies. We like the Fluffles. We're big fans. And we're excited to see what the application ecosystem has in store.

Guys, let's keep moving. We're hopping around a bit here. Going back to the Wasabi protocol, hit by more than $5 million of exploits across multiple chains. Very unfortunate. Um I don't have much much else here to add. I mean, look, unfortunately, we need risk controls. You could even argue that we need circuit breakers. We need better monitoring in crypto to understand when we have suspicious transactions.

Nothing should We we just shouldn't really be in the situation where we have you know, $5 million the entire size of the TVL moving out of the protocol in one fell swoop. Shouldn't that raise some red flags? Right? Shouldn't shouldn't that trigger some people like, "Hey, maybe this you know, maybe this is suspicious. Maybe we we should just you know, slow down the processing of some of these transactions." Where do we need the risk controls? Guys, tell me in the comments. Should it be at the application level? Should it be at the sequencer level?

Right? Should we embed some access or risk controls into the sequencer itself so that we can understand, "Hey, there's a lot of transactions and value moving from this one area of our ecosystem. Why don't we just add some extra validation to those transactions before we just process all of them?" Some of these things seem obvious in hindsight. I'm sure they I'm sure they seem obvious in hindsight. It's easier said than done. But guys, It difficult. I I I do think um a lot of these institutions are going to be using tools like Magic, like Newton, that are going to give them some some checks and balances before depositing into some of these protocols. Uh I was on a call earlier. I think I had

mentioned this, but Hypernative is one of the protocols that uh my understanding is that they're able to monitor the situation, flag some of these risks, uh and hopefully freeze or slow down uh the illicit transmission of funds. These are tools that are just increasingly important. Um we're going to see an out-of-the-box solution for this, I'm sure. Uh security companies are going to get massive cash flow as a result of the narratives at play here. Um but then, obviously, you guys got to take security into your own hands and uh and and deploy some agents to hopefully tighten up uh the security modalities out there right now.

Let's keep going. It's unfortunate to see all the hacks. Our friend, Mr. Shift, speaking with our other friend, Hunter from Bitwise. Hunter says, "One of the largest banks in the US just told their management team to go from zero to 500 miles an hour on crypto." Guys, zero to 500 is very fast acceleration. Let's uh huh this is the most bullish moment for crypto in history. Leave it to Mr. Shift to just raise the stakes. Let's play the clip.

I always call you Mr. Optimistic, always bullish. What are some key trends that you see with the institutions? Cuz Bitwise is at the forefront of that, right? What are what are some key trends that you see with institutions that keep you uber bullish and optimistic about the future of crypto? There has never been a time in our seven or eight years in crypto where there are more reasons to be bullish than this exact moment. Which together, this is the most bullish moment from my perspective in the entire journey that Bitwise has witnessed in the space. Let me give you an anecdotal example. Last week, we were with one of the largest banks in the country and a senior executive there shared that the management team of this bank,

which I won't mention, has quote said the bank needs to go from zero to 500 miles an hour on crypto. I don't know that a bank has ever gone from zero to 500 miles an hour on anything. Not even from zero to 10. Zero to 10, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just just putzing around at three. That is absolutely extraordinary. It's indicative of how the moment that we're in. Things have absolutely changed. Absolutely a new chapter in crypto and the rate of change is now going to accelerate. Things that people were familiar with and used to in crypto are going to change in some ways and dimension is every corporate financial institution is going to be in the space in one way or another in the next 12 months. I

was speaking with another representative from Bitwise, our friend Matt Huang, uh who leads a lot of the investments over there at Bitwise and you know, it's it's tricky to parse out when we say, you know, and a bank says, and I think this is indicative of their sophistication level, which is why they need to go so fast. When when we say, you know, go zero to 500 miles an hour on crypto, that sounds great. I mean, at a high level, it sounds great. It could apply but the issue is that it it could apply to so many different things. Crypto is such an umbrella term right now that you know, there's some things that crypto

applies to that I think banks would love. Stablecoins, digital assets, composability, 24/7 markets, instant settlement. This is music to an institution's ears. But when you say crypto, you're also talking about meme coins, and you're talking about North Korea exploiting $300 million of of capital. You're You're when you say crypto, you're talking about the entire thing. And I think it's important for us to parse out what it is that institutions are really excited about. And And we should communicate that to them so that they understand exactly and specifically where their management team should

focus. So, if you have a senior executive, and he says, "Let's go 500 mph on crypto, what exactly within crypto are we looking at?" We're not talking I'm sure we're not talking about meme coins, and we're not talking about, you know, the the 400th L1 and, you know, all these things. You know, we're I'm sure we're talking about tokenization. We're talking about 24/7. We're talking about instant settlement. We're talking about stable coins. Let's get specific. Right? Let's get specific when we're educating the banks so that when the senior executives are instructing their management team, the senior executive is knowledgeable enough to say, "Hey, I want to go 500 mph on stable coins, or I want to go 500 mph on

instant settlement." Right? I don't want to go 500 mph on crypto because the management team's going to end up wasting time. And at this point, the market is is mature enough and sophisticated enough where we can start to untangle some of these threads. I think ultimately, this is going to prove a lot more beneficial for um not just us, but also the banks themselves. And this is a two-way relationship. Digital assets and crypto will win if the banks win. For so long, it was like, "Hey, your bank. We don't need your bank. We don't want your bank. The bank can piss off.

But the reality now is this market is so much more mature. We want the banks to win with our technology and with a lot of the things that we built. The banks are the buyers. The technologists and the disruptors in this industry are the sellers. We've built the technology. We've built a lot of these products. Now the banks are coming in. They're behind. It's our chance to sell our products, sell our infrastructure, and sell our experience to these banks. And look, a better product is going to mean that they these banks win. I want the banks to win. I want them to win on our terms. And I think this is very much possible given the right nomenclature, the right language.

Let's keep moving. Next up, the Defiant. It's talking about what happens when crypto systems give a small group bank-like power without bank-like accountability. Gabe Shapiro, uh our friend Lex Node, argues this model is not commercially, legally, or socially viable. Calls it the worst of both worlds. Guys, I'm very uh I'm very curious. Gabriel uh Shapiro, uh he has been on the timeline. He's always got He's always got a spicy take one way or the other.

Um Play the clip. Should we be setting systems up like this? And I think the answer to that at this point is a very clear no. It's not commercially viable. It's not legally viable. It's not socially viable. There is no due process to this. There is no um accountability to this. And it's it's objectively the worst of both worlds. You have a small group with all of the power of a PayPal or a bank and none of the legal frameworks or accountability or responsibility that they have in wielding those powers. Yeah.

>> Should we be setting >> Yeah, I mean, look, you know, it it's it's easy to to crack on uh DeFi systems right now. Uh unfortunately. And And so, what we have here is, you know, we have Gabe Shapiro who's uh obviously correct in this model. We should not be giving uh bank-like power to those without the accountability. Um the idea here was, look, you know, we had decentralization, we have verifiability, we have the ability to be transparent, and, you know, conduct very sophisticated financial mechanisms on chain without bad things happening. Unfortunately, uh we bit off more than we could chew, and we were a bit naive when it came to the security practices of a lot of these

mechanisms. And so, the issue here is that small groups have big power. Uh and they lack the due process, and they lack the accountability. Uh and so, when you combine these things, we end up layering on more risk. Uh and and, you know, we obviously want to we want to compose reward together. We want strong, deep financial partnerships between on-chain protocols. But, we don't want to uh you know, take take the risk of one, compound the risk of another, and then all of a sudden you have an exponentially uh compounding set of risks. This is unfortunately what we have as we've seen

composability and looping, uh and we've started to layer infrastructure on top of infrastructure. We have to mitigate these risks. We have to tighten the security. Think Gabe Shapiro is right. Unfortunately um it's just it's much, much easier said than done. Let's keep going. We've got one more before we bring up our first guest of the day. What we've got here is a16z uh talking about the largest exchanges and the largest stablecoin issuers, as well as the largest D5 protocols, all exist outside of the United States.

Um I think if you were around for the Gary Gensler villain era, this is no surprise. Um Gary Gensler decided to uh rule by enforcement, regulate by enforcement. And so what he did was, "Hey, no one no entrepreneur wants to have their business with their legs cut off." We we don't want that if we're entrepreneurs. We don't want to get our legs cut off. Uh we move where we're not going to be persecuted. And so this is what happened in the Gary Gensler era.

Uh a16z highlights this. Uh and Miles Jennings and Patrick Wood are talking about this. Uh Patrick Wood obviously uh is leading the Clarity Act. Um and so what we have here is um unfortunately, you know, this mass exodus of founders outside the United States. And so yes, we do have the largest exchanges, stable coin issuers, and D5 protocols all existing outside of the US. Now we're looking at onshoring a lot of that founder intellect, a lot of that entrepreneurship on chain. We're bringing back to the United States. And what is happening is the current administration has to work twice as hard in order to first make up for the work that was was done, if you want to call

it work, but it was effectively just this this push uh away uh from the US by Gary Gensler. We first have to correct that, and then we can move forward from it. And so a16z articulates that here. Uh and Patrick Wood, of course part of the current administration, articulates that as well uh in saying that this industry got wrongly targeted and politicized, and it drove all of the innovation offshore. Uh that's exactly what happened. Now we're seeing a lot of that come back. Guys, this is our last piece of news for today. We're going to be bringing up our first guest um Believe it an American entrepreneur just on the heels of this. And so, we're going to be we're going to be we're

talking about Michael Saylor stretch product which is making incredible gains in the US. Bitcoin is become a national priority here. And we've got the guys that are knowledgeable and experts on it. Here to talk about it. We've got APY X uh on the show. Most recent partner of the roll up as well. We're proud to welcome these guys. They've been retweeted by Michael Saylor left and right it seems just all over the timeline. It's incredible to see. Uh there he is. Welcome to the show, man. It's a pleasure to have you.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Absolutely. Um Parker, let's just let's just get right into it, man. Um you guys have have launched and and made an announcement that caught a lot of the Bitcoin Bitcoiners attention. It certainly caught Michael Saylor's attention. It caught our attention. Believe it $125 million of purchases of the stretch product done through APY X's. Is that the right Is that the right the right number there? Yeah, I mean it's already above that. We just are buying every day and so we do an announcement and it's like, you know, it's hockey sticking up which is pretty exciting.

Incredible. So, tell us a little bit about how this mechanism works. Well, well, I'll just give you give you a little bit of background. I mean, Parker, you you were C C O O C I O of DeFi Development Corp, a Nasdaq listed public company with a background in bond trading, 6 years at Kraken plus CFA credentials. You're a veteran in bridging TradFi and crypto. Just what what brought you to APY X? Tell us a little bit about the vision and then ultimately a little bit more about the story here around APYX.

Sure. And just to be clear for all the DFDV Bulls, I am still at DFDV and still the COO and CIO. But um Yes, so you know, taking a step back, um you know, I got into crypto back in 2017. Um and was pretty active in DeFi summer of 2019. Um you know, with Compound, um Aave, Uniswap. I actually I bought some ETH land way back in the day, like back in 2017. So, um I like to say I predated um you know, had some of the OG there.

Um Absolutely. >> But Um so, you know, the kind of the holy grail of stable assets in DeFi was something backed by the best asset in crypto, which is Bitcoin. And so, we saw obviously Dai kind of gave it a run, but they had to do it with ETH, but you know, ETH is not exactly, you know, the pristine collateral that Bitcoin is. Terra Luna tried to do it at the end, right? They started adding Bitcoin, but it was too little, too late. And so, what we have here is really a Bitcoin backed stablecoin, um done in a maybe unexpected manner, done through a public company balance

sheet. Um but Bitcoin backed nonetheless. And so, you know, fast forward a little bit, um we Uh you you know, I spent a number of years at Kraken, myself and the entire team at APYX. Um and then of course, most of us left to launch DFDV, the first non-Bitcoin dot dot built on Solana. It's actually the best performing dot of 2025, which is pretty cool. Um but kind of getting immersed into the dot ecosystem, we saw what Saylor was doing with Stretch, with STRC, very early on.

Obviously, he started with different preferreds and, you know, didn't really um hit a home run until, you know, the fourth try there with STRC. But, a lot of people don't know this, STRC was actually the largest US equity IPO of 2025. It was bigger than Circle. It was bigger than any other dot. It was bigger than any tech IPO. It was bigger than any IPO. It was the largest single IPO of any kind for 2025. And they've really built off the that momentum. And so, we kind of followed that. We saw that um development on the DFDV side and we said, "Hey, this is pretty interesting." And then we had the idea, kind of let's say Q3, Q4 of

last year to build a yield-bearing stablecoin on it. You know, connecting that whole kind of uh pristine collateral, perfect vision for a DeFi-backed stablecoin um or a DeFi-native stablecoin. Uh from back in, you know, 2019, kind of the dream era. And so, we started, you know, started building, um brought some other folks over from Kraken and elsewhere, engineering team, product team. Um but, in December 2025, Saylor got up on stage at Bitcoin Mina and he had a slide towards the end of his presentation and he was like, "Hey, do you talk about digital money?" He's like, "Hey, somebody should build a stablecoin built on this thing." So, we're like, "All right, it's go time."

So, we launch uh announced the launch at Strategy World um in like February and have been kind of growing ever since. So, I'll pause there and, you know, that's the backstory. Yeah, incredible. I I mean, I I've got a bunch of questions here, um but I want to first understand the stack, right? Cuz You've got your your stablecoins that, you know, are are are churning along. And then, strategy has its stack, right? And And like you said, there was four uh four tries at it, and then Saylor hit a home run with, you know, this stretch product. Just quickly, what was it about the the first three that, you know,

allowed Saylor to raise a little bit of money, but but he didn't have figured out until he hit stretch. What is it about stretch that has, you know, led to the rocket ship of of, you know, an incredible amount of buying power that that stretch has been able to to unlock. Yeah, so I think the key unlock there is the stability. So, all these other preferreds have fixed dividends, and preferreds in general have fixed dividends, and then, you know, equity, common equity dividends, you know, there these are all kind of add-ons to the instrument, but the instrument is designed to be volatile.

And so, when you have a volatile instrument like that, um you know, anybody from finance knows that you have to discount that, right? The more volatile something is, the more return you need out of it to kind of take that risk. And so, the the magic of STRC is, well, rather than having the price be volatile, let's have the yield be volatile. And so, by allowing the yield to float, that makes the price much more stable. And in fact, you know, they're working on switching dividends to bi-monthly, so issued twice a month, and that should further compress basically any volatility. And the idea here is to basically make a money market-like

security. So, as we know with money markets, they don't break the buck. Well, mostly they kind of almost did in 2008, but they don't break the buck. Um but the rate floats, right? Or like your checking account or your savings account. Doesn't break the buck. The savings account is always there, but the interest rate you get is different um based on interest rates. And so, Saylor's trying to replicate that, replicate this money market type, um, instrument, the savings account type instrument, but of course there's some, um, the the asset backing it is not, you know, the full faith and credit of US government, it's Bitcoin, and Bitcoin's obviously more volatile today than the full faith and credit of the US government. And so, you have to pay a

higher yield, higher interest rate. Um, but it's kind of that same dynamic, and in a world where Bitcoin is a hundred trillion-dollar asset, the hope would be that STRC, at least for them, the yield actually comes way down, and it's like really close to that risk-free rate, and actually maybe at some point people say, "Well, hey, something backed by Bitcoin is actually less volatile than full faith and credit of the US government." And so, this is early days, that's why it pays eleven and a half percent, but over time I think that rate's going to come down as Bitcoin becomes more stable, becomes more understood, and people trust it more.

And how is the yield generated? Um, is it through, you know, Saylor's products, lending Bitcoin, generating yield on it? What what is kind of the crux of of the the eleven and a half percent yield? Sure. So, ultimately, it's total return. So, a lot of people, um, kind of mix this up or they confuse this, but in, you know, this is kind of finance 101, you've got two components to total return. You've got growth and you've got yield, right? And for example, um, you know, most tech companies they don't pay any yield, right? There's no dividends, it's all growth. And in fact, from a tax optimization perspective,

zero cash yield is actually kind of a a better way to do things, just pure capital gains. And so, for an asset like Bitcoin that does not generate yield, total return equals growth. Most of the time it's, you know, growth plus yield equals total return. Here it's just growth equals total return. And so, in a world where Bitcoin, let's say, goes up 30% a year, and that's kind of what strategy has, you know, forecasted, hey, 30% over the next 10 years CAGR seems pretty reasonable. It's been a lot higher than that historically.

If they're paying 11 and 1/2% on the preferred, then they can always make dividend payments if Bitcoin's going up 30% over, let's say, a a decade-long period on average. And that would potentially mean selling some Bitcoin. And strategy has said, "Hey, you know, if we need to pay the dividend and we don't have any other sources, then, you know, we'll sell some Bitcoin." So, that's kind of the backstop. Now, of course, they haven't sold Bitcoin because they're able to raise more cash off of stretch. They're able to run the, you know, the common equity ATM. They've got the converts. They're able to raise capital in all these different ways. But, assuming those were all turned off, they could always sell some Bitcoin.

And as long as Bitcoin stays a larger asset than stretch, stretch is 8 billion, Bitcoin is, you know, 1.6 trillion, you know, it's pretty big delta there. Then, strategy should always be able to, you know, tap liquidity from Bitcoin if needed. But, they do set aside cash, two to 2 and 1/2 year reserve. So, on a short-term basis, you know, if Bitcoin trades down, they're not forced to sell Bitcoin to pay the dividends. They can uh just kind of dip into that cash reserve until Bitcoin kind of rebounds. Um so, you do kind of have to have a long-term belief in Bitcoin for this to, you know, be able to pay.

Um but, you know, importantly, it's not required because they're way over-collateralized. It's not required for Bitcoin to go up 30% a year to make their dividends payments. They actually only need it to go up single digits a year for them to be able to make their dividend payments. Yeah. And they're not pressed even if it doesn't go up, you know, in 1 year. They've got some patience. They've got some reserves like like you mentioned. Um okay. Uh let's let's get a little bit deeper into, you know, what APY X is doing around the stretch product um because stretch hit I I got here a billion 1.6 billion dollars in a matter of days, 11 and 1/2 percent dividends like you

mentioned. On 75% of strategies Bitcoin buys, um APY X tokenized another 50 million in the stretch X. And so the the APY X protocol is wrapping stretch into APX USD. That's kind of the liquidity layer. And then APY USD, that's a yield-bearing stablecoin, I presume. Could you just talk about how some of these pieces fit together? Why this the yield-bearing stablecoin? How the liquidity layer fits in? And then obviously how stretch helps to facilitate the functionality of of of both of these products.

Sure. So I should say it's um right now the majority of the balance sheet is stretch. We do have about 5 6 million dollars worth of SATA as well, which is Strive's instrument. But over time as more dats launch these variable rate non-convertible preferreds, very similar structures, we want to have a diversified asset base. And we'll, you know, have it volume weighted. So it'll probably still be mostly stretch. But, you know, just to uh call that out is over time we want to have this diversified base cuz that, you know, everyone knows diversification lowers risk.

Um So the general idea is we have a stablecoin APX USD. It does not pay any yield. It's just a very standard ERC-20 token and we'll bridge it to Solana and others. Um and whenever people buy that and they give us USDC or they give us cash of some kind, we go out and we buy a mix of the preferreds and then also some treasuries. So, we kind of hold a diversified asset base. It's not 100% in preferreds, either. And that helps us to reduce the volatility a little bit.

Then, some portion of the users say, "Well, I'm here for the yield." You could say maybe the majority of users. "I'm here for the yield. So, they're going to go ahead and they're going to take their APXUSD and they're going to lock it or stake it, whatever you want to call it. And so, once they do that, they start earning yield. And we right now target about a 13% yield. I think on the website we're paying like 12.6. It kind of comes down as more people come in. Um so, you know, let's call it a 13% yield. And if you're sitting on the sidelines, you're kind of you you want a savings account sort of for your, you know, crypto assets, um this is a great place to just park some cash. Set it and

forget it. 13% um it's pretty attractive yield. Now, there's an unlock period. It's 20 days. So, again, this isn't kind of designed for quick flips in and out. This is for the kind of the long-term holders that just want exposure to good yield. And yes, of course, stretch can go down some. It's had low volatility to date, but, you know, when it first got started, it had some volatility. So, maybe this thing goes down a little bit. Maybe it, you know, de-pegs, drops 1 or 2%, 3%, whatever. But again, for a long-term holder, if you're making 13% a year, even a few percent de-peg, not the end of the world. And because we hold a mix of treasuries and preferreds and some over-collateralization,

overall our basket is going to be less volatile than the underlying, than just holding stretch natively. Now, that might beg the question, well, why would anyone hold APXUSD? It doesn't generate any yield. Like, everyone should just stake. Fair, but some people don't like that 20-day lockup. They want to go in and out right now. They want to farm on, you know, points on Pendle, in the future, you know, whatever. They're they're fast money, right? And that's fine. Those people can lend APXUSD to generate yield. And right now, you can go on our website and you can lend APXUSD and generate somewhere around 10%. And that's because some people they don't like the 13%. They want to loop

it, right? They want to borrow APX and they want to loop it a couple times of leverage to get, you know, 20, 30% yield. And so, people can the fast money can lend the APX and generate some extra yield, you know, that way, but have kind of the full liquidity, no lockups, that kind of thing. So, then from there, we're kind of building out this ecosystem. And I'll pause in just a second, but we've got, you know, Morpho vaults, we just launched tranching on Morph on Royco. Uh and there's a whole bunch of other products being built on this for people that have dis- different risk and return profiles. So, we're kind of creating this foundation that other projects can build on.

And so, a lot of this is built on the Bitcoin ecosystem, given that, you know, the the stretch product underpins a lot of this yield, and the the stretch yield is underpinned by the total return of Bitcoin. Have you thought about doing any, you know, direct-to-Bitcoin like, you know, people that want exposure directly to Bitcoin or even to, you know, some of these leverage products like like MicroStrategy's just pure equity and building in some other yield strategies around this. I'm I'm curious, you know, you you've built quite the quite the ecosystem around this product.

Now, Where do you go from here as far as how much you start to build out the risk the risk curve? Well, maybe we should bring you on as an advisor strategy officer or something, but yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think ultimately what we're building here is a yield platform. I mean, APY X, you know, it's APY is in the name there. And so, I think there's a number of interesting off-chain yield opportunities. Obviously, we think this is the most exciting one, but yeah, there's potentially um a route we could go where we could tokenize and package the convertible

bonds that MicroStrategy has done. They're paying lower yield, maybe an 8 9% 7% sometimes even lower, but they've got that convertible feature. We could also package in some option strategies where you could say take a MSTR and then sell covered calls against it and then create something. So, this is the first product here and you know, we're going to build it as big as possible, but you know, there could be other things that we develop around this that um you know, offers again different flavors of risk return.

Yeah, or even you know, you mentioned how Ethereum isn't quite the pristine collateral that Bitcoin is, but a lot of people have been calling upon Tom Lee and Bitmain to build a stretch equivalent, right? Because there's some native yield in Ethereum. Do you think this is a it's a good idea? Would it would it make sense for him to for him to do something like that? Yeah, I mean, we we text Tom Lee constantly talking to Young Kim as well, their CEO and like bros, like you got to do this.

I had a good chat with David Hoffman over at Bankless and um, know, like I think the community is rallying around like Tom Lee, you need to do this. Um, and absolutely we would put a Bitmain pref into our asset mix. Again, volume weighted, right? So, stretch is probably still going to be larger, but um, you know, I think a pref issued on Ethereum makes a lot of sense. I think one probably issued on Solana makes sense. Again, all sized appropriately. But um, you know, where Bitcoin doesn't generate yield and you ask the question, "Well, how do they generate the yield to cover the income?" And I talk about total return or whatever.

Something like Ethereum or Solana, like there's native yield. And so, you kind of don't have to ask that question as much. Um, so it totally makes sense and we hope it happens. And Tom Lee, I hope you're listening cuz you should please do this. Yeah, we're going to ta- tag Tom Lee in the clip. Um, Perfect. And so, you know, it it makes sense as you're kind of building out the rest of this this preferred capital stock. Um, how much are you guys looking, you know, at at non-preferred? Something like I mean, RWAs are all the rave. Uh, we've got Apollo, Janus Henderson, these JAAA's, these A-creds yielding 8 9%. Are these interesting as you build out more of this basket of collateral that spits

off yield to all these APY APX USD stakers? Yeah, you know, I think uh, long-term, potentially, but we don't specifically for the APY holders. Um, the beauty of what we're doing here with digital credit is that it is the antithesis of private credit. So, private credit, pretty decent yields, maybe low double digits, high single digits. The problem is it's illiquid and not transparent.

Digital credit is liquid, fully transparent. And you might say, "Well, the liquidity is actually a bug because, you know, sometimes Stretch trades down a little bit and you know, on February 5th, it traded down like, you know, 4% or whatever and like, you know, that creates some volatility. But, private credit also has volatility. It's just not marked to market. And so, you don't actually know until it's trading at a 50% discount and then it's like, oh like we're wrecks now, right? And so, I think what you're actually going to see, and this is why we're really like driving a truck through this opportunity of digital credit, is I think you're going to see a lot of flows out of private credit into digital credit. And that'll take different

flavors, right? It's not all going to be just piling into Stretch. It will be other instruments backed by Bitcoin or other like major uh crypto assets. But, you know, you've got a lot of investors that are used to taking esoteric risk, right? And they want that double-digit yield. That's the bogey and they're not going to just say, well, this didn't work out. I'm throwing that bogey away and I'm just going to go buy Treasuries. Like, that's not what they're going to do. They're going to hunt for the next thing that generates those double-digit yields. And I think that's going to be digital credit. Uh and there's a number of different flavors around this. And so, we want to be hyper-focused on this narrative, because that we think there's significant growth here.

Yeah, sure. Maybe down way, way down the line, there's uh you know, a market for and there certainly is for reinsurance or um private credit or whatever other things on chain and you know, there's lots of other projects that are doing those. So, you know, they're probably doing it pretty well. Um but, we really want to focus on this opportunity right now, because we think the opportunity is massive. And I think, candidly, the growth that we've seen just for ourselves, but also in Stretch is um you know, has surprised even bulls like us. Yeah. Yeah, you know, Parker, what you're what you're saying makes a lot of sense. Um we've heard a lot a lot about the cracks in private credit.

And so it feels like that, you know, comes with its baggage. And you know, you're you're bringing up this category of digital credit, which feels a little bit new to all be it we've had a lot of these mechanisms in place for a long time. You mentioned die was kind of backed by Ethereum and you know, that was sort of early early at least proving out the concept. You know, there's one more thing I'll toss your way. I'm curious to hear your take on it. We've got this thesis we talk about quite a bit on the show. It's this neo Finance thesis. You know, initially it starts with tokenization.

First we got to tokenize a lot of these assets. We bring them on chain both, you know, speculative in terms of equities, but also non-speculative in terms of treasuries more, you know, yield based products. As more let's say equities become tokenized and go on chain, you know, they end up in the same D 5 protocols that we kind of know and love. Like they they become pristine collateral if you will for assets and protocols that have previously been limited to just, you know, crypto tokens that maybe weren't the best forms of collateral. And so I can imagine a scenario where, you know, we get a tokenized form of Google Apple

Nvidia stock or a basket of those comes on chain and then we can use that basket as a form of collateral to almost create a similarly interest bearing stable coin maybe from yield or from total returns. And and again we just sort of incorporate this, you know, higher quality basket of collateral into the stack and build credit products out of that those forms of collateral as well. Would that fit into the digital credit thesis that that you're putting out here today?

Yeah, I think you could kind of expand the digital credit thesis to include that. And you know, I think to your point a little bit you know, ultimately what DeFi is is yeah, sure, it's decentralized finance. But, another way to put it is it's innovative finance. Yeah. Finance in the existing confines and constraints has effectively been regulated to a standstill, right? There's very little innovation happening.

Um again, little tweaks around the edges, but like nothing new has come out of New York City um in I don't know, since like 2008 or prior to 2008. Really, I mean, some small things here and there, but um nothing groundbreaking. Um I think it's telling that, you know, the the major TradFi asset that is ripping now is, you know, gold, right? It's a precious metal that's um many millennia old um or stocks that are, you know, 50 years old, right? The Google and so on. Uh or maybe not 50, but, you know, decades old, right?

So, I think when I think about DeFi, it truly is innovative finance. And, I think this is really important for, you know, you talked about American um you know, at the end of the show or your last segment, um re-onshoring finance and DeFi building and crypto building. Um you know, I'm an American, proud Texan, been um a Texan for many generations. And, I think you know, obviously the key export of the US is finance.

It's financial markets globally. And, so I think it's imperative for DeFi to grow and flourish because it creates this innovation innovative explosion on finance. It allows finance to finally be unencumbered, unshackled to innovate, and do so in a more transparent um manner and a more maybe risk controlled manner. But we've you know, I think APY access perfect example of this in you know, three months. We've launched a collateralization product. We've gotten lending set up. We've got more vaults set up like vault curation set up. We've

got tranching set up. If this was a traditional financial product, this would have taken many many years to fully build out. And we've speed run this in three months. And so you know, maybe those be some more things that break. But the point here is that D 5 enables us to you know, us collectively everyone building D 5 to go much faster to try lots of things to innovate to tweak and that ultimately will drive in my view and already is candidly this Cambrian explosion of new financial products, new financial innovation which if primarily built by American companies, American

teams, you know, unfortunately APY access offshore. It's set up in the Caymans due to some of the regulatory environment. But long term if a lot of this can be brought back on shore, I think this could be really a another leg in the story of American exceptionalism and American you know, exportation of finance. And so you could take digital credit and even like expand it beyond that and just say digital finance and it's the story of innovation, the story of financial revitalization and I'm you know, here for it and you know, playing a small little role.

Well, I think I think it's incredibly well said. I I like your idea of expanding this to digital finance at large and also accelerating it with a lot of the technologies and tools that we have at our at our fingertips now. Um, Parker Matt, appreciate you coming on and I appreciate APY X as a partner of the roll up. Um, you know, just just number go up when it comes to these stretch buys and and uh, yeah, we'll we'll see Bitcoin as a result. That's right. Thanks for having me on. Love it. Thank you, Parker. We'll see you next time, man.

Yep. All right, guys. Well, there you have it. Uh, very very cool to see. That's Parker from APY X. Hope you guys learned something about the stretch product as well as uh, what APY X is doing, uh, which is very very cool. Like I said, they're our latest partner here on the roll up. Uh, they're buddy-buddy with Michael Saylor, uh, which is the man in the arena these days. Um, personally, feel like I learned uh, quite a bit about the capital stack that Saylor is building out and it's very cool to start to see augmentation of the capital stack from people just permissionlessly buying. You know, they they, like you said, uh, or like you heard from Parker, they've been able to build out tranching, lending,

all of these components that would have taken several years, uh, in the traditional financial world. Guys, next up, uh, we've got another killer. We've got Joshua Moss from uh, from Visa, who's going to be uh uh an inter- it's an interview that Andy uh, recorded before he went off to El Salvador and started gallivanting around. And so, we're going to play uh, this interview. Uh, this is going to be our flagship stablecoin show of the week, Stabled Up. Uh, shout out to Frax.

And so, we're going to take not even a quick moment. We're uh, we're not going anywhere, guys. Stay right here and we'll have uh, Joshua Moss coming up uh, in just a moment. What back to another episode of Stable Up, our premier weekly show covering the ins and outs of digital dollars, stable coins, and the future of decentralized finance. This show is made possible by Frax, and Frax is powering the financial engine of the internet, powering FRX USD and genius compliant stable coins. This is the stable coin supercycle made possible by Frax. Now, enjoy Stable Up, our weekly stable coin show.

Welcome back to Stable Up episode number 30, our weekly premier stable coin show powered by our friends at Frax with their FRX USD product. Visit frax.finance, guys, to learn more. If you've been watching, you've show you've seen this show evolve. Today, we have a larger fintech public company in the nest in the tokenization tower. Joshua Moss, good to have you, man. Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to the tower. Thank you. We have a great view. Not a bad view, huh? I can see I can see the Visa office, your apartment, where you were having drinks on Saturday.

>> there. It's all there. Josh, what is your role at Visa? Um and how did you join the company? Welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So, I've been at Visa for about 5 years now. Um and most recently, I've moved into a role leading our stable coin product strategy and go-to-market focused on stable coins for commercial and money movement solutions business. Okay. >> So, there's a lot to unpack there. Um and just to explain what we do just generally in the CMS commercial and money movement solutions business, on the commercial side, that's essentially, you know, you go to a coffee shop, use your consumer card, right? Everything outside of that consumer transaction is

really what we focus on in the commercial business. So, that coffee shop needs to pay its suppliers, it needs to pay its rent, employees, etc. That's what we focus on in the commercial business. And then on the Visa Direct side, that's our, you know, the core of our money movement business, um and that's, you know, where we have um over 12 billion endpoints across cards, accounts, and wallets. And what we're doing across both of those business lines are finding ways to embed stable coins and blockchain technology in our solutions. Amazing. And this has been a long time coming from the blockchain world, like from the sense of like, okay, we had stable coins as a construct, right? Like so, when I joined

the space, we were trading against Bitcoin. That was the only pair. Stable coins came out, and they they dominated the trading landscape. And for us, it was like very obvious that uh these things were far were were far more practical and feasible than an ACH, than a wire. Um but like like all things, these kind of industries are kind of slow to mature through the regulatory process, or the adoption process. But it feels like something happened where like we reached this tipping point. Um there's a there's a very There's a very good book called The Tipping Point that explains kind of exactly what's happening right now in stable coins.

What would you describe as Visa's tipping point, right? Or the kind of way that you guys have approached the payment space as it pertains to to stable coins? What was the the company's large kind of like, okay, this is it type of moment? >> Yeah, definitely. So, we view stable coins as both a currency uh and a rail. So, you know, at Visa, we've actually been in the space for quite a long time, and specifically in Visa Direct. So, you know, for example, when you go to Coinbase, and you want to, you know, buy cryptocurrency or stable coins, that's using what we call an account funding transaction, or AFT. And what that is doing is essentially pulling funds from your account to bring you on chain, to

on-ramp you, so that you can then trade, you know, cryptocurrency at an exchange like Coinbase. Now, let's say you've been, you know, hoddling for for a while and you've made a bunch of money on Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency and you want to off-ramp. That's where we have what's called OCTs or original credit transactions. We're we're essentially pushing those funds back to your card. And so, that's really how we've, you know, started in the space and then we've just continued to expand from there. Yeah. And so, this this kind of contract of on-ramp and off-ramp was like the primary like original breakthrough thought process. It wasn't like the speed or the or the cost or the 24/7. It was just It was purely on the on and the

off-ramp side. >> Well, so that was that was one piece of it and and really what we try to do is provide a bridge between both the TradFi and DeFi worlds. And so, you know, that can show up in the form of, you know, the speed and efficiency of stablecoins. And then also, really starting with the the DeFi world and trying to bring them into TradFi and bring our clients our TradFi clients on chain. And now what we're doing is we're looking at how we can support our TradFi clients and bring them on chain for, you know, some of these specific use cases. Yeah. Yeah.

Um you know, when we're thinking about just to kind of lay the land of the scale here, could you just kind of illuminate the scale that Visa currently operates in? Because I think a lot of us understand you know, a lot of us think that stablecoins are growing. Right? But when you think about it, we are just like like 10, 15, 20 bips of the of the total kind of volume of payments and just of dollars moving around. Could you just give us a sense of like the scale? Like what what what kind of numbers did you guys do last year? I know you have earnings this week. What what is the scale here that your company occupies?

Yeah. So, I'll give you give you two examples. So, with Visa Direct, as I said before, so there's 12 billion endpoints that we support today. That operates in 195 different countries and territories and then we support a wide range of of currencies and you know different offerings and use cases there. In terms of the scale and where we are today with stable coins and blockchain, it's still very very early. So you know there's been some you know great research out there done with looking at the on-chain data and the majority of it you know around 99% of that is for trading.

You know which is great. It's a great use case to support that and really only that 1% is for payments related use cases. And so that's really what we're trying to grow. And then when you look at like where opportunities are right? Just focused on B2B which is one of the largest spaces in the payments world, the B2B market is about 145 trillion dollars in payment volume let's say. So where do stable coins find product market fit? With B2B about 20% of that or so are cross-border transactions. And then let's take another haircut another 20% or high friction corridors where the currency is volatile, there's a number

of it's very expensive due to corresponding banking. And so that brings us to about 6 trillion dollars just in the B2B space alone. And so those use cases, you know those high friction B2B cross-border corridors are really what we're focused on. Can you believe that about 90% of our 6 years in business in terms of our our payments from to and from contractors clients any merchant has been in stable coins for 6 years? Yeah. That's yeah and and that's that's really what it's about too. Just you know we we've been supporting you know our merchants, issuers, acquirers with a number of different offerings. So just to you know list them out and sort of you know

explains our stable coin strategy more broadly and where our clients need our support. Um you know, just starting off I mentioned you know, the AFTs and OCTs right with Visa Direct that's you know, helping people get on chain and you know, off-ramp as well. Um then we also have our stable coin link cards. We have stable coin settlement um and then we have pre-funding and payouts using stable coins um as an extension of our Visa Direct network. Um and then lastly we have our consulting services. So that's really helping you know, everyone from you know, our traditional issuers to our DeFi clients help develop their stable coin strategy. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean this is a left-field question but I'm

not sure if you guys have thought about launching a Visa stable coin. Does that make any sense? Like maybe talk to us about how you think about the relationship between a payment network and the issuers themselves? Like how you see the collaborative and competitive dynamics between you know, Circle, Tether, insert issuer here for a stable coin and then payment networks like Visa, like Stripe, etc. Yeah, and that's a great question and we view our role as you know, bridging that gap like I was saying before. And so what that looks like is supporting a number of coins and a number of chains um especially where they add value you know, for our clients. And so you know, what we try to do is is basically just extend our

network to these new currencies and these new rails to make it more efficient. Um and then help bridge that gap because you know, for example and just going back to Visa Direct, you know, we have connectivity with you know, a number of real-time payment networks um which you know, a lot of our DeFi clients might need um that additional connectivity and and also from a trad fi perspective um the stable coin link cards, you know, that basically operates as a way for them to be able to spend that stable coin and make it useful. And so whatever that underlying currency is, just the way it operates in the TradFi world, we're bringing those same principles over to the DeFi world. Mhm.

And and you must be seeing like margins of opportunity to add So, you know, you laid out these business lines, right? And and and kind of how you're thinking about stablecoin strategy holistically. But, you you guys wouldn't be here thinking about this if A, you didn't feel like it was extremely disruptive to what you were doing or B, or and/or you didn't see opportunity to grow a business line out of it. >> Yeah. Which one of those is it? Is it a bit of both? Like, how do you think about You know, I put out this clip that was like Visa's cooked. They're too far behind. They're now scrambling to get into the stablecoin game. Agents are going to use stablecoins, not going to use cards.

People are going to want to use kind of crypto-native kind of on-chain networks. Yeah. I know that you're going to, you know, push back on this, but just talk to me about the the reasoning behind this kind of broad strategy. Is it disruption? Is it monetization? How do you think about that? Uh I I'd really say it's it's all the above. And so, you know, I'll just give you one example. >> Sure. So, with uh stablecoin settlement, so, you know, we're at an annualized run rate in the billions at this point. >> stablecoin settlement. >> Just on stablecoin And could you just unpack what that is? What is stablecoin settlement?

>> Yeah, definitely. So, I'll give you an example. So, you have a an issuer, um Rain, who you who you might have heard of. So, they have uh stablecoin link cards. >> They're crushing it right They're doing great. Yeah. And what they do is at the point of sale, they will convert that stablecoin into fiat, and then the merchant just sees fiat. It's a BAU transaction after the conversion. With Visa and Visa's card payment business, the authorization and the settlement operate at different times.

And so, with the settlement, if you have an issuer, um you know, such as Rain that operates in stablecoins, what we're doing is saying, you don't have to convert back to fiat just to settle with us. You can just send that stablecoin directly to us and we'll count that as, you know, stablecoin settlement and fulfill that obligation. And why that's so important is you have a number of DeFi clients like Rain who, you know, they're incurring a lot of costs where they have to offer up the mint and burn fees just to settle with us, right? So, that's that's one, just trying to help them reduce their fees and make it easier for them to settle with us, um, 24/7 365.

And then you also have, um, these clients that operate in emerging markets. And, you know, it's actually easier for them to acquire a stablecoin, um, and USDC, for example, than it is to acquire USD due to the cost they're incurring and the time it takes due to correspondent banking and a lot of the frictions there, right? And then the last example is you have some issuers they need to hold collateral with us. Sure. Um, and so they can actually start to settle with us on chain to help lower those collateral requirements because they can settle 24/7 365. And so we're really just trying to solve problems for those

specific clients, um, and and really help them, you know, improve, um, their general operations using stablecoins. Yeah. And so then kind of looping back through this, uh, stablecoin settlement line of business into the kind of this mental framework of disruption or, um, monetization, you can you can kind of clearly see that there's both happening, right? Right? Like, you know, this is going this is going to happen that, you know, this is something that is a trend that is accelerating in terms of, uh, the very obvious reasons for demand, right? For if you're someone in, let's say, Latin America and you want to get exposure to dollars to hedge your currency right?

You're going to do stable coins because you you can't get access to dollars. I mean, unless you have somebody coming back from the States bringing you like bags of cash, right? Uh or you have an Interactive Brokers account and you can kind of figure out a way to get into into that through there. But either way, still very kind of very difficult. So, that's like on the disruption point, it's it's happening. On the monetization point, you you mentioned that you're running a multiple billion ARR business with the stablecoin settlement product. In the in the kind of three examples that you laid out, which is the which is the most profitable or kind of could you explain a bit about how that business actually generates that revenue? Yeah, sure. So, so essentially the way it works is, you know, when they

settle with us, um you know, it helps them reduce their costs and then we're charging a small fee on top >> as a business or a consumer? As an issuer okay. >> so so it's issuers and acquirers and um when they're settling with some stable coins, part of that volume we're charging a small fee, but you know, they're really reaping the rewards that they would otherwise have to incur by, you know, converting back to fiat to settle with us, acquire USD to settle with us. Um and so like the benefit significantly outweigh the costs Yeah. in in a lot of those examples.

>> And so like cards like Rain, I believe Kast is another one. I don't know if they're a client or a competitor. Are they both or >> Yeah, so there are a client? There there are a number of programs out there. I um in terms of in terms of where they operate, it's you know, a very large global operation. Um and so, you know, we're really just looking to ensure that if there is a stablecoin wallet out there, we want them to be able to spend that stablecoin. >> Okay. >> And the biggest blocker at the moment um and with stablecoin linked cards, if we you know, want to talk talk that for a second, >> um it is very hard to spend your stable coin. So, you know, one thing that we're actually hearing a lot of from clients is you're in a a country where your

currency is very volatile, right? So, we're seeing a lot of um clients or end end users basically receive their paycheck and then they'll immediately convert that to USDC on an exchange. Mhm. Now, you know, how are you supposed to spend that stable coin to pay for your groceries or, you know, if you're a business to to pay for advertising for for example, right? And so, that's where Visa's network really comes into play where we support nearly 200 million merchants globally. Yeah. Um both, you know, for in-person payments or online. And so, that's really, you know, what we're trying to do ensure that all of these stable coin wallets have cards attached to them to really

add significant value for those customers. So, Pudgy Penguins just came out with a card actually, which is great. Um but Etherfi is the main crypto linked card that I use like I use it on the subway today, right? And so, I have some like some ETH in there. You can actually borrow against your ETH in their structure. You get stables, then you can spend the stables. And so, when I go to spend that stable on the subway, there's a settlement that has to happen between the currency, which is the US dollar that the subway accepts, and the stable coin that I'm spending out of my wallet. And Visa is obviously there, and you guys are processing, I mean, millions of these transactions a month. Um and on that, you're able to just continuously

kind of create a business line there. Exactly, yeah. And I think the the thing that's really great is the consumer experience does not change at all. >> Not at all. It's actually great. It's super easy, yeah. >> so, you know, there's a ton of great rewards and benefits that you're getting on chain. You already you know, mentioned a couple of them. And then from a merchant's perspective, it's a BAU transaction. So, they don't have to add another wallet, right? >> mean, by the way? BAU? Business as usual. Oh, got you. Yeah, yeah. Um, and so, they don't have to add another wallet, another checkout button, right? So, it's just really simplifying the experience to make stablecoins useful in the real world. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and you mentioned USDC quite a bit. Um, they found themselves

in a bit of a precarious situation as of late due to a an exploit which they did not freeze funds. Tether's came out and frozen funds. Uh, we had a Mike Mike Dudas on the show last week. He He He went on a crazy rampage of against against Circle. Uh, I'm curious, does Visa have any sort of preference on stablecoins? How do you think about like uh genius compatibility Yeah. um, versus not? What What's your kind of dynamic between the two the two uh two leaders now? Yeah, so, I mean, there are a lot of coins, a lot of chains, and we are not in the business of picking winners.

>> agnostic completely? Yes. And so, we will work and and onboard a number of currencies. You know, USDC's one of them. Um, we can get into pre-funding a second. PYUSD's another. Um, you know, and and additional chains as well. So, ETH, Solana, you know, all of those. And it goes through a very stringent process um to ensure, you know, those things genius compatibility and um you know, our normal onboarding process, but even more um attention, you know, with everything happening in the the DeFi world.

>> Yeah. Okay, so, whether it's like a Plasma one neo bank, an Etherfi card bank, a Cast, Pudgy Penguins. Um, there's so many of these now. There's so many of these of these neo banks now. You guys are agnostic. Whatever drives transactions, whatever can support the ability to get stablecoins in the hands of more people, use them for payments, you guys are happy to basically kind of, you know, push that forward. Um what happens if we get to a world where this specific settlement line, and we can kind of move off this, but this specific stablecoin settlement line doesn't need to exist anymore, such that the typical merchant will just accept stablecoins direct. How does that affect Visa's kind of strategy? Yeah,

definitely. Um so, I'll give you that example I I had before, right? Um so, you go to a coffee shop and and let's say or say a bodega, right? >> Yeah. Um you know, bodegas love accepting cash. Right. >> Um and so, you know, let's say, you know, they started accepting stablecoins directly. Um so, that business is going to need to pay their employees. They're going to need to pay for advertising. For sure. >> going to need to pay their, you know, other suppliers and vendors. And so, that's where the stablecoin link card comes in. And then we also have other, you know, B2B offerings that, you know, we can support and we're looking to uh support as well. Yeah. Um just adding additional functionalities that are, you

know, clients are looking for. Yeah. So, you know, to your point, yes, in that, you know, direct uh stablecoin to to stablecoin flow, there is an on-ramp and an off-ramp. And and we're playing, you know, both sides of that. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so my my Visa is cooked uh thesis is never going to is never going to happen because there's always going to be something on on unless we're like entirely on chain and we're just in even still, I'm sure you guys are going to come up with something for us. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, we're we're exploring a number of, you know, really interesting and exciting use cases.

>> Yeah, yeah, good. What are some of those um like actual um like where has there been a outsized growth percentage-wise, perhaps not uh perhaps not in terms of pure pure uh pure number growth or nominal growth, but in terms of like percentage growth as a business line of these that you've mentioned, has there been like one or two that have been particularly growing faster than the others in the last 6 to 12 months? Very They're all seeing rapid growth. >> Yeah, I bet. So, you know, like I said before, um we are very early. Yeah, sure. You know, it's not even the first inning yet. Okay. Um and the runway is enormous, so these business lines are are growing rapidly. Yeah. One uh one

that I'm really excited about is what we announced for Visa Direct for stablecoin pre-funding and payouts. Okay. Um and so, you know, we're launching that pilot. Um we'll be live, you know, hopefully very soon with that. And And what that is is before, you know, I mentioned Visa Direct for cards, accounts, and wallets. So, on the card side, that's your your normal uh Visa net rails, right? Traditional card rails. For accounts, that's bank accounts and then digital wallets, what we've said is that clients can pre-fund us in stablecoins. And so, what does that mean? So, when you use Visa Direct for account and wallet, you need to pre-fund Visa so that we can use our

network and ensure that those funds are there for a payout. So, you know, let's say that it's a P2P remittance, Mhm. right? So, that uh remitter that's originating the transaction, let's say in the US, will provide us money um that we will then pay out to, you know, let's say Mexico. Yeah. And so, we will use our network and our banking infrastructure to move those funds there so that the recipient of that remittance can receive those funds when they need them. Yeah. Um so, what we're doing is more of our Visa Direct clients are moving on chain and operating their treasury using stablecoins. And so, now what we're doing is when they pre-fund

us, they don't have to convert it back to fiat to pre-fund us, they can send us stablecoins directly. >> Yeah. We will convert that to fiat for them, you know, using orchestration, and then move those funds in fiat for that payout. So, that can support B2B, B2C, P2P use cases, right? And then on the payout side, the client could pre-fund us in fiat, and now, you know, I said before the 12 billion endpoints, we view stable coin wallets as a new endpoint. And so, now they can't only reach accounts and digital wallets, but also now stable coin wallets. So, they'll pre-fund us in fiat, we'll convert it to stable coins,

and then push that out to a stable coin wallet. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so, that is just going to solve any of the pain points that a more crypto-forward business has for paying employees, for paying contractors, for cross-border payments, for for the whole lot. So, So, you guys clearly see you guys clearly see the development of stable coins as a technology as being important to facilitate more optionality with your customers, and thus giving them a better experience at the end of the day, because you're now unlocking, let's say, a new way to facilitate transactions that, you know, previously

you would have to just do things, you know, in a very kind of like set way. Like we have, you know, we have fiat on-ramp into a currency, you then will swap it for you, then we'll give you the fiat to your bank. You're kind of just opening up optionality now, and then if I'm one of the recipients of this remittance, I can choose to get that in stable coins from Visa, which solves a lot of this like Western Union payment fit problem that a lot of people struggle with and fees and and delays and yeah. Yeah, and I mean, we're we're just seeing a ton of demand all over the world for this. Um, especially in those cross-border instances.

You know, a few that we're really excited about are creators. Okay. Um, so you know, let's say that you're a creator and and you want to be paid out immediately. Um, you can get that payout. Let's say you're a creator in a country that doesn't have great banking infrastructure. You can now get that payout directly to your stablecoin wallet. You don't need a bank account to do that. And these platforms, um, you know, TikTok, YouTube, whoever it may be, can pay out anywhere. The same thing is true for um, gig workers. So, you know, your ride share drivers, right?

They operate all over the world and to get those payouts to them, they want them immediately, right? So, how can we do that? We can pay out to their stablecoin wallet. >> Yeah. Well, well, interesting. Um, when you're thinking about holistically where where you guys are, uh, you know, very much excelling in this stablecoin landscape and then where you're seeing a lot of direct competitiveness from other payment networks, what are those direct competitive angles that you're seeing from other other payment networks that are kind of innovation first here? The Mastercards, the Discovers, these types.

Like, where are you guys really going head-to-head? Yeah, no. So, I think to to explain what it's doing, stablecoins and blockchain, it's really just pushing innovation forward. >> Okay. And our role as Visa is to support that interoperability between currencies, between chains, bridging the TradFi and DeFi worlds, and then also that trust layer. So, you know, going back to your stablecoin like card example, those come with built-in controls that, you know, are not there yet in in the DeFi world. So, it's that, you know, user experience that everyone knows, loves, and trusts, right? Um and that's really what we're trying to do, and

there's there's so much room for growth that if we can apply those principles that have led us to be very successful in the TradFi world, um you know, there's there's an enormous runway out there, and it's it's the competition is only really just pushing that forward and accelerating that growth. Let me ask this differently, Josh. Um why is Visa dominating the crypto-linked card market rather than any any of the other kind of payment networks and card providers out there? I've really yet to see many proliferation of anything else but Visa across all crypto cards, anything from crypto.com to a EtherFi. Okay, actually, Gemini has like a Mastercard credit card, I think.

Um but I've barely seen any. Why are you guys dominating this market specifically? So, did you guys move first? Or did you better tech? Why are you guys winning? Yeah, I think it's it's Visa's reach and network, right? One. Um you know, we're the largest network. Um and you know, we want to play a role in the crypto space. So, we moved very early. We've been in the space for quite some time now, and really view stablecoin linked cards as that way to off-ramp, um and then unlock all sorts of use cases. So, you know, one that we're really excited about, and just going back to the B2B example, right?

So, if you're a supplier, and you know, you want to receive um your payment and operate your treasury in stablecoins, um you know, that's a great opportunity for your platform to issue a stablecoin linked commercial virtual card, right? And you can use that, your employees can use that, and we're just continuing to find new use cases out there from, you know, traditional payments to agentic even. Another area that, you know, we're really excited about and diving into. Yeah, let's talk about it. People are People are, you know, conversing about whether agents will use credit cards, cards, or stablecoins. This is why I was

saying like, "Oh yeah, Visa's in trouble." because the the idea is the amount of microtransactions and micropayments and just the the sheer quantity of transactions conducted by agents at scale in the future is only going to be able to be handled by a network that can support a massive scale. Now, I say that from like this ivory tower considering Visa processes, you know, a magnitude an order of magnitude larger of transactions per second than the combination of all of the blockchains in existence today.

But the thesis is that you can just keep kind of creating more block space and you can keep kind of, you know, building more markets for these agents to operate in. But I anticipate you guys are able to just kind of scale your systems and scale your throughput. How Why is Visa not going to be overwhelmed by agentic payments? Why is this not going to swallow Visa's payment payment network up and cause serious issues? Yeah, so you know, it's a all really good examples and I think it's important to note that, and I'm saying this before with stablecoins, you know, agents will definitely operate using stablecoins, right? But in order for them to really be useful in, you know, the traditional

merchant landscape, that's where they need a card. Mhm. So, you know, that's really what we're looking to do. These agents, you know, a lot of the activity is for trading, right? But if they want to make a payment Mhm. at a merchant, that's where this agent will spin up potentially a stablecoin linked card >> Yep. and spend that at a merchant, you know, like like they would. Um and we are really setting up a framework to be able to support that with these controls in place, fraud and risk protections that come with the Visa network. Um and then also looking to support additional use cases, um you know, working, like I said before, with a number of chains, uh currencies, and and so on.

So, maybe a bit more of a pointed way, and I and I really don't mean to be uh pushing pushing your buttons too hard here, but I was on a panel in Cannes with a Mastercard head of stablecoin payments, etc. And he said, like pretty much verbatim, "There's going to be a journalist out there that, you know, gets me in trouble for this, but card networks are not built for agents. We have serious work to do to get in front of this trend, and um you know, prepare ourselves for what agents are going to come for in terms of their needs for payments, from the identity perspective, from the account holder perspective, from the sheer amount of transactions perspective." Um

just push back here, like why is this like is is he right? What are you guys doing to get ahead of this? Oh, agents can't have credit cards or cards because they don't have an identity, they they can only have a crypto wallet. Card networks are in trouble, you know, they won't be able to scale. And you know, I'm kind of asking you the same thing here, but he he, you know, he he said that verbatim, essentially, and it was like it definitely caught a lot of people off guard, considering he was, you know, working at a at a card network. What is your What is your response to that? >> Yeah, it's it's really interesting. Um yeah, so I mean, we are taking this space head-on. Hell yeah. Here we go.

And the opportunity for Agentiq is just starting. Um and so, the way that we are looking at it is how can we support our clients, issuers, acquirers, merchants use agentic technology to make these agents useful using a lot of the same controls and trust that Visa provides. And so if you're a business, you're probably not going to just give an agent you know your your card number, right?

And so that's really where you know our tokenization technology comes in as well as the additional controls that we're setting in place with uh Visa Intelligent Commerce. Um so you know we're really exploring this area and getting ahead and starting to see some traction with a number of our clients. And then also that linkage between agentic and stable coins um is this going to continue to grow. So you know there's a lot more to come. >> This guy's dialed. This guy's dialed in. Um you know there's a there's a there's a school of thought that suggests that um in the future there will be this kind of growing amount of uh new types of chains blockchains by

companies like Visa or separately more like large banks you know the JP Morgans, the City Banks, these types. And there's this kind of growing construct of thought that are a lot of Ethereum bulls take that is well JP Morgan's not going to want to use City's blockchain and build their technology atop there. And neither of them are going to want to use um you know US Banks blockchain and then you throw in Wells Fargo and Bank of America and you kind of just got all of these disparate ecosystems where the promise of blockchain has been the composability you know that's kind of like the big benefit here. And so the Ethereum bulls will use this as a way to to suggest that rather than fighting over this

disparate permission corporate block space what's going to happen is that these companies are just going to use Ethereum or use kind of more directionally neutral substrates rather than a you know you know permission set of substrate. Then you've got like a company like Canton who you guys are a super validator of Visa is whether that's you know in line with what you're working on or not maybe isn't so relevant but it is a separate kind of construct of an idea that is almost like the epitome of what I was just saying of all these banks kind of coming on and having their own they call them like almost like zones it's not a zone they have like a they have an interesting like global

synchronizer and all these things and so um there's just like differing views of how large payment and fintech and financial services companies are going to come on chain. Yep. I would like to hear your personal view but I'm sure you you you know you have to stay pretty PR friendly here but like how is this going to play out? How would a company like Visa be thinking about this? What do you personally think? Um yeah just curious like how how may you and your company maybe think about this? Yeah um it's a really really good points and you know definitely something that we're discussing and and looking at and supporting our clients with every day.

So to answer your question around how are we going to support all of these chains? Every you know client that we work with has a different chain. That's really where Visa comes in. That's the interoperability that we provide today moving between fiat and stablecoins and vice versa and then supporting multiple chains all over the world. And so in terms of bringing these clients on chain that's something that in the trad-fi world I think you know you'll continue to see more and more traditional issuers you know really start to move into this space for all sorts of reasons. One you

know treasury efficiency you know, moving uh funds uh cross-border, right? Um but then also supporting their clients as well. Um and that's really what we're trying to achieve here um with our multi-coin, multi-chain approach, and embedding that into our existing stack with Visa Direct, with stablecoin link cards, with stablecoin settlement. And so, you know, it really creates this great um framework to move forward and support our traditional issuers, but then also provide the scale and reach to DeFi clients looking to play in the the TradFi space. Yeah. So, then would you say that Visa launching

its own chain or stablecoin would be somewhat prohibitive to the current business goals due to the conflict of interests of sorts? Yeah, I I think the the question is how do we support our clients, okay, just broadly. And Good anchor. >> whether that is a specific chain for a specific use case, >> Yeah. that's what we'll, you know, do. Um and whether that's supporting multiple chains for, you know, some B2C payout, um you know, we can also do that. So, you know, really nothing's off limits, and it really just depends on the client, the use case, and trying to solve actual problems that exist with

traditional rails today. >> Yeah. So, um when it comes to the complete interoperability, there is uh also another school of thought and kind of getting off the Ethereum and the types of chains construct more into the stablecoin liquidity and fragmentation school of thought here. There's this There's one school that's like, you know what, we're just going to use USDC or USDT for most all payments going forward in terms of, let's say, 10 years from now, merchants will accept these. And then there's like an there's another school that's like, well, actually, once Genius Act is through actually implement implemented, we get more a bit more regulatory clarity, there should be a world where there's going to be an Amazon stablecoin and a Starbucks stablecoin and a Walmart and a

Costco stablecoin. And um you as a user would be interfacing with those stablecoins specifically when using uh when when buying those products, right? And uh the problem there is obviously like, well, a US dollar is fungible in the sense that your my one US dollar is the same as your one US dollar and that that means that we can spend any US dollar at any place in the world or, you know, at least in the states. And that that's not the case for my one Starbucks coin and my one Walmart coin because those are not fungible in that same regard. Um and so that is like a deprecated UX compared to the current UX. So, how how would you think about how that so how would a

a solution to that construct come about? Like, how would you guys think about that? Are you guys seeing anything like that? Yeah. Yeah, I I mean, again, it's it's just applying the same principles in the TradFi world to the DeFi world, right? So, we have FX solutions supporting almost every currency in the world, right? And so, when you move on chain, you're going to have, you know, merchant A coin, merchant B coin, this issuer has a coin, right? It's like the Oprah meme, you know, you get a coin, you get a coin. And that's really what we're in the business of is providing the interoperability between coins and chains, embedding them in our existing stack,

um and then exploring new ways to make blockchain technology add significant value for our clients, whether that's um tapping into protocols on chain, whether that's um you know, working with different partners all over the world. You know, that's really what we're doing every single day. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think the advantages of like a Wells Fargo announcing that they're launching a stable coin or for Wells Fargo? Or like like what what are the advantages would you see as like for a bank to launch a stable coin?

Yeah, I mean I think there's the the question of you know, tokenize deposits or stable coins and you know, when to use each one. Sure. Um and you know, that's what we're talking to our clients about every single day and and helping them you know, explore that and what makes the most sense for their business. I think the the most obvious one is really from a treasury management perspective and your internal operations. So a lot of what I think we will see in the future is stable coins operating under the hood. So you don't actually really even know that a stable coin um is is doing this transaction. Um so you know, one example might be the the stable coin sandwich, right? So you know, what that means is

you know, you have fiat, you know, the issuer merchant or whomever it may be is in the US and they want to move um their treasury over to another country. Um you know, today in certain markets that might take a really long time, right? And it's costly um and you know, you don't have great visibility into that. And so in terms of improving their liquidity management, working capital, whoever the the business may be, that's where the stable coin sandwich comes in where you can have a wallet in country A and a wallet in country B, move those funds and then Visa has connectivity to a number of real-time payment networks and domestic schemes to help off ramp,

on ramp and then off ramp those funds. Yeah. So one thing on that, I'm curious how you're thinking about the reserve management practices that Visa would kind of have to, you know, start to think about when it comes to to this um this product that you mentioned with with regards to me being able to give, you know, uh pre-fund uh or sorry, give my stablecoins to Visa and then you guys have this pre-funding product where you can pay out. It It can be used for P2P, uh you know, uh cross-border payments or remittances, etc. You You guys obviously already run 24/7 payment network, right?

Like obviously on the weekend it's not like Visa's not going to spend my money. I mean, it's, you know, everyone knows this. Obviously banks take take a little holiday there. Um but when it comes to the stablecoin payment structure, does anything have to change from your reserve reserve management perspective of like let's say it's a Sunday morning and I'm like, all right, Visa, here's 10 grand of stablecoins. I need this down to uh Guadalajara in Mexico like ASAP. Are you guys able to process that in non-banking hours? How do you guys kind of manage your reserves, especially if you start thinking about like really really big numbers or a lot of transactions?

>> Yeah, so, you know, we are talking with our treasury team every single day. Okay. >> And moving those funds in our network, it's called a Visa Payments Limited or VPL. That's really this banking, you know, network and infrastructure that we've set up to move these funds all over the world. >> Yeah. And so, you know, to answer your question directly, yes, stablecoins can help, you know, improve some of those efficiencies, um you know, and it's really again just improving the customer experience. So, if you want to pre-fund us in stablecoins, that's great. We can do that. You can pre-fund us, you know, anytime, improving your liquidity, um and just optimizing that process. Yeah.

And then if you want to receive stablecoins, yes, we can, you know, use that same flow with the pre-funding in fiat and then pay out 24/7 365 to that stablecoin wallet. So, those funds will land directly in that wallet, which is just a product that did not exist uh previously. Yeah. Joshman, last thing, I mean, when you're thinking about your kind of current role, thinking about stablecoin strategy holistically for a big public company with, you know, a ton of customers, trillions of transactions a year, or or perhaps still in the billions, but I'm sure it's trillions. Um what is the what is the the biggest most important focus for you

this year? Like we are on the precipice of um you know, we've got the Secretary of Treasury uh Scott Scott Bessent saying stablecoins are going to reach the trillions by 2028. Um you know, we're just seeing 40 to 50% year-over-year growth across the largest stablecoins. We're in a crypto bear market and stablecoins are still growing, which is a actual rare nuanced difference than any other bear market, so it's very clearly a a secular trend here. What is on your mind for delivering the best possible experience from Visa? As we kind of close out here, what is your number one priority for this year? Yeah, that's a great point.

Um in terms of I'll give you three things that we're that we're really focused on. One is bringing our clients on chain. So, whether you're a TradFi client or a DeFi client, we want to bridge that gap. Um and we want to bring them on chain and they can tap into, you know, the great benefits of DeFi and blockchain technology. We want a stablecoin linked card in every attached to every one of those wallets to make that stablecoin spendable. And then lastly, incredibly focused on B2B. Yeah. Um that is, you know, as I was saying before, just an enormous, you know, $6 trillion opportunity, right? For, you know, those high-friction cross-border corridors, and we want to support that flow using

our stack um and continuing to explore for with, you know, our issuers, merchants, acquirers, and you know, different fintech platforms that we work with. Amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, Joshua Moss, episode number 30 of Stable Up. Thank you for being a part of it. Shout out to Frax, frax.finance. Episode 30 powered by our friends. This is Visa's stablecoin strategy. Thanks, Josh. Thank you. Cheers, man. All right.

There we are after an incredible session with Joshua. Um, very, very cool to see. Um, guys, Visa is coming into the payments game strong. Uh, you obviously heard from Joshua from Visa. I think uh, this is going to be a uh, an appearance that we will continue to remember. We'll continue to refer back to it for a long, long time. Uh, it was a pleasure having Joshua on. Uh, he was up there in the tokenization tower in New York at the Empire State Building. So, very, very cool to see. And uh, I'm excited and I look forward to welcoming Visa on the show again sometime in the near future.

I want to keep up with our payments lens uh, because we got some news crossed the wire uh, just while this last segment was playing. And so, let's go ahead and get over to the news. And so, what we've got here uh, is we've got M0 partnering with Anchorage Digital. Uh, what's important here is that Anchorage Digital is the first federally chartered bank, which is incredible that they have now partnered with M0.

Uh, M0 obviously is about making uh, make your money. Uh, they are about uh stablecoin issuance, and they help some of the most successful brands like uh MoonPay and MetaMask uh launch their branded stablecoins. And so, as we continue to see the proliferation of stablecoins throughout the payments universe, uh more and more of these stablecoins are relying on the tried-and-true proven infrastructure partners that has been able to build out uh resilient infrastructure. M Zero has been able to do just that. They've got plenty of uh significant players in their ecosystem, success stories, and test cases that I'm sure Anchorage Digital looked at looked

into and decided, "Hey, for their custody partners coming into Anchorage Digital, leveraging their banking rails, and accessing stablecoins through Anchorage Digital's regulated platform, M Zero is now here to help power a lot of those stablecoins." Uh and so, got a couple more stats here. Uh the idea is that it turns Anchorage Digital from a custodian into a primary engine for institutions looking to mint and manage regulated stablecoins. That's another big part of this. Obviously, we have the Genius Act. We have the Clarity Act looming. And more and more of these regulated stablecoins are on the horizon. M Zero is showing that they

have the infrastructure and in place they have the regulation and compliance in place in order to fuel a lot of these uh regulated stablecoins, and they can do so through a custodian like Anchorage Digital. Like I mentioned, M Zero currently works with the likes of Stripe, MetaMask, and MoonPay. Uh very, very cool to see. Uh we've had their team uh Luca Prosperi, as well as uh a couple other members of their team we've had on the show. Uh and they they're they're always great. I met up with Luca in in uh believe it was Korea last year.

Uh he was a tremendous guest. We walked through his founder story. The guy runs ultra marathons through the Italian Alps. I mean, that's my founder. That's what we're talking about. So, it's very cool. Uh I'll just finish up here by reading this quote from the Anchorage CEO, Nathan McCauley. Uh he said in a statement that by partnering with M Zero, they are extending their issuance platform to support that growth while maintaining the regulatory, operational, and security standards that their partners rely on. So, absolutely incredible to see. I think this is going to make waves in the stablecoin space.

And you're again you're seeing institutions pick winners. Um obviously this is a free market. We love the open competitive nature of this landscape. Anyone can come in, disrupt, and innovate. Um at the end of the day, Anchorage is a large institutional player, and we're continuously seeing that they have uh the leverage in in a lot of these situations because now they're able to go into the market. There's several stablecoin issuance platforms. They decided M Zero met their standards better than the rest, and now M Zero's got a seat at the institutional table. Congrats to the M Zero team. And uh friends of the show, shout out to Luca, uh Joao, uh Nicole, everyone behind the scenes, Connor, everyone

there uh on the M Zero team. Great great to see. Guys, we've got our final guest of the day uh coming at you live. We've got uh Shashank from uh the Fraction AI team for AI Supercycle. And uh we're going to we're going to bring him live here in just a moment. And so guys, don't go anywhere. We're going to have the Fraction AI team uh live right here for AI Supercycle in just a moment. >> Welcome back to AI Supercycle, our premier AI show airing every single week

presented by Near. We cover the ins and outs of decentralized AI, privacy, and the future of this massive technology. Near is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps. You can check out Near's latest AI product at near.ai. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Here we are. This is AI Supercycle episode 31 presented by Near, and today we've got our friend Shashank from Fraction AI XYZ.

Uh we're going to be talking about autonomous AI trading agents and everything happening in the space as Fraction AI uh recently recently announced. Uh and so, Shashank, congrats on the announcement, and welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. Well, I I'd love a a a bit of background on yourself, how you ended up as a founder of Fraction AI, and then we'll we'll get into Fraction AI and how you're viewing the entire AI and agentic space nowadays. Uh yeah, definitely. I started in AI back in 2014 in college. It used to be called machine learning back then. Um we barely had any uh deep learning models. Um

uh so, we we were doing research in computer vision, and our goal used to be identifying things from images. So, if given an image of cat, the model has to say it's a cat or a dog, like super simple models. And uh so, I've seen the growth how industry has progressed over the years, and uh transformers was barely a thing back then. And uh especially in that natural language processing, we used to believe non-neural models were actually better at prediction uh because generation itself was super bad. Wasn't possible at all. And the kind of growth we have seen in the industry over time, it's just fascinating.

After college, my first job was at Goldman Sachs as a AI researcher. There I worked with Professor Charles Elkin. He was head of machine learning at Goldman. So our team was called core machine learning team and we were embedded into several different finance teams. So got to learn how finance actually how AI actually embeds into finance at the world's best investment bank firm. So yeah, that that that was that and after that I worked for an early stage startup, a hedge fund, and finally decided to start Fraction AI because I saw how how quickly AI was moving, how quickly it was improving, and it was necessary to ensure that everyone had equal access to AI, equal

access to agents so everyone can have their own agents that creates value just for them and not just in the hands of few companies. Absolutely. And I and I think this is a general trend from, you know, those that we're seeing even with the larger labs, companies, you know, the the idea that intelligence should be ubiquitous among everyone on the planet. I think this is something that we all share. Obviously some of them are going about it, you know, different ways and you know, two of them, Elon and Sam are in court right now battling it out about how it should be done, right? So obviously you know, we here believe in open source and we believe in a lot of these a lot of these pillars for open source intelligence and AI.

And so if we're talking in particular about, you know, the AI trading agents here, I'm curious before we, you know, really dig into a fact fraction, what was it that you saw at Goldman Sachs, you know, during your time there? How were they, as much as you can share, I'm sure, you know, they've got trade secrets and and things, NDAs and whatnot. But, you know, what what was your experience at Goldman? How were you using AI in the market making and trading business at the largest scale? And what were some of your largest uh your most important takeaways from that experience?

Yeah. So, uh trading is a major part of Goldman's business. Uh market making is mostly done by HFT firms, so it's not that relevant. Um so, they create very exotic products and uh like directly sell it to high-net-worth individuals. So, you have to create engines to manage that risk. So, for example, there's a portfolio of watches, paintings, and like several other exotic stuff. It is very difficult to identify a true value and uh sell it at a price where you can actually uh like hedge the risk with respect to your entire firm. So, so what you learn from there is managing risk itself is uh way more important than uh the the returns curve. Um so, yeah, that that kind of

got stuck uh there. And uh regarding uh agents for finance, uh perps are like the biggest growth drivers in crypto right now. In in due time, possibly all assets, all RWAs, indices uh all equities, commodities would be there in perps. It's just a better way to trade. Options uh are super difficult. You have to know a lot of maths to actually do options right, but with perps, it's super simple. Uh anyone can do it. So, I believe perps is going to be a big growth driver. And uh agents for perps uh is how it's going to play out because uh the way agents can trade, it's way more efficient than humans ever can.

However, uh the there has to be intelligence behind how trading happens. So, if you read Marcos Lopez de Prado, he has been the the authority on using ML in finance. He talks about how you shouldn't directly try to put fit models onto the data because the model will always fit on noise since in finance there is very high noise to signal ratio. Most of it is noise, very little signal. So, he talks about how you should always start with an idea and then try to validate that idea through data. And we used to do that at Goldman and that's what we have done with our new product product index.

So, there you just get started with with an idea. You just say what you believe about the market, what what is going to happen, why is it going to happen and the AI just talks with you. It it discusses why it thinks you are wrong or why it thinks you're right and then it converts your idea into a strategy a code a coded strategy and then you can back test that strategy across different time periods, see how well it has performed and the then AI even recommends you based on the results how you can actually improve that strategy. And then you don't have to improve it.

AI does it for you. So, at the end it's you who is working with AI to create a good strategy but just through your ideas. You don't need to code, you don't need to do anything. You just supply with your ideas and it gets validated through AI. And finally when you are done, you can just make it live and it trades directly on hyperliquid. And yeah, that's it. It's it's just that simple. So, very fascinating. The AI is effectively farming us for our ideas.

We're we're willingly obliging. And so we we come up with this idea. Now, it it you know, we'll talk back and forth with us. Ultimately, it will it will codify the strategy and then it will go and it will execute the strategy. And so I've got I've got a couple questions that immediately come to mind. You know, let's say I have a terrible idea, right? Like I don't know what I'm talking Let's say, you know, NFTs are going to make a massive comeback. Uh Bored Apes, right? If you And And I I I say this because a lot of AIs right now, they feel like they're going to agree with whatever we say. It's like it I don't Well, if it hallucinates, you know, it'll say it it it it'll say all

these kinds of things to just affirm our beliefs. If I have some radical idea that I think Bored Apes are going to, you know, or I think If I think what what's one that might, you know, if I think Solana's going to flip Bitcoin. Ridiculous things, right? Will it push back? Will it tell me like, "Look, man, you probably got you probably got the wrong idea here. Maybe you want to you want to you want to check yourself." Or is it just going to affirm? And it's like, "Oh, I can go lever up on Solana for you if that's what you want."

Yeah, that's a real problem, and I guess that's why harnesses are becoming more and more important, because most of the models are converging. If you look at like top three models, they have similar issues, almost similar performance in all things of value. So, what matters is how you design workflows around those models, so they get validated at at each step and are sure about making a choice whenever they are making a choice. So, probably in our case, if you say, "Okay, I am really long on Bored Apes." It'll probably say, "Really, bro? I mean Something like that.

If you ask it whether Solana is going to outpace Bitcoin, then it'll look at the past data, look at the current news, and then it'll come up with why it won't happen probably. And if it does happen, what has to happen for it?" And then it'll say, "Yeah, it's Yeah, really unlikely to happen. Don't I wouldn't bet on it." Yeah. Yeah, so maybe like a confidence interval or something, like uh statistical probability that it it it could happen. And And so, let's let's talk a little bit more about why perps are such an effective modality at expressing some of these ideas.

Um yeah, I mean, Hyperliquid obviously has started to incorporate more assets, uh more traditional equities and these sorts of things, commodities, oil, gold, all available on Hyperliquid in addition to traditional digital assets. What is it about perps and Hyperliquid that are such an effective venue at expressing some of these ideas and allowing AI models to carry out and execute these trades? Yep. Uh I would say leverage. Uh and if I have to compare perps, I would definitely compare them with futures and options.

Uh so, you can trade with leverage on futures and options. Uh in futures, you have to carry over because they expire at the end of month. Uh so, it's a hassle. You There's an extra step involved there. In case of options, uh they're just super difficult. They're You need like super cool quants to work all time to make sure you actually make money in options. There's uh those Greeks. Uh there's so many equations, maths. Uh you need actual physics PhDs to uh trade options. Whereas in case of perps, it's just up or down, uh long or short, and uh and a leverage, and you are in. Uh everything is taken care of by the system. It's just a funding rate, which is uh pretty well defined. Uh you

can't really do that much. And uh yeah, so you are just just taking up your directional position. Uh it's like the purest form of taking a position. So, as things get simplified, they are they are just better for everyday people. Man, how how long until we see uh we see Goldman, you know, you go back to your old boss, and you're like, "Hey, I built this thing. It's ready." Oh, actually my old boss, Professor Charles, he's one of our advisors, and we do connect like probably every week to talk about what what what's happening in crypto. So, he's he's an AI expert.

He He's a professor at UCSD. So, he's like super deep into AI. He has been in AI since decades. So, I I'm the one who connects him with crypto, and he's he's super excited in the direction we are going. Very cool. And and the the Index product is on mainnet, right? It You know, it's ready for people to say their ideas and and execute strategies. And so, what is Do you have any insight into what people are currently using it for? Can Do you know like what some of the more popular strategies that that people are saying into into Index are?

There are some cool power users in our community who have been kind enough to share some ideas in our Discord. And by the way, the the product was in beta for a few weeks, and it was open to like 50 people, and they tested like thousands of strategies. I myself, since I had access to API, I just paralyzed things and ran like 25,000 strategies of my own and I figured out what actually worked, and and those are kind of live right now on Index. So, I super believe in dog fooding your own product, because if you don't use it yourself, how can you expect them others to use? So, so let me I just want to clarify. So, you were you you ran 25,000 strategies in parallel.

I I mean, Shashank, you're a smart guy, but there's no way you had 25,000 ideas off the top of your head. Did you have another model generate the ideas and then you put them into Index to to to run these strategies? Yeah, as you said, AI is farming us for ideas. So, I would just start with a very simple basic thread. Yeah, I want to trade something related to momentum with some probably volume or RSI-based filters, and then it would generate like 20 different ideas. Then we would backtest those with like different set of parameters. See if if those are working. If they are working, are they stable? Because if something works for one parameter and doesn't work for other, it's it's not really stable.

So, it would run and then it would learn where where it failed. Then it would say, "Okay, this didn't work, but this part of that strategy works, so I'll I'll combine these two." Yeah, it kind of got out of hand over time. And then I had like 25,000 strategies running in parallel. But yeah, it was a great experiment. Okay, and so back to the original question. What's working? What you know, you backtested all these strategies, you ran all these ideas, your community got in during the beta program. Now you're seeing these things in production. What are some of the most successful strategies on Index right now?

Yeah, so if this whole space is the space of all strategies, the working strategies are like few dots here and there. So, when you search for those strategies, you like kind of go like this and then you hit some good strategy here. So, that doesn't mean all strategies here are good. There's something here, but you have to start from a different point to get there. So, the point where I got the the best strategy is something like trade on momentum when the market actually mean reversion. So, if the market has gone down for several days and also in several hours and the volume right now is pretty high, then if you buy, you make money most of the times.

So, going against the trend. If you have momentum Yeah. Like Yeah, so the market has fallen for for quite a while and now the volume is high. Relative volume is high. So, it's like it's it's building up and now if you buy, it's it's more likely to go up. Oh, interesting. And this is true across a wide spectrum of assets, crypto, equities commodities. Most of crypto, most of equity equities, not on BNB. Nothing works on BNB somehow.

Yeah, but yeah, it it it works for most assets. And another great insight is don't trade too much. The the transaction fee eats a lot of your profits. So, as a strategy that that only trades when it's confident is way better than something that trades a lot. Wow, very cool. And so, you know, obviously you're you've got the infrastructure now where anyone can trade anything. Just their idea, the Index AI will effectively, you know, coordinate the execution of the strategy. Do you plan on, you know, kind of open-sourcing some of your dog food ideas? Like, you know, some of the ones that you were able to do, give people

some suggestions early on, kind of help get them started, and then they'll start to, you know, use that as a starting point and build from there? Yeah, so we do have documentation and we are working on that, but my principle is your product should be such that it shouldn't require any documentation to use. So, when you go to Index, you see several options there. Like, do you want to analyze a token? Do you want to start with some pre-built ideas? So, you are not presented with a blank screen. You have some prompt to get started with. So, initially, if someone comes there, he doesn't know what to do, they can just click, get started with, get a feel of the system, practice a few things, see

what's working, what's not. Then they can even ask questions, why is it not working? So, the goal is to be make it back and forth, rather than asking user to go to our documentation, go through it, just just interact with the AI. It'll help you create a strategy agent. It'll also tell you how likely that agent is to do well. And so, yeah, just just talk to the system, rather than read documentation. Yeah, makes makes complete sense. Now, we can talk directly to systems, you know, given these LLMs. Um I want to I want to switch gears a little bit because it it it feels like there's an untapped opportunity here.

Now that you have the the uh the portal, the front end, the user interface, if you will, to interact with these venues, I don't I'd imagine that you can now uh expand the breadth of venues. Um so, you have Hyperliquid, perps, because you have leverage at your disposal is a great modality to execute some of these strategies. You know, prediction markets also have a very broad set of markets at their disposal. Do you have plans to integrate prediction markets uh into the back end so that you can carry out the execution of some of these strategies there, as well?

Uh yeah, definitely over time because our goal is to bring this intelligence to all uh products on chain. Uh as as we have seen uh like the RWAs and perps and all all these financial products are coming on chain. It's going to be worth in trillions, but it doesn't really matter if uh if no one can actually trade those products in the right manner. Uh if you just have to uh deposit your capital to a fund and then then that fund decides where your capital goes, uh it's it's not really decentralized at all. So, I believe it's going to be agents uh who are doing who are going to do the allocation, and we should enable users to create good agents. So, they can use it, they can make their friends use use their agents,

and uh yeah, that's how we enable intelligence for everyone. And so, what do you think the market structure looks like as we build out the rest of the agentic trading economy? And and, you know, I I speculate because um the the idea is like, "Hey Claude, build me a trading bot that is going to make me a millionaire in a month. Make no mistakes, right? Everyone types this into to Claude or Index. Now we all have intelligent AI trading systems. Maybe the market gets a lot smarter, but then you have smarter market participants all competing against one another, and it becomes difficult once again. How do you think the market

structure will shake out once everyone has agents at their fingertips? All right. It's funny because that was part of our introduction video where it starts with Index making me a millionaire. It's like, "Yeah, that's not how it works, but we have something that that works." So yeah. Um So, the the way we look at it, it's it's still going to be like few people who are really good at creating these agents. They'll have those agents, and everyone would be using those agents. But those agents change over time. So, it's like how YouTube democratized video consumption. Earlier you had to be dependent on Hollywood for getting movies, and there's only few studios who

were in charge of making movies, and only everyone who was good at creating content worked there. If you worked there, you could work in movies, otherwise not. But YouTube ensured there was a platform where you could create content, and that content could be consumed by everyone. So, I believe it's going to be same for agents. Rather than just 10 firms which have been same for like several decades who were managing trillions in capital, people would be creating agents on Index and people would be putting their money into the best performing agents. The best agents are going to change over time, but everyone has a fair shot at creating a good agent. So, if you have a good idea, just go, experiment with your

agent, see how well it is doing, and then you can make it open for everyone to manage their capital through your agent. So, just make it open for anyone to to be able to manage capital through agents. Yeah. I I really like this, you know because things will continue to come out. People, you know, uh they will will generate a a meritocracy of of sorts, you know, just through their ideas. Some people are going to have good ideas. Doesn't matter if they're, you know, they're they're young, old, you know, where they come from. Anyone can have a good idea and they can embed those good ideas into these agents.

I I'd also imagine some people are too lazy to come up with their own ideas. And so, you know, let's say, you know, Shashank, you you've already kind of done a lot of the backtesting, obviously have, you know, strong AI background. I can come up with an idea, but the likelihood of it being successful, I don't know. Maybe, you know, I have some money and I want to use your agent, right? Can I I want to like I want to rent or license your agent on the Index Protocol. Do you think this is something that will will see a lot more of?

Oh, yeah. This is like the one of our major features that's not not live yet, but we are working on it. But yeah, that's how we look at it evolving over time, because not everyone can create good agents, but everyone should have access to good agents. So, it's like everyone specializes in different things and the job of a platform is to connect capital to someone who manages good capital in the right manner. So, even you could be someone good at creating agents, then create good agents. You might just want to manage your capital better, so just select based on past performance, actually look at the strategy, how it has worked and then deposit your capital there. Maybe even diversify it.

So, yeah, both part of the market are important and yeah, that's that's why we we are making it this way. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like there's a marketplace developing here for agents as well. Um once they're created, then they can do multiple things for multiple different entities. So, very, very cool to see. Um I also want to just ask, you know, we've obviously we've seen a lot of exploits as of late. It kind of feels like AI has gotten into the hands of the bad actors and and a lot of the bad actors are using AI for evil things more than the good actors are using AI for protecting and defending against those evil things.

Um you know, AI because it's still somewhat immature or naive or nascent, um presents a lot of opportunity, but it also, you know, there's been somewhat of uh some some apprehension when it comes to giving AI private keys, you know, putting a lot of money into these agents or into these models. What is the What is the security mechanism or the funding mechanism for how money's deposited into Index? Is it just a matter of, you know, I have my hyperliquid account, I fund my hyperliquid account, and then the AI has permissions to trade on my hyperliquid collateral? Can I set up limits or risk

control so that it doesn't spend all of my balance in one trade? Like, what is What are some of the parameters here that that can protect against something going wrong? Yeah. So, this is super important to us and uh we didn't want to leave this to the user because uh a platform shouldn't be like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, I can make mistakes. You you just take care of your money, keep limits, and so on." So, the way we made it is uh agent never has access to your wallet. It never It can never directly call your wallet or use your wallet. Uh it can only interact within uh a small set of parameters. It It has It's like its own sandbox. Uh there It It has its own language, it our own proprietary

DSL. So, what it it just writes code in that particular language and it it calls the APIs and it can only do certain actions and it can never send your money from your wallet to some other wallet. It can only place trades, take actions on the platform, do whatever a normal user would do on Hyperliquid and nothing else because it doesn't have access to any API outside those. So, it's it's uh yeah, so since it doesn't have access to that API, it cannot call that API and that's why it's safe.

Yeah. Yeah, makes makes sense. Uh Shashank, really really appreciate you coming on today. I'm just curious um what's the best way for our audience to get involved? Where should they go? How do they get started? Yeah, just join our Discord. There's uh lot of power users there who are sharing their experience, uh sharing some of the strategies that worked. Uh a lot of users ask why their strategy is not working and these kind people are super helpful. They always say, "Okay, try this and and not this. This doesn't really work." Um so, yeah, just just go there, uh talk to people. You'll you'll you'll learn a lot. Uh you'll learn a lot about finance, you'll learn a lot about AI and you'll create super cool strategy agents that uh grow your capital.

Very cool. Uh that's fraction AI.xyz. Try out the product. It's live. You can test out these ideas um and uh join the discount join the Discord, learn a lot more about what's going on here. Very, very cool. Shashank, thank you for joining uh this episode of AI Super Cycle. We really appreciate you coming on and and congrats on both the raise and the launch. Uh very cool to see and uh wish you the the best of luck and success here in the future. Thanks a lot. It's been a pleasure. See you next time. Thanks, Shashank.

All right. That's AI Super Cycle presented by our friends at NEAR. Uh NEAR is helping to deploy agents of their own. And now you have uh Shashank and Fraction AI helping deploy finance in particular, finance-enabled agents, AI trading agents live on hyperliquid. It's insane to see. I mean, look, stay safe out there. I wouldn't give all your AI collateral over all your collateral to an AI, but go in there, test out some ideas. It's a very cool product, especially if you're lazy.

Someone else has great ideas out there. Everyone is very specialized on a particular subject. You can execute all kinds of trading strategies on all types of ideas. Go out there, find someone that had a great idea, executed a strategy, now they're up 10,000%. Go copy trade them. Just pay them a little bit of a cut and and leverage their ideas. It's all we do here at The Rollup. We bring smartest people in the world on the show. We leverage their ideas so that all of us become smarter and better off as well. Guys, this is the end of Rollup, the end of the Rollup for today.

Really appreciate you guys coming on and and and watching the show today. We had Stable Up, Joshua Moss. We had Shashank from AI Supercycle. And we started off with a bang, our friends over at APY.X. So, another great show today. Guys, we will see you tomorrow for our final show of the week before we head over to Miami and we go live from the Capital Summit early next week in Miami. Right here, we are The Rollup. Guys, signing off. We'll see you tomorrow.