🟢 LIVE from Digital Asset Summit in NYC Day 2

Transcript

Heat. Heat. Thank you Lord. We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back.

>> I think The Rollup is one of the most premier media brands in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. >> Adding it to my library every day. >> Potentially multi-chain deployments. >> We are at Dev Connect day one here. You guys see the face? Heat. Heat.

JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. >> I'm bullish. >> He said it. He finally said it. >> So bullish. Andy's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. Heat. Heat.

Heat. Heat. Corola is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to

the top. >> Roll up is my favorite. >> People from all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry come together for the roll up. Zoom out. The institutions aren't coming. They're simply here. Taste the

golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. >> Day two. >> Welcome back to day two, baby. Let's get some love going. >> We're doing a marathon soon today, baby. We are live. >> We are live. Presented by OKX, our lovely friends. One of the biggest exchanges in the digital asset landscape. Let's give OKX some love. The biggest Asian exchange, faster, better, stronger than your average crypto exchange. These guys are putting in real work to onboard institutional products already way products on chain onto their application. Guys, let's get into today's topics. We've got a lineup of a

lifestyle. >> Should we go through this lineup? Absolutely insane lineup. Why don't we just speedun through the entire thing >> summit day two? >> Day two. We are going to start off hot with Charlie from Chain Link. Then we're going to get into Chris from 1KX. Then KPMG. We have Franklin Templeton and Ando talking about their most recent partnership. We have we have drum roll >> Viv who from Solana the marketing guy who's not a marketing guy. We have Santiago Santos the most bearish person in crypto. We're going to find out here we've got Jeff Park. Very excited to have Jeff on the show from Pro Cap. Uh then we're just going to keep it rolling. We've got Muriel from Optimum. He's g she's going to be coming on with Terrun. Uh so Tun is going to be welcoming the show. I've got a panel

with him tomorrow. R.J. from Align, Miller White House, Lavine from the Salon and Policy Institute, Mike Dudas from Sixman Ventures, Austin Campbell, Phil from Leafy. Yes, sir. And we're going to have the framework guys, Parker, the third framework guys going to be welcoming us. >> Man, closing up today. It's going to be unreal. Let's go, man. We got markets and weather. We got an institutional bull market is very much here. And as Rob mentioned, founders, CEO and more joining the show today. >> Any takeaways from day one before we kick off day two here >> guys? My takeaway is that we are not in a bare market. We are in an institutional bull market. There is more happening in this space than I have seen

in a long time. This conference as Yano tweeted was to bring optimism back to the space. It's happening. It's here. I know there's a token bare market. Unless you've been following our towel trade and our hype trade, there is there is a lot of bullishness happening here on the rollup. Guys, >> give us some give us some air horns. Let's go. >> Let's goensor man. >> Let's go. >> Of course, today's topic is powered by Treasure V hardware wallet for your self custody crypto. Guys, use code rollup10 at treasure.io to get access to treasure. Now guys, let's go into the markets and weather. Before we do, let me tell you about FRA. FRA is one of our cornerstone partners here on on the rollup. Building the infrastructure for

the future of digital money, open, stable, and borderless. For more information to start using the future, visit forex.inance. Today, guys, it is a little chilly out there today. We are not in the tokenization tower, but we are at the Javit Center. And it is 44. It is windy. It is sunny. It is We're inside, so I'm feeling good about it. And um yeah, I mean like we're we're wearing suits today. >> Every time I come up to to to New York, I somehow miss the the blistering cold or the snow. Uh I just get extremely lucky with the the weather up here in New York. So I think I'm going to be coming back here more often, which is an absolute pleasure. Uh and and yeah, I mean, look, it's a beautiful day out there. It's not as cold as yesterday.

It's also greener in the markets than it was yesterday. Let's go ahead and get over to our markets segment. Uh weather of course sponsored by Relay. >> Yes, sir. >> All right, guys. It is a bit of a bit of a green day today. If you've been watching Bidensor and Hype, uh risk is turning on again. and a bit of a a relief rally as Iran comes out today and says that they want to end the war. Oil has dropped sharply uh back under around the 90 range. Uh there's kind of this energy shock panic shifting towards more of a deescalation relief. >> Apparently they gave a gift to to the

United States. >> Uh what do you mean? >> Trump says that there was some big gift. It was very valuable. It was worth a lot of money. Didn't go into too much detail. Someone asked him whether it was nuclear related this gift. He said no. But then he said uh someone else asked if it was oil and gas related to the uh to the stra of Hermoose. He said yes. So we don't know exactly what this present is for >> the war ends. I did see something that uh Iran was telling the US troops to come closer on the ground and that they had been waiting for a while. I love the war movies. I just you know just can't imagine this stuff happening in real life. Rates and dollar are getting a little bit softer. We had Felix on yesterday. He was telling us about his kind of anti-dollar debasement thesis,

dollar rebasement. Um, my uranium position looks great today, guys. So, stoked on that. >> Yep. Um, and hype and look amazing. So, guys, key drivers here, ceasefire, negotiations, and more generally just kind of risking back on and yeah, >> I I think it's important to note that we did see some action in the equities markets as of yesterday. uh as a result of the yield issue that came to light. Uh the yield issue of course being that there's probably not going to be uh yield on stable coin balances. Coinbase took a big hit. Circle took a big hit. >> Huge hits. Yeah.

>> And and so you know we're going to be watching that very closely. Obviously, you know, there's a big presence here in terms of stable coins circles here. Uh we're going to be talking with them uh behind the scenes and continuing to monitor this situation. may be getting a successful audit from a big four auditing firm. We'll see what that, you know, kind of happens. How how that happens. I think that kind of drove a lot of the price action actually more than the um more than the news about the clarity. Uh really getting an audit. >> Yes. I think that the arbitrage around Tether people got optimistic about that and in turn shorted Circle because the actual stable coin yield stuff uh it's actually favorable to Circle uh because they can basically keep their moat of passing yield back to users on kind of like uh idle balances uh if this happens

whereas others won't be able to um we'll see >> so they can retain all the net interest margin that that they're currently passing back. I just I worry that anyone who's not gaining yield from these stable coins is going to revert back to fiat or just end up losing out on market share. >> Guys, all our markets today powered by Zama. Bitcoin at 70.9, Ethereum at 2160, chain link above 9, and near sitting at 1.3. Also ready for its next leg as this AI narrative comes together. I think Near is probably next guys. Powered by Zama, who just had huge announcement yesterday. Let's give Zama some love. Thank you. and they actually were able to form a really important partnership with a large group called T-Rex Group.

We're going to cover it in a few. Let's get into the news. Let's get into the headlines for today. But before we do, let me tell you about Near. Near is the blockchain for AI. Uh Near is a the blockchain designed for AI native applications and autonomous agents. Start developing today at near.org. Guys, we had massive news in the Ethereum staking landscape. Bit mine has came out with Maven. They are planning to be the world's largest single entity staking operation and pushing for a future of postquantum Ethereum staking. This is massive. Tom Lee acquired Pier 2, which is a one of the world's largest Ethereum staking businesses with about $6 billion dollars

of staked ETH, and they are now going to be building out a massive Ethereum treasury. Here's my take. Tom Lee recognizes that Ethereum needs to go to the postquantum world. Tom Lee realizes that he is one of the largest stewards of the Ethereum protocol and so it is his it is in his best interest to push forward the postquantum efforts as described by Justin Drake forward for the Ethereum protocol. This is not a charity business. This this is not a a little uh you know handout. This is Tom Lee putting his foot down and saying, "We're going to be one of the largest Ethereum operating companies in the world and we're going to push to make sure that this asset is postquantum secure." And I think that is one of the most important things that Ethereum has

over Bitcoin right now. And this is a massive win for Bitmine and all Bit Miner shareholders. >> As of uh 5:00 p.m. on March 24th, that was yesterday, Bit total stake stands at 3,42,643 ETH. That's almost $7 billion of ETH that is currently being staked. Uh, Bit has staked more ETH than any other entity in the world, which is absolutely incredible. It's really no surprise that they're going to be verticalizing their stack. >> And now after this, they will get more. They have an additional 6 billion of ETH joining their operation, guys. I mean, Tom Lee wants to build the biggest Ethereum company in the world. He's doing it with Bitmine and he's doing it with this acquisition of Pier 2, now

known as Maven. Congrats to Ash. Congrats to Pat and the entire Pier 2 team. >> I have I have one take that, you know, just on the heels of the conversation we had with Brian Pellegrino yesterday. You know, you know, part of the the thesis around zero the chain is that it's going to be production ready from day one. Now, we are going to be facing things that are almost unfathomable in the coming months to years. One of those being quantum security. I think it's important that we do have flexibility and we prepare ourselves for upgradability as these protocols mature and as we're faced with new challenges such as quantum. And so I think we are seeing two fundamentally different approaches here. You heard Brian talk about the Ethereum roadmap and how this is more of like uh you know very

different approach on the zero side. I think Ethereum is in the stronger position as it relates to quantum security because they have already executed successful hard forks in practice as this plane is flying. They're upgrading it in real time. If layer zero is thinking that they've solved it all from day one, I'm going to be very interested to see how these two very different approaches play out in real time as we're faced with challenges such as quantum security. >> Most definitely, guys. We're going to move into one other piece of news before bringing our first guest from Chain Link up. We talked about this with Jim yesterday of Superstate. Invesco joins the tokenization race and takes over Superstate's $900 million onchain fund.

Guys, this is massive. Jim basically came in and told us that Invesco is now the major player of Superstate. Superstate is the technology provider to Invesco and its funds. And this is now enabling Superstate to scale all of their product offerings to the entire cast of characters and customers that are using Invesco's products from the commercial side all the way to the retail side. Superstate is working on new licensing as well that will enable them to have products available to just uh not just accredited investors but to retail investors as well. >> There's a bit more here uh and we're seeing it play out across all of the tokenization protocols. We're continuing to see the the un the unbundling of the tokenization stack. And so obviously

Superstate had accumulated about $900 million into this fund. It was their flagship fund. They said, "Look, we are not asset managers. We are a tokenization enablement partner and that is the role that they're continuing to play. Then they will have Invesco as the asset manager of the fund." This is mirrored in the other partnerships and announcements that we've seen dominate. This week we were talking with Carlos Domingo, our friend of the show. Uh, Securitize was able to partner uh with the New York Stock Exchange. They're going to be uh the tokenization enablement partner of the New York Stock Exchange. And then we'll see a plethora of tokenized equities on top of this as well as lots more tokenization agents, digital transfer agents, and asset managers. Later on today, we're going to have Franklin Templeton and Ono talk

about their partnership and we're going to have them on and they're going to be explaining a little bit more about what this divergence looks like because it is very similar to what Invesco and Superstate are doing. Franklin Templeton is the asset manager. They are issuing the ETFs. Ono is the tokenization enablement partner. So, this is the pattern that we're going to continue to see play out. We are unbundling the stack and we're getting more specialization as this industry and this sector matures. So, I would I would anticipate that we're going to see a lot more of this. We're going to see more funds. We're going to see more asset managers. And we're going to see this >> complexity start to arise as there becomes more specialization in the tokenization stack. I would continue to watch out for this pattern as these funds mature. >> Guys, we're going to get our first

guest, Charlie, up here from Chainlink. He is the one of their principal leads at Chainlink. And so what we're going to talk about with him is the evolution of what Chainlink is doing and bringing these institutions on chain. So we're going to pan back to Rob and I and we're going to get started with Charlie here in just a few. Um and yeah, hear from Chainlink. We had them as one of our core partners uh during the DC blockchain summit last week. Uh, and so looking forward to kind of getting more chatting more with uh Charlie and the entire Chainlink team uh here here in in New York City. This is the beginning.

>> Let's go ahead and cut off the news and uh and and tell you a little bit because I I I am quite excited to speak with Charlie. Charlie spent uh 11 years at city uh and so he's definitely got the institutional backing and the knowledge as far as what these institutions are looking for. uh we're going to be hearing about what exactly the value proposition is of them coming on chain and how these big institutions are thinking through some of the nuances here because as we understand you know sometimes you've got you know the banking department that is at odds with crypto this is right next to the investment department or the asset management department that is looking at the volatility in this industry and are very excited about getting involved. So even within these institutions there is some combiveness and friction as we look

to the digital assets industry as a whole. Um, so I'm quite excited. I think >> we're gonna get Charlie up, Rob, in just a second. We're gonna take a super quick standby. One of our only of the day. We're gonna get Charlie's situated and sorted and then we're going to rip, guys. We are about to rip this one hard. See you guys in just a second. All right. Hey, hey hey.

Heat. Heat. Get out of here.

Heat. Heat. N. Baby. Get out of here.

Heat. Heat. Heat. down.

Okay. fun admin like who are the I I got to ask who are the winners and the losers of all of this and I we have four winners on stage obviously don't gloat too much of course >> but like yeah who like what other where where else are we going to see disruption >> well I think it's easy to start with where do we see the least amount of disruption and like I'm looking five years forward and I'm saying this as an individual and I'm not an expert, you know, yada yada. Um, I think the least amount of disruption is eventually going to be at the custodian layer. I think

the job of a custodian is going to change a little bit. You know, you record ownership of a security on behalf of someone, you record ownership of a security on behalf of someone using a token. I actually don't think that goes away. People never are going to truly want to manage their private keys. They're not going to want to like actually change like, you know, how they own things. So, I think custodians are going to change the least. I think you know on the other end of the spectrum we have exchanges this good and bad for but you know I think we're gonna move from a world in which you know in the US there's really only like two equity exchange groups and like venues where things trade to a world in which like equities are trading on like the same stocks on like a hundred different venues where it gets really easy to make

an order book and there's almost no reason why the tokens can't move into brand new systems. I think exchanges are going to change the most. In the middle, I think we have like broker dealers. Their job won't really change that much. They'll have to integrate tokens and new systems instead of, you know, just the old way. Um, and you know, against that entire backdrop, we're going to have startups trying to destroy everybody and, you know, take away their market share. But, you know, I think least is on custody. I think most is on exchange. And I think everything else we'll wait and see. >> I think wary of giving stock picks on stage. So, uh, not financial advice. Um but um I kind of slightly disagree on the custody side. So I think it's going to be a bit of a bifocation. So you'll have some people who will be kind of

more I guess first adopter mentality who will be like they they just want the raw ugly experience at all times but they love the feeling of being a first adopter and they'll want to suff custody etc. But then you'll have institutions who essentially remain using a custody uh sorry a custodian but they're essentially just see it as like almost paying you know two bits a year or half a bip a year for the risk transfer. you're paying almost essentially for an insurance premium to to transfer that risk to another kind of GI bank or something like that. So I think it's it's not necessarily I think a huge part of their book will be disrupted but some of the body won't. Um I think the the the massive disruption comes to parts of the like the plumbing which are very manual. So things like fund admin um kind of data reconciliation those things

can start to become much more automated uh and you know particularly in a world of AI can be AI assisted. Um, you know, I think asset managers like ourselves are probably beneficiaries in some regards because we can streamline our back office um and be a beneficiary of the utility u be that kind of collateral management but also around kind of fund structures and uh underlying and we might you know choose to be self- custody for examp and benefit from that but I think we're also threatened on the perspective which is that if you are lowering the access to tools like collateral management you're also lowering the access to uh the hurdle rate to access for to those instruments. So, we might also be threatened from the perspective of like having almost like a a Robin Hood 2.0 phenomenon in our

structure. So, we need to be wary of that and making sure that when we're charging management fees, we're adding alpha for that. So, there's kind of a we need to stay to the fire on that approach. The one that I think is the most interesting who will um who will be really threatened is around the distributors. So um less the exchanges but more kind of like the stock platforms the fund platforms um particularly like in the UK hug Landown in the US like AJ Bell the Charles Schwab those sort of players because if you start to move particularly on the consumer side if it's all in wallet um >> ladies and gentlemen we are back live at D in NYC day two here at the Javis center today we are joined our first guest Charles Duncan the principal solutions lead at chain link a man with extensive experience in finance bringing

a lot of these in institutional flows and adoption on chain. Charlie, welcome to the rollup. Thank you. Chain link in DC last week was was huge. This week we're in New York. How's the conference been for you? >> Conference has been great. You know, um lot of great conversations with banks, asset managers, right? You can see that all of Wall Street is here. Um and actively talking about how to explore blockchain technology. >> Yeah, man. uh you you spent 11 years at city uh and so you've got an an extensive knowledge bank as far as what these institutions are looking for before they make a technological shift. Just curious about your experience there. Talk talk us through you know what you were doing with city and then

ultimately how you found chain. Yeah, absolutely. So, I spent uh five years investment banking on the debt capital markets desk uh and then five years as a product manager building the technology that supports capital markets issuance at city. So, great experience for how banks think about you know enterprisegrade technology solutions um and have been following the market and and knew that I wanted to get into the space. Um, and for me that was always chain link because of the enterprisegrade security that they provide for these institutions when connecting to blockchain, which is really what they care about. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do they ever, right?

I actually put out a tweet that said, "If the tokenization thesis is correct and trillions of dollars of assets move on chain in the coming years, which company will benefit the most?" and folks had a variety of answers, but it was around lending markets and DeFi protocols, exchanges and oracles. >> Yeah. So, I I I also do think that uh traditional finance institutions are well poised to benefit from this as well, right? Um part of the benefit of blockchain technology is um increased efficiency, right? I saw firsthand building capital markets technology how complex it can be, right? um each bank spends tens of billions of dollars each year on on these technology um systems

and so being able to have more efficient markets um and reduce your tech spend is going to greatly benefit all of the participants that are here this week. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Uh couple of the most uh prominent announcements this week have been from the tokenization partners and the asset managers that they're working with. Uh New York Stock Exchange working with Securitize Superstate working with Invesco. Um, I'm curious, you know, it seems like there we're starting to get more competition and more specialization in the tokenization market, but oracles are underpinning a lot of this. Chain link, you know, can power tokenized equity feeds. You guys are working with S&P on some stable coin things. Just talk us through is there kind of this competition layer on top and you guys are just powering it all very similar to DeFi.

>> I would say that's a great way of putting it, right? We are the infrastructure that is underpinning bringing data and connecting systems on chain, right? I'll say that um all of these institutions are enthusiastically um investigating how to do this right and whether you're just bringing data on chain we did with uh S&P bringing their SSA scores on or if you're orchestrating systems uh you need the reliability that chain link has proven that it has um over the course of x many years. >> Yeah. reliability and resilience and and and it's no wonder that Coinbase comes out today and announces that they're doing a ma a major data integration with chain link. Um they announced uh order books, spot prices, per futures, e- mini futures, and more on chain link powered

by chain link. What does this mean to the community? What can you say as to why chain link is the right fit for Coinbase? And what does this kind of open up for you guys from the uh kind of uh establishment of the brand perspective? Obviously, Coinbase is a massive public company. Uh what does this mean to you and how did this kind of come about? >> Yeah, this is this is a really exciting time and really chain link's bread and butter as you guys both know, right? Bringing data on chain in a secure and reliable way uh and working with an institution as large as Coinbase is incredibly exciting, right? when they think about bringing this data on that all markets need in order to support the growth of where we all think that this is going. They need to ensure that security is first and foremost which is

what chain link provides. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I I'm just curious you know how deep this partnership goes. Um I'm also seeing here you know CCIP as the dedicated bridge uh technology that helps base communicate with a lot of these chains. Coinbase is obviously moving lots of tokens and coins given their their reconciliation process as a centralized exchange. just take us through, you know, the depth of this partnership and why chain link is selected to work with Coinbase. >> Yeah, so again, we've got data coming on chain as well as as CCIP to to bridge the wrapped assets. And so when you think about the two most critical parts for assets moving and being on chain, you need reliable data and then you need access to the liquidity of the entire DeFi community, which is what CCIP provides off the shelf, right? And so

with all the chains that we support as an agnostic infrastructure provider, we were able to provide this service for Coinbase again with the security that they require. >> Yeah, man. I I mean this is this comes off the back of a lot of this stable coin conversation around idle balances with clarity kind of yesterday circle and Coinbase took a big hit in the equity markets as Tether also announced that they're looking to get uh big four audits on their kind of reserves. I'm sure you remember the Bitfinex guy on Medium back in the day and just kind of like generally how this is is shaping up. But I guess like the one way to kind of put a bow around all of of of kind of like what's happening here is we're getting to an era where trust me bro is

just simply not enough. I mean it's not been enough for a long time but I mean even further now as we're getting the onboarding of a lot of trillion dollar asset managers this kind of transparency track record and Lindy is is required. And so I think that's all great, but if I was to push back on this, I would say what makes what makes chain link any better than just using a traditional kind of provider of of data like a a centralized kind of like uh like a database or a a pro a centralized kind of like intermediary to connect? Why are institutions or why is Coinbase going to use chain link rather than just kind of like do this inhouse or use something in a more centralized fashion? It's a great

question. So, I think that part of it is the scale as well as our depth of products, right? Obviously, when if we're just talking about Coinbase, it's data link and CCIP, but in the conversations that I'm having with banks and asset managers, um bringing data on chain is one thing, but there's also orchestration of if we're going to tokenize a security natively, right, I need to be worried about KYC, AML, how do I know that this is going to a accredited investor if it's going crosschain? you know, we have the compliance framework to support that with our also digital transfer agent. It's really a full stack of connectivity uh layers that these banks and asset managers can use as Lego bricks, right? Um so rather than doing a peace meal pulling together different vendors, having a non-scalable go to market, you

come to chain link, we're able to provide the full service uh in a cohesive fashion. >> Yeah. I'm curious, taking a step back, zooming out a little bit. Um, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty out there in the world right now. Um, you know, Andy, you put out that tweet as far as like if the tokenization thesis is correct. I I think, you know, just kind of toying with the idea that it is still an if. A lot of people here believe it's a when, it's inevitable, but, you know, some of the uncertainty could put some slowdown or obstacles in the way. I I'm curious if if you know the United States, you know, faces a recession or there uncertainty blows, you know, out of proportion, do you think that tokenized equities is going to take a hit? Do you think we're going to end up slowing down the tokenization wave just

to kind of face what, you know, could be more pressing financial circumstances? So, just speaking from my own experience, right, we've seen plenty of bare markets, right? And when I was at city on the desk, every time one would happen, you'd hear bankers go, I knew that was nonsense, you know, on to the next one, whatever. >> Right. >> Exactly. Um, I will say that, uh, this year, you know, October 10th changed none of the conversations, right? It is. Yeah. Markets go up and down. Totally fine. Let's continue with the path forward, which is really the infrastructure that will underpin all of this. >> Got it. Yeah. And and and just quick followup, how much do you think things like like 247 market access, hyperlquid, you know, the price discovery that is now happening on chain, whereas, you

know, previously there was no price discovery, markets weren't even open. How much do you think that could help fuel and push forward the economy because it does become more efficient? Is this something that institutions are taking seriously? >> Certainly. And I think the most important aspect that they're focused on is cash onchain. So we know stable coin providers but all of the banks are thinking very hard about how they handle tokenized deposits right and then collectively as an industry how do we maintain singleness of money because when cash can now move with the velocity that it's supposed to of you know 24/7 there's no T plus2 for a wire settlement now you have all of these asset managers pension funds interacting natively on chain they may not even know that they are but they just know they can move

cash as needed and that I think will be what is required before we see a explosion of tokenized securities because at the end of the day they're the ones buying it. Um and so it's immensely important for I think our economic growth to bring cash on chain first. >> Yeah. Interesting. Um kind of a a different topic here. You guys are bringing S&P risk data on chain and I think this kind of brings us to a interesting parallel here where there are S&P global has a ratings agency as part of its kind of offerings right you know it does billions of dollars per year just on their ratings agency it's kind of ironic that the rating agency also is ran by the person who runs the index and a lot of the uh platform there but how does chain link think about becoming like the ratings agency for um

instit initutions on chain, right? Because you guys sit at this very interesting point in between the two. Not that you know this is a new product or a new launch, but talk to us about like what the ratings are that institutions are looking for for onchain safety. Like what does that actually look like? >> So bringing ratings uh onchain and and working with the ratings providers is really table stakes for robust securities issuance on chain. So, you know, back in my debt capital markets days, I sat on the investment grade desk. You have asset managers that have a mandate that can only buy certain rated assets, right? That doesn't change just because they're onchain. And so, bringing that data uh to market participants in the place where they're playing, which will be this this onchain future, will be required again before we see this robust uh issuance. So, we're

we're slowly laying the bricks for this future, and Chainlink is the one that's underpinning all of it. Yeah, >> you you've seen the fear greed, you know, like index, right? I'm just curious if you could put this tokenization super cycle that, you know, we find ourselves in on the fear greed index. Are we closer to fear or we closer to greed? >> Man, that is a that's a tough one. I I think I'm going to kind of pivot in my answer and just say that we're we're so early days. I know that it's very exciting and we have a lot of headlines, but there's so much more to do and so much more to come that I think are h is happening quickly that um it's almost it's almost too early to tell. We don't have enough data points.

>> Okay, so just quick follow up here is like what more to do because we've seen so many announcements asset managers tokenization like every asset goes on chain. And I think at a high level people understand what that means. But what how do we get there? Like if you could put in sequence the stepping stones to ultimately put every asset, you know, I'm not going to ask you to walk through all of this off the dome, but >> yeah. How much time do we have? >> All right. But like what are what are some of the the things that you're most focused on? What do you think is most important as the work that we have to do as we're seeing, you know, all of these headlines? Yeah, I'll I'll say in order of importance, it's cash on chain so we can bring that demand because just if we're tokenizing a security, who's going

to buy it? The cash needs to be there. Again, great for the conversations I'm having because these banks have spent billions on core banking systems. These need to connect also to central banking systems. Come to chain link hidden API. We handle that orchestration for you. The next is going to be handling corporate actions and all of the um maybe less sexy features about a tokenized uh security right. If I need to figure out a proxy vote or a share split, how does that orchestration happen? Where does that business logic sit? Chain link allows banks to maintain that business logic and not have an extorminant like gas fees uh and handle that orchestration. And then once those are laid now, we'll start seeing native bonds and equities issued in force. The >> these are some of the things that we don't hear about, you know, the less

sexy version uh uh you know, benefits of of bringing these things on chain. So, you know, a proxy vote. I I'm of the understanding you know equity holders right now very low voter turnout it's a very high lift thing to do mail all these things people don't respond how much easier is it what is the benefit to corporations that are doing some of these proxy votes on chain >> so >> is this what a Dow is supposed to be >> I I would say that this future um would be rather than your shares um immobilized and going through broker dealers to which you which you can do but it's complicated if I them directly on the share registry, right? Then I have the benefit of um monetizing that vote without going through all these extra steps and a bunch of paperwork, right? So, um let's say there's a vote

that I don't particularly care about, but I hold the share. We talk about this feature of extracting monetization value of I could sell my vote just for one day to someone that does really care, who also holds shares, right? And so that is sort of science fiction right now. But as we move on chain, we're going to see ways of securities interacting directly with their owners uh in in a way that honestly we can't even think of right now because they just haven't been invented. >> Charlie, that is really really interesting because it sounds a lot like the convex curve bribe wars that we saw a lot about in DeFi somewhere where people were, you know, selling the future emissions and the voting rights in order to bribe more incentives towards their protocol. But it's happening at an institutional level. If

they do this with corporate stocks and equities, then you could see those sorts of application layers on top of a an asset class that is 10x 100x larger and those applications that business logic still applies. I I'd be really curious to see that application in action. >> Yeah. And it is it's it's very exciting. And when you say at the institution level, the hardest challenge that they need to solve is still maintaining um all the legal and regulatory compliance that they have to, right? And so we are actively helping them with that orchestration of ensuring that we can build this exciting future but also that they're totally compliant in doing so. >> And and how much different is uh central banks versus doing that at the corporate institutional level?

>> Uh you know they're equally interested. They're just their time the scales at which they move are just slower. But the conversations and the velocities that we're having these conversations with are active and and pretty frequent. It's just, you know, a much bigger scale that they need to think about. So, understandably move slower. >> And, and is there any case studies, just a couple of shout outs to your favorite central banks out there in the world using chain link? >> I, you know, I like them all so much I can't pick a favorite. Okay. >> Um, Charlie, can you tell us some of the more like, uh, frequent questions that you're fielding, like the unanswered questions about like how does something work or what is the right way to do X or how do you think about why? like when these allocators and in institutions are

asking you about like whether it's to uh tokenized stocks or equities or cash or stable coins like what are some of the common uh questions or misunderstandings that you're you know used to answering? >> Frequently I um find myself describing why a decentralized oracle network consensus is so important for blockchain because I think there's still a misconception at a lot of these institutions. um that a blockchain is just a database as opposed to an immutable record. So it's you know why can't I use my API and just put this on chain myself and it's now having a conversation of you know if it's just one data fail point this creates massive risk for you as an institution right whereas if you leverage the chain link decentralized oracle network to reach

consensus right this is why we have shown year after year why we're so reliable um you're now able to trust the data that you put on chain uh is immutable and verified >> got it so still kind understanding the consensus mechanism of blockchain design and why it's needed. >> Absolutely. >> Which is, you know, they haven't existed in a world where that's been any sort of uh like the consensus is is often unilateral or it's just or it's kind of like multiple databases confirming ledger entries, validators, nodes, etc. And understanding the importance of like the immutability of that, I can understand how that would be a little bit of a new kind of like learning curve there.

>> Yeah. Um, and what's exciting though is that all of these institutions are very eager to learn. Right. Right. These these conversations are no longer why should I do this? It's how should we do this, >> right? And it's how can we do this quickly, right? Because it's, you know, Invesco has just partnered with Superstate and the NYC just uh announced a partnership with Securitize. So, if I'm a NASDAQ, I'm like, all right, well, you know, who am I working with, right? and S&P futures just went on hyperlquid through uh trade XYZ. >> Call that institutional FOMO, >> right? And it's happening. >> Yeah, absolutely. Which is great, right?

We want the FOMO so that people come uh and it feeds a lot of the the interesting conversations that we're having. We are uh benefiting from again being an agnostic infrastructure provider which really resonates with with these institutions um to help them accomplish whatever use case it may be. It may be payments. It could be securitizing assets. They may just be trying to figure out how a proxy vote can be done on chain. We're here to help all of them. >> Yeah. And the suite of products from the channeling side has grown significantly such that for most any institution that you speak to, you typically have something that can help them. >> Yes. Yeah. I have not come across uh an instance in which we don't have a Lego brick that they require which is also a lot a lot of these institutions maintain deep digital asset teams and so we're also very happy to say you guys have

built a great working product here you just need the last mile let us help you with that right >> I I'm curious you know given that you guys are an a agnostic team and and helping to to support a lot of this via the infrastructure that you've built at chain link how important is clarity act regulation ultimately for the progress over the entire industry, but given that you guys are agnostic, whether they're securities, commodities, does it really matter? >> So, I I will say that I I care about not trying to do a pun here. I care about clarity as a concept, not necessarily a law, because it will allow institutions to interact and know the risks and and trade-offs where right now if it's ambiguous, it's hard for them to come in enforce. As soon as we have regulatory clarity, not even necessarily that law,

just in general, right of how they can interact, that's uh removes another blocker from them coming in and force. >> Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. >> Yeah. Man, I mean, last thing for me, how long have you been at Chain Link? >> I've been here for about nine months. >> Okay, great. And through this evolution, what do you want to see from Chainlink as a as a team, as a brand, as a protocol going forward in this kind of like massive institutional bull cycle? What do you want chain link to really excel at and and fulfill in these coming years? >> I would love for us to continue to be the infrastructure provider for these uh you know obviously the the main headlines that are very exciting but all the back mundane back office things that I lived and breathed for a while that are very complicated to solve that is

where I think that we provide a great product market fit when it's complex and needs to be brought on chain that is our bread and butter. >> Yeah. Beautiful. >> Awesome Charlie. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Hope you have a great conference link. It's always a pleasure. >> Absolutely. Have a good one. >> Yeah, we'll see you next time. Enjoy the rest of your conference. >> A lot more to come here. We're going to take a super quick commercial break and we'll be right back with our next guest, guys. Stay tuned. Special guest coming on. Guest 2018 um was uh being regulated and great tech was just enough and and a venue

that familiar with. So uh even things like uh service levels you know the the service level in that I experienced in the crypto world personally you know when there's an issue can take uh hours to get back to you in traditional finance in equities or foreign exchange is you know things have got to be sorted in a second. So um we you know dealing with Elmax where they've been familiar with the name for 15 or or more years um certainly makes it more comfortable. So the transparency the uh matching logic that's you know public and they and they understand it um all add up into that user experience.

>> And uh one of the more uh the more recent products I've become familiar with is the Omnia API. Can you tell us a little bit about the the unified API offering there and uh does that target audience change a little bit than the the rest of the exchange business we've been chatting about? >> Yeah, very much. So, Omni Exchange has uh been in stealth mode for maybe two years, been live for a year and only just publicly announced. So, it's uh you know what we call our our future finance department. It's a uh a sharp sharp uh small team of people that have developed an API that uh crosses all our markets.

So you know foreign everything we we do foreign exchange crypto stable coins uh ties it into a single API and uh with routing logic you you can choose to settle instantaneously onchain settle offchain via rails and um uh it's powering uh some crypto debit cards some uh charity donation type things these guys are going you know well we've been talking to the 40 banks in the world. These guys are going to mobile phone congresses and uh all sorts of stuff that's different than our our traditional client base. Um it has no scheduled downtime at all. It uh allows trades down to one cent or one penny um

247. So it's it's different than the traditional markets that we we've operated in before. So is the end user here more of the sort of like a B2B product then and it's meant for other products to get built on top of essentially. >> Yeah, very much so. And so I'm a customer of the theirs in a way to allow my clients to be able to exchange stable coins. Uh >> all right, ladies and gentlemen, we are back in New York City at D2. We've got Jacqueline Melanick here. Special appearance before her amazing panel, >> friend of the show.

>> She was on with us in DC. They just released their Crypto in America annual episode um with chairman >> SEC SEC Chair Paul Atkins. >> Chair Paul Atkins. >> I got you. Yeah. >> Give us the give us the rundown. What was the key takeaways? Obviously, his his policy framework has shifted so much. What was, you know, some of the key points there? >> Yeah. So, we had him on on Friday after DC blockchain summit. We were going to do it in person, but he had a flight, so we're like, listen, whatever. We'll do it virtually. Um, but it was kind of a a full circle moment for us because it was our one-y year anniversary of Crypto in America and we had SEC uh Commissioner uh Hester Pur, oh my gosh, I should know this on on the podcast a year ago. So, it was kind of nice to have this like,

okay, annual SEC appearance on the show. Um, and so when we had Paul Atkins on, obviously he took this position and he essentially was talking about, you know, the SEC and CFTC kind of like working together now. how it's no longer so fragmented and they're really trying to move forward uh on the the policy front that they talked about last week. And then he also commented a bit on like the Gary Gensler era of like regulation by enforcement and how that's kind of in the past um and then like what they're really trying to do now. Um so I mean it's it's all the balls in their court and we'll see how everything pans out. I've heard mixed reviews on the the SEC CFDC kind of proposal. Um but I think the the main thing here is that we're getting clarity and guidance and that's

key. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was landmark, you know, guidance that they put forth last week when we were all in DC. Um, obviously the the the thing is always what's coming up next. Did he give you any hints? Any any anything that he dropped as far as like, you know, what we can look forward to? >> Um, I think maybe like a brighter future is kind of like the take on this, right? Um, and then in terms of like what's next, I guess we'll kind of see like with the Clarity Act coming into play. Um, and then like the variations under that in terms of like market structure, uh, stable coin yields. I know we saw something yesterday. I didn't read too in depth about that, but didn't look good for Circle Stock.

>> Yeah, did not either. Yeah. Or Coinbase. >> Um, >> yeah, that was weird. And Tether had their kind of uh big four auditing announcement. I think that's kind of what drove it actually. >> Um, Jackie, we are here and it feels like we're in not a deep bare market like in this room. I feel like I mean there's a lot of energy, excitement, partnerships, tokenization, stable coins, everyone's kind of like the institutions are here, they're coming on chain, it's happening. Um, how would you describe kind of like the sentiment at D? And just generally like what you're seeing in conversations like are folks more excited, less excited than you expected? Like generally what's your take on the state of this kind of sentiment? Yeah, >> I would say the the vibes here are a lot

stronger than uh some of the other conferences I've attended recently. I think the DC blockchain summit one was also very optimistic, but in terms of like the type of people in this room, it's very different. That one was very policyheavy congressman, whereas this one, you know, we got the suits. Everyone here is like dressed pretty nicely. Um, you know, there's some people casual, but like I mean all three of us are dressed up, right? And it goes to speak to kind of like the caliber of the people that are here. And even the conversations I was having yesterday where we're mostly with traditional financial institutions. Like I'm not talking solely to crypto companies anymore. I'm talking to banks, asset allocators, uh, family offices, and it's just like a very different audience. Um, and I I think, you know, Blockworks has done a good job of curating this conference over the years and really

making it towards that like Tradfi, DeFi kind of uh, convergence, so to speak. >> Yeah. Yeah. We we've been calling this institutional FOMO. uh cuz like it they're just they're kind of like banging the door down, right? These institutions we saw Invesco, New York Stock Exchange, S&P, all of these guys are just, you know, they're they're trying to talk to all the tokenization companies. Those are the most prominent announcements. I'm starting to feel like this, it still feels early, but maybe like a little oversaturated, you know, like maybe there's like just feels like we're getting announcement after announcement. There's a lot >> talking about this. Yeah, the New York Stock Exchange and Securitize uh Superstate and Invesco and then today Ono and >> and Franklin Temple. >> And Franklin Templeton. Thank you. Like

I have to think of these pairings >> because there's so many. Yeah. >> Yeah. And listen, I think there's probably space for a lot of these and like even like 1% of like their total AUM is a big push into this space. Um but whether or not it actually gets traction on the flip side is kind of yet to be seen. So, so I asked uh our first guest Charlie th this just how we meter it. You know, you've seen the fear and greed index like >> Yeah. Like where are we at on the tokenization? >> The tokenization fear. >> I think there's a bit of greed on that front. Even though we're in a bare market, there feels like a lot of greed to like grab these title names and like partner with them, work with them, etc.

Um, and then it's it's going to be interesting to see like where the demand falls in that. I think Black Rockck with the Biddle fund was they were not expecting that. Like they didn't say that verbatim, but I think they were like pleasantly surprised with how big that became. And even on the ETF front with like Bitcoin ETFs, some of them were like the biggest launches for a lot of these traditional firms >> for any ETF ever. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> So, we'll see. >> Yeah. I agree though. It there's a lot of like the logo by logo partnerships happening that like feel >> you guys want to work together. >> Yeah. You know, it it feels like there's um a lot of like this building up. Obviously prices aren't really reflecting it, but this is like the kind of stuff that happens in the bear where it builds up. It builds up, it builds

up, and then you look back in hindsight and you're like, "All right, Clarity Act passed, all the institutions came on chain. We had the most uh friendly regulatory agencies ever. New Fed chair came in and literally like foreign sovereign wealth are accumulating Bitcoin as a digital gold. of course we bottomed like but right now it's hard to kind of like feel that and see that but these types of things build throughout the bear and it becomes obvious in hindsight. >> I agree with you and I also think the energy in here does not feel like a bare market at all. Um and it's not that people are like uh superficially optimistic. It's more so that, you know, they kind of see what's on the horizon and it's okay that Bitcoin's down because we all kind of know that it'll come back up and that there's like a

market ahead that really is institutionally uh enterprisegrade driven, right? >> Yeah. Um, you know, I I we realize that your time is tight here. You got to you got to pay. >> I got to go on stage. >> Liquid. Yeah. >> I did I did buy it. I told you guys I'm a woman of my word and it's down. So, you guys owe me money. >> We got it. Yeah. We pivoted from >> Hyperpping. We're ripping today already. Is it up? There we go. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. It's going >> Robbie's like, "Back to the programming enough." >> Uh, just before we let you go, any, you know, takeaways from day one or or what you're most excited about day two and day three?

>> I'm excited to see what another, uh, what other announcements come out? Uh, it's kind of a bummer that these things like don't move the markets anymore cuz can you imagine if any of those three announcements we just talked about came out like two, three years ago, it would be like ripping. But that goes to show like the maturation of the space and like Bitcoin's volatility isn't as big as it was, which I think is a positive even if it doesn't affect our bags that way. >> So, enjoy your panel, Jacqueline. >> Uh, great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. >> Nice shirt. >> Thank you. You guys look great. Always great show. >> Thanks. See you next time. >> All righty, guys. Up next, we've got as part of the institutional FOMO, we've got the head of digital digital assets, a manager of digital

assets at KPMG. Uh Christopher, sorry, that's not Christopher, it's Greg. Greg >> Greg Genega. Greg, join us, please. Greg is the manager of digital assets at KPMG, a very large firm in finance, a global firm here at D2. Yeah. Talking about the future of what KPMG is doing on chain. and Greg, welcome to the show, man. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Nice to meet you guys. Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, Greg, I mean, welcome to the welcome to the dark side, man. Welcome. This is madness. Welcome to the madness. You've caught us at a uh sport coat and suit time of our life if you've been part of the show the last five years. Uh this wasn't exactly the case. >> Past the hoodie phase.

>> Yes, past the hoodie as >> great. How long have you been with uh KPMG and when did you guys start your digital assets arm and um how's that going? >> Sure. So I've been with KPMG coming up on four years. Uh but we've been in the space for about 10 years, right? So a few of our clients started uh adopting and custodying digital assets that long ago 10 years ago and we were actually one of the first one of the first audit firms that basically had to figure that out. There was no guidance. There was really not not not a lot of certainty on how these things should be accounted for. So we got really lucky that that we were one of the first to kind of take that in and you know we didn't abandon our clients. We're like okay we're going to work with the we're going to go on this journey with you to understand this

and and because of that we've seen immense immense growth in our in our digital asset practice that's that's effectively only grown uh o over the last 10 years. >> So KPMG is one of the big accounting firms. You guys do a lot of consulting with helping your clients and and I would imagine and I'm curious to hear hear from you, you know, since you have a large customer network. A lot of these companies and teams will approach you with first questions, you know. >> Yeah. >> They just to even formulate what their entrance into the space could look like >> exactly. >> What are when you're talking to these companies and it's a first touch point, what are they bringing to the table? Is it just pure curiosity? And if so, what do you where do you have them start?

What do you introduce them to? >> Yeah. Well, it really depends on what on what their needs are, right? So, basically big four is generally it's it's audit, it's accounting, it's tax, right? it's regulatory, governance, risk, etc. It's all these types of things that pretty much all large companies need at some point, right? So when we're we're talking about this that this ecosystem specifically uh it could be right now we're seeing a lot of interest from a lot of theuh traditional finance institutions gibs super regional banks asset managers wealth managers payments companies like you know based on everything that's been going on the last few years we're getting a lot of intake from them from them and like to guide them on their journey. They're like you know oh what what is everyone saying right now? What what are folks doing? How are people taking their their first

steps? Uh so that that's that's a big big uh inquiry currently. Uh but you know there's a lot of cryptonative blockchain native funds and firms and infrastructure companies and miners and all sorts of people that you know they they they need to do their taxes, they need to do their audits at the end of the day. And so they want to make sure that they that there's a companies out there that have the right technology that have the right credibility that you know they they have a staff of experts that that they know can understand their business. Uh and so so generally it really just comes down to you know what what what are their needs and then exploring like how we can best help them. >> Yeah. So we saw Tether uh announce that they're looking actually to hire a big four firm. You know I'm not going to ask

you if it is KPMG um to do their audits right for their uh entire stable coin business, their reserves, all of their equity holdings, uh their stakes in other businesses, uh their treasury holdings, their entire, you know, nine yards. They've got things uh in El Salvador, in in Switzerland, in um all over the globe. What does that even look like? Like how does one like take us through what a audit for a company like Tether would look would look like and like what what does the market want to see from that audit basically that they are backed that they have enough capital but like what does that process look like? What would that actually look like in practice? Yeah, I'm not not sure about them specifically, but I I could just say broadly for for companies that

that custody digital assets that have smart contracts or they create uh digital assets, you know, your example like a stable coin is, you know, basically a smart contract on these permissions blockchains. And so making sure that that we have effectively the the technology uh that we can on a third-party basis verify that what these companies like what they are custoing they are custodying that their that their security and their controls are are up to snuff. Um and you know you think about what uh you know an audit consulting firm does like you know we're that we're that third party right we we sell trust right we're we are that that those folks you bring in to basically look under the microscope making sure everything is good 1 plus 1 equals two.

uh you know of course we we've seen many things in the past most of the legislation coming out coming out of since the you know since the the 1920s or Enron and th those things you know a lot of a lot of those were create created uh these engagements that the market need needed to you know we're there we're there to promote capital efficiency you know market u capital formation in markets uh so so the the the markets need this information investors need this information the regulators need to make sure you know that there's no disasters etc So, so we're there to to basically, you know, make make help those companies on their journey to give their investors confidence to give the market confidence. Uh, and so no matter what kind of company you are, you know, if you if you do custody digital assets,

you need to make sure you're bringing on a partner that has the right technology processes people to to to look at it. >> Take us take us inside uh the company a bit. You know, personally, what what is your day to as a as a manager of digital assets at KPMG? what does your day look like, you know, on a day-to-day? >> Yeah, so I'm kind of like a a jack of all trades. I'm mainly in the audit practice, but uh I also help a lot on the advisory side as well. So, sometimes it's sometimes it's internal training, right? Sometimes it's it's uh you know, maybe we want a new client, some of the auditors need to get up to speed and it's just talking to them, guiding through them, you know, this is how a blockchain works, this is this is what custody is, these are the type of

controls that that we would expect. Um so there so there's internal training. uh there's providing thought leadership to external entities. I've actually spent quite a quite a lot of time uh over the last few years talking to like seuitees or finance departments uh who might not even be like a like a crypto native or a blockchain native firm just to tell them like hey here's what's coming like here's this things here these things called stable coins right uh here's here's this thing called tokenization here's how this might how this might disrupt you know your business or finance coming up so having having those conversations just providing those insights to our clients uh clients is a big one I'm flying out tomorrow to basically do do exactly that uh with the client. >> Uh uh the advisory side right now there's a lot of interest uh looking at like enabling tokenization is a huge

huge topic right now. Uh so all again all those examples I mentioned for a lot of asset managers and banks that they're looking at their first their first steps like you know looking at the the wise like like why are people doing this? What's what's in this for our business? And then once they kind of see see that benefit it's okay how do we get started? How do we navigate this? So talking talking to all of them and and helping with their with their governance and such. >> What sector of the current financial ecosystem do you think is the most ripe for disruption of you know by tokenization? >> Yeah. So what I I don't know if I call it disruption. I feel like it's an augmentation almost right because I I feel like the the traditional plumbing like there's always going like it's always going to exist in a in a certain way. I feel I feel like this is just

another another bridge, another settlement layer, right? Another liquidity layer, another efficiency layer that they could augment into the into the current system. So that there's there's just there's just different whale different rails, different ways to to to get access to more of a consumer base. End of the day, we think about like why we're all here and and what what what the value proposition of a blockchain is. And in my opinion, it's it's essentially a settlement layer, right? Essentially all you need is internet connection and you have access to this global financial ecosystem. No centralized intermediaries, right? You know, you look at emerging markets uh where there's a lot of you know there's a lot of instability in the in the globe right now, right? They some emerging markets they they can't trust their banks or they can't trust their their governments and stuff. So you know if

they if they put if they have access to internet through satellites or something like this and like all they need is a private key now they're in a global financial system. And so when you when you when you're seeing those use cases and that adoption happening there, then you think about the traditional ecosystem. Well, it's like well now now there's ways that we can give access to more of our markets more more broadly. Uh and of course all all the the settlement uh benefits and disintermediation. When you have disintermediation, you know, that generally has an element of lowering costs as well. >> So so we have settlement layers now in the current financial system. Where do those fall short if the primary value it's settlement value? You know, where does the current settlement fall?

>> Yeah, I I think it's I I think it's there's a give and take depending on what your needs are, right? I I would say, you know, clearly if speed is of a necessity, then that's where a tokenization could really shine. Um, you know, one of my one of my favorite examples, uh, the the 2022 UK guilt crisis, if you're familiar with that, right, where effective effectively the, uh, the rates on UK treasuries kind of were very, very volatile and there were a lot of pension funds that were very exposed. They had, you know, money market funds which considered to be very safe. You know, they effectively had like a margin call at that and it caused central bank intervention for that. But if you were if they were to be able to have tokenized money market funds, you know, they may have been able to address that address that kind of systemic issue

much much quicker might have prevented some of that central bank intervention. So just having more velocity and fluidity of the transfer of assets is generally only beneficial. Now there are going you're still going to have wire transfers. You're still you're still going to have a you're still going to have all the things where maybe you know maybe speed isn't isn't that important. Um, and they're still gonna they're still going to work fine. Uh, it's just, you know, it's just going to be a world where there'll be more options. >> Yeah. Yep. When it comes to actually, you know, having more options, having kind of like a traditional settlement engine, a traditional uh equities market for example, and then something like stable coins or or something like tokenized equities. How do you see the the transition occurring? Right. It's it's starting very slowly now. But from your perspective from from the

consulting side, from KPMG side, like what is the what are the core drivers here of this transition? Is it just purely like a a monetary opportunity? Is it a a kind of catching up with your competitors? Like where do you see the core drivers of the transition uh into this new kind of like multiaceted world where there's different ways to do kind of like the same thing? Yeah, I I think it comes down to a few things. For for one, it's the the maturation of the technology, right? You know, the these blockchains, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, said they've been they've been running for over a decade, you know, like unhindered. So, you know, they they've kind of stood the test of time there. So uh I think a lot of folks will sit will see it's like okay like this this is working as a settlement layer and but and a lot of these institutions

even way before any of like a lot of the regulatory momentum that's happened in a couple years they've still been building on this technology for for quite a long time right and still been taking advantage of of some of those things it's just now with the the the regulatory updates some of the more uh recent guidance from US regulators of course we had the Genius Act last year it's now giving more options more rules of the road, more comfort for people to to engage. And so now that you kind of have, you know, at least at this moment like a green a green light to experiment, to innovate, uh, and people are seeing like, yeah, exactly where where is where is the opportunity here, right? So again whether whether it's a disination the saving them costs lowering the settlement times and expanding liquidity you know the

composability you know bringing in DeFi avenues like you know what whatever is most valuable for what whatever the company is that looking at it you know there's there's more more options to explore now >> and do you guys see this as a new avenue of business for KPMG2 right like if Tether is going to go to a big forward firm and get kind of a stamp of approval then you ought to think that like okay there's going to be other large digital assets companies that are like, well, we also need the stamp of approval because that's what Tether is doing. This is going to open up a whole new line of business for you guys as we have a, you know, the the next evolution of of the space. If you're a believer, you see 10 trillion dollar market cap, 20 trillion, 50 trillion, like how do you think about opening this business for KPMG?

>> Yeah, potentially. But I mean, this has been going going on for 10 years, right? It's only been up up and to the right effectively in terms of adoption and growth and the number of companies. We look at the last year, we've had so we've had so many IPOs in in the last year, which we haven't really historically seen, right? So, it's always been kind of kind of a strategic imperative for us just because just because we we've seen that, you know, we we feel pretty good at this technology, supporting people on this technology. Um, you know, we feel like we have a lot of lot of really great clients uh that that come back year-over-year. Uh and yeah, you know, the we think the the word will word will get out and again if people need audits or help with tax or help with consulting or whatever whatever it is on the on the risk side,

the governance side, etc., you know, it's we're getting more and more cred as we add more and more clients. Um and yeah, and as more the next unicorn, the next IPO, right, the the the next uh digital asset native company, you know, they're looking to uh you know, to to to grow up and and they need to need to explore some of some of these things we offer. You know, we're there. >> Definely. I mean, that's where the space is going. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> The the only question is, is KPMG going to survive the AI accountant crisis? That's the real question here. >> Yeah. Right. Yeah. I know. >> Are you guys all going to be out of jobs pretty soon? >> Well, who knows? I mean, the thing is, Gen Gen AI is definitely something that we're uh have a is another very very

core focus of ours. Like we've invested very very heavily into that very shortly after uh you know, Chat GBT burst out into the market. So uh so we we are definitely looking at at at all avenues to create efficiency efficiencies with with with Gen AI and you know I'm playing with it quite a lot. My my panel this afternoon right after this is on the Gentic commerce right it's a really fun topic uh and so you know when you look at you kind of look at the crystal ball and see where things could go with how powerful that technology is getting how rapid it is uh it's definitely both both an exciting and a scary world ahead of us. >> Yeah. Does it make your life easier or more difficult having all these payments and all these transactions happening on a blockchain? >> Uh so in in some cases it's both. I you

know the auditability of a blockchain is is really great because there's you know you can run a node effectively and verify everything very very easily and you can run run it independent independently right instead of kind of getting access and exports and stuff and stuff like that. So in in some ways it's uh it's actually it's actually quite easy. Um, and now that we're having a lot more guidance and we're on these working committees with like the, you know, like the AICPA and other governing bodies in the area, um, you know, we're we're able to to apply a lot of the a lot of what we're learning, a lot of what we're teaching in in those areas to to make it clearer, to m to make it to make it easier. >> Awesome, Greg. Thanks so much for joining us, appreciate you having me and hope a great conference. There was

actually a funny tweet that just went out from a kind of like a like a meme account. He was like, "The worst thing about crypto right now is you actually have to act like you care about aic payments." >> Oh my go Yeah, it is quite quite a controversial topic for some reason on Twitter, right? You you have the people who who think like, "Oh, this is this is so boring. It's never going to work." And the other side like this is the future. What are you talking about? This is why this is why we're here. You know, Satoshi didn't make it for people. They made he didn't realize he made it for machines for robots. >> Yeah. Exactly. So, but we're see it's all it's all unwritten story, right? So we'll see we'll see where it goes. >> I mean with the with the advancement of micro payments you can see that

blockchains were basically meant for this especially high TPS chains. >> Yeah. Yeah. How are are we going to give AI agents social security numbers right? Probably probably not. >> That's the big problem right is the identity and like the credit card and all of that structure. So >> yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you for joining us. >> Yep. Have a guys. >> Thanks. >> KPMG is in crypto ladies and gentlemen. They're going to be auditing major major major companies. I would imagine a world in the future where uh they are actually put so someone's going to put the stamp of approval on Tether. Someone is going to do it. >> Do you I I I just want to I just want to bring up I mean you we were around when you remember Bitfinex.

>> I know. I know there's all these medium articles about them being completely insolvent. Uh not >> back in the day when they spun out of Bitfinex that was kind of the early innovators of this and then eventually it was like hey are they solvent or they not? It was Circle was always like the western stable coin. Tether was always like this shadowy eastern stable coin. This was 2018 lore for you guys. >> I know. I know. I mean, and now I literally see a world where if KPMG actually or some big accounting firm, right, when one of the big four does Tether, then I think there will be other companies forced to kind of follow in the footsteps. And I think maybe I'm, you know, getting a bit too bullish, but I think it's going to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to take a super quick break. We've got two guests, Ono

and Franklin Templon, talking about their latest partnership. We're gonna get them all set up and sorted, and then we're going to talk about what they're doing with tokenization. Guys, be right back. token layer and and and packaging it that way. Uh we have Patrick who is uh building universal tools almost that can enable privacy across many different blockchains. We have Eric who has taken that from a very chain native perspective and baked those privacy controls into the network itself. And we

have YANIC that is probably the most aggressive of the of the privacy preserving protocols in that it's all encrypted compute. So they're all different ways that you can get privacy on chain. Um so I'm expecting a very nice conversation. So maybe Katherine will we'll start with you. Um you've spent years around CBC CBDC's and stable coins and and tokenized assets and you have a lot of experience in talking to regulated institutions about coming on chain. uh what do they usually mean when they say they want onchain privacy because there's many different forms that onchain privacy can take? You can uh have confidentiality with the general public uh so it's not on a on a blockchain explorer that you can easily pass or it can be privacy with your

counterparties uh or it can be privacy uh against the actual uh the infrastructure nodes uh that they can't see what's happening. What what do institutions want when they say they want privacy on chain? >> Sure. Um I think all of the above in the sense that uh depends on the institution and the use case you're looking at. I think privacy really means uh quite different things when you get to the nitty-gritty details of how you actually design that privacy feature. And so the way we are looking at privacy is really it's a spectrum, right? It's it's not like you either have privacy or not, but it's like what level of privacy are you looking at? And we actually um just wrote a report quite recently that you guys can take a look on payments.org,

which is our website. Um and it's a report we just launched uh on privacy this Monday. So the way we look at it is actually by a 2x2 ma uh matrix in the sense there there's the the sort of um privacy in terms of identity and then there's the privacy in terms of like the amount and balances of transfer the value essentially value against identity. Um I think for some institutions they care only about say hiding the value bit but they can just have the addresses still retain as is i.e. your public addresses are being known you don't need to hide it any further. This is what we call confidentiality right in which you hide the amount you hide the balance i.e the value but you don't need to hide the identity. There are other folks who are looking at the reversal which is more the anonymity set which is looking at

hiding the identities of the sender and recipient but they're fine by leaving the uh the balance and stuff uh on chain. And of course there's the more extreme end which is what we call total secrecy which is essentially combining both identity layer and the value layer to be hidden and private. And I think what's interesting is increasingly when we talk to financial institutions that's actually more and more the desired level of privacy they're looking at because a good example is say uh you know a fund manager creating a pool of student loans and you only want to give to a subset of approved um you know entities then in that specific case if you want to do it on you know mainet on a public chain you don't want anyone else to know exactly what's going on other than the parties

is involved in that specific use case. So you want to hide both the identity as well as the amounts being involved in that specific case. So in any case, I think it's a incredibly exciting and complex topic for us to um you know to to spend a lot of time investing efforts into it and I think as Salana thinking about all righty ladies and gentlemen we are live here day two at digital asset summit live from New York City. I've got Sandy and Ian with me here from Franklin Templeton and Ono, respectively. Guys, welcome to the show. How's Dash treating you? >> Awesome.

>> It's great. Yeah, lots of excitement. >> It's a It's your time to shine, guys. Isn't that right? >> I think that's right. Been waiting for a while. >> Our day has come. Our day has come. >> Yeah, it's been a while. Well, guys, you are partnering uh today. We don't want to bury the lead. Let's just talk about what the partnership is about, why it came about, how it came about. Ian, we'll start with you first. >> Yeah. No, so as some of you know, Ando has been really on a mission to make institutional-grade financial products available to a global audience seamlessly, permissionlessly. We started with treasuries. Most recently, we did that for stocks and ETFs with our on the global markets platform. We're now listed on major exchanges like Binance and BitGet and Gate and OKX. And so

we're getting to the point where hundreds of millions of users finally have should have access to institutional grade products. But obviously we still need a partner to bring more products on chain to design custom solutions for this global investor base and that's where we're so excited to partner up with Franklin Templeton to make that happen. >> Beautiful. And from our perspective, right, we have been passionate about this wallet based ecosystem for years now, right? We launched the first tokenized fund ever back in April of 2021. So we're coming up on five years of being 247. Uh we are looking at this partnership with Ando as our opportunity to really bring more of the Franklin Templeton organization to this

wallet-based investing audience. And we really want to start with our ETF suite because this is where we have already been really investing in thinking about what are the products that are really going to drive return. So we're looking at things like gold. We're looking at things like new technologies and then you need to have basic diversification and that is something we feel like you know this audience is ready to really embrace is having a diversified portfolio so that they can be building long-term returns along their short-term uh volatility and opportunities. So we think this is a great way for us to come to market and really learn more about the investor appetite and help to shape it together with >> Yeah, I think that's amazing. I mean,

because for the longest time, we've had only crypto assets on chain. >> Uh, meaning that users have to pull funds out of the ecosystem to access other assets. I mean, every time that I do that, I feel like it's like, oh, I'm safe now. I'm going, all right, I'm going to put into my Schwab account. I'm good. But then the weekends come and we are in a regime that is very volatile and all of a sudden oil futures are are flying on something like hyperlquid or I want to quickly trade into a gold ETF. Um or I want to have access to to some yield product uh that is you know safe by means of FDIC or by means of a large bank not by means of a DeFi protocol or by a stable coin. And so there's kind of this evolving set of users. No, come on. Like I like stable coins. Come on.

There's a there's a change here. >> And so there's an evolving kind of user base here that's going to be using these products. >> Sandy, talk to us about the type of user that you're trying to reach through this partnership with Ono. What is Ono's distribution onchain really? What do you look to get from, you know, their set of users and token holders? >> Yeah. So, I think that the there's three really critical things that we feel like we're going to get through this partnership is number one, we believe that this audience is an audience that has come from the crypto world and is now starting to have more interest in the traditional investing world, but they don't necessarily understand it as well as they might understand crypto.

And so, we think this is an opportunity for us to bring the financial education that we provide all the time through Franklin Templeton to uh this audience. We're going to be doing things like uh learn to earn programs, right? Uh we think that it's going to give us an opportunity to really understand how to build >> to us a 21st century portfolio, right? Most people today think about a portfolio as 6040, 60% equities, 40% bonds, and hey, that was awesome for 1970, but it's 2026, right? >> Full stack into Bitcoin, baby. Let's go, Sandy.

>> I want I want my crypto. I want some exposure to private equity. I want some exposure to private credit. I want to see some tokenized cultural assets in my portfolio. And we want to build those products, right? We are here to deliver the product our customers want. And this audience that Ando has access to is really I think the audience of the future. And so we want that understanding. And then I think the final thing is like look Ando like Franklin Templeton has leaders that come from a traditional financial background who who understand consumer protections who understand how to build a safe and reliable system but they also like Franklin Templeton have this passion for innovation and we want to push the boundaries. I want to always be pushing

the boundaries on how do we use these rails to do more and to let our investors do more for themselves which is such a new concept that I love about this space. >> Yeah. Yeah. Ian, I think it's very, you know, a very easy tagline here is just do more with your assets, right? That's what totally >> blockchains enable. That's what Ando enables. What do you envision the kind of Franklin Templeton products coming on chain into product suite as part of the offerings that you guys have? What do you anticipate the uh growth traction to look like? How do you plan to kind of onboard folks into more traditional products on chain? You guys have a great job so far. What does that look like moving forward after this announcement?

Yeah, I think it's a great question because to Sandy's point, you're dealing with an audience that's fully on chain. Some of them may have brokerage accounts like yourself, right? But the moment you go outside the US, the odds of that dropping are pretty high. You're dealing with an audience that doesn't necessarily even know what is an ETF, right? So, you really have to start educating them first and foremost on what are these investment products, how should you think about a diversified portfolio, right? We joked a little bit about going full stack into Bitcoin and that's good, right? But at some point hopefully people made some money and then they got to diversify. But what does that look like? The 6040 model is clearly outdated. How does crypto fit into something like that? So figuring out what are these actually diversified portfolios look like? How do you think about commodities versus equities versus

crypto? What should be the blend? Throw in some fixed income in there. So really helping users educate on what it is, how we think about a 21st century diversified portfolio across asset classes and then really building the content to bring that to this audience so that they know what they're investing in. And then when there's a cryptobear market, maybe they do want to invest a little bit more into these stocks, ETFs, US capital markets more broadly. Like if you take a bit of a step back, the global wealth engine that has been US capital markets is truly phenomenal. Right? We joke a little bit about the return sometimes in crypto of an S&P ETF, but 12% over the past 25 years is a marvel. That's unbelievable. So just the fact that you can put these products all

in the hands of a global investor base, literally hundreds of millions of investors that can now self-custody these things and trade them 247. That's incredibly revolutionary. So that's why we also need a traditional financial partner who can think through how do we even create portfolios in a setting like that to give people better diversified exposure, better returns while still putting crypto in that basket of assets. >> So one of the things that we haven't quite kind of uh or you know we've been orbiting around it but investors want these products on chain they want to have a divers a diversified portfolio what a lot of uh the investors on chain sanity want to do with these assets though is they want to go do something with them uh a a lot of us have been doing DeFi for five six years we've been first to a lot of early opportunities a

lot of highly speculative highly risky opportunities but there's always a desire to create productive capital on chain it's almost like a It's almost like a culture of the crypto environment is like always trying to create maximum capital efficiency. Sometimes that increased risk oftentimes it does too far but there's always a kind of group of people wanting to do that. Talk to us about how you think about these new products, these ETFs coming on chain and then doing more with them. Do you envision a future where investors could actually borrow against tokenized equities or gold ETFs or earn yield on them? talk to us about kind of like this unlock here that you see that isn't currently available on brokerages in an offchain environment.

>> That's right. I mean, and you've hit it on the head, Andy, right? It's that every asset that sits in my wallet should have utility beyond its stated purpose, right? So, my ETF that sits in my wallet that's been tokenized by Andondo should give me the return stream of all the underlying securities that are held in that ETF. But once I have that return stream, that return stream itself is an asset. >> And I should be able to use that return stream coming off that ETF as an asset in another investment vehicle, either as collateral, either as a lending opportunity, as something that I could use to start to lever, right? I need to be able to look at every asset that sits in my wallet and think about what is the additional utility I can get from that.

And in the way that we do traditional securities today, that's really tough to do because you have to go through this know your customer anti-moneyaundering. You have to update these off-chain books and records. None of the securities are transferable uh wallet to wallet. We are a digitally native company at Franklin Templeton. Ono is a digitally native company. Um, that's why we felt there was such good alignment and we want to be able to see these tokens that is issuing have that added utility that if you were just buying the straight ETF, you would not have. So to us, this wrapper is actually enhancing the value of the ETF itself. >> Yeah. Um, then back to you, Ian. I know that has a very unique way of tokenizing assets. Um, but there's some education

that is required when we're tokenizing Franklin Templeton's ETFs and other products. What kind of actual ownership and rights do users have? Uh, folks who are holding these in brokerages are used to a certain set of rights. Onchain users are are kind of used to like you know my keys, my coins. H how do we educate and kind of what kind of rights do users of those tokenized and owners of those tokenized assets have? Yes, I love this question. There's so much debate on like how to tokenize and it's kind of funny to me because I mean for for all the listeners I guess typically there's a debate that centers around do you do native issuance native tokenization where the thing you hold on

chain is the equivalent of the actual stock or do you go for a wrapped model where what you're holding is a different instrument but it's fully backed by the actual stock. It's just not exactly the same. But the token, the rapper token that you're holding can give you full economic exposure, but technically it's something different. And I find it interesting that we're relitigating that debate a little bit because the most popular asset by far that has been tokenized is a stable coin. >> Yeah, >> that's a rapper, right? It's backed by off-chain assets and what you're holding is not the same thing as a dollar. If you want an actual native tokenized dollar, the closest thing is, I guess, a tokenized deposit. No one's holding tokenized deposits. People are holding stable coins. Yeah. And that's totally fine because stable coins can be permissionless, right? Increasingly,

they have better investor protections. And that's the same thing with our stocks and ETFs. You can have incredible investor protections as long as you structure these things in the right way. So, when you hold an Onondo token, you have what's called a security interest in the collateral. You're holding a debt product against the issuer. That will always give you a security interest in the collateral that is perfected by a third-party agent that has access to our brokerage accounts that posts daily attestations. We're always fully overcolateralized. So, the rapper token is something different than the underlying stock, but it does give you full economic exposure. It's fully backed, fully bankruptcy remote, and on top of that, it is permissionless.

>> So, you can hold it in wallets just like you hold a stable coin. You can use it in DeFi just like you can use a stable coin. If you're going to go the permissioned route, might as well hold it in a brokerage account, right? I don't really understand what we're doing there. And on top of it, if you want a native issuance, kind of like what some of the others are doing. You can't actually do that to Tesla and to Apple and to some of these ETFs because you need issuer buying. So, we fundamentally believe the rapper model is a superior model. If you look at the it doesn't mean that the other model can't exist. We we think all models should exist and then you let the market decide. The market is deciding, right? Tokenized stocks and ETFs went above a billion dollars last week as a category. Ono has 70% market share in that with 700

million. >> There we go, Ian. >> There you go. Uh pick stocks with Kraken has 25% market share and then the native issuance model has like 5% market share, right? So I I find the debate there's a lot of time spent on it. >> That's fine. I the market is deciding. The rapper model is great. It's fully compliant. We have an approved perspectus in the European Union. We're approved for secondary market trading in Abu Dhabi. Franklin Templeton has reviewed the model and is very comfortable with it. So, we feel very confident about it because it gives you honestly economic exposure to the assets and it enables permissionless access and DeFi composability in a way that a native model can never.

>> And if I could just add to what Ian said, Andy, I think that >> you have to always challenge your preconceptions. Yes. >> Right. This is what I think crypto is brilliant at is the entire crypto industry has basically said to the traditional financial world, >> hey, you say it has to be done this way, but why? >> Right? And that why I think is so important. And if you lose that ability to question the established models, then you're really not belonging in this industry. And so what is exciting to me is that I want a permissionless token that gives me these types of exposures because having that token be permissionless gives me new options for utility that I've never had before, right? And it's not necessarily the exact same way you do it in your Schwab

account, but you know what? Maybe I want something better than what I kind of pointed preach. >> Let's go San Die. So that's why we're super excited and that's why we want a partner who's also willing to say why why does it have to be that way? >> Welcome to the rollup where we challenge assumptions and ask hard questions. Ian, thank you for the answer. Sandy, back to you here. How big are we talking? How what is the TAM here? Uh Franklin Templeton is a trillion dollar asset manager firm. Obviously the total market cap of of cryptos is around two and a half trillion. onchain TVL is um is still low. You know, if we're talking just, you know, BIPS here, we're really making a big dent. How big are we thinking and kind of what's the time scale for this evolution of tokenizing a

lot of Franklin Templeton's ETFs assets and and kind of how do you expect that transition to happen? >> Look, the global ETF market is $30 trillion, right? So, let's just say we get 5% of the ETF market in additional growth from new audiences, which really, Andy, could be very conservative, but even at just 5%, we're talking about one and a half trillion more dollars coming into the crypto ecosystem, which would be a huge expansion to what we have today in terms of total value on chain, right? I think it could be much higher than that, but I don't see any reason why starting with a 5% transition over the next three years is, I think, a very solid conservative estimate to think about what this ETF opportunity alone might look like. Forget as we bring even

more products to market and extend that into completely new types of portfolios and assets. >> Yeah. Ian, last thing for you from my side. Uh, I thinko took me from around 70 assets on chain right now. 70 to 80 or 100. >> We expanded. We went to 260 recently. >> 260 recently. Okay, there we go. There we go. Always always challenging assumptions and correcting each other around here. Um >> there's I mean thousands and thousands of equities and ETFs and products on chain. Um you know, like you said there's there's um xtocks and I think dinari has like 70 or 80 assets. There's really not that many providers who have significant amount of actual quantity of assets on chain. How do we scale this to thousands? like is this partnership going to help? What does that look like?

>> Totally. I think this is where the partnership comes in and this is where I think the unique model of tokenization that we've built really helps to do that. So I think the the issue that some of our competitors historically had is when they brought a new asset on chain, they wanted to recreate liquidity for the asset onchain. >> So they were deploying like DEX pools for all these stocks. >> Yeah, it's very difficult. >> You can't scale that model. No. And there's also no reason to do that because all the reason why it's interesting to tokenize these assets in the first place is because they're so incredibly efficient and they have incredibly deep markets in Tradfi. So the tokenization engine that we built essentially is you can almost think of it like a bridge between trady liquidity that is very very deep and then onchain demand where users actually want to buy

these assets. So with the global markets platform, we can tokenize as many assets as we want. And when people buy this, the price they're paying is the same as in a brokerage account. The liquidity we have available to instantly mint these tokens is the same as is available in Trafi. So we're really not capped quite frankly in how many assets we put on chain. We started with 100, then we expanded to call it 180. Now we're at 260. Like by the end of the year we could be at a thousand no problem. It really is just like getting these smart contracts deployed and building the distribution rails and then working with the asset managers like Franklin Templeton to create very interesting problem uh products to put on chain. But the the the tokenization rails and engine at this point has been built for us to scale to thousands of assets. No

problem. >> Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful guys. Congratulations. I hope you have a great rest of your conference. It was an absolute pleasure to chat with you all and uh look forward to the ever growing tokenized asset growth on chain. Um more users for Franklin Templeton, more assets, more products for Ono. Guys, congratulations. >> Awesome. Thank you so much. >> All righty guys, we are live here day two at D. We're going to take a super quick break and be right back. Thank you guys. We are sort of isolated. And when you want to do something like smart order

routing across all of those dark trading venues within Treadfi, um you encounter the darkpool smart order routing problem. Um with shared state and encrypted shared state, we can turn all of those blackbox trading venues into lit trading venues, but all of them exist within this encrypted space, this this encrypted realm. Um now when it comes to compliance what I think is so important to understand about all of these cryptographic primitives including um the the cryptographic primitives that we've been developing over the last years is that with encrypted execution um all of this becomes multi-dimensional. So I can define an algorithm that specifically specifies

when I perform a transfer from my wallet to someone else's wallet here in the audience then the financial institution that is providing the stable coin that is being transferred should also get access to that information right and all of that happens in a verifiable encrypted way takes a few milliseconds that's it there's full privacy full cryptographic security while there's auditing in place Um and that is only the most simple um yeah system you can build with with encrypted execution. You can actually construct systems where you can have um and that is I guess more of future music um down the line in a couple of years. But the way I see this technology evolving not just within um

finance but enterprise as a whole is that we can get rid of a lot of um expensive processes um and simply define clear rules um which defines how information is being processed and what are the consequences of um what is contained within that information and only if certain rules um over which there is collective consensus um are met then this information let's say gets shared with a third party um and I think that is the future where um open open um finance together with traditional finance will move most likely um at at my heart I am um extremely cypher punk um so um I would

say um the ideal world that I see is a fully encrypted world where everyone be an individual or be an organization, right, has this ability to bring themselves into a strategically superior position by keeping ownership over all information. I think that's what it is at the end of the day. Um, and that's what we see on an individual level, but also within capital markets. >> Patrick, I might throw to you because what Yanuk is describing is a whole new system. Uh, but I get the feeling that traditional finance really wonders whether any of these new systems are backwards compatible with the frameworks

that came before. Um, are is any of this backwards compatible or is are we really just building a new world that we had better exist in for for the better for the for the better of the industry overall? >> I think the space has steered closer and further from that. I think with the early ideas of Bitcoin and some of like Zcash, some of these early like more cyberpunk things, I think it was very much like it's our way or the highway. Uh but now with like all these this focus on real world assets and stable coins, like I mean we've definitely put ourselves in a position where it takes two to tango. So um I think like you can layer on all this crazy cryptography and whatever, but if ultimately like whatever asset issuer it is has the right to stop it or inhibit something at some point, like why at it? like it's

>> bingo bingo bingo. >> It's it's a big question and like I love the cyberpunk stuff and like it would be really cool. The problem is I think there's a I mean whether or not it's true. There's a lot of people that think like uh it runs the risk of uh really aiding illicit finance and you can take a really strong position on like cyberpunk principles, but if you're if you're not willing to go down with those cyberpunk principles, like you're going to have some very very difficult conversations with some people uh from three-letter agencies. And uh you know, I I think that like the technology ultimately you have to reckon with its impact on society. And I think that um sometimes it it doesn't feel quite like the society that wants to see crypto thrive wants to see um this full encrypted world be be the world that uh

that ends up taking advantage of this technology. So uh I I'm hoping that like we get to that and I think like an internet world that is enabled by that is really cool. like if the if the user demand is like on these assets that are issued by regulated entities on chain, um it begs the question of like how much uh how close we can actually get to those ideals unless we like really rethink how those assets are actually issued or what those assets are. if we're on like a like a a massive metaverse where like nothing is actually physically tied to anything and it's like a globally native asset um where there is no true ownership like true like creator or manager super interesting u but I think for a lot of the assets we're working with today like I think you um temporal privacy is much more useful and interesting like can we

hide trades before they're actually executed u but then after executed reveal u certain information about it is much more compatible with the worldview uh that a lot of the enterprises that want to bring significant value on chain have. Um and so I think there's a question is like do you comply or do you uh choose to go the other way and I I think there's a big open question today in the in the crypto landscape. How big is that market for the let's go all the way cyberpunk because I in recent years it seems like that group of people has gotten smaller that is just not as loud anymore. Yeah. >> I mean imagine a scenario JP Morgan calls a regulator. Great news just installed some new tech. I can't see anybody's balances anymore, but a black box gives me a big thumbs up every time something happens. Like, it's just kind

of a ludicrous example, but I think it is telling that this isn't really this isn't really additive if we're trying to rotate the GDP onchain. It's all extremely additive if we're trying to create regulatory arbitrage and push the boundary and disintermediate and attack and create something alternative above and beyond what the existing system is. And that's fine. and there's a definitive space for that, but it's not necessarily the application that I don't know we're working on at Canton. So, I don't have any qualms with it whatsoever. It's just not really eligible to be applied in these contexts. Maybe yet you could add to my statement, but I don't think right now.

Katherine, I might throw to you quickly because in how I have viewed Salana's trajectory in that it really did start out as a very retail focused. It was like it was the community chain almost. It was very retailheavy big shift now towards institutional interest and that's because the inst institutional interest is here. But is there a world where if institutions are coming onchain at scale and they use Salana, where does retail fit into this? Uh and it we don't even have to talk about Salana specifically, but the chain space overall. Uh how does retail still be catered to when institutions are so

powerful in in what they're demanding? Yeah, it's it's basically two-sided of the market, right? You need retail, you need institution, and the marketplace is where they meet. In fact, I think is very important to have both retail and institutional on the same uh platform, whatever that might be in order for them to intact because when we think about institutional use cases, it's not just wholesale financial uh use cases. It's very much there's a small B2B, B2C, uh whatever you have it. I think actually just kind of again tracing back a little bit of the history uh and all of the things that happened organically I think is very interesting and I think as you asking in the question I was just kind of thinking the the growth or the tra trajectory of how Salana has evolved

over all these years sort of like on a macro scale reflects the the trends in crypto overall and what I mean by that is as I said at the very start right like SVM Salana virtual machine the Salana entire architecture was designed to be the NASDAQ and right now we're calling internet capital market. That vision has never changed. We really wanted to create a blockchain that is highly performant that can compete with all the centralized exchanges etc in a completely trustless permissionless setting and we are achieving that right right now. Now what's interesting is that now you have this amazing high performance scalable infrastructure but because this is a open permissionless

network any use case anyone can come in and build and see what will actually succeed and take off and what doesn't and so it just happened to be that there was a period in time that you know whether that's NFT or whether that's memecoins like that actually brought a lot of retail interest and it's actually through that experiment if you will it allows a lot of the retail uh liquidity to come among chain and through that experience they start to have a wallet right they start to understand uh financial literacy in a very different and interesting way that as a creator of the chain you would not have predicted that like ahead of time but it just happen organically and that's what I think about is very interesting when it comes to market forces and you just see how things go right but now as we're thinking about the future state I think

was obviously everyone acknowledge regulatory plays a massive influence in all of that prior to 2025 I I think the the the sort of the the trend is there but it's always undertone because no one dared to move into here and thanks to genius thanks to hopefully clarity and many other things. um we finally have a real shot for financial institutions to participate and of course we need to treat it very seriously because as I said without institutions retail can only you know like just in the specific corner but it's the same same case for institution as well ultimately blockchain is used for distribution purpose is used in order to aggregate a lot of these liquidity such that you know different assets as we said about composability can intact can compose can really trade against one another. This is where new value creation can also

come in and this is where I think is really exciting. If we continue to be you know highly scalable scalable, performant um and composible right from that design I think ultimately is the market forces to really tell us you know what's the next trend where is the real value is going to stick. >> Eric, I'm wondering your take on that. uh because Kenton it obviously has a focus. Uh can can you learn from the retail market forces anymore or is it the institution's game?

>> I mean uh I'm I know I look 27 but uh you know I'm old enough to have lived through a lot of the early days of the internet. I I do think that we too often hold Bitcoin and Ethereum as our model for what does a successful public network look like? And I think actually the internet is a much better case study and it's gone through very similar evolution to the early days of the internet. I mean the early adopters were building their own single page web apps and blog posts and there were you know encyclopedias online and things along those lines. And then it became a co-mingled ex existence of retail uh institutional certain websites came to much larger domination than others. And I think that's just part of the general evolution. It's rare that you find the incumbent institution be the first mover. I don't think that that's a

reasonable expectation. Uh, and you know, I I heard I saw a really great Twitter back and forth with um some of the founders of Stripe and they were talking about how once they really opened up to the challenger ecosystem, they got kind of two things. One is the obvious one which is really fast feedback loops and the product just evolved much quicker. But I think more telling was that they said that those new business models that got built on top of this capability got pioneered by the challengers. And that was the part that was harder for the incumbents to kind of come up with. Well, how do I really take advantage of this? What's the value to the user? And again, just kind of a silly hyperbolic example. I always like to talk about Napster versus iTunes and Spotify. Napster, I think, even to this day is the fastest adopted

thing on the internet in our history. Something in that neighborhood. And I think it's undeniable that it completely changed expectations for what it means to consume that form of media, but it wasn't Napster that won. And the risk that it comes with interacting with a fully decentralized regulatory arbitrage gray zone enabler of a change is fundamentally different than the safe contractual delivery of that to me in a format that I can consume at whatever pace I'd like to. And so I think that this is a natural evolution and I'm I'm I'm like unbelievably supportive of all this stuff that takes place in the in these broader ecosystems that are retail first that push the envelope of what's possible. We get boom and bust cycles and experiments that do and don't work.

But it's always changing the perception of what's possible if our economy is on chain and it serves as a really strong um light to help us understand well what should we be enabling. So, I I I take tremendous inspiration from everything that takes place uh especially the failures and and even from places that people don't anticipate. Like I' I've been pretty public about how there's far too much hate for things like JPCoin in this audience maybe not so much, but I mean if you go to the more cryptonative uh ecosystems, that's a pretty common whipping child for for the market. but what it took for them to build the internal institutional knowledge to be able to engage in these ecosystems, how can they do it, they're going to be able to react to opportunities unlike any

other institution just from the the investment that they've made to date. So I I think there's far too much um like religious debate in this space instead of accepting whether it's retail for retail sake, decentralized for decentralized sake, institutional and highly centralized. All these things have a place on the map. Finance is deeply heterogeneous. capital markets are deeply heterogeneous. There's a lot to learn from all of them and there's no one-sizefits-all. So, yeah, we're we our go to market is just B2B first, but we will we do have tons of retail use cases going on in the network right now. Uh just people are not as aware of it as you know the big names that we have been lucky to work with. >> Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today. Please give our wonderful guests a round of applause.

Thank you so much everybody. Thanks so much to our last panel. Next, we've got a talk on D5 vaults and building earn products for institutions. Uh coming up, guys, I want to give a warm welcome to our next guest, Jacqueline, Sand and John. No, no, come on in. I think I think you guys are friends, right?

>> Hello everyone. Happy Tuesday. We are almost at the end of the day, so we're saving, you know, the best for last. Uh, I am Jacqueline Melnik. I'm the founder and CEO of Token Relations. We do a lot of crypto investor relations for a lot of the teams in the space. And more importantly, I am joined here today with John Zetler, Kraken's director of product for ER, and then San Ragupati, the CEO of Veta. It's my pleasure to have you guys here on stage. And to start off, obviously for a number of years, institutions have been more or less eyeing on chain yield and historically it hasn't been that easy to access, but now we're seeing products like Kraken Earn, which we will get into, and other D5 vaults kind of extracting that away. to kind of set the scene here. This has become a bit of a universal trend right now. I feel like

everyone is talking about vaults all the time. So, why do you think it's droppings? It's the year of the vault. Happy 2026. >> But maybe we'll start there. Why do you think it's the center of discussions right now? Is it because they're popping up or what's the deal? Well, I think um I mean, first of all, I've been in crypto long enough to have gone through a number of narrative cycles, and to finally have the pleasure of being in the center of one when it's going is is always great. Um, and I think one of the reasons why it is very pressing right now is because number one, you're at a you're in a situation where there is a positive rate differential where like you can just earn more with vaults than you can earn in other yielding opportunities. Um, that is and for all of those who aren't

super familiar, where does the yield come from? The yield comes from over collateralized borrowing on the other side of borrow lend protocols. And if you just think about the efficient frontier, you can understand why these things are paying more than treasuries or other sort of investment grade bonds. So number one, you've got the fact that on you USDC you can earn more than you can in Tradfi. There is an opportunity to earn on other assets as well which can in in sometimes is higher than the staking yields. And then I think the other thing that's just new and fresh right now is that the infrastructure has shown up. um no better person to speak to that than Sun. But the uh infrastructure now with embedded wallets with the vault uh EIP 4626 and all the standards that have been built, they are time-tested, they're battle tested, they

hold a lot of uh TVL, and it feels like it's just uh it's time to go now that all the puzzle pieces are in place. >> Yeah, I'll just add a little bit to that, which is yield has been a universal demand in crypto and finance for ever. Literally, it's like one of three things that maybe matter. People want to send money to each other. They want to earn on their assets. And they want credit. So, yield has always been this universal product demand. I think there are three factors that have made vaults viable finally and brought them to the forefront. The first is stable coins, right? We've seen this proliferation of stable coins. Uh it's almost like every fintech, every traditional institution is looking at stable coins because it's just a more efficient way of moving money. Uh the second piece is reg.

>> All righty guys, welcome back to D day two in NYC. We've got our afternoon marathon starting now. I mean we've got 10 speakers left. Some absolute bangers. Up next we've got Vibu Norby, CMO at Salana. Uh their comm strategy has been very very unique as of late. Looking forward to having them on. Rob had a great conversation with Ian and um Sandy from Franklin Templeton. Tell me about >> three huge announcements. Franklin Templeton and Onondo, Securitize and NYC and Invesco and Superstate. And yeah, I mean it they are bringing a ton of Franklin Templeton's ETF products on to Ono's product suite and onchain, expanding the total breadth of Ono's uh uh product offerings. Basically, what FT

is looking for is more buyers. Looking for more buyers of their products. They're looking for more distribution. They're looking for a new user base that they're not really used to having and that is that is what Ando is bringing them and and and that is kind of like the trade here in a way. These teams get uh this stamp of approval, this legitimacy, this access to new products and these you know kind of traditional firms get access to a new investor base and that's kind of seemingly what we keep seeing um from these from these firms doing these these partnerships. So yeah, I I I didn't catch all of the episode, but I I did hear Sandy say something particularly interesting, which was that uh she believes the cryptonative power users, buyers, and investors that have been, you know, investing in these

in these tokens are actually starved for some high quality assets. Yes, >> she didn't say this verbatim, but she believes that there will be crypto uh users on chain that will pivot from buying exclusively tokens and meme coins into buying others. >> Exactly. Yeah. Yep. 100% going to happen. And that's her thesis. >> All right, guys. We've got Vibu here. Vibu, if you're ready, come on the show. He is ready to get started. Salana's strategy here. Looking forward to this one. There's an interesting comm's game going on o over there that we're gonna talk about. Um, and yeah, they also just picked up a new higher Sarapim macromate. So, that's going to be interesting. He's going to try to help uh Salana dominate the game there. And

yeah, I mean there's a lot there's a lot to talk about here just from the pure marketing side. If Fibbe is ready, we will bring him up and get this show on the road. And guys, we are here for for the marathon now, Rob. Let's do it. >> Absolutely. >> I'm so ready. >> Yeah. Are you? >> I'm so ready. I don't think I've ever been so ready. >> Hey, Vivoo. >> There he is, man. >> All right. Welcome to the show. >> Oh, no. >> Oh, goodness. >> You're just coming in just havoc right away, just like you're doing on the marketing side. >> Yeah.

>> We got Vibu Norby. >> Vibu is going to answer. Is Salana's comm strategy winning? Welcome to the show, man. >> Thanks. Well, uh, thank you for having me. Of course, man. >> You actually want me to answer that or >> I mean, we we'll kind of answer that throughout the the conversation. I'd like to I'd like to ask you about a colleague's tweet, Lily. >> Gaming on blockchain is dead. Was this strategic from Salana side? >> Yeah, I uh there's, you know, in crypto there's no difference between like uh 4D chess and 1D chess. Um so I I will never reveal the answer to that. >> There you go.

>> But uh no, it was not. There was no strategy and Lily's just yapping >> uh like we all do. >> Uh I guess the strategy is let the people speak their mind in public and um and deal with the consequences. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean I feel like Solana went from like uh like this uh like the fast chain, the cheap chain. It went went through like the like like the memecoin chain. Then it went through like the Ethereum killer phase. like it's gone through many narrative evolutions and descriptive evolutions.

Some of them >> um put on by external forces, some of them probably internal. >> How would you how would you describe the comm strategy now and why you guys are doing such a great job of being able to be top of mind consistently? >> Um well, thank you for saying that. I don't I'm not I genuinely don't know how much of it is strategic versus like Salana is just like a has just been like a I mean it's like almost built into the history of the chain like we were kind of platformed by Ethereum folks who were FDing us for a long time and I think that people don't realize that like FUD is good like it actually like is a huge uh like you know attention uh like boon And so uh you know I think we've kind of

like we've been like Salana was built in the fire and anything we do creates a lot of opinions and contro Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. N.

Heat. Heat. N. Get out of here. Lady.

Hell yeah. Hey, hey, hey.

Heat. Heat. N. Heat. Heat. N. Hell yeah. Hey All

right, guys. We're back with Vibu here. Um, Vibu, what is Salana's primary focus as of now? Obviously, we're here at D. is extremely tokenizationoriented. A lot of kind of RWAS um people want to see Salana evolve into this institutional welcoming chain. How does that process look? What's the main focus? >> Um you know we like to think of Foundation as like an economy builder. Um and we do uh a lot of things all at the same time. Uh obviously but we're very responsive to what's happening around crypto. Obviously like stable coins and tokenization is a huge huge uh thing happening right now. Um over the last year our RWA um TVL has grown 10x. Uh we're by far the fastest growing chain in in like

distributed ROA RWAS which means like RWAS you can actually buy and use that's just represented value. Um and we're just uh below Ethereum on that um on that vector. on stable coins. Uh we're behind Ethereum. I'm quite a bit behind there in terms of TVL, but we still have significant volume relative to other chains and we're leading on payments. Um from a product standpoint, I think we're kind of all in on AI. and I came here at Blockwork just a few minutes ago to speak about um our AI strategy overall and uh how we're building products here and building APIs and um and skills and kind of uh preparing for what's happening which is I think basically two years away from like 99% of everything happening on chain um emanating from agents um and so that's a big focus for

us uh but yeah there's a lot happening Salana is basically number one or number two in like every single category that matters in crypto and uh we but we want to be number one so we're gonna uh keep uh working as hard as possible. H how do you balance uh an institutional positioning from the comm side with you know kind of Salana's track record of you know pump fun memecoins a lot of success and activity was driven as a result of that now feels like the entire industry is kind of like repositioning around institutions and AI so there's kind of like a three-headed beast you know Ethereum doesn't really have like a central communications or marketing strategy so it's almost like you know everything and nothing at the same time but you guys

are a lot more organized in a certain sense you have a central comm strategy how do you balance those three the three factors >> I mean to be fair uh we use the resources that we have like there's I I this this point kind of like triggers me a bit because um Ethereum owns the Ethereum Foundation owns at Ethereum on Twitter just like the found Salana foundation owns at Salana and it's just like a choice on how you want to use that to benefit your ecosystem. We've just chosen to use it for max distribution for the teams that are building on Salana. Um so like that's like you cannot there's certain things that it can't be centralized from a marketing standpoint. Um so that's a values choice. Let's be very clear about that. Um yeah like uh Salana is really for everything. I think that's what

makes it exciting and and you know like memecoins as an example um uh because of how people trade meme coins. It made Salana's DeFi infrastructure extremely resilient. Uh like we survived the Trumpcoin launch which was the single biggest thing that happened in >> it was insane >> in crypto and because of the work that we did on the chain to be able to support that kind of stuff. when 1010 came around, Salana was by far the best performing network, you know, like fees stayed minimal and uh and whereas like in other places like people were getting absolutely wrecked. So I think our view is like you know one like yes there's a ton of institutional adoption uh but they all everyone wants the same things they want a fast cheap resilient network

and you know okay maybe you don't like the methods that which it uh came to be but the reality is that Salana is like super super battle tested and um and then I would say on the social side sorry I'm kind of running on here but like uh you you mentioned comms and it's relation to this Uh I simp I think our marketing team simply disagrees with how most people think about this. Uh I can't tell you how many times the institutions have come to us and said, "Dude, we love what you guys are doing out there. It's hilarious. It's fun. It's interesting." Um these are all just people like, you know, whether they're wearing a suit or not, uh it's still like they still resonate with humor and uh you know, hutbah and and all that kind of stuff.

These are just basic human nature. Um it's it's never penalized any penalized us if anything like it's just brought so many people to our doorstep who just want to learn how they can tap into that. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think that that this this world is shifting but at the same time you know Twitter is Twitter right? There's a community there >> window shift. I mean, look what the White House is tweeting like they like it's in different time and everyone I I don't want to give advice to our competitors but like it's very obvious that the Overton window on how to do marketing shifted over the last few years and we want to live in that place not in whatever the you know the the old world is.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So what you describe that as like mimemetic in in a way or >> Yeah. I I I think it's it's it's uh it's living chronically online and our marketing team does and understanding, you know, and and trying to just be in touch and being responsive and being brave. Um, there are things we put out that nobody in our industry would ever dare to do. If you remember our Starknet teaser, >> oh my gosh. Um, I mean, even our we did a a thing with uh Ripple and XRP, wrapped XRP, and the tweets that we uh put out in that uh campaign were not only the most viewed like tweets in our history, but they were also the most viewed in Ripple's history. And you

know, those guys are cracked on stuff. >> Yeah. >> Like uh I I we really just I think we we just we're just like you guys. We're DJs. We're there, but we're not afraid to use our main accounts um in unconventional ways. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Do you think Twitter has gotten more or less important over the last couple of years as the industry's evolved? >> Yeah, I it's so Twitter I think of Twitter as the industry itself because our industry lives there and so you know I think there are some folks that say why does it matter at all? You know, the the users aren't there. Um, but uh the fact is that's where the builders are.

That's increasingly where the Trady folks are scrolling for news and spending their time. Um, so I still see it as like the most the number one channel for us from a industry perspective. Uh, but it isn't the only thing we're doing. We're all over Instagram and Tik Tok. We're we're doing different things in different places, but you guys work in the industry, so you you kind of know us for that, but we're we're we're kind of everywhere. >> Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, when it comes to actually uh building a kind of distribution strategy for builders and for projects within an ecosystem, what do you think is something that a lot of ecosystems get wrong? Like like what has bass gotten wrong? >> That's bait. That's baked. Uh because I don't I don't really honestly I don't pay that much attention. Um I can't

really speak to what people are doing wrong. I mean >> um I I can just tell you how we think about it. >> Sure. Yeah, >> I'm not gonna fall into that trap. >> Just curious though. >> By the way, uh speaking of base, uh we announced yesterday that Jesse is speaking at uh Salana Accelerate USA on May 5th. So, he's coming to uh Salana event for the first time. >> How did you guys pull that off? >> We asked him. >> Nice. >> We're working with him on stuff. >> Yeah. So the so the distribution strategy from Salana side has always just been like supporting builders at all costs and bringing them and putting them in the spotlight. But yeah, has there been a preferential treatment of any sort or is it pretty much maximally distributed across like you know as as long as there's a live product or a credible product or a solid announcement

you're happy to kind of amplify, engage and support or kind of like how do you think about the preferential way of supporting and betting on individual companies within the space while kind of maintaining this neutral perspective? >> Um I mean I think we try our best. we are human but uh you know like this year alone we've I think uh talked about 300 plus different companies from the salon main handle um over the last year we've uh like diversified uh the number of different audiences that we're talking to we rolled out capital markets x42 salana pay at salana payments um at luminary so we've kind of created a constellation of different accounts that um and really just to

handle the inbound that get and request for amplification. I would say like the only place where it might feel preferential is that Salana also uh well two things. One, we want to protect users. So, uh you won't often like we'll do diligence before we're amplifying things like I'm not going to bring attention to scams and things like that. Um and then second there's uh hey uh there's kind of a uh you know we're also marketing ourselves and so there's like certain themes or like areas we're really focused on at different times like right now we're super focused on AI and so like >> uh you know like if there's something that's interesting in that workstream we're much more likely to hit the uh the retweet or quote button

>> but um yeah I I don't I don't see it as preferential. I think we're I I think we probably amplify more builders than all other chains combined. Like we're just really prolific >> and yeah and it works. >> Last thing for you from me is is there a strong internal focus on this kind of agentic economy running on Salana? Like how do you think about capturing a lot of that market on Salana? >> I I I think that two years from now, I just said this on stage, but I'll be even more strong here. two years from now, uh, basically a 100% of all things that happen on chain will be agentic. Uh, I don't think people are going to be pushing any buttons. I think they're going to be chatting to an LLM and

they're going to be laying out a strategy and letting their agent do the work. Um this is like like if not exactly correct directionally incorrect for sure and we're kind of prepping for that and we see that as you know combination of um APIs uh that help agents do things um supporting payments at deep level. We just announced today we're building a payment gateway for for uh for agents let them pay for things in the real world with stable coins and soul. Um and then uh we're also working on some moonshots which are how how else can blockchain service uh agents who need trust and who need uh permissionless access to things and coordination. Um we uh are playing to win here because in my

opinion AI is basically the only game that's going to exist uh in the next couple years and it's absolutely existential for us to um to be there. >> Beautiful. >> I think that's the right take. I I I think two years from now almost 100% of the things will be executed via LLM's agents. Um two years doesn't seem like a long time to change consumer behavior, but when you think about the people who are transacting on chain today, it's all early adopters. They change their consumer behavior very very rapidly. Chat GBT is three years old, >> right? >> And >> and cloud code and codecs are basically two and a half months old. And you see how fast these things are changing.

You're not >> you're not prepared for two years. You can't even imagine two years from now. I mean, there's insane things happening. >> Yeah. >> Uh, thanks so much for coming on, man. Appreciate it. Enjoy your conference. >> How was your talk? >> Um, I I mean, I don't know. I was probably a little low energy like, but uh, yeah, it was good. Like, we >> need a pep in your set, man. >> You said I'm tired, man. >> You got a dry sense of humor. I actually I I enjoy I enjoy it. >> Okay. Yeah. >> But, uh, um, you guys need we need to do more. You guys need to do more in Salana. More yapping on the timeline, more drama. >> Uh, we got to have you guys at Breakpoint. I hope you'll uh come by.

>> Give us more. We got to have more. Like give us more that we can >> I will. Okay. We have some I have someone on the marketing team and they're full-time job is uh booking guests for external podcasts from the Islamic ecosystem. I'll connect you and make this happen. >> All right. >> There you go, baby. Thank you. >> Totally on the show before we know it. >> Yeah, we never had to. What the hell? >> Yeah. What's going on? >> Totally. >> Got response to all my tweets. >> Yeah. Never been on the show. >> Guys, we've got Santiago. Santo's coming up next. Um, that's Vibu. That's the Salana's calm strategy. Certainly uh certainly an interesting one and uh and a a very a very dry humor. >> Dry sense of humor.

>> Very very dry humor. >> I don't know if he's like that all the time because he certainly doesn't seem like that on the timeline, >> but uh yeah, absolute pleasure having uh having Vivu on the show. Obviously doing great things. Uh our next guest, friend of the show, been on several times. Absolute pleasure as always to have >> Yes, sir. The mad. The man. >> What's up, Santi? >> The inverter. >> How are you, buddy? >> I haven't died. You guys still You guys still haven't um you know, gone tired of me? >> No. Bring the coffee so that I think we're trolling you a little bit today. I think the I think the marketing team put the headline as is is Santiago the biggest crypto bear on the planet? >> Biggest crypto bear. I've heard a lot of things. I have not heard that. >> Okay. Well, today you have. Um, no angel

checks this year. Uh, tokens are are not going to perform as well as equities. The once prominent angel investor sitting in front of us is at D not wearing a suit. Not wearing the suit. >> I mean, what's going on? How are you, man? >> I'm sort of like a chameleon, right? You sort of constantly reinvent yourself so that no one can just pin you down. Uh, >> look, I've survived this long, you know? But, um, no, I'm not I don't know what you guys want to talk about, but I'm not a parab bear. Uh, I don't I continue to believe a lot of tokens are just uninvestable. >> But that doesn't mean that like there's a ton of adoption. Like, you know, I was I was like I came in yesterday at 9:00 a.m. There was like a line that looked like TSA >> and and there was like a lot of

institutional growth. Like I could tell you like how many of the folks here do you think is their first time attending a crypto conference? >> Yeah. Right. Decent chunk of them. Yeah. >> That I mean I tell you that that to me is like the sign of the times. As we look across the room, there are a lot of people here that are coming here not to buy a token, >> right? Or not to understand what token to buy, but more so the CEO of their company told them, "Guys, you got to get your together." And we just had the CEO of Western Union. You know how I feel about Western Union. And and I was like, "How real is Western Union about stable coins?" And I think if you heard him on stage, it' be something along the lines of it feels different than a

pilot. And from what I've been told is I'm excited to see how they report that through their P&L over the next year. I think they're going to save like a couple billion dollars on the float. I think they're going to they which is crazy because you would have heard the CEO go back to like call transcripts as early as like two quarters ago. He was like, I don't believe in coins. >> Yeah. I don't think it's real. >> Yeah. What do you think? What do you think changed his mind? >> Probably the competitive landscape, >> the institutional FOMO. >> Yeah. I mean he's looking at like Visa >> jump in the space he's looking at Mastercard do one of the larger acquisitions Black Rockck I mean most of like so I did an analysis and looking at every single stock the day that they started talking about crypto and then when they implemented it if you if you

look at the stocks that are most of those early adopters were founder companies generally founder companies just do well better than the traditional company but that basket of public company stocks have vastly outperformed the S&P. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Since we last spoke, um there was this really interesting integration in the S&P 500 with Hyperlquid and Trade XYZ. This is kind of like the one uh token that you keep leaving out of your kind of basket of bearishness. Um, I'm going to put you on the spot here, but what do you make of this kind of uh 24/7 tokenized trading uh growth? Like like uh is this something that you think is an accelerant to um bringing new assets

on chain, trading on chain, like how do you how do you reason about the like this trend and then like investing into this kind of inevitability? It feels like >> Well, I remember uh sitting down with you guys uh D like in Brooklyn. >> Yeah. Um, I told you guys I was long volatility. >> Yeah, I continue to be long ball. So, how do you express that thesis? You want like crypto sits at that intersection. Young generations want to trade. They want to trade all the time. Uh, prediction markets are just one expression of that, right? The second to that is when you say we've always had this like 247 365 uh DeFi market but the reality is not everyone wants to trade your tokens but they they want to trade commodities because they see Stan Miller go up and

say you got to la copper and then silver did what it did a couple months ago uh and now oil is front and center given geopolitical tension. So Hyperliquid has just become that venue and I haven't seen the numbers but I'd be really curious. I could probably say the amount of volume that's coming in there's like now over 1.3 billion of open interest on commodities after hit three >> super impressive. I think that 10 10x or 100x in a year. >> Um but it's not your tokens like people want to go long these things. >> So I I you guys probably heard me say I was sitting in a room over the weekend when the war broke out and a lot of these PMs some of the smartest macro guys were like I was just sitting in in a lunch and they're all pontificating oh

you know what's Monday going to look like? I'm like what are you talking about dude? like, "Have you heard about hyperlink?" But they're like, "Hyper, what? Pull up my phone, look at the chart, like stocks already at 86 bucks, >> right?" >> And they're like, "Holy shit." >> Yeah. >> And I've only ever felt that with stable coins like six years ago. >> Yeah. >> Where when I was fundraising back in the day for DeFi when before DeFi was a thing, and I would convert like everyone was like, "You're going to invest in what?" I'm like, "Defi?" I'm like, "We don't understand what that is." It's like, "Go try a stable coin and then come back to me." >> Yeah. like you see the light when you when you send a stable coin you see the light with with this is happening now with with hyperlquid and

>> of course it paints a it paints a picture of like it's commodities I'm not sure stocks are going to take off as much but commodities I'm super bullish on >> I want to use hyperlids uh you know revenue generation buybacks as a as a segue um intertwine that with what we saw in DC last week you know SEC CFDC working together on some of this guidance uh that classif ified tokenized commodities, tokenized securities, couple other classifications in there. Um, I'm thinking that we're going to start to see the token economy reflect what we see in the equity uh asset class, meaning, you know, right now we have growth stocks and then we have dividend stocks. Um, and we're not we don't have any dividend tokens or or companies in that space because that would classify them as a security. But

now that we have regulatory clarity, is that the right way to pass revenue and value acrruel back to token holders? Is, you know, a relatively stable coin token, but paying a a pretty nice dividend from the revenue generated onchain. >> You know, I'm not I'm not a regulatory expert. Uh, so I can't really comment on like is that going to be enough to convince people that that's something that they want to hold in their portfolio. I think the market's fairly narrow in why they want to buy something and and the the the narrative around Hyperlid is very strong. It's strong because it's tokenized commodities. It's strong because it was a community launch. >> The last time we saw that was with Wi-Fi. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. On your own. >> Boy, were we heavily involved in that as a I was a farmer back in the day. Yeah. Um so I don't I'm not sure. I mean there's a there's a whole body of psych like psychological studies as to why people hold stocks. There's something really true around if you the narrative needs the mind can only comprehend one concept at a time. Stocks that have like different narratives don't don't people don't really understand that. Um I think for hyperlink it's very pure. Uh what is it? They they do a lot of buybacks, right? They subsidize part of the fees like it's a it it is the token that most resembles stocks. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. And it's backed by like very clear understanding that like you're seeing basically trading for tokenized commodities go parabolic, >> right? >> I'm not sure how much volume and open interest there is in the S&P one, but I I'm tracking that as well. >> It's the it's starting to become one of the top five now in terms of volume. Yeah. But I can see what you mean by commodities may be stronger and provide more volume for longer than just individual equities or indexes because they can be way more volatile and there's a lot more geopolitical dynamic happening right now that is creating volatility in those commodities.

>> Um so you said that you're not doing really much angel investing as of now. Your your former firm Parafi just announced a $450 million raise. Um what do you invest in right now? like what do you do with $450 million looking at the landscape? There's prediction markets, there's AI, there's crypto. Like like how do you allocate hundreds of millions of dollars into the current landscape because clearly you're not seeing opportunities for you know your angel uh check. So how are funds going to be allocating going forward? >> Yeah, I mean I I don't know. Um >> I'm tempted to not go too far and say there's no investable opportunities >> but you're seeing a lot of the larger players uh like Rain >> uh certainly Poly Market and KHI like

those rounds are getting larger that the stuff there's like a very clear divide the stuff that is working is is really working and they're getting a easy you know those guys are not struggling to fund raise >> but I I mostly traffic in early stage like like you guys like first check in second check in I I do across stages, but that's sort of been where I mostly have deployed in terms of a number of deals, not necessarily dollar amounts. >> And I haven't I haven't seen that much >> and and that is consistent. Like I'm like, is this a skill issue? Maybe people are not reaching out to me anymore because I'm bearish or they don't want to work with me or I'm a terrible angel, whatever. >> U so I go out and talk to a lot of venture funds. I'm like, are you seeing quality deals? Um and and they sort of

say the same thing. So I mean I guess like I'll catch up with Ben tomorrow. Um, I would most likely think that they're going to be investing at this intersection of fintech and def I mean Pari has always been a D5 focused shop since I was there. >> That's where I see most of the opportunity candle like the the lines between what was a standalone fintech Silicon Valley startup and crypto are converging and they're one, right? You're seeing funds like traditional VCs like Sapphire Venture. Like look at look at the funds that have invested in Rains last round.

>> Rain the the crypto card. >> It's mostly fintech VCs along with some sprinkled cryptonative VCs. But that that distinction is going to go away. In fact, I would argue if you're going to want to be successful in crypto, you're going to have to quickly become an expert or hire partners and investment professionals that really understand fintech because that's >> yeah, >> you know, you're seeing that convergence. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity to invest meaningful size into those. >> Um I just this morning I was on the way here I I got a pitch for like a different flavor of prediction markets using like consumer data.

>> Is that going to work? I'm not sure. Yeah, >> but you know they're raising two to three million bucks at a sensible valuation like 20 million which is you know where I you know anything above 2030 you start thinking twice. Um so again I think it's a very interesting time in the market if you have capital because you always want to deploy uh in this moment where valuations are compressed people are being skeptical like me and um the only difference this cycle versus others is that there's all I think there's like a Stanford um engineering index if there isn't one I think electric capital talks about it a lot because they build a developer ecosystem map they track the number of developers as a whole coming into crypto and that's a great that's a great barometer but

it's sort of like a lagging indicator like your Stamford engineer >> is captivated by AI like we didn't have we did not have AI like I'm fascinated by AI like like I can tell you >> I always have I continue to have this imposter syndrome as a builder like it took me so much to get out of my seat and say I can actually build a company because I always felt that I was disadvantaged not being technical and the first thing the first advice I got was like you got to go hire a CTO in fact, go look at my first post pinned to my profile. I said, I want to hire a chief of staff and I want to hire a CTO. If I were to write that post today, I wouldn't include those two.

>> Yeah. And uh so so I guess what that all means is if you're well capitalized, I think it's quite difficult to fund raise right now for funds and uh just traditional retail is not here. But it's the best time to deploy. The question is, are you seeing the smartest guys want to build? And I'm I'm I'm just not seeing that. I don't know if you I mean, you guys are active on the venture side, too. Like, I haven't come across a team that I'm like, it's electric. I I just >> Yeah. >> And maybe it's a skill issue. I don't know. Maybe I've lost my done too many deals. >> Seen a whole lot either.

>> It's been a lot of tinkering. And I think a lot of it is consumed by AI and that requires a a little bit of a different skill set. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But but it's it's uh you know, agentic commerce. I think a lot of people, one thing I will say is it's very tempting to say um like tokenized stocks are not going to be a thing or a commerce is not going to be a thing because like look at X was it 402 volume and it's like it's it's declining right and and it sort of fizzled out. Um I remember when I did the seed round for poly market I had lost money on augur and nosis and but I was fascinated by the idea of prediction markets. It's like something will work and there's um you got to position yourself so that you can win. You're not going to get it right. You're never

going to get timing right, but put yourself position your portfolio. You know, like agent commerce is going to be a thing. You know that AI agents are going to want to use stable coins and gosh, we're going to be se like we're going to look back in 10 years and it's like why were we overthinking this idea that markets should be 247 365? Yeah. like like in fact it is it's going to be nonsensical markets that are not 24/7 365 right so position yourself to capture that value >> so this is why I think I'm I'm going like the counter to what I'm saying that tokens are not investable is I think I think there is room to continue to innovate there is room to continue to fund the incremental L1 because I don't

buy this idea that we've solved the L1 scalability so like layer zero Z is really interesting. Uh as much as I'm an investor in love with Brian and team and Raz, I they would say we've reached like this is the this is the end state. Uh I I don't buy that. Um because because we haven't really seen a proliferation of use cases on top of the infrastructure. Now now we we even hyperl like we've reached the point where like the infrastructure is no longer the bottleneck. It's no longer the handy and and you could argue that over the last three years that's we've been in that state >> but it takes time. Yeah, >> fix time.

>> And and and that's typically the the evolution that we see happen, right? Is you know the infrastructure reaches a critical point, an application gets some product market fit, it ends up juicing the the infrastructure to the extent where it does break the underlying and then we kind of reset the cycle and we go back to the infrastructure and then uh kind of expand the throughput from there. I've kind of gone on the record here and said that I think the next L1 trade is the the New York Stock Exchanges, the NASDAQ, some of these guys that are >> going to say inversion, but you know, like fine. >> Well, inver inversions in there as well, just not from the from the tokenized equities point of view. Um, I'm just curious. I mean, do you put inversion into that group? And if so, like, do you

agree that is the next L1 trade? Well, what you're saying is very similar to my house view, which is >> uh what does the NYC, NASDAQ, Western Union have, >> they have distribution, they have flow >> and and that's my whole MO is I'm going to go buy something >> that has distribution because I don't want to build distribution. I I I want to acquire it at a really good price. The best part of all this is um you know, people are like, when are you going to announce your deal? You know, are so so I I I've >> been acquiring for three years. I've been acquiring for three years. I promise we'll do it now.

>> For better or for worse, um what we've done over the last 12 months is really narrow down the scope because we started with this and still is a very flexible manage like you can buy anything, right? And so and so what I can tell you is as much as we love AI in house, the AI will hallucinate because it is going to scrub all the different pages of all the different vendors out here that are claiming a lot of stuff that hasn't been really implemented. And so, you know, we've looked at different sectors like FX and when we actually collect field data, it's like, no, you can't really make that business more efficient with this stuff. Not now. It's a liquidity game. So, crypto doesn't solve that. We've looked at a business like Figure as a really good case study of, okay, this is an interesting business that has dominated

HELOCs where other banks were not servicing them. How much of that is related to what they've done on the crypto side or how much of that is a combination of Mike being Mike a phenomenal builder um also using a lot of good technology traditional technology and then some crypto stuff. >> Um so now we we really narrowed down the focus of where we actually think this technology is really useful for and of course we're the first and likely will be the like dominating in the field of what type of business can use this technology. But it's equally valuable to understand something you definitely don't want to buy >> because I mean the whole point of inversion is don't buy stuff where you die. Just don't die. Yeah.

>> Don't do a stupid deal. Like like Berkshire Hathaway like Warren Buffett his first deal was a textile business. He bought it I think for a couple million bucks and it was a terrible like it was it was probably one of his worst deals and then he bought that insurance business for eight and a half million and that kind of set the stage. So I'm I'm kind of paranoid and maniacal to not buy a business where the AI or you go talk to a lot of these folks and you're like like stable coins are gonna transform the world. Yes. But how and in what sequence? Because I do think there's a lot of I mean crypto is phenomenal at overpromising and underdelivering. I want to do the inverse. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. U so I'm not going to go on the record saying I'm going to buy something now even though I got 48 hours to close like sign a pretty definitive agreement on a transaction where I feel really confident in what stable coins can do and what tokenization can do. Um again it just goes back to something that I posted earlier which is we sort of have the we know there's foundational stuff in crypto that will really really work. >> Yeah. um like and and it just goes back to a very narrow use case of 247 364 um markets and const like we've built internet capital markets. I'm not saying that you know gaming is not going to be a thing. I'm not saying that NFTs will never come back. they will. Um but the big big opportunity for us is um you know stable coins getting

stable coins in the hands of people that really want it or using stable coins in a particular financial workflow that can cut costs in the same way with the Western Union sort of woke up to that idea. Yeah. >> Yeah. I I ju I remember this might be pushing back a little bit just because I remember you know we were sitting at uh at permission list. I think this was last year and you were very concise and direct and said you wanted to buy the second largest uh telecom business in Latin America and it felt like okay you already knew what you wanted what you didn't want and but but so was that still just kind of like a theory and you had to go out and do it and just confirm that thesis and that that's what you've done over the last

>> you have to agree on price. >> Yeah. So like price dictates the return that you get. >> Yeah. >> Like again Ethereum could be a great asset, great technology, terrible price. >> It's not worth 300 billion. Certainly the market agrees with me since November like these things are not worth what they are, right? So um in that particular transaction, it's it's a lot of it is price. As much as I like it, as much as I think it's a telco is a great asset, >> um your telco provider should give you more should be their financial institution. You've seen it in Asia. it will happen in Latin America. Latin America continues to be a cash based society. So there's a lot there's risks in that deal that I need to underwrite to then derive to a price. Now if the seller doesn't want to agree with me on the price, I I'll walk away.

>> Yeah. >> Again, I don't want to do the the worst deals that I've done are because I chase the deal and uh inventure is a bit different because the difference between 25 million and 30 million, you know, uh preede or seed like don't overthink it. It's like you're investing in a killer team that is going to drive through a wall and make a good investment. Don't overthink it. >> Yeah. >> Like don't nickel and dime on the venture side >> on the on where we're now operating. You definitely want to nickel and dime and you want to structure terms. You want to meet the team and and in this particular case we're still hunting. I mean it's a core thesis that I have which is I stable coins have really worked in the developing world. Look at Tron.

>> Yeah. in the US. You know, people people are not like jumping out of their seat when you tell them, "Hey, you know, there's this thing called USDC." They're like, "Yo, dude, I have Venmo." Like, what are you talking about? Like, get your head out of the gutter. Like, what are you guys cooking up here? Like, you're you're fixing a problem doesn't need fixing. >> Yeah. But when you go out in Mexico, uh you go out to Brazil, you see how quickly Brazil is digitized because the government during COVID said, "We're now going to introduce pigs." >> Yeah. >> Overnight the economy went digital. So there there are risks when I when I say okay I want to buy the largest telco one of the largest telos in Mexico if I get it at a good price I get access to >> 15 20 million users

>> most of them are using remittances with someone like Western Union most of them are paying monthtomonth you know $5 $10 at a time to buy data I can get data cheaper yeah I can use data to get them to fund an account and what I mean you look look at a company like New Bank 70 billion they jumped on the opportunity in Brazil >> they had the timing right they've invested a lot of money but you know they they've tried to penetrate other markets like Colombia and especially Mexico you look at the customer acquisition cost very very different than Brazil so I compute all that in my thinking and saying I I'm going to acquire again I think it was like Travis Kal uh the founder of Uber >> that went on another show not yours and said the most important thing is LTV a cap like what's the lifetime value of

the user what's the customer acquisition cost if you look at the world through that lens you stay really really disciplined >> but for me it's I think >> so if I look at go here here's an experiment like if we could walk around we go out in every booth out here and ask them like what is your customer acquisition cost and none of them >> when I say none of them will tell you that >> like go talk to Visham here like >> they don't know >> they don't know >> how crazy is that and some of them will tell you oh you know we don't know the user behind a wallet I'm like okay Well, airdrops don't really c like they definitely they definitely cost you money. It's part of your equity. I mean like so I'm very focused and disciplined on acquiring a business with distribution and I look at the world

through LTV to account. >> Yeah. Now when I think about what does L what what does LTV go from and just the telco business and people have $10 to spend on a monthly basis for telco. You're not going to squeeze out an incremental dollar for these guys. but they don't have banking services. >> And so I think it's like the classic DeFi mallet that I didn't coin that term, but I think it's very good. Um, so all this to say is it's a core thesis that we have. >> Um, it is a bit more front and center. It's one of the rare cases where I actually do want to buy a business that is B to B TOC. >> Yeah.

>> In a market that is very underpenetrated. But, you know, when I when I I stay very disciplined on the price, and they came out at me and said, "We're gonna sell this business for like three times the amount." I'm like, "Good luck." >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And lo and behold, I'm not going to sleep for the next 48 hours because I never want to chase a deal. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> That deal did not go through and it's still still there. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, um I I don't want to Here's what inversion should never do because you always want to know in the classical inverting sense. Know how you die >> and then just don't do that. Yeah.

>> And then don't do you don't have to be incredibly smart. Just don't do >> dumb Yeah. >> I can tell you don't over don't overpay. >> Especially when you have data to underwrite, right? >> But it's crazy here. I I'll give you an interesting stat. So when you look at all the different fintexs in Latin America, uh, Felix Pago and Dollar app and, um, the market is willing to pay on average a,000 bucks per user. So and and the simple calculation is like if no bank has X users, their valuation is Y, divide Y by X, you get to average price per user. So I have like a comp sheet of all the different fintexs in Latin America. All the venture rounds, all the public companies, meal, new bank, all the average and the median or there's like a pretty big divide because some of

these rounds are pretty over overvalued. >> Yeah. >> But the market is willing to pay a,000 bucks dollars per user fintech user in Latin America. >> So if you're going to fund Felix Ba or whatever, they're using WhatsApp and stable coins to money can people can send money through WhatsApp. I'm looking there and saying, "Okay, this business is worth a couple billion and they have like 300,000 users. I can buy a business for 280 or 300 million that has 21 million users that are not fintech yet." >> Yeah. >> Oh, if only I could use stable coins because I know and I'm not theorizing like I'm not prompting the LM. I'm going out to the convenience store, calling a customer, meeting a customer. I I hired like 20 interns in Latin America. I said, "Go and talk." Every week you have to meet people. >> It's crazy. Like simple things. If you

want to become a better investor, do things that don't exist online. Yeah. I say this is a fun anecdote. I was a really good investor. I've been talking to him for like a year and a half. Every so often we catch up. And every month he's like, "Look at this nice dashboard that I've created with AI." I'm like, "Honestly, better than what I could do. Pretty impressive. How'd you build this?" And all this stuff. And he's like, "I really I'm ready to go buy like a plumbing business or an HVAC business. It's all the rage these days. Like AI resistant businesses." So he wants to go buy a tradition like a plumbing business. >> I say this your dashboard every time I talk to you looks better and better. I think you're using it. You're sourcing all these your CRM looks great. You have all this data on these companies. I'm

like have you called any of them? He said just scared of me blank. And I said what is stopping you from calling the founder? He's like I don't know. I'm like you realize A is not going to do that for you right? I mean maybe you can create a like there's nothing quite like going to a conference sitting down with someone looking at them in the eye and reading their body language and saying I'm there's a very human element that will never be outsourced by AI. The temp the temptation is like you're here and like we love cloud and we're using a you know every the best model and perplexity and all this stuff. There's just certain things that if you want to go out of your way and do things that don't scale especially that the eye won't do there's massive amounts of value.

>> Yeah. For us, it was like doing surveys, like looking at a Mexican consumer and saying, "Okay, what is a consumer between the ages of 18 and 25? Do they have a bank account? Are they using Romanes? How much data are they consuming? What apps do they want to use? Can we create a partnership with Tik Tok or Disney or ESPN?" Um, and that the difference between the user that is 18 to 25 is different than 25 to 30 and 30 to 40. And so, uh, a lot of this data doesn't exist online. >> Yeah. And so you're still very focused then on this market and on finding a product where you can basically insert like a form of neo banking into a existing set of just of users or customers and effective become like their banking layer as a part of a of yeah I mean >> embed you guys have a great neo bank

report it's embedded finance it's like integrating a financial solution that is powered by defi that is powered by a stable coin um the the other sector we really like is is is credit. >> Yeah. >> Especially at a time where like this probably the most contrarian take and I know you guys got to kick me out of this thing because I've talked for too long >> short duration credit. >> Now this is at a time where you've had the most amount of D5 like like hacks and D5 really gone up over the last year. >> Uh it sort of spiked up quite a bit. I think there's 132 million of of hacks and losses. Most recently the resolve was it resolve stable coin? >> Again an Oracle problem. guys, you know, like come on like just get your Oracle right. Um but um I think that

there there's a couple there's two things that I think we we're very focused on which is um fixed rates. Most of the of rates if you want to borrow most of that is recursive leverage. It's like funds is doing loops and loops and loops and loops. Like again back in the day I was a farmer you know you go yield farming. Um so it's very short duration because money is moving around very quickly in the incremental farm. >> But you haven't had like a fixedterm loan. >> Yeah. Like longer term >> crypto. And the reason that is I think is there hasn't been quality opportunities on chain brought onchain. Um a lot of the RWA platforms have a principal agent problem and an adverse selection problem. >> I've looked at all these rounds I pass for the same reason which is you didn't work at Oak Tree. So you're underwriting

Sanders are not going to be as good and the stuff that you're bringing on chain is the bottom of the bottom of the bottom. is that the it's the equipment financer the that couldn't get credit on in the real world. And and and >> a word of caution for like if you're if you're looking to like capture these opportunities from an investment side or you're like a vault manager, you got to make sure it's quality paper. Let's for once crypto should avoid the problems of trade and what you're seeing in private credit and duration mismatch and asset liability mismatch. Um, that's where we come in because if we're buying a business, so so in the case of Telco, right, why I like it again is there's a lot of smartphone financing. They're right now selling those

receivables for 80 cents on the dollar, 60 cents on the dollar. >> We can bring that on chain, >> right? If if if the incremental user needs financing for their smartphone, I'll provide it. I own equity in that business and I'll bring that credit on chain for someone else to take that receivable off my book. So that's not my core competence, right? And I think that you can get better terms on chain and it's quality, right? You're underwriting against a smartphone that has value against a user that is paying you monthto monthth so you can underwrite credit. >> I'm skeptical of like these vault managers because um and certainly automated strategies like you have to be close to the customer to underwrite credit. This white figure is perhaps the most bullish case of how this space is

going to evolve. Right? They took a segment of the market which is non like helilocs home equity lines of credit and Mike said why does it c like starting like subtraction. >> Yeah. >> Why does it cost 11,000 for a bank or a non-banking financial institution to underwrite a home equity line of credit? Think of it. You know the zip code. >> You know a lot of data of that the house that you can underwrite against. So why does it cost 11,000 bucks to do that? And Mike just I think just being Mike just built a really nice business off of that and he's not going to stop with Helox, right? So in a similar way I think that credit credit on chain will be a big opportunity. I do worry that a lot of the hacks a lot of the stuff the paper that is being brought on chain is not high quality.

>> No. >> Because the people that are bringing it have nothing to lose. >> Yeah. And they're just looking to sell it to somebody else basically on chain. >> And Apollo is going to jump on it because you know there there's a lot of brokers in that assembly line. We're not brokers. We buy the business. We underwrite. We put equity on the line, which is junior to debt. >> And I think that's the way it's going to work. >> Yeah. >> Sant just closing out here. Um, quick thoughts on just the state of this conference and the state of kind of institutional adoption of crypto. I know you you kind of have this phrase, the great valuation disconnect. It's clearly happening. Um, close us out here. >> I mean, it's very exciting. I mean, I still go back to the days where I was showing up in the Bitcoin Soho Center

trying to buy my first Bitcoin and I was in a suit and tie coming from JP Morgan trying to squeeze out uh when I was a young investment banker and people looked at me and saying like what is going on right now if if you're not wearing a suit and tie, I wouldn't go as far as saying a tie. If you're not wearing a suit, look, I'm looking across the room. Pretty much everyone's wearing a suit. So I think again this this is the state of the market and it's incredibly exciting to be New York um to see a lot of look even booths I just can't even recognize half the booths in the in this room. So >> uh very different crowd I think very institutional adoption will continue adoption will 10x from here your typical token is not going to do that >> uh but I do think that a lot of these opportunities a lot of these new

companies are going to emerge and and in fact I think the biggest benefactors of this technology will be companies like Western Union let's see how much they implement it and execute on that but companies like Robin Hood CLA this year I'm paying a lot of attention to those companies in the public markets And I want to really see how they can especially claiming one. >> Yeah. >> Uh payouts to creators, what stablecoin does to that business model. Once that happens and the incremental company that reaps benefit and outperforms the index because of crypto. >> I mean that that is what detonates >> the next leg up. Uh and that might push tokens up. And I might be looking like an idiot here saying, "Oh, you you really tic the bottom." I hope that's the case. I mean, I don't want this

space. I mean, Lord knows it. I still have a lot over 256 >> Yeah. >> private investments of which more than twothirds haven't launched a token. >> Yeah. >> And so I want, you know, of course I want teams to win. I think in order to win, you have to be smart. Um, and it's not going to be let's slap a token. In fact, I don't think you should launch a token. Like kind of wait six months to a year, figure out how regulatory clarity is going to evolve. Maybe to what you're referencing, Robbie. I mean, we're certainly not eager to go launch the chain until we have scale and users. Um, but no, look, really exciting conference. Appreciate you guys having me on.

>> I'm tired. >> You haven't tired of of me coming here and regurgitating the >> I'm actually glad that we got the inversion stuff here. Uh, it was uh it was much needed. Nice little investor update. I think that folks will be happy to hear it. >> All right, we're building the open, but thanks for having me on, guys. >> We'll see you next time. Thanks, Santi. >> Guys, we are live here at D2 at the Java Center. Santi's building inversion, the chain that inverts a lot of the traditional practices that we see from blockchains and brings them into a new light, new distribution. Glad that we got to hear about the uh process of actually, you know, acquiring a company and Oh, yeah. Uh getting kind of an investor update there. >> Yeah. Um >> look, I mean, he Yeah, he did come on last last year. He said, you know,

second largest company, telecom company in Latin America. Um and it sounds like uh you know after you've identified uh a target purchase there's still a lot of work to do negotiations on price uh all these things that go into actually making that deal and facilitating it executing it. Uh then it's really like a new beginning. That's when the work starts imple like ripping out the old infrastructure implementing uh stable coins doing all of this work to ultimately make the business more efficient improve it and then reap the rewards as you know off of that. So >> and we'll see I mean we'll see when it you know how he goes into launching it and building it out. It's going to be a process for sure. Obviously, you don't want to rush it, but

>> No. I And you know, I I think you know, he also just in a in a in a nutshell put the valuation disconnect as far as how, you know, the adoption of these things is going to 10x. The tokens will not. However, I do think that, you know, we're going to have to take a look at the N7 and sort of >> think about what equities we want to include. Like I think Robin Hood and maybe CLA belong in the N7. I think there's, you know, probably some other things that >> if they kind of actually adopt stable coins and Yeah. Yeah. And ultimately I think look who better to invent some sort of index product than you know those who have a bird's eye view on both the equities market and the and and the token market as these two worlds converge you know these will ultimately become one market and we believe that

you know those who are uh implementing these new technologies like AI and you know digital assets and chains uh these will be the most the the primary benefactors uh of the the neoinancial you know acceleration. Guys, we've got Jeff Park, the CIO at Pro Cap. He's going to join us next. He's here. We're ready for Jeff. Looking forward to having him on. Uh, and talking about Micro Strategy, Bitcoin, STRC, and more. I' I've actually not really heard much about STRC yet on the show. Jeff, please. >> Great to meet you, man. >> Happy to be here. Thanks for the show, man. >> Cheers.

>> Thanks for joining. Cheers. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. >> What's going on, man? How's the conference treating you? H you know this is I think the biggest turnout I've ever seen for D New York and I'm a New Yorker so I've seen all the dashes throughout the years. >> Yeah, everyone's got the sport coats on or the or the suits on and >> people their first crypto you guys have suits on so this is all very uneasy for me now. >> There's too many suits in this room. >> Jeff man, we haven't talked much about on this show about STRC and I don't know if there's anyone better than you to talk about it. There is so much misinformation out there about whether it's going to blow up the sustainability of Sailor's strategy. He also recently just pushed out a new update and kind of a new kind of product evolution there.

What's your honest take on STRC and on Sailor's current accumulation strategy? How are you kind of viewing it as part of the Bitcoin Bitcoin macro lens? >> Sure. Well, let's go right into it. STRC is complex because it doesn't fit into a box very nicely and as you know many things in crypto don't fit nicely into boxes which begets a certain amount of uncertainty but excitement and STRC is one of them. Um at a high level I do think it has found product market fit in the sense that there are investors who want to earn high yield with the understanding that that yield could be collateralized by hard assets and STRC is a medium that permits that possibility. Um at the same time I think

we have to acknowledge that it's highly unusual as a prep equity structure that has existed in the capital markets environment and so there are rightfully I think concerns as to the sustainability of those underlying strategies. So for example I know it's popular to call these digital credits >> but preferred equities are not credit instruments in the eyes of the court in the eyes of bankruptcy. So even though there's an credit-like element because it pays a coupon, um credit and the relationship that it represents implies a sense of seniority versus junior investors and shareholders of a company and a capital structure upon the event of a bankruptcy. Preferred equities have slightly different protections when it comes to that as a covenant than true

credit instruments would. And I think rightfully some people may ask questions about those dynamics. This is not to say that STRC therefore is an inferior product. Quite the contrary, I think STRC is uniquely purpose-built for exactly what Sailor wants to do, which is Bitcoin accumulation at a lower cost of capital. And the nice thing about these prep securities is that you can do things that you can't do with traditional credit instruments, like having a variable interest rate, like having the ability to pick and defer, like the ability to defer payments, and all these things. While they're not kind of black and white favorable constraints of a credit instrument can long-term be actually good for Bitcoin accumulation. So, I think we'll find out in the future

based on kind of the inlays that it makes with new investors. >> But I think the headline news is this. People like it. People like it. People like getting paid 10 plus percent on Bitcoin related risks. And I understand that to be a positive feature for the ecosystem. This is Pro Cap versus Strategy Race to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. Sailor's got a little bit of the lead here, but we cannot fade Jeff here. We cannot fade Jeff. >> I appreciate that. >> Uh I'm just curious where where you think Bitcoin sits in in the broad, you know, scope of a portfolio these days. Obviously, we saw the runup in gold as that reacted to global uncertainty. Uh the thesis was that Bitcoin was a better gold. How do you think this plays out over the coming months?

Well, I think in the coming months the uncertainty for global macro is as high as it has ever been. I believe the world uncertainty index hit a local high, which is pretty astounding and not surprising perhaps based on kind of the news flow that we're all witnessing today. In light of that, I think Bitcoin has been fairly heroic. You may know that Bitcoin actually had its local bottom on February 28th upon the announcement of the war with Iran and ever since it's been kind of steadying higher. Uh >> I think as everyone knows who's been in the space long enough, Bitcoin generally sings to its own tune and that correlation you can measure intermittently between equities or gold or bonds are dynamic and always

changing. But the perpetual state tends to be uncorrelated to most of these asset classes which is actually how most commodities behave because it's price is purely determined by the marginal buyer and seller. And going back to your question, I do feel like right now most of the seller exhaustion has been processed because the uh news flow that has come out that one could think would be acute to the downside of Bitcoin hasn't been true. And that makes me think that anyone who's actually want to be out of Bitcoin at this point is out. Um, and that's generally a great place to be because usually when those exhaustion goes away is when the indifference curve hits and people have apathy towards Bitcoin. And once there's apathy, that's when people can actually start accumulating more soundly and then it will tend to have its runup

thereafter. So part of me is excited that people aren't talking about Bitcoin as much in the mainstream because that means that people are going to be focused on it over a longer time horizon than the moment of now. >> Yeah. Jeeoff, you're somewhat critical of the traditional investor portfolio uh through your Twitter and just through your uh strong strong you know you have an opinion set that Bitcoin should be in everyone's portfolio. You have this kind of radical portfolio view as you call it. um what does this actually look like in practice for investors, right? Um I know that the 6040 portfolio is obviously not the way forward. What is the way forward? How should investors think about building a Bitcoin oriented portfolio? Um and what kind of tools and

uh assets are you looking to add to that portfolio? >> Yeah. No, thanks for the shout out. The radical portfolio theory is one of my uh >> held close to heart projects to espouse the mission of dynamic investing for the next generation. >> And it ultimately goes back to the view that most economists assume the world will look the way it does in the future based on the past. But the reality is there's always a great monetary reset that happens every generation. And I do believe that we're in the midst of one where the death of the Washington consensus is unlikely to dissipate. So everything we've known about investing based on Warren Buffett or Benjamin Graham's intelligent investor are built on this foundational assumption of what

American capitalism looks like and what that represents in the risk-free rate of the US Treasury bonds. Once you assume that the US Treasury bond may not represent the risk-free rate and one of the cases I make is actually people should start calling it the risk-full rate rather than the risk-free rate to reflect what it is in the construct of our ever growing deficit in our debt expenditures. >> You have to rewrite what that future is going to look like and the roles of other exotic and esoteric assets that can play into portfolio construction. So my theory is that there's going to be a very big generational liquidity uh transfer in the future and that's because there are certain signs that point towards that inevitability almost

with 100% certainty. So you know as John Maynard Kane says it's better to be probably right than precisely wrong. And the thing that I think most people have precisely gotten wrong is that the demographic trends in this country is inverting. >> And that inversion is going to result in a wealth transfer that is almost unavoidable. So as I've looked at the latest stats, in 2030, which is three years from now, all the baby boomers are estimated to be about 65 years or older. And that's one out of five Americans. And then in 2034, which is only 70 ways from now, there's going to be more adults living than children for the first time ever in American history. And then two years after that, 2036, the fertility rate of

this country is going to go below 1.5, which is well below the replacement value. And it's projected to stay there for another 20 years. Because, as you could imagine, if you're not having kids, then you got to wait 18 years for them to become adults to even have kids. So, we know this train is coming in that direction. And I think in preparation of that, we have to think about how to invest for the future, not what we're taught about what 6040 represented in the past three decades, but what it could look like in the future. >> Bitcoin is, I think, one of the most canonical asset to imagine what that liquidity transfer can look like for a young generation to not be caught on the other side of the big trade. >> Yeah. Could you just paint, you know, what the portfolio construction looks like in the radical portfolio team?

>> Yeah, absolutely. So 60/40 is coming from the idea that you want to own some equities, you want to own some bonds because they tend to be uncorrelated between risk on and riskoff sentiment, right? People go flight to safety for bonds and then if you want to be risk, people buy equities. So the decoupled relationship should hopefully push out the efficient frontier. But I think what we all know is that's false. Literally bonds and equities now kind of move lock step together. Right now it's happening as it is. like 30-year bonds, 10-year bonds are all imploding while stock markets are not having a very good moment. And so once you see that 6040 just has to look different. So going back to your question, my framework is to think about compliance assets and resistance assets. And I think this is the key demarcation I'm trying to draw.

>> When you own bonds and equities, those are all what I call compliance assets. You're all part of the same global liquidity money flows in which assets are moving amongst a compliance system of financialization. It's a big part of what is otherwise called the global carry trade in which money that is coming from Japan's low interest rate funds US equities. And it's a pretty circular mechanic of how financial assets rise in price through kind of the way GDP is measured today. The resistance assets, the 40% that I think of as truly radical, do not play a role in that global monetary system. They're removed one step further and therefore their correlation behavior by definition just has to look different in that world. Bitcoin is certainly one of them.

We're finding though Bitcoin is becoming more intertwined with the macro systems as institutional adoption is happening. But a big crux of why Bitcoin was interesting and important was that it was removed from that system. Yeah, >> there's actually a lot of assets that should be investable that behave like this that people just don't have abilities to access. >> And I do think that's why tokenization is a really important project for crypto because I know a lot of folks are interested about tokenization for US equities and uh you know real estate funds or private equity funds. But I think the true value of tokenization is giving investors liquidity into esoteric assets that were once uninvestable. So take for example the idea of bringing liquidity to US farmland. >> Yeah.

>> You know, if you want to own US farmland in a way that represents ownership interest that's not going to look like a private fund or an ETF, but you know, farmland is definitely uncorrelated to the rest of the global macro systems because it's not tradable in that 60/40 portfolio. you should have an allocation to farmland. It's just historically been inaccessible. I think collectibles also represent a bit of that category. And sometimes I joke about people buying Pokemon cards and all that, but but but I actually think it's real. I think that if there are demands for scarce assets, which is again not part of the global carry trade and the financialization of the said Pokemon cards, it retains value in a slightly different way. I think watches, luxury bags that women collect all kind of play a role into having a 40% allocation that looks different than

what you're taught otherwise in econ 101. I mean, >> the Hermes Birkin bag, which I don't expect you guys to know, but my wife loves, has basically outpaced the S&P in the last 30 years. >> It's incredible. Full of hair. Well, one of the things that that you left out. I think you probably did it intentionally from the 64 the the radical portfolio is private credit. I think you left this out for a reason. I'm curious as to why because well I think I know why and it's because we're starting to see the cracks. Um just talk to us more about why private credit is left out of this radical portfolio theory. How early do you think we are in the you know where do we stand on the fear greed index of private credit? Um and and how early are we in this cracks? Do we do we think like right now we're kind of scraping

the bottom of the barrel when it comes to tokenization? We're going to work our way up to the high quality assets. How does private credit fit into this? Hopefully it's just a stepping stone to higher quality things, but just generally private credit where where do you stand on this? What's happening? >> Yeah. Wow. We're getting to the spicy stuff now. And you're right. I don't talk about private credit often in allocation because as a category, I'm fairly pessimistic. It's not to say there are certain aspects of private credit that actually fulfill a function that can be desirable, but private credit as a catch-all phrase of what it represents today to me is not a good value proposition. Right? Because private credit's ultimate value and why institutional investors gravitate

towards it is precisely the things that you should try to avoid if you can. In other words, private credit is valuable for most investors because it doesn't market. It doesn't mark to market every day. There's no price discovery. So, if you can book an asset for 100 and book it at 100 for next month, next quarter, next year, that's great for an institutional portfolio manager because you're not taking any volatility. But when a sharp ratio looks like 4x or 5x, you have to be very careful about what the distribution of two standard deviation events can be once there's price discovery. And what you alluded to exactly what's happening. People are finding out actually it wasn't worth a hundred. Uh and they're learning it the hard way. And so my problem with private

credit is that the incentive alignment has been abused. You should want private credit if you think you're truly earning a premium for the risk that you're undertaking. Whether it's because of its duration or whether because the exotic risk behind that particular profile requires heavy structuring that qualitatively demands a premium. But if it's just private credit because it's not traded, to me that's not enough. >> And in fact, one of the things that I've noticed when I was pitching Bitcoin to a lot of investors over the years is people would gravitate towards private credit for the exact same reason they would hate Bitcoin. They don't like Bitcoin because it's too volatile and they don't want to have risk towards that portfolio that they're not responsible for because they can't

control the price of Bitcoin, of course. But those people generally tend to love private credit because it's the exact opposite alignment of feeling like it's 100 and it's 100 for a while until it's a zero. >> Yeah. And and that's the that's the cover photo of your Substack is the Thanksgiving turkey. Uh the happiness with turkey is it's great. It's great. And then it's Thanksgiving and that's what >> No, that's right. I think one of the things that sometimes finance miseducates young investors and old investors is this overly focused physics and kind of uh focus on like Newtonian laws on what like portfolio theory should look like. But portfolio theory is only as good as there's liquidity.

You can't have sharp ratio on things that do not trade. The problem is if you abuse the numbers enough, you'll get the output you want. Yeah. But sometimes the proof is in the pudding. And I think if you go back to like your childlike curiosity of just questioning like, well, why do people think this way? Like why is it valuable that there's no price discovery? It feels like you should want to know what the price is. And you go back to those fundamental 101. You'll realize a lot of things they teach you in finance today is ultimately involved in this great liquidity transformation with incredible duration mismatches that blind the younger generation versus the older generation.

>> Jeeoff, have you ever thought about being a teacher? >> No man, my wife's a teacher, so I think I get enough of that at home. >> You've got a very uh teaching vibe to you. Like I'm sitting here just learning and consuming. >> It's it's really appreciate Well, no. Abby, I I I love educating people, but also I learn a lot from having conversations with people. It's a two-way street, and that's been one of the most fulfilling aspects of reaching out to the Bitcoin and crypto community. >> I love that all the folks I meet through the Bitcoin community came for different reasons. Bitcoin can sometimes be a mirror to reflect the social values that you feel that is most important and pertinent to you. And in some ways, the common value that I see amongst all of us is we're all high agency people. We all want self-determination. We all want

to think independently and critically. And I cannot imagine these features being more important now than ever. And if I can be a part of educating that importance more and more, I will be a part of that story any day. >> Yeah. Jeeoff, are you bullish on Bit Tensor? >> You know, I haven't spent nearly enough time on it as I should. Uh but from the time I've spent I think that uh I think the meta is super important. Um I I think it is one of the keystones to be had in the age of understanding what agentic finance and agentic commerce could look like especially with the inability to price intent. So I think the meta is very worthwhile the same way I think that the meta behind privacy coins are very

worthwhile. I often have a hard time ascribing the value of the meta to the actual price action of a single token, but the people that are behind it, the foundations that are supporting it are credible people that I've come to like in the space. And so it should probably sit on my research queue a little higher. And you can ask me next time when I'm back. >> I'm going to ask another one. Are you bullish on Hyperlid? >> That one I can answer a little more conviction and say yes. Uh, I am bullish on Hyperlid. Um, I'm bullish on Hyperliquid because whether you like it or not, whether your politics lean left or right, it's pretty clear that hyper financialization is an unstoppable trend. Um, and it's not a crypto story that's actually happening everywhere.

We're seeing that with private equity and private venture companies being stuffed into public ETF formats that are trading at premiums outside of its NAV. We're seeing that with a rise of 2x levered ETFs and 3x levered ETFs. We're seeing that with the rise of zero day expir options. I don't know if you guys saw, but in February 60 plus% of all S&P options, 60% plus were zero day expir options. It's a new record. Now, I'm not saying whether that's good or bad. I'm just saying it's happening. And so, the thing that I appreciate about what Hyperlid at least is doing is they're trying to create a market structure around these thematics with more transparency than I think most traditional markets permit. And as there's growing unrest in the rules of

how automated market makers are abusing our US capital markets, I think it's important that there's a competitor that can stand behind it in a different way to offer a parallel system and that keeps competition that keeps people in check about a value proposition because in the end without customers exchanges are nothing. So it is one of the purest businesses in my opinion where if you do a good job you're rewarded and if you do a bad job the customers don't come and hyperlquid clearly has proven something valuable based on the tremendous success it's had and I do believe that trading derivatives is just going to become a larger part of how people think about risk- takingaking and hedging and so those types of developments at the frontier is where the exciting things are happening. >> Yeah. Last thing for me, I'm just

curious to just hear about anything that you think we didn't cover that that you think is particularly interesting that you have your focus on as of late and and you want to make sure that you you educate the people on. >> Man, uh I've only been thinking about crypto for so long that uh it's hard to sometimes get my head out of it. Look, I read something pretty scary the other day, which is that uh most Americans are reading less and actually kind of the growing population um are having hard time reaching even the fluency of a sixth grader amongst the cohorts that are rising. And to me, this is a problem. This is a problem that is universal beyond the issues at crypto. This is a problem about again going back to human agency. And so one thing that I do feel really passionate about is

>> we have to start reading more. Um, and by reading I don't mean doom scrolling Twitter. I don't mean Tik Toking. I mean pick up a book, sit down with it, read it from cover to end and don't check your phone and try to actually teleport yourself into this other world because that's how you build focus. And focus, believe it or not, is a muscle. Yeah. And if you don't build it, >> you're as good as an NPC and a bot. And my bigger virtue above all of crypto is I want people to live a high agency life. And to do that you have to read more. And I will go even one step further to say you have to read fiction.

>> Fiction. >> Fiction. Because I think non-fiction is read with a different deliberation for purpose which is information discovery and knowledge gathering. But it's really in reading fiction when you are allowed to have creative thoughts that can metamorphosize into something intelligent and unseen >> and especially in the rise of AI where you're already seeing how everybody sounds like slop because they're repeating the things that otherwise is consumed as common knowledge >> amongst news. It's actually in fiction that you find the art of communication that allows you to be convincing and empathetic and all the ways that you're not going to learn from participating in AI slop. And so I think reading fiction

is so important and it's a little out of favor. I know this because none of my guy friends read fictions, but it is I think probably the most important thing we can do for ourselves for our own longevity for the decades to come. >> Great take. >> Awesome. Jeeoff, thanks so much for joining the show. Absolutely pleasure. Great, man. >> Let's do it. >> Education is one of our main missions here and you certainly educated us and the audience. I really appreciate it. >> I love it. No, thanks for the kind words. >> Absolutely. We'll see you next time. >> Ladies and gentlemen, we will take a quick commercial break before our next guest. Guys, don't go anywhere. Stay tuned.

Hell yeah. of regulation. With the Genius Act in the US and Mika in Europe, formal stable

coin rules are taking shape. However, regulatory fragment remains and clarity is still often cited as the biggest barrier to stable coin adoption. Are these new rules accelerating institutional adoption of stable coins and crossber payments or creating regional silos that limit global scale? Austin, you want to start with this one? I think you have some strong opinions here. >> Yeah, I mean the I guess the answer is integration between rich regimes because the answer to your question is yes. um both for instance if you look at genius stable coins and you look at ma they might be mutually exclusive which that's not actively helpful for crossber payments unless we establish some sort of reciprocity. It's here's the reality.

The views of regulators and governments on this are not uniform and the incentive functions that they're dealing with are very different. If you are a small to mediumsiz sovereign in global markets like outside of the G8, US dollar stable coins are probably an existential threat to your existence. And so their view of that are going to be very different than say the Euro zone where I think the euro probably continues to perpetuate. The other problem here, and Tom was alluding to this earlier, is the granularity of what do we even think we mean by like money. Genius is a good example of this, where they define stable coins as a essentially an instrument attempting to hold a $1 value on a blockchain and then you go and read it and there has to be a list of like 20 different things that are exempted from

that because they're doing the exact same thing, but they don't want them in that framework like tokenized deposits. and then elsewhere in the text maybe didn't think about that. So some weird interactions are happening there. There's going to be a lot of teething. So is this accelerating institutional adoption? Yes, but you need to be specific on a use caseby use case basis. None of these frameworks cover all possibilities. >> Yeah, I agree. It's it's definitely helpful to have clear rules of the road so that institutions in in both markets can understand what needs to be done and what good looks like in order to participate with this with this new technology. But the real value proposition of stable coins is that the sending institution in one country can send that cross border in seconds at a

very low cost to another institution in another country in settlement of a liability. And if those two countries have different regulatory regimes and the same stable coin can't be used because of regulator fragmentation then that that really undermines just the core thesis and value proposition of using these things for for cross border and I think we're already seeing that with so so Austin pointed out in the micro regulation micro requires the reserves to be held in European banks and that's designed to protect the European banking system. Um, but that means if you're a global stable coin issuer operational in lots of different countries and for for a company like ours who wants to use a

stable coin to transfer value in lots of different countries that fragmentation is very unhelpful. You have to have a very specific reserve mix, specific operating model just for one market. Um, and I think that is a problem and if regulation develops in a similar way in lots of other markets who are taking notes from both Genius and from Mic um that that could be damaging to the overall value proposition and I'm hoping regulators can get their heads together and really think about that. You want to add anything else just in in terms of regulation. I was in Washington last week at the DC blockchain week which is a fantastic And you know it's pretty clear we have a real tailwind from the regulation from the Genius Act um from Micah. You know

there's a similar stable coin bill in Hong Kong for example. And so all of those things matter but step one's legislation. Step two are the rules by the people who have been designated the the regulators for that. In the case of Genius that's at the state level as well as at a national level through the OC. Those rules have just been published and out for for comment. Right. And again, it goes back to my certainty point. You know, corporations and financial institutions are not going to use any kind of asset, including new forms of money or digital forms of money, unless they're certain on what it is, unless they're certain what rules do we play by. They're not just going to say, I'll just I'll just put five millions in my balance sheet and see what it turns out to be. Like, nobody's doing that, right? You need the clarity. You know, we're

getting we're making really good progress on that. You know, Congress is working together very, very well. They they had different agencies CFTC and and FDIC, you know, I think are part of this conference as well. They're committed to it. They'll get it right in the US and I think they'll be a catalyst for the rest of the world. And then it gives you an environment where it's ingrained in law. It's not going to switch with a regulator or administration and people can get back to certainty which is what you're going to need in institutional environment. >> Lauren, how does Ripple look at regulatory landscape tailwind? >> Yeah, like everyone said, the tailwinds are strong. Um, so as an issuer on the Ripple side, we take a really conservative approach uh to regulation. We work very closely with our regulator, the NYDFS. Um, on top of we've now been approved for an OC bank charter and so

we'll be doing the work there to make sure we're adhering uh as needed. I think as a builder maybe stepping back from Ripple um been building in crypto for five years um you know we've watched different firms take different stances on how liberal or conservative to go um and we've seen some firms be burnt um we are hopefully past that but yeah I mean I agree with everyone like I said as an issuer we take a very conservative approach and we want to make we are following rules and innovating within guard rails um and that is what's best for our customers. >> I'll say though the like I understand

everybody on the institutional side says that there are some people who are going to push the boundaries and this is going to create some problems for regulators especially as we get outside of the jurisdictions that have had really good rule of law. So like Tom operating from Belgium or operating from the United States you're within systems that to be honest have largely worked proply but if you look at global stable coin distribution like if your other option is I don't know the bullyar or something like that like locally you might take a yo on tether right and so one of the other things that regulators have to realize is all people need to get a US dollar stable coin of any form is the internet and something of value to trade for it so if your local system is worse than that you're going to lose right this is something where people will be

dragged along by the technology kicking and screaming in some cases voluntarily leaving in others. >> Great. So now that we've discussed stable coin value proposition, institutional adoption, regulation, if stable coins achieve global scale and crossber payments, which institutions or revenue pools are most exposed to margin compression and which business models are best positioned to capture the most economic upside? Tom, you want to take this one first? Yeah, I like the business model question because some kind of this is not fully understood or gets gets conflated and sometimes when we say a bank you know whether it's you know city bank or these are large complex organizations do many many things really really well right so one of the business models they run is the corresponding banking business model

that's highv value payments cross border um those are important payments if they don't happen then money gets stuck someplace it shouldn't get stuck or somebody who's relying on those funs to do something with that doesn't get their money. Right? So you with the larger the value and and this kind of the corresponding banking business model again it's very different than retail. But another thing that's really important to consider is that the banks that are on Swift the corresponding banks that are on Swift actually compete with each other every day. So think of Swift as the network where they where the corresponding banking business model is run and that's where large value institutional payments um are are done today. So how does a You're talking about the business model. How does a corresponding bank make money?

Right? There's three ways of doing it. Foreign exchange obviously crossborder, right? Um they keep uh float or get interest on the Nostravostra accounts which are gigantic, right? There could be estimates of 10 trillion dollars in Nostravastra accounts on any given kind of normal day. Um and then they make fees when they when they intermediate, right? When you when you instruct a payment here through your US bank and they have a relationship with a bank in Japan, for example, somebody's going to collect a fe along the way as that money moves around. So the thing that's really interesting is that the >> All right, we are back. Day two digital asset summit. Very excited to uh welcome my friend Muriel of Optimum here to the show today. Uh Muriel, it's a it's a pleasure to host you I think on the show for the first time.

>> Yes. Yeah, >> absolutely. So quick story. Muriel and I met uh in the University of Florida. she was giving a a a talk, very technical talk, very very uh informative about how some of these things work, algorithms and and staking infrastructure uh and data availability at the time. Um and so I I think it'd be great to start with just sort of um maybe a bit about your background, but then we'll get into some of the architecture around Optimum, kind of lay the foundation for everyone to understand what's happening here. >> Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, right? It was like two years ago, I think we met in Florida or something. Yeah. And we had such a great time. I remember going to that great deli near the campus went to lunch. Yeah.

>> Um so yeah, my name is Mera Madard and uh thank you so much for having me. I said first time on the show I was really looking forward to it. Um I have spent my career as an academic as you were mentioning you know giving highly technical talks to willing or unwilling um audiences and students. Um and I've been doing that at MIT um holding the NEC chair in software science and engineering. It's the main software science and engineering chair for the school of engineering. >> Uh and this whole time I have been working on decentralized coding. Mhm. >> Coding in the sense of taking data, making equations and making those equations, render the data more robust, more reliable, faster to access and

effectively creating truly a decentralized data infrastructure, accelerating the data. Yeah. >> Um when I started doing it, I think um my colleagues were doing wellness checks on me because it was just like such a weird thing to do. Um but you know, I was very very fortunate. U my career went very well and I think because people thought well this is really innovative and the math is really cool and you can do all kinds of cool things. Who knows why you would ever do anything decentralized. Can you think of anything decentralized? Uh and then of course you know here we are. uh this many years later and uh we have web three and it's about decentralization.

>> Yeah. And and for so long um academics such as yourself were working on the math uh working on the algorithms that ultimately uh you know they were they were pushing the efficient frontier. uh but there wasn't a lot of pragmatic product market fit or or any sort of real tangible applications for a lot of this math which >> I also have I have a pure math degree as well and I think you know that is sort of a a drawback of the industry is so much of this feels like you know pushing and pushing and pushing without the the you know gratitude or the gratification of ultimately finding an application for a lot of these things. So, how did you feel, you know, after working on a lot of this math uh and then having, you know, web 3, Bitcoin, blockchain ultimately come forth? Was it it was just a match made in heaven?

>> It was. It was. I mean, I have to say I really believed at some point we would have this sort of decentralized, you know, infrastructure basically for data and computation. And the reason was that you can't really scale without it. you know, it's not so much to me a question of philosophy. I mean, there's some really interesting philosophical questions about, you know, what kind of governance you want and so on. Um, but whether you like the decentralized governance or not, it's the only one we have that can actually scale. >> Um, think of for instance the electric grid. Um really when you have failures it tends to be because there's been too much centralization in one location but

we don't have one big global interconnected grid. It is interconnected uh but it's not centralized and if you try to make it centralized it would be so fragile that it couldn't hold. Same for web 2. >> Um you know it is robust because it is decentralized. Again, many times when we have, you know, massive outages, it's because there was excessive centralization in at least some part of it. >> I I I want to clarify when you say decentralized governance, it it's maybe not, you know, the typical DAO voting structure that we're talking about.

We're talking more about the coordination of actors in a decentralized network. >> Yeah, that's right. No, that's a really good point. uh decentralized operation, heterogeneous players having to manage playing together without a single person telling them all what to do. >> Yeah. And and blockchain is is great for this. It's I think the best technology for coordination of actors that are not necessarily trusting of one another. They don't have to uh but they are able to facilitate transactions and coordinate and orchestrate with one another. Um and so you were working on this. you saw decentralization finally come up as a practical application for a lot of this math. Um, Bitcoin and blockchain continued to progress. You know, when when we met, I think it was a couple years ago, uh, you know, Optimum at the time was primarily used for the

computation of data availability. >> Um, and the industry has progressed quite a bit since then. There's still a lot of compute. In fact, I I you know, maybe later in the conversation, we'll get to the decentralized inference and compute that's now being, you know, talked about in AI, Nvidia and Shamath, Palapatia, we're talking about this at Nvidia's conference. So, you know, bit tensor and these things are getting a lot of traction as of late, but kind of, you know, working our way up to this uh you know, Optimum started, at least my understanding is that started as data availability. Give us a sense of how it started and and how it may have evolved over the last couple years since you last spoke. >> Absolutely. So, For us when we were talking about data availability was not data availability sampling let's say in the traditional sense only it's really about accessing

and having data access so data acceleration getting your data or whatever you need about your data fast um you know it's not necessarily just about sampling and figuring out whether you know a full node whether it exists exactly but actually getting that data Yes. Yes. So, you know, if you think of, you know, data availability and access, data acceleration at large, that's what we do. >> Um, uh, which is, you know, not again not just about checking that it's there. Um, and in particular, um, what we've been doing, um, with validators, um, on Ethereum, um, and right now, if you look at the validators that we've signed out, we're talking about about 30

billion of stake deep you know um and you know many of the larger ones and you know our partners like you know ever stick nethermind demon etc um what we're doing is we are making the operation for the validators faster and more reliable >> and effectively that's what you need to have a true infrastructure um you you know, I I need to know that the lights are going to go on. I need to know that my internet's going to be, you know, not always there, but by and large, yes. You know, otherwise, you can't rely on it. You can't really create services. Um, and you can't afford just putting tons and tons of

money and building out hardware everywhere. Um, that doesn't scale, certainly not at a global scale. Uh, and even locally, it becomes very, very expensive. Um, so what we do is this decentralized coding which I mentioned I've been working on. Actually just finished Monday and Tuesday. The reason I was in here yesterday was um doing a a first decentralized coding workshop uh at MIT um you know co-sponsored with optimum and also Georgia Tech my good friend Shir Bishwan out there um and you know we had we had people talking about you know data availability sampling as you were mentioning uh a lot of people talking about um you know decentralized um uh online learning and so you can see

that this is really bringing bring together all of those different strands. >> Yeah. And and so um there was a big piece of news that that dropped today which was Bit Mine. Uh you know obviously they're working their way up to 5% of the the global Ethereum supply. I think they are you know over halfway there. They've got billions of dollars I think upwards of seven billion dollars now uh that they have in their treasury uh staked and you know they're working on deploying another five to seven billion dollars uh and they're targeting staking infrastructure and verticalizing it being the largest staker of ETH uh and doing so in a very quantum secure way. I'm curious what you think this could mean as they are verticalizing their staking infrastructure. Um what it

could mean for Bitmine as one of the largest holders of Ethereum. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'll I I'll maybe address the those very good topics more generally rather than just in the context of Bitmine, although obviously that's a prime example as you bring up. So I think that there's a couple of things there. One is you know really staking with APY in mind. I think, you know, that's that's the first facet of what you're describing. Uh, and a lot of that actually relies on speed, right? I mean, we all know about MEV and ME games and timing games. Uh, those are really gaming with differences in speed and latency. Um, so what we're able to bring is better latency.

>> Uh, but not just better latency on an average. um measure, but also and you'll love this as a as a math major, but also with respect to reducing the variance more reliable, right? So, you you very much improve the mean and you massively improve the variance. Okay. >> Um and that's one of the things that coding does um in in >> you know at large in many many different settings that reduces the variance. Um, so that's I think very important if you going to say look my gig is I'm just going to get better APY. How do you do so? A and B, how do you do so reliably?

>> Yeah. >> Um, and whether you're staking your own ETH or staking for somebody else, you know, that's the name of the game. >> Um, there's a second facet that you brought up which is the quantum security. And it's interesting because uh postquantum security has nothing to do with quantum, right? It's actually about cryptographic approaches um that are as far as we know uh not breakable through a non-deterministic computer aka a quantum computer. And you know many of sort of the workh horses of cryptography right now um such as for

instance RSA which was co- um co-invented by Ron Revest uh colleague in my department uh at MIT was later shown by another colleague at MIT in a different department Peter Short to be breakable if you had a quantum computer right so you know we can argue how big a quantum computer when do we have it you know but but The point is that the algorithms are there, the math is there. Um, and so the types of cryptographic systems that are postquantum secure actually very few and far between and they actually all based on coding. Mhm. >> So the coding aspect, the making of those equations that I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation is

actually the basis of postquantum security. Uh so you can't do postquantum secure I mean short of doing you know some really very uh difficult physical things you know uh without having the coding. So, so the coding is really underpinning everything there. >> Got it. And and so this is optimum specialty uh is >> where the coding gas >> the the coding in particular. >> Um and so help us uh just understand you know if we're drilling down a level deeper here um the coding and the architecture that allows for uh more reliable and lower latency staking infrastructure. You mentioned that you've onboarded $30 billion worth of

ETH. um give us a sense of how uh how you've done this, why people that are staking for others in terms of institutional stakers and uh and staking for themselves, these you know large holders um why they're choosing optimum and and what sort of tangible benefits they're able to drive. >> Yeah. So uh we actually right now through the process of launching mainet. So we're right now what's called the calibration phase, right? when you're calibrating uh and uh we'll going on mainet next month >> um uh Ethereum mainet uh so it it is a very very exciting time um but as I said the the the we've had uh very very large uh number of partners with you know considerable portfolios uh on our test net for several months at this stage. So

um the idea is the following you know you you need to node and you need to have some information >> um from somewhere and it's decentralized. So somewhere in this big uh auditorium that we're in this big room somebody sends something and you need to get it. >> Yeah. >> Um how does that happen? Uh well if we're talking about Ethereum uh that person hands it to their neighbor who has hands it to other neighbors and you know these this information is just flowing around sloshing around until it gets to you. Um, one of the approaches is first of all to make that information into smaller pieces, right? So that people are not, you know, handing over, you know, big

blocks but maybe smaller shards. Um, so that makes everything a little bit more fluid. One can see the benefit there almost intuitively. But the problem is now you're going to be picking these shards and maybe somebody took a block and cut it into say 10 shards and you get shard the first shard you get is maybe shard number four and you go great I got shard number four I never saw it before I'm so excited and then the second shard 90% of chances it's not the one you saw already right because you only have one >> by the time you have half of the shards 50% of the time you're going to see something you already saw >> right >> right by the time You got nine out of 10. Almost every time that you see your chart, you're like, "Yeah, you know, tell me something I didn't know."

>> So, there's a name for this problem, which is, you know, why it's easy to start collections, whether it be a Pokemon collection or or a shard collection, and it's hard to finish a collection. It's called a coupon collector problem. >> Um, now, if instead of doing that, you said, "Hey, look, you know, I'm a math major. These are shards, but actually they're just numbers. I'm going to combine them. Now I have 10 unknowns. If you give me 10 equations, as long as, you know, there's nothing wrong with the equations so that, you know, I can solve my system of equations. 10 unknowns 10 equations, I'm done. As soon as I've got 10 equations, I'm done.

>> So you don't see you almost never see a repeat equation, right? Versus you almost always see a repeat chart, you know, towards the end, >> right? So that's that's >> that's the crux of it. >> Okay. Awesome. Um Maria, my last question here as as we sort of draw to a close is, you know, obviously you've you've onboarded a significant market share of ETH onto this uh onto the Optimum system. Uh $30 billion worth looking to go live on mainet very very soon. Uh ETH is at at about a $260 billion uh valuation right now. So, you know, over over 10% of the network. Um, will we just continue to see the optimum market share continue to drive up until,

you know, we're we're hitting really really high numbers in terms of the percent of ETH that's staked through Optimum? Is there any cap? Is there at what point is there a centralization risk or or something of, you know, ETH staked? How do you how do you think about this and the the go to market and the scaling strategy? >> Yeah, so um we are decentralized ourselves. So uh we're not you know we don't have a centralized system. We are actually decentralized. So you know as I was telling you these equations we we're not making those equations. Other nodes are making them. So um we don't have a centralization. You know I I couldn't centralize it if I wanted to. Not that I even want to. Um our goal is not to hit any particular number. It's just to onboard people if we can be

helpful to them. >> Yeah. >> Um but as we're moving ahead, we're actually also going to other projects, you know. Um so Ethereum is of course a great place to start. Uh but we're chain agnostic. >> Yeah. >> Uh and our goal is to have this data acceleration for as many chains as possible. >> La last thing just came to mind. you know, the elevator pitch. If uh Bitmine is out there watching now, you know, they've got a lot of ETH. They should be staking it through Optimum. What's the the you know, one minute elevator pitch to uh to Tom Lee and Bitmine uh watching, thinking about, you know, how they're going to stake in their in their new program? >> Well, um staking rewards, connect to latency, APY and latency are tightly intertwined.

You want better APY, you better have better latency. >> Awesome. Tom Lee, you heard it here first. Uh, Muriel, thank you so much for joining the show. >> Thank you so much. >> Yeah, looking forward to the next one and uh uh best of luck on the on the launch. >> Thank you very much. I hope to be able to update you about it in the future. >> Please do. We'll see you then. >> Thanks a lot. Take care. Thanks. Byebye. >> All right, guys. We'll be right back. Uh thank you so much for watching. Don't go anywhere. We're going to have our next guest, R.J. from Aligned, uh chatting a little bit about DK. See you soon. Hell yeah.

The problem that we have right now today in the blockchainbased finance world is that it resembles the same fragmentation that we started with. and fragmentation breaks financial systems. To quote uh the BIS in a recent report, when transaction fees become too high on one blockchain, users migrate to alternatives, new blockchains emerge to cater to these users and the user base splinters across multiple chains rather than the virtuous circle of greater acceptance and greater use. There's a fragmentation of the monetary landscape. Network fragmentation has emerged as one of the most pressing hurdles to adoption and building at scale within blockchain based finance. Uh there was a recent report uh co-authored by the DTCC uh Clearstream, Deutsch Bank, Euroclair,

BCG about the key problems of interoperability and the fact that without interoperability assets remain trapped in isolated pools, operational costs remain high and operational and regulatory risks remain elevated. The key thing about crosschain interoperability is latency of settlement finality. So contrary to what maybe most people understand, messaging or bridging standards are not enough to solve coordination alone, applications across chains uh fundamentally they can't communicate with each other faster than transaction finality. So if you have different standards or or protocols out there like CCIP etc. They can't communicate messages between blockchains

faster than those blockchains are actually able to reach finality. And for context, blockchains like Ethereum have extremely slow finality time. They take 15 Ethereum takes 15 minutes to finalize transactions. Even if it's on so-called layer 2 chains on top of Ethereum, like Bass, settlement time is 15 minutes or more. And so applications spread across different chains can't communicate in real time unless you have fast finality of many different chains. Uh and so what we do at Espresso is we use state-of-the-art consensus to unify liquidity across assets and create seamless interoperability between blockchain platforms. We provide speed and security. Importantly, we provide customizability. You can create different blockchains that all inherit the fast finality and speed and security

of espresso network but using different types of customized environments. We're compatible with all kinds of VMs, even application specific uh blockchains. It could be EVM, it could be non EVM, it could be something entirely different as we're going to demonstrate today in our collateral management use case demonstration. And the important thing is that everything running is composable not only with other chains that are running on the espresso network but also with other blockchains that exist today like Ethereum, Salana etc. It's a fast settlement layer so it can support many many chains collectively reaching very high up to millions of transactions per second. And while today we don't necessarily need to support millions of transactions per second to bring mainstream finance on chain, people do talk about how with the future

of agentic commerce um and the more kinds of heavy calculations you might want to bring on chain, we do need to scale up to that kind of throughput. And the way this scale happens is through parallelization. You need to be able to support many different customized chains running in parallel. And that's how you get to millions of transactions. That's how you get to real world scale. The key thing that the espresso network does is it doesn't doesn't handle the application logic on these different chains. It just provides settlement of data. It finalizes transactions and makes it so that everyone can read it consistently across the world.

Now that brings me to what we're going to talk about today, which is collateral management. A use case that many have stated are uh is the the killer app of blockchains. Uh collateral mobility is the killer app for institutional use of blockchain as Dan Donnie from the CTO of DTCC said. Um and the key thing about collateral management is that positions can span multiple chains especially if we're in a multi-chain world and we need to have a continuous risk recalculation. It's very computationally intensive and crosschain actions that involve you know pledging of collateral, movement of collateral or even freezing of assets when >> ladies and gentlemen back day two Dash NYC. We're here with RJ Roberto Cataland Buenos Migo. He was asking about our amazing production team down in Colombia trying to find out where they are. Uh

we're here today in in New York City. R.J. join us here, man. How are you? >> All good. Am I I'm in the right position. >> Yes. Yes. Yeah. You're doing great, man. >> Very good. Happy to be here. >> Welcome to New York, man. >> Thank you. Yeah. I know you are locals now, so >> slightly. >> It's your job to to receive me now >> from your home to ours. We're here. It's D day 2. Everyone's wearing suits. It's very institutional. There's a tokenization mania happening. Aligned being a very, you know, DeFi native, crypto native company focusing on ZK, focusing on on launching blockchains. How do you guys adapt to this everchanging environment here where it's it's much more of an institutional oriented environment? What is the aligned strategy to play a part in this future of digital assets? Yeah, I think now our job is having the conversations to explain to all of these new players

why the infrastructure that we have built in crypto has actually get us to to this point, right? Yeah. >> I mean people demand Bitcoin, they demand Ethereum and DeFi for certain reasons, certain features that we built with infrastructure that we have. The question is how can we explain to them how these features are useful for them in order to grow their businesses and provide better services as well. So our job has been talking to all of them trying to understand how they can adapt to this technology and we call upgrading we're in the face of upgrading the system to Ethereum or to blockchain right and it has been it has been a new type of uh adventure I would say because there are people that see the world differently and they make different trade-offs so for us uh we are 100% focused in talking with enterprises

fintexs and institutions to see what uh we can build in the last mile to offer them to migrate to wallets to rollups and to interoperability using digital assets. >> Yeah. And so I you guys are doing some work with uh or or at least kind of associated with uh a couple big companies new bank uh Levenu some of these larger institutions and neo banks down in Latin America. There's been a really big, you know, jump in neo bank adoption in Latin America as well of stable coins and digital assets. How do you guys take a part in that and what is your you know view and vision on the kind of neo bankanking side in Latin America? What's your what's your take on that side of things? Yeah, I think it's an objective thing to say that today neo

banks are eating part of the pile of fintex and I think every single fintech in LATAM is seeing is is asking theirelves like what can I integrate in my text stack so I can compete with them because if you are from a country where your currency is very weak you have a lot of inflation and devaluation offering services in dollars that is a strong currency is a zero to one and it has always been a very big problem for fintex How can I get access to the best banking system in the world that is the US and neo banks have offered a way to offer this to users just by connecting to the internet. So everything we're seeing is people saying okay how can I integrate stable coins so I can offer dollars. The product they're selling is access to the dollar. So for us that we're an infrastructure company what we are doing

is building every single part of the stack they need in order to offer what people are demanding right now that is access to dollars. And for that we need to do a work that is not only on the fintech side here but also on the fintech tax side in the US which fintexs in the US want to get into LATAM and we can be a bridge between the neo banks that we have and the more formal place in the states and that's where we're doing a lot as well like I give the technology but we are someone who can who can speak with a fintech in LATAM but also with a fintech in the US because we know very well the the the technology and very well the use cases and I think that's an edge that we So, a lot of the announcements that were made this week, the the some of the biggest

ones were they were co-branded announcements and partnerships between tokenization partners and asset management partners like uh Superstate. We had Jim Hilner talking about uh their partnership with Invesco uh Carlos Domingo and Securitize partnering with New York Stock Exchange. These are asset managers partnering with these tokenization to ultimately give them distribution, tokenize their funds, you know, give them composability, all the benefits of tokenizing and using blockchains. Um, neo banks are a little bit different, right? But they're still kind of in this, you know, this they're not really cryptonative, right? But they're on the more like web 2 fintech, you know, that that sort of side. Similar to these asset managers, but, you know, a little bit foreign. What are the neo banks primarily looking for? I take it it's probably a little bit different from the asset management

space. When you're helping them as a tech enablement partner, what are you hearing? You know, what kind of questions do they ask you? What are you helping them with? >> Yeah, I think the first question is how can I give access to my users through a debit card or credit card is tell us >> like the the first thing they ask out of the box. Why? Because that's already has some product market fit and people are asking. But what we are saying to people and it's very related to what you're mentioning with organization Robbie is ste show that the world demands dollars and they want an easy way to access dollars. What is the US exporting just a currency but the next wave is not exporting only the stable coin or access to a quick bank account but it's also exporting the financial system that you have with Wall

Street. people in in in Latin America, they can't easily buy an Apple stock and people who say they can, they haven't actually tried. I end up buying Bitcoin first because I couldn't buy an Apple stock. That was literally the the problem I had as a user. So I think the next wave to Neo Bank is saying, "Hey, we can give you access to stable coins, but people will of course they will want Bitcoin and Ethereum in many cases, but they also want Nvidia. They also want access to tables. >> Getting access as a small enterprise in Latin America to Gild on using Tibles that is the safest asset in the world is extremely hard. You can't do it. >> Yeah. So it's turning the the main export of the US which being the US dollar. It's it's activating more of the

US economy, the the entire US equities complex, more of the Wall Street financial mechanisms, exporting those in addition to the dollars. >> Exactly. Because the US has built over the years it has started like great institutions. Replicating those great institutions is extremely hard all over the world and >> if you see when you travel it okay having a wall street is not easy and the thing is when you speak in Wall Street people is saying yeah you can upgrade and have like 247 settlement instant finality whatever but at the same time is hey you can grow your business because you can connect Wall Street to the rest of the world. And the question is what's the best infrastructure to do that and how can you do it in a way that is easy for neo banks to offer to their users. So I think the next thing we'll

see is kind of like what you have seen with stripe and bridge that bridge like nailed the UX for developers for using stable coins and bank accounts is nailing the real world asset and organization because that's what people will demand. And so when you guys are looking at the aligned product roadmap and kind of sales cycles again like how do you guys get in front of this? Is it partnering with the neo banks? Is it building chains for different banks for different institutions? How do you kind of bridge this latam and uh US capital markets gap? >> Yeah. So I think there are two things.

One is like the BD part and the other one is the technology part. We're very confident that the technology part is almost solved because Case is already got us here for scalability and privacy that can be also used for compliance and the customization you get with your own rollup is very important for people in Wall Street that they need to have their own garden and define their own rules. there are like adoption is coming here but every single person I have spoke from Wall Street they want to do something but they don't know exactly what are the rules right now and how we would like do how the connection with the new technology will work so our job is trying to advise them and tell them hey this is how our tech in our part of the world works let's see how we can connect it in a sustainable way that can actually help grow your business and

going to the neo bank saying hey you already are offering something people want dollars Okay, why don't you offer this as well? In this case, tokenization of assets or how can we help markets in existing countries like in LATAM get access to the liquidity of the states because it's a two it's a two-way bridge is offering Wall Street and also connecting or giving Wall Street opportunities with better trust assumptions of countries that where they cannot operate. If you want to operate in Argentina, you don't know if in 10 years you will have someone else who will increase capital control. And if you run a multi- I don't know billion dollar business, opening a subsidiary in Argentina is a risk. >> Yeah.

>> But if you use stable coins, maybe the risk lowers and you can take that bet. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I I'm curious how how important ZK is is still to the aligned stack. Um is this something that neo banks are uh prioritizing and fintex? Do they care about privacy? Do they care about ZK? Um or has the strategy shifted towards one that's more stable coin ccentric? So CK is not the product. CK is like the techn if I had to make an analogy I think it will be like hey I'm PayPal. >> Mhm. >> My edge is that I'm connected to the internet. Anyone can access to me. And they nailed the fraud part. But they they were not selling the internet in itself. They were selling the availability for money being able to

connect the dollar directly to eBay and all these things. So we're not selling CK. What we're selling is products that are way better because we use CK. Why they're better? Because they're simpler. They're simpler to understand and build because a rollup used to be a Frankenstein before. >> Yeah. >> Now it's not a Frankenstein. >> Yeah. >> It's simpler modular components and that's only possible because we use CK. >> Yeah. >> They do they do want privacy and compliance and I think that's where CK will come very handy. And that part, even though a lot of people think KYC and CK solve, I think we're not there yet. And I'm very confident that with our expertise, we can solve problems people have by knowing how to use this technology correctly. >> Yeah. Uh I'm curious about the the

consumer behavior. Like, you know, we we've heard that, you know, consumer behavior is one of the slowest things to change. Obviously, people know the brands that they like. They have their consumer practices. They're used to going onto online banking, logging in, you know, they're they're used to these sorts of practices. Once you start to offer some of these other Wall Street mechanisms that we talked about and these other more, even if they are like highquality US equities, you know, these other speculative assets inside, you know, some of the the neo banks and fintexs that, you know, people are accustomed to. How do you think consumer behavior might change? Is this going to be like the hyper financialization and gambling like everyone seems like they're addicted to it now or like h how do you think people are going to react when they start to see equities and stocks and lend borrow inside of their

their fintex? So I think yes we'll see a mania of like people buying a lot of things but I'm very optimistic that I think with these new rails we'll be able to build markets that were not possible before and I will give you an example when you look at how finance used to work like 150 years ago things were more local used to go to your bank you knew the person that was in touch with you in the bank they say okay you're a farmer I know your family and friends there was some trust network right and that broke because we didn't have the technology in order to scale that system of trust. I think with crypto will back we will go back to the basics saying that it will be internet native communities that will use this to build uh new kind of banking systems like Mr. V bought a bank.

>> I think I think that's very interesting. >> Why like there's a very I use this example of a very widely popular YouTube channel in Latin America that is for traveling >> called Luito Kunika like Luito speaks basically. If I use him to know to decide where I travel, why wouldn't I use him to save in order to travel >> or use him in order to pay when I go to Brazil? >> Right. Right. Right. >> Like I think the consumer behavior will change in the sense that now people that have different markets and different type of users that trust them for particular reasons. I will be able to put money involved in the middle because now we have the technology that allows us to >> make anyone be able to offer financial services with very high integrity

>> and that was not possible before. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean I think that as you look at the the markets that are being the most adopted by blockchain technology stable coins it is the markets where it is needed the most. it is the markets where these as you mentioned a lot of the access and the ways to get exposure to different you know dollars equities etc isn't available and so when you think about your your kind of um customers and who's going to be using your technology it's almost like a lot of it's down in the southern cone down at home >> yeah I think it's it will be connecting the two worlds we're in a very unique position where I can we can go and say okay I know very well the technology so to understand exactly what someone in

Latin America needs. But I because we know very well the technology, we can speak with someone here and say, "Hey, this is the right stack and this is the way we can communicate the two words." Because for Wall Street, I think is how can I grow my business? How can I have more people buying and selling assets? >> Yeah. >> Well, the way is you already have the the stage is very developed. Where else can you go? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Um I think I think it's incredible. I think the proliferation of this is you're you're going to ultimately get picked up on both the American side as well as the the you know the South American side um as these things proliferate and and look us as you know crypton native people we're looking forward to high quality assets on chain. Yeah, >> this this is something that you know most of the token economy is just not

there. It's just not it's just you know it's not it's not high quality assets. We had Santiago talking about this like we know this is the case. Um, and so high quality assets on chain I think is something that everyone around the world is looking forward to because ultimately this improves everyone's everyone's financial health. >> Well, it's just that all we had was crypto assets on chain and now we're getting more opportunities, more flexible opportunities and and also from the strategy perspective kind of bringing these two worlds together now becomes the main mo right. I mean yeah >> yeah I think that the first use the first bene the first person that benefited from stable coins was the US government.

>> More people bought Tibils. I think the pitch to Wall Street is the Fed benefited a lot because people were buying you had like terror and you circle buying enormous amount billions of dollars of T-books. Okay, Wall Street, you can now have billions of dollars of people buying your assets, high quality assets, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Just dump them on us. >> Let us have them. Thank you, R.J. man. Enjoy your conference. I know you have talks. I know you have this other fell over here trying to give you a demo. Thank you for joining us. Um, thank you guys. Hope you have a great time here. You might need to wear the suit tomorrow.

>> Yeah, >> I'm going from Huri to Patagonia. >> Yeah, >> next step is the suit. >> We're on We're on the same journey. Thanks so much, man. See you next time. >> Thank you very much. >> Pleasure. >> All righty, guys. We're going to keep it rolling here. We've got the Salana Policy Institute up next. Joining us, Miller White House Leavani. He is the founder of the SBI. Huge huge week in policy with Clarity Act, stable coin yields. Obviously, a lot of controversy around these topics, guys. Regulatory clarity is coming whether you like it or not, Rob. It's happening. It's happening. I've got 30 minutes until my talk.

>> I've got a Neo finance panel. >> Oh, do you on the institutional stage here ready to drop some bombs? >> Who's on the panel with you? >> Invesco Circle. Um, and a couple others. Yeah. So, we're gonna have we're going to be joined by Miller here, the uh CEO here. >> Miller, >> hello. >> Crypto policy is hot right now. >> I guess I guess so. I've heard >> missed you in DC at the amazing DC blockchain summit. >> We are. >> Yeah, we were supposed to host an event together, but the weather, the tornadoes in DC, the tornado, the first in 20 years, of course. >> Right. Of course. It was called Proof of Spring, so we earned it. Man, I take it you you've been quite busy lately.

>> It has been a uh the busiest 15 months of of our lives for sure. >> Yeah, man. I like to think of the SPI as kind of a extension of the entire digital assets complex. >> You know, I think you guys are obviously doing work within Salana, but really all the work that you're doing to push legislation forward for crypto as a whole is very important. So, I just wanted to thank you for that. >> Well, I appreciate it. it uh it has become a complex and I think that's uh due to the crypto industry realizing DC is important and uh if you're not at the table you're on the menu I think is a truism in Washington so when I first started doing this work uh it was a threeperson complex in Washington not so much not so much of a complex and we had

zero resources and three humans so it's been um very encouraging and uh we're appreciative of the investment >> well a lot of great work done so far and a lot a lot still more to do. Um maybe we'll just start with a bit you know of your background from from three people no resources. Get us caught up you know how did where did you start in DC and ultimately you know h how did you find solon policy institute? >> Sure. Yeah happy to give my my origin story. So I first got into crypto 2013 2014. I was in school so not professionally and I'm not a technical person. So I uh I knew I couldn't do anything coding but everything it grabbed me at the time. I was living in China and uh you know that's quite an education. You really feel the presence of the state and how technology can be used to empower the state. And I think

uh crypto uh crypto is the first major technology in several decades that I think has a real shot of empowering individuals via v centralized intermediaries be those businesses or governments. So uh you know I had an ideological attraction to Bitcoin at the time and nothing else existed. Uh eventually I uh got a job at the blockchain association working for Kristen Smith and that's uh where I started my career. So, I have only done crypto policy. I'm completely unemployable anywhere outside of Washington in crypto. And uh I think that to to answer your real question there, I think there have been kind of three eras of of crypto policy. And the first was benign neglect. Like no one cared about us. If a member of Congress

ever said the word crypto or Bitcoin, it was an exciting moment. And we would all text each other, you know. Now it's every day like hundreds of members of Congress are talking about crypto and it's like overwhelming. But you know at the time no one cared and uh where that really changed was first with Libra, the Facebook stable coin uh attempt and then with the Biden administration era 2, Gary Gendler trying to kill us, not just him but really the entire US government. Uh I think in retrospect it's come out engaged in a coordinated attempt to crash this industry in the US. That's problematic for a variety of reasons that uh we don't need to adjudicate again. But that brings us to air three.

And I think uh you know a lot of the progress that should have been done and could have been done 10 years ago has happened in a very good press time frame. So it's just been incredibly busy and totally encouraging. I I I still have to pinch myself that legislation like the Genius Act is law and that we're going to have it probably for the rest of our lives. Um so long may it continue. I think um it's it's just always surprising to me how much more work is to be done. Like each time we get something done, 10 new issues come up and uh it's certainly going to be a long journey here. But um we have to engage if we're going to be successful. It it feels like um like you said that there's so much opportunity compressed in such a short amount of

time that it is an allout blitz and sprint to get as much done as possible. >> Um with the caveat that with government things take time. >> What would make this administration a success? You know what what has to get done? What work still has to be done to ultimately say okay we did what we had to do with the opportunity that was given to us. >> Yeah. I think um my philosophy and I think the admin's philosophy is to try and establish or implement as many durable wins as possible. I think like our greatest macro risk from the policy perspective is the pendulum swinging back uh toward you know the Gary Gendler approach uh in the way that it moved in our favor last year. So I think you our big uh risk is 2029 and we need to get

as much uh as many rules alleged uh statutes, laws on paper as quickly as possible such that they're um immune, not immune but are more durable uh next administration. You know, vibes are good. Obviously, tone at the top is important, but uh that can change quite quickly with an election. So, I think getting rule making done, getting legislation done, which uh on the Genius Act has happened, um is the focus. And I think to the extent we have rules that will outlast this administration in place by 2029, it'll be a success.

>> Yeah. >> Epic. >> Yeah. So, there was recent news here uh over the last couple days about some insiders getting some access to the uh next set of docs on the clarity side. Um and that the the stable coin yield portion was still quite restrictive. At least that's how uh crypto insiders would receive it. >> Where we at here? I mean Armstrong has gone tooth and nail in DC to defend his business obviously in his private interest but the entire space. Where do we go from here on clarity? What is the what is the what is the rumblings on the inside on the stable coin side? Is is is there anything that you can share?

>> Yes. I mean I think the first rumbling is just an immense amount of frustration. >> Okay. >> I have said several times already. The Genius Act passed last summer. this provision or the issue that uh is now holding up market structure was in the bill last year. Like usually when a law passes, you wait a decade before trying to rejudicate it. For whatever reason, the banks were asleep at the wheel for the first bill to pass through the Senate Banking Committee in like a decade. They missed it. I don't know what happened, but they're trying to renegotiate a deal that was reached last summer and passed into law. So, I think that is uh >> is extremely frustrating cuz now we have a stable coin policy issue. Uh we passed the stable coin bill last summer holding up market structure legislation uh because the banks, you know, weren't

doing their jobs last summer is pretty much how they explain it. So, uh that is extremely frustrating and I think it's disappointing that, um you know, they've had success holding up this bill over this issue. At the end of the day, what Coinbase and uh other stable coin issuers are trying to do is pass on rewards to customers. That's a net benefit to consumers. Banks can compete if they want to uh uh not lose customers to someone that can give out more yield or rewards than uh than they can. The banks don't want competition and uh unfortunately, you know, they've convinced certain members of Congress that that is a valid position. Uh I don't know exactly where things stand today. you know, the the deal reached Friday does seem to be pretty uh

favorable to the banks, and that's certainly what Coinbase is saying. So, I think uh you know, hopefully we can have a peaceful resolution here in the next 48 hours cuz time is running out. >> When you say a the deal that was reached Friday, like who is that deal between? Because it does seem very one-sided. At least what we heard was that, you know, effectively nothing that even resembled some yield could be passed on to to stable coins. And so when you say a deal was reached, does that mean that crypto teams and blockchain lobbyist groups, you know, signed off on this? >> Uh, not to my knowledge. And I think that's part of the problem here. Uh, you know, I think the agreement in principle that was reached on Friday was between uh members on the hill, so senators and the white house. And uh I don't know if anyone in in industry has actually seen

legislative text yet because I don't know if there is legislative text yet of um you know reflecting whatever the deal in principle was. Uh so I think you know part of it is I you know this issue has been now holding up uh this legislation for nine weeks and we're looking for a breakthrough and so I think um everyone was quite hopeful that you know the deal in principle would uh would resolve it and it hasn't. Um my understanding of the way that you know these these policy institutes such as you know Salana is essentially you're representing you know Salana in DC um and so uh I guess would you advise Salana like accept you know the current deal on the table? Uh well I think it depends on who you are. Like I

think our interest is making it as easy as possible and as um uh having as clear as possible rules for anyone that wants to build on Salana to build a business to build a protocol to do so. Stable coins are a massive important part of the Salana ecosystem. And I think it's ridiculous that the banks are using what I believe to be, you know, a um a fig leaf argument to uh try and protect their regulatory mount. So, I certainly don't want to take the deal. I think that in context, the question gets trickier. Like, what I'm thinking about is um are the banks going are the banks winning this battle, but we can win the long term more or are the banks winning this battle and we we're going to lose the long term more. If it's the latter, then we should, you know, take our

medicine and get take the rest of the bill because there's huge benefits to other portions of the ecosystem by getting 19 uh, excuse me, market structure done. Um, so I think that's unfortunately like the tough choice we as an industry and as an ecosystem have to weigh right now. Uh, you know, are the upsides of the rest of market structure uh, make it worth, you know, taking our medicine on rewards? Uh, and do we think that if we sacrifice market structure for rewards that the banks won't win via some other legislative vehicle in 6 months and we're all going to be very regretful. So, you know, it's tough because you're taking a leap of faith >> either way and uh it's late March. >> Who who do you think has the leverage

right now >> uh on this issue? Well, clearly the banks have a lot of leverage. they have they've activated because uh you know to their credit whatever strategy they're implementing here is seemingly having uh uh yielding them results no pun intended um so I think uh who has leverage I I mean I think crypto has leverage banks have leverage it's kind of like an immovable object unstoppable force situation which is why this issue hasn't been resolved like ultimately someone has to lose here and uh both constituencies have a lot of leverage Yeah.

>> And is the urgency just midterms coming up? Is that the urgency? >> That is the urgency. You know, Congress uh in a midterm election season really leaves Washington at the end of July and aren't doing serious legislative work uh until after the election. And who knows, you know, where things stand after the election. So that's the clock. >> We have like two three months. >> We just thought it was Europe that took off for the summer. >> Yes. No, they're going on tour, right? >> Yeah. Exactly. They got to go win her. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um what's what are the other less talked about things happening in policy right now? I mean I everyone's talking about clarity and market structure. Are there other things around like taxes around uh payments around uh blockchains? Is there anything else that's happening that's interesting?

>> Yes. I mean I for me the most interesting thing that's about to happen that I feel like people in crypto have not picked up on enough is what chairman Atkins was talking about yesterday with the innovation exemption. What the SEC is talking about there is allowing for people to trade using wallets, self-hosted wallets and onchain DeFi protocols, US equity securities and public securities. That is like in an insane that is an insanely revolutionary idea. 14 months ago, if someone told us that would be in the cards in 2026, like I would have laughed at you and then shot you in the head. So, it's uh I think quite revolutionary. I think it's a once in a-lifetime opportunity. like I the dream is for all assets to live on chain and you know be able to use them

uh anywhere anywhere in the world at any time online and uh the SEC is about to make that real >> and and how do you anticipate um companies and teams leveraging this innovation exemption like you know maybe you know we have so many tokenization and asset management partnerships that have been announced uh and he's going to go on a panel with Invesco here in a few minutes like how do you anticipate companies such as these guys are going to uh you know uh use the the innovation exemption. >> Well, I think there's like a lot of obvious applications. What I'm most excited about is the unknown unknown innovations or new markets that this uh will bring. You know, it's much cheaper to go public on Salana than it is to go on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. So I think um uh

new access to capital for businesses that could not otherwise raise money is I think uh the most exciting thought in my mind like potentially new addressable market that the US capital markets have never been able to serve and same with the investor side you know if any one with an internet connection can access investment opportunities in US companies that's good for us companies that's good for wealth creation on the user side and then if you're like an issue were today, you know, we have hundred trillion dollars worth of securities. Expanding the liquidity available uh to buy those assets, expanding for businesses the pool of capital they can tap is in everyone's interests.

>> Yeah. Quick question on the investor side. Um we also heard Celig talk about how uh he's he's going to look at pretty much every rule in the rule book and and remove a lot of the antiquated ones. One of the ones that I think he may be talking about, I'm curious to hear your take is accredited investor laws. Yep. >> And for I mean I just think it's ridiculous how they you know it's okay for you know normies I guess to buy lottery tickets and go to the casino but they're not allowed to buy you know private placements and and securities. It it just doesn't make sense. So what what do you think is going to happen? Are you hearing any rumblings? Is accredited investor laws on the table as one of the things that could get repealed as Celick moves through these these rule books? >> Yes. So, I completely agree with you.

Like, I don't know how our current accredited investor >> laws are currently still the law. It's not just like you could go buy a lottery ticket and get in private placements. It's only if you're rich enough and make enough money can you participate in what has become uh you know in the US the private markets are now larger than the public markets because the SEC you know in the last admin made it so difficult to go public. So, it's just crazy and it's totally antiquated and uh you know, I think classist to a large extent. Um, the good news is like I think everyone pretty much agrees with that like on a largely bipartisan basis. You know, the Elizabeth Warren crowd somehow finds issues in expanding access to investment opportunities and uh we'll have to ask

her about that. But um >> man, I'd love to have more show. Um uh but Senator Tim Scott, who's the chair of Senate Banking, this is like a big issue for him that he's focused on. So he has a bill that would not um change the existing accredited investor qualification rules, but add an additional one. So you you would be able to qualify under the existing income and wealth uh standards. But in addition to that, there would be a knowledgebased test that uh folks would be able to take in order to gain access to private placements. So like right now you know a finance professor that makes 180k can't access private placements and uh to the extent a you know finance professor knows more about uh the risks and can pass this test they should have access

to those investment opportunities. So I hope to see that happen. Uh it's um I think common sense and would be a huge unlock. >> Yeah. Well uh shout out to everyone watching. You know keep watching the rollup because we're going to help you pass your test. You guys want access to private places. You're going to have to study up. We're gonna have exam pass these exams so that you can, you know, be up there with all the accredited investors and participate in these private markets. >> Yeah, Millie, man, we just I just want to say thanks again for the work on the hill. Um, means a lot to everybody in the industry in Salana, in all the communities. >> Let's get this bill through, man. Let's get it done. >> I know. Fingers crossed. Knock on wood.

And I Yeah, I appreciate having you on and it's an honor to do the work we do. So, I couldn't imagine doing anything else. >> Well, thanks for coming on. Appreciate all the hard work. >> Thanks again. >> Yeah. See you next time. >> See you. All righty, guys. We're live from Dast New York City. It's day two. We're going to take a quick break until our next guest arrives. See you guys in just a second. >> All all all of these other assets that are coming on on chain, where do we see them happening? Do we see it on public blockchains? Do we see it on private blockchains? Do we see these two merging over time? Do we see them being separate financial systems? What what are your takes on that? Um Dennis, maybe.

>> Yeah, sure. So, um again, I do think it is use case dependent. Uh we have certain use cases that run on our private permission blockchain platform, which I don't think will ever necessarily leave that that platform. And these are primarily ones where we're targeting those efficiencies that that we talked about earlier. And the reason why they're easier on the private permission is because we don't have to worry about provisioning wallets or teaching our clients how to use uh wallet infrastructure. We don't have to do sanction screening, transaction monitoring. All these additional things that come with issuing assets on a public blockchain are a bit easier when we do them within the walt garden. Uh that said, obviously in the second half of last year, we started deploying assets onto public blockchains and there the idea was a distribution use case. So bringing traditional assets to folks

that want to buy them on public chains and really using those networks as a distribution mechanism. The important thing for us is that any network that we deploy on and we build on, we want there to be demand for what we're doing. And so, you know, we again going back to like I kind of look at the different blockchains as distribution layers and some of them will be better for certain ones than than others, but like as far as the JP Morgan side, we will be deploying on on multiple blockchain networks. Same here. Uh we will be deploying on multiple chains. Canton was the first but not the last. Um we definitely were intrigued by the compliance features of Canton for all the reasons that uh Dennis just mentioned, right? Like there's an element of privacy that we, you know, you don't want people peeking

into other people's wallets and seeing what's in there. Um we will we will support public and private. We're actually chain agnostic and it's really going to demand it's going to um depend on where demand is and our clients had demanded canton. So that's where we started first. So we are we have um a nicely curated public private chains and it's only been a couple weeks now uh that the SEC sort of uh took off the shackles of private uh public chains as well. Um and we're deploying an orchestration layer on top of it that would allow for a secure movement of uh tokens among different wallets, different chains uh to be able to do that. So um again when we talk about being open uh we will be open to uh any blockchain that a client wants to look at um as well um as uh the partners that we bring into our ecosystem. So that is

how we believe we can build an infrastructure that's accessible um and useful to the market at large. >> Yeah. The open ed we look at utilities. So for the most part it will be public because that is where the flow is that's where the activities are. So bringing the product onchain is just step one bring accessibility. But step two which is really more important is to bring on utility. for example, you know, having the asset being freely tradable on decentralized exchanges or having a borrow market and all these things are existing in public blockchain rather than private. So for us really we kind of go to where the demand is and and for institutions I can understand why

private blockchain would make a lot of sense but I think for the most part at least our existing user base are people that are still trading or or living onchain. Okay. So I mean earlier in this conversation we talked about you know maybe different types of tokenization would lead to fragmentation issues but then if we start to launch on this private chain on this public blockchain and this this different types of virtual machines aren't we worrying about fragmenting there as well like are we just hoping that one has liquidity one is like NSA when we've looked at different initiatives around

>> matter expert and we'll go down the line. >> Cool. Hi, it's great to be here after a 19our flight from and we'll go down the line. >> Cool. Hi, it's great to be here after a 19our flight from Asia. So, my name is Alvin Ali, >> matter expert, and we'll go down the line. >> Cool. Hi, it's great to be here after a 19 hour flight from Asia. So, my name is Alvin Ali, >> matter expert, and we'll go down the line. >> Cool. Hi, it's great to be here after a 19-hour flight from Asia. So, my name is Alvin Ali, >> growth at Big Gat Wallet. Uh we're building the truly first borderless wallet >> matter expert and we'll go down the

line. >> Cool. >> Hi, it's great to be here after a 19our flight from Asia. So my name is Alvin. I lead growth at Big Gat Wallet. Uh we're building the truly first borderless wallet >> matter expert and we'll go down the line. Cool. >> Hi, it's great to be here after a 19-hour flight from Asia. So my name is Alvin. I lead growth at Big Gat Wallet. Uh we're building the truly first borderless wallet for everyday finance. So with about 90 million users globally where people can trade, earn and pay with digital assets and stable coins. >> I am sadly only coming with a 30-minute car ride from >> All righty. Day two here in New York City at Data Austin Campbell who caught my eye with a lovely quote tweet of one of my posts about some company that's very well capitalized but not talked

about. Don't not sure if he's going to share but Austin, welcome to the show, man. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. >> It's good to have you, man. I I think it was the um uh it was one of the revenue tweets. People are talking about revenue now, Austin. People are valuing these tokens like companies now. >> I think this has been an alarming development for a lot of the crypto ecosystem. Yeah. Where we lived in this world, I mean, if you rewind the history of crypto, most of it existed in a zero interest rate environment where a lot of investment was very speculative on future value. Now we live in a very nonzero interest rate environment. Are people starting to worry about things like cash flows and actually generating money and it is a pretty big regime shift in what matters and what doesn't.

>> Yeah, I mean definitely I mean >> hyperlquid and I don't know there's not much else to say. So this company that that you were speaking about there's a company there that is doing a lot of revenue but isn't getting a lot of interest and getting bought out or it was vice versa? >> No. So the tweet was about so it's a company I'm actually an adviser for called Inca Digital which is how I know the entire internals. They do what I can best describe as open- source intelligence operations across not just the crypto but forms of financial ecosystems. So most people listening to this are probably familiar with the existence of something like chain analysis. Yeah. >> Which is to say that's a wallet forensics tool. You can look at what happened onchain. But if you've worked

in anti-inancial crime in the fintech ecosystem or the traditional financial ecosystem, usually your best data comes from places like social media. And weirdly still, sometimes the newspaper, as bizarre as that sounds, um, also fully aware of this, the US intelligence agencies. So there's something called open- source intelligence operations which is taking info from places like Telegram, Reddit, Twitter, WeChat, right, where people talk about stuff. And let me tell you, the number one source of information breaches is people just talking about stuff. Take all of that, slam it through large language models, which is where the AI intersection really matters because now you can taxonomize that data real fast, and you actually start finding very

interesting things on the blockchain because you could do a huge amount of reconstruction and wallet address connection, or you could break into a Telegram chat and just see the wallet address where the Iranian guy told you to send the money. >> Yeah. >> Right. And one of those two methods is actually much more reliable and faster than the other if you can pull it off. >> Yeah. So this company exists. Nobody in crypto pays any attention to them. Just so you know, if you're in crypto, they are spying on you and reporting on you to the federal government because this is their job. >> It's exactly what we wanted to hear. >> I'm being honest. and they are generating tens of millions of dollars a year of revenue because a lot of the real asset tokenizers work with these people because they want to make sure if you're a stable coin issuer if you're

like a tokenized money market fund manager, >> you don't want to have Kim Jong-un come into possession of a huge amount of your tokens. >> That's not >> right. And the open source component is important because they're not KYCing everybody or like hoovering up huge amounts of information to create honeypotss. But these sorts of businesses and this is not the only one that exists in crypto but they exist and generate very little interest even in crypto. Like let me ask you this. What blockchain in the world has the most KYCed users doing payments activity? >> Optos. >> No. >> Um Salana >> Cello. >> Cello right.

>> Nobody will know this. Mini Pay. Yeah. The Opera mobile app. They literally hundreds of thousands of KYCed users and I think 12.5 million actual users. >> Wow. >> Only the exchanges have larger audiences. Like yeah, Binance has more customers. Fine. >> Cello token like total market cap, one of the lowest of all of the chains. >> And so your point like really resonated with me that we've gone from this meta of like hyper speculative investment >> to revenue. And I think there's a few projects like you raised Hyperlquid is a great example of one with positive revenue but there are many others that are kind of undiscovered right now.

>> Yeah, there are. But we don't value revenue in the same way like it there was a comparison of like Sky and Hyperlid and Sky does half the amount of annualized revenue about 360 mil around eight and it's 12th of the fully diluted valuation. So revenue is also not valued equally depending on the sector, depending on the project as well. And so there's kind of a also an inefficiency in the way that people are valuing the types of revenue. >> It may be an inefficiency. It may actually be crypto whether we like it or not starting to become more trady. >> Yeah.

>> So if you look at traditional financial businesses like banks or asset managers, they attract lower multiples than a lot of like the speculative tech companies, right? Right. And the reason is there's only so much user growth and margin growth that JP Morgan can have. Right? That thing's pretty damn big. >> But also in those businesses, the network effects don't work the same way. Like the more people who use Facebook, the more valuable Facebook is. >> Yeah. >> The same is not true of like stocks. Like it is not the case that if more people have bought a specific stock, that's actually a forward indicator of value for the stock.

Similarly for asset managers, if I'm winning because I have high yields now, if I have lower yields, the next year I actually lose a bunch of my customers. So the network effect is different. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And the stickiness of that revenue, how how we project forward those multiples. I want to double back to Well, actually, so you mentioned Cello and and you know, they have a lot of KYC users via Mini Pay. You're you're suggesting that you know that that customer data is really really valuable. Um, and a lot of the crypto companies don't have customer data because a lot of this is permissionless and wallets and these sorts of things. It's just keys and coins, right? >> What like you're saying that we should go further in into this direction or or more companies, more crypto companies are going to start to look like this.

How should we start to navigate like the KYC era of of digital assets and tokenization? So one like I am very pro capitalism and pro competition. My answer is people should experiment and figure out what works and that the diversity is actually part of the game right and that is a good thing for the world. So, I'm not specifically saying everybody should go become mini, >> but I am saying what's odd to me from a market perspective is you have somebody demonstrabably doing something different with significantly more users >> and significant transaction volumes that is being ignored. If anything, my critique is the reverse of like crypto >> is too monotonic in how it values things. It needs to branch out. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Do do you um I I put out this tweet that was like if the tokenization thesis is correct and I think this was the one, you know, trillions of dollars of assets coming on chain, which company is going to benefit the most? The resounding answers were exchanges, uh oracles and like DeFi/ like lending? Do you agree with that? >> No. Um yeah, pretty simply the answer is no. Exchanges will only benefit if they hold on to the customers. But here's the thing, these are currently exchanges for native crypto assets. If you have tokenized stocks, are people going to buy that through Coinbase or are they going to buy it through Robin Hood, right? Are they going to buy it through Schwab? And so it may be that some of the winners here are already existing financial companies that integrate this into their existing consumer base.

>> The other part is for market innovation and efficiency, the end winner is usually the consumer. >> It may be that the profits don't accumulate at any company, right? Good example, the stable coin yield debate. If stable coins start paying everybody in the current environment, let's call it three-ish% yield, that's actually into like your pocket and my pocket. We are the winners. It's not a specific centralized company. >> Yeah. >> Um I'm a little bit more curious about, you know, some of the things that we talked about early on, which was kind of like this uh surveillancess that you mentioned and how >> guys got Zack XBT on the screen. So I saw this recently where the circle froze a bunch of balances. Um people were kind of unsure as to why uh and Zach Zach XBT says you know there was a he spoke to one of the affected businesses directly.

They stated that it was a ongoing US civil case. Details are not yet disclosed. I'm just curious like again as we get more into this KYC era of crypto chain analysis, their entire business is just accumulating user data and labeling more and more wallets. How do you think we're going to react as more of these crypto companies become like the the central infrastructure that connects a lot of these financial mechanisms together? You know, here Circle and Tether are freezing Iranian wallets. good thing, bad thing, permissionless is taken out of the equation. It just looks more and more like, you know, the existing financial infrastructure.

How do you think this plays out? >> I mean, so I've been saying this for many years, and I think people are only now coming to the problems that I've been identifying, and Zach is very angry with me right now, but I think he's misunderstood the point I'm trying to make, which is that you could pick two of being permissionless, having real world assets, and having smart contracts. >> You cannot have all three. And the reason is exactly this, which is to say, take a hypothetical example of a legitimate operating company with an omnibus wallet structure that's got a hund00 million of funds in there, and it turns out that I don't know, 5.9 million of it is the Iranians. A federal judge doesn't look at that and go, "Oh, those crypto guys got me. They put it all in a pile labeled money. I guess I can't do

anything." They'll just say, "Freeze the whole thing and sort it out." And so what you end up is with huge amounts of collateral damage to unrelated businesses and people. But one, a freeze is not a permanent seizure. Most of these people will get their money back after the court proceeding if they're not, you know, literally the Iranians >> years later. But two, by having built a system that just ignored the existence of real world law and how these things historically work in the US legal system, because I will remind everybody in asset comingling cases, the standard is freeze everything and figure it out.

That's true of tradi companies. Ignore the blockchain. And so you basically said we're going to be permissionless cipher punks. We're going to build complex interconnected smart contract systems, but also we're going to use assets where a federal judge can rug them. >> What did you expect to happen? >> Also, what do you expect the judge to do? You can't build a system where you say, "Hey, cuz we made strategic errors, you'll damage people, therefore crime is legal." >> Yeah. >> So, so this is where people start to say, "Hey, Ethereum, Salana, these L1s are actually L2s built on Circle and Tether." And if you are integrating those into everything, I would tell you that's true. But it's maybe even worse than that. Like an L2 would imply coherent rules on top of that. The bigger problem is that you have a sand

castle built on top of a swamp and that swamp is the real world concerns around the traditional financial system because underneath Circle and Tether are a pile of treasuries in the US banking system, >> right? And we've already seen Silvergate. I was at Paxos managing the stable coins there and so I was very attuned to this problem which is that I personal hot take stable coin should not be on Ethereum in the current way it's designed right it is a matter of time until something like the USD like T E pool on unis swap or like one of the major a lending pools gets bricked >> wow frozen just frozen completely >> completely frozen because we know that there's elicit activity flowing through that Correct. And the federal regulators are

not going to be like, well, you know, we got to protect all these UNKYC DeFi people when we don't know who they are. They're just going to be like, no, freeze it and sort it out. >> So, what's the alternative? >> So, there are alternatives. Mini Pay is actually a good example of alternative. So, how does Mini Pay work? >> It is permissionless. It's surprisingly cipher punk, but everybody has their own segregated account where they hold their own assets. So, in that case, if you need to freeze it, we freeze like your $52, >> not the whole pool. >> That's fine. These are little boxes that can all explode individually. Notice what came out in that one, the smart contracts.

>> Yeah. >> Another thing you could do >> is have permissionless assets with smart contracts. I like a pretty big proponent to Bitcoin. >> Right. >> Right. It works great and that is permissionless, but it's because it's not responsive to any particular local authority. Build smart contracts on that. If you're going to run an exchange that's no KYC, you should have Bitcoin to crypto pairs, not stable coin to crypto pairs. Lastly, >> ah stable coins again, >> right? Lastly, if you want to have the smart contracts and real world assets, then you need a permissioning ecosystem because at some point a judge somewhere is going to nuke you. Yeah.

>> And you need to have an ecosystem that could surgically go in and take out those specific funds to avoid breaking everything, which means controls outside of just the asset issuer. Yeah, >> that's the answer. >> I Austin, last thing for me, uh, is, you know, you spent time at JP Morgan, City, and Paxos and more like through lines that you may not have already mentioned today. What should we be keeping in mind as this industry progresses? >> I would say the biggest thing is that the crypto people and the financial people have talked past each other in tremendous fashion over the past 10 years. And that is to say, there are real and deep technological innovations happening here that financial people need to be aware of. But there are also basic riskmanagement principles that they have ignored completely and refuse

to learn from Tradfi. We're only really going to make progress if we bring the best of both worlds together instead of continuing to fist fight each other. >> Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks so much for uh for joining us today. really appreciate it and uh love to have you on again sometime when uh you know some more of these debacles play out. >> I would be happy to. Thank you for having me. >> Appreciate it. >> See you next time. >> All right guys, uh quick commercial break and then we will be right back with our last couple of guests for the day. I think we've just got two. We've got Phil from Lei and we've got uh our friends over at Framework with an announcement. So stay tuned, guys.

Hell yeah themselves are kind of kind of the brains of the operation. And I think we can all admit that LLMs like all of them, they're all great. They're all amazing. They've all been life-changing to to me and a lot of people, but like I I've seen cases where they still hallucinate quite quite a bit, right?

You you'll tell them or you'll ask them something and the answer might not be completely truthful or maybe they misread or misunder understood something. Do you think something needs to happen at the at the LLM layer where they have it has to mature a certain level so this hallucination risk goes away? Is that going to be uh a limiter right now in in experimenting this and seeing a lot more adoption where we could see potentially trillions of dollars transacted with AI agents? Uh this is an open question. The rest of this is going to be open question. So whoever wants to kind of kind of raise their hand and provide their thoughts. I >> I have I have two thoughts. I I think first it's already happening. So I think we're on the there's no there's no major breakthrough to wait for in my opinion.

like all of it is you know if you look at the just pace of development of uh gentic quality call it uh on a year-to-year basis most of it is already happening and I think maybe something Alvin was talking about implicitly before is like a lot of this is already happening in trading as well and so maybe the precursor to like agentic commerce is agentic trading and we see a lot of people trying to have agents run strategies that I think are going to for the foreseeable future run a huge portion of the volume for you know these these agentic uh commerce protocols will be trading before they are payments and then it'll switch over to payments. But I think a lot of this we're already kind of on the way. Maybe though the big unlock that we need is about, you know, kind of consumer education or user education, which is uh there's certainly

things I still don't trust my agents to do. And until something shifts in my head with regards to the amount of risk, even if I have all the controls in place, until my default behavior is to go and try and spend basically from whatever the agentic interface is, um then we will be blocked basically on like intent to purchase. Uh and so having said, I don't think we need anything else. I guess we do need something else, but I think that's more on the human side than it is on the on the LLM side. >> Right. Anyone else here? Yeah, I think look um models are going to change, right? And and and you know they'll be some will be perfect, some will be imperfect. It doesn't matter. I think um we it's our job to kind of ensure there's a trust layer and there's a policy layer, right? Uh the trust layer

comes from uh and I'll just give you my framework on it. Um you know, the the point Moonpace CLI serves is effectively a bit of a trust layer because we're integrating everyone else's CLI. uh and obviously they're our partners. So uh you know chances of that being rogue malware are are zero because you know you're interfacing through uh tried and tested kind of CLI but then secondly uh there's also a policy layer which is really important. So if you have the trust layer, great check mark. The policy layer is, you know, what these agent what your wallet can do, cannot do, you know, um can the, you know, how does the private key sign things without being exposed. Um and those that all that all that kind of uh logic, our opinion is should be an open standard.

Um, which is why we launched open wallet standard because 402 and MPP do a really good job uh at how do you interface uh on the web uh in terms of making making the payment happen. Um, but they're unopenated on the on the wallet layer in terms of where the wallet key is actually residing. Um, so we felt really strongly about that standard and that policy layer being a bit open. Um, so that's why we launched open wallet standard. But I think with the with the combination of trust and policy uh we will continue seeing improvements in LLMs but it's our job to manage the trust and policy.

just want to add that I think the breakthrough is already here right it's not something where oh we've tested something there's great potential but we got to wait I think it's already here right um but there there two things important one is again permissions layer I I don't think the LM can get so good to an extent where you don't have to care about what they spend right maybe maybe that may happen but it's in what one two decades like you need to make sure that the permissions layer is there for you to control it and second is then the the education right like what Henry was saying um I was just sharing just now um off stage where in Asia there are people like hordes of people queuing up in parks and paying people to install open claw for them and then three weeks

later they're paying people to uninstall open claw for them right because they realize there's a lot of security violations and so on so you need to really educate them what is the risk and how do you manage this risks right that is important anyone else on that one okay all right so I I think uh what a lot of folks you know is we have a pretty packed room on this subject right here. You know, a lot of people there. We have some folks from digital asset native companies. Uh we we have a lot of folks. This is a digital asset summit. It's very institutionally institutional focused. You know, we have a lot of banks in the room and asset managers and payments providers and such. Uh maybe if there's if there's anything that you can maybe give some of the the folks in the room, maybe a little bit of FOMO in this

area where you can say like look like here's here's a real example where we we've heard of someone using our our product or our protocol or even anything else openclaw anything else uh that that might get people like really really excited where they're seeing right now real Agentic Commerce or real Agentic payments or trading uh happening right now. Um, and maybe like a fun success story that that you might might have heard in in your journeys here so far. >> I I'll start. I I think we see so on on on the privy side, we see about 35% of incoming developers who self-s serve today are building aic products. So they're using, you know, our wallet system, our policy engine, and so on to basically give agents funds that they can run with. Um, and so just the the

sheer volume of experimentation happening, uh, you know, this is always a Sorry for the VCs in the room. This is always a backwards way of looking at innovation. The sheer amount of VC dollars going into it. Um is uh is pretty wild and and there's a lot of like emerging behavior happening. Um I think just so so that is the the first thing that's very exciting. It's just the sheer amount of experimentation. The second is if you look at the volumes going through the protocols, it's still very spiky. So it's driven by like point events. It's still very much being driven I think by trading patterns. Um but at times you get into the you know quite sizable volumes for for for things being traded and so there's uh real money being put to work basically through these agentic products. Um I think that's the second. The third is

that um I think it's actually quite exciting for card issuing quite you know maybe uh uh something that that's that's not intuitive is that I actually think agents will use both digital and fiat rails and there's a lot happening also on the stable coin card issuing uh place where uh the agents are finding ways to pay not just through via like you know agentic payments protocols but actually by getting uh stable coin cards issued that they can then accept. And so I think maybe the thing that to me is most exciting is that this is completely multimodal. It's not like agents get a rail and they can do nothing else. What's exciting about what's happening is that the agents will kind of find like water the least resistance to go into to then spend. And so I actually think it affects all of our systems. Uh

but the demand that's you know Stripe is seeing for example for how do we price our goods in a world in which a transaction is streaming. it's no longer a single purchase is absolutely wild. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, it's it's completely agree by the way the the especially on the third point the the cards uh being being closely closely linked with with this as a payment method. Uh agents are not going to care about like like you said like it's going to be the path of least resistance in terms of making the payments. But then on the other side the the beauty of this is also it's going to get simpler for the best product to win. uh because you know it's in agents are not responding to marketing and and uh you know all the all the marketing materials per se uh they just are programmed to get a job done and I think

agentic architectures will also evolve there'll be some cases in which swarms are needed uh and in some cases where you know a single kind of agent with which has which is heavy on skills is is required and I'll give you an example one on the e-commerce side one on the on on the trading side, you know, the classic one is, you know, uh prediction market trading ARB strategies. Um, and that's what we're launching next next this coming Monday, uh, as as a separate CLI because we realize like our CLI integrates a lot of skills, but there are some strategies which kind of can deserve their own kind of standalone version, right, of if if it's a breakout use case. And the other one is e-commerce, right? Which is, you know, go find me

All right, we are back on the home stretch of Digital Asset Summit Day Two. We've got our friend of the show, the best mustache in digital assets, Philip from Leafy. Uh, man, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you. >> Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure to be here. >> Absolutely. Well, you guys uh you're at the top of the game. It feels like Interop is kind of a is it a solved problem? We did it. We solved Interup. I I would say uh interrup is solved in many ways many different ways and that's also why we exist right so Lifa as an universal liquidity layer like we are covering all these different bridge architectures and they all exist for for different reasons yeah they have each design has their own trade-offs so is it solved we will see I think there is still so much more to come with

different technologies like your knowledge proofs and so on we'll see you're not done yet >> okay not not done yet uh but you guys are certainly paving the way. I I I was chatting with your partner Dom, you know, behind the scenes a little bit yesterday. Um, and he just reminded me that you guys have like almost all of the major wallets, you know, have have integrated Lei's SDK. I think this is a success that's been flying under the radar. Maybe you could just chat a little bit about your your success stories, some of the case studies that you guys have had. >> Yes, of course. Yeah, Lifa grew to over 100 people by now in the past four or five years. And um it was pretty clear a few years ago that the space is going to fragment on so many ways. Like it was clear we're going to have multiple

blockchains. They're going to have different exchange designs like AMMs, POP AMMs, uh order bookchain, indexes and all of that. Um and then uh different bridging solutions. And it was very clear that if there's an application coming from the top, let's say in Robin Hood or a wallet, they need to they need to cope with all of that. It's hundreds of API integrations need to be implemented, optimized, maintained. That's a lot of work. So that's that's uh that's some that's a wheel that everyone would have to reinvent themselves. So it was so clear to build a business around that. And yeah, four or five years later, now we have a thousand B2B clients, B2B clients. Thousand we cost a thousand. >> Wow. Um, and you're right, we have almost saturated the market within crypto. We're working with almost any

institution from a Coinbase, Kraken, Binance to a Metam Mask, Phantom Ledger, um, and and custodians of all sizes. >> So, a thousand companies um, like you said, have have reached saturation in the cryptonative market. You mentioned, you know, a lot of centralized exchanges as well as wallets, DeFi applications as well. I I take it at this point there's a an inclination to start to to go outward to to start to explore new market opportunities outside of the crypto cryptonative, you know, world that that we've been in for some time.

Just talk to us about some of those sectors that you're targeting. What are the categories? Where are you seeing the most uh the the the segment that's most ripe for innovation? >> Well, RWAs are happening. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And RWAS are exploding on so many chains and they come via Robin Hood chain, they come via Arc, they come via Temple, they come via Solana, Avalanche, everyone is leaning into it in different way with different token standards. So it feels like day one literally because um also lots of these institutional players are trying to come with their own bridging solutions. We see also like circle bought Axel recently. So they're internalizing whatever is out there.

Lots of M&A, lots of consolidation and then things change and uh that is essentially for us the same challenge as has been back then. However, I think we just recently solved a very very big problem which is multi-chain composability. Okay, as things have been fragmenting, we focused so much on intermobility and so on. But what really was missing was composability that I can actually build on multiple protocols at the same time. on on almost my contact level and we have built a a virtual machine that really just lives on chain and expresses a domain specific language in Typescript. So I can type D5 workflows within TypeScript it's being compiled into bite code and just execute on chain within one transaction. So we can swap rich swap and then zap into a

deposit as a collateral take that collateral and do something else with it. Yeah. So that is like true multi-chain composibility and and this something we've been working on for a long time. I think this solves a really big problem. >> Yeah. So uh we've evolved to this point where we're doing so many of these complex strategies on chain. What do you think is the difference and and and you know from your experience talking through with cryptonative applications but now more recently with institutions how does their approach differ? Because you know us as retail like we've been accustomed to using the chain ourselves. you know, we would go back and forth between chains. We would go to the bridge. We, you know, use jumper. We would, you know, go between chains and these sorts of things. Institutions aren't necessarily, you know, clicking the buttons for themselves. And and it's

with a different asset class. And so I'm I'm curious, how does an institutional approach to crosschain differ from a a retail approach? >> Well, that's a big question can be answered in multiple ways. I would say when it comes to user experience many of them are not even at the point understanding what it will mean for crypto native users to navigate to their own chain to their chain on canon or to their own popular chain whatever it is right like many haven't even really thought about that um and we are trying to consult them on uh what does fragmentation actually mean for your users why they should care about that why they should care about crypto native users um when it comes So also for institutions it's a go-to market. Yeah.

>> It's about building brand awareness in a space with a lot of >> nerds like deep domain specific knowledge. People they want to hire people they want to acquire. There's a lot of knowledge these institutions have to build up internally right um and yeah even when it comes to issuing assets many of them are not even thinking about having multi-chain native assets which they could have with an axr or chain league or hyperlane wormhole. Right. Yeah. >> Uh like that this multi-chain problem is not very very present. Many like Robin Hood chain they simply saying okay I want to own the full stack. Uh I would I like the I like 247 trading. Yeah.

>> Uh let's start with this offering first then we can think multi-chain in the future. >> Yeah. And so does the approach from Lei's end do you when you're speaking to a Robin Hood that wants to verticalize the whole thing versus someone who wants to be a little bit more you know maybe a black rockck that wants to be a bit more multi-chain with bidd on almost you know every chain at this point does the approach as you're offering to them these different facilities and services does that differ >> for us it's very early sales cycle essentially we educate we we we raise awareness and we educate um but then also we have a thousand clients to show and be like, "Listen, >> we know what you're doing."

>> Yeah. >> And and we're well positioned to to help you come on chain as you build out your applications. Uh uh but I expect an institutional learning curve over the next five years in terms of >> how do we tokenize our stuff? How do we distribute our stuff? And here again also NIFA comes into play, right? Um you might tokenize your assets, but then >> you kind of need to sell your tokenized assets to all the players. we have already integrated with. So here Leifi simply becomes a distribution partner. You don't even have to think about. So we have an open intent system. You can plug yourself in. It's permissionless. You can plug yourself in as a solver and market make your own assets. Okay. Right. So this is where where essentially we can really speed up of speed up adoption of crypto as an

industry because anyone that comes into into the space now and needs distribution can just talk to us and we are there. >> Okay. Okay. Okay. So, let's double click into this because like you said, you have the distribution, you know, you have a lot of these institutions that are bringing more of these tokeniz tokenized funds, tokenized products on chain. Like the the largest announcements here today, all three were these tokenization announcements. It was Securitize working with New York Stock Exchange, Franklin Templeton working with Ono, and Invesco working with Superstate. It's asset managers at the largest scale working with tokenization enablement partners to ultimately tokenize these things and bring highquality assets on chain. What you're saying and what we've been talking about on the show is that the next step for these tokenized assets is that they end

up in DeFi. They end up moving along these different chains getting collateralized getting borrowed against and ultimately becoming pro productive assets and programmable collateral because Lei has the distribution. Once these things are tokenized, do will you serve these? Actually, there's one one more piece that I want to loop in before I I get to my question here. We were in DC last week. I was I was speaking with a founder and, you know, he he was bringing up how the the the one of the main value propositions of of blockchain is that um right now banks don't like talking with one another. like they have their customers, they have their payments, they have their order flow, they kind of stay verticalized, but and and so we're not going to see the the benefit of uh blockchain and tokenization on one

protocol. We need a credibly neutral layer that works with lots of players in order to facilitate crossbank, cross asset manager composability as you were talking about. That's where I want to that's what I want to ask you about is is h how does this this neutral layer that works with lots of players. How will the how will you help to serve liquidity of institutional tokenized products across chains? How does that work? How can you how can you be composable with lots of chains and lots of different banks and asset managers. >> Yeah. So you're touching base on lots of things here in a sense what swift solved 40 years ago for banks. We want to do this for crypto. We are talking about fragmented rails, right? That's where it starts and yes we we we are credibly neutral and we will also work on making this provable by the way. So we're going

to make it provable that we are a neutral player. Now on top of that um yes after tokenization the next step will be distribution and making things usable. distribution comes uh obviously being making making tokenized assets available um but also making it programmable and usable in a in a way that uh in form of money markets for example right you want to >> be able to deposit um a certain stock as a collateral in AVO or MOF um or maybe some VAS and you want to make it work um and here LeFi is not only taking care of distribution but about it it makes it tries to enable uh workflows, >> workflows that are seamless, that are chain agnostic. It shouldn't matter if

things have been minted on Salana or on Arbitum or an Ethereum. It doesn't matter, right? Like we are trying to >> pave the way for all of this to happen um in a way that that everything feels chain abstracted from day one. We've been working for the past few years on across the full vertical stack to make to enable that. Yeah. >> From from the from the DEX aggregator to up to like the multi-chain composibility VM I was talking about Lei composer. >> So yeah it's a lot of work and obviously also Leifi is becoming more compliant.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Which is a important piece as weant you know as as as Lei is working more and more with these institutions. Um something that you mentioned you know also reminds me of of another trend that we've been seeing play out which is this progression from a chain centric view of the world uh where every chain kind of have has its AMM has its lend borrow has its yield aggregator you know if you want to use the applications on a chain you move your assets there and then you get you know access to all those apps >> we're now seeing this happen in more of an asset centric view of the world I have an asset I want to get another asset or I have an asset, I want to earn some yield on it. The yield products are served to me. Anyone who owns these

assets, I'm just, hey, do you want 4% yield here? Do you want 3? And and I'm looking at this from my portfolio as the construction of my assets and then going from there to access the apps that have that asset integrated. So now, you know, just walking through a case study, I'm curious. I'm curious how you might see this working. you know, we we uh we had Brian Pelgro on the show, you know, layer zero and and you know, maybe there's Citadel on the zero chain and then there's, you know, there's uh there's like Robin Hood, right? And Robin Hood has a lot of these tokenized equities. How how could we see crosschain bids and asks work when we're when, you know, I have an asset on one chain, I just want an asset on another chain. How how can Lei help facilitate

that type of financial transaction? >> Yeah. So there is a smart auto routing. By the way, we have been saying you said you spoke about asset centrism. >> Yeah. >> We recently really went out and said it's about markets not chains, right? Yeah. So we shouldn't so markets are where people come together in order to exchange anything and it just might be collateral versus loan and um we are trying to look at the space like that where are the markets and how can we enable user flows to these markets no matter where else are coming from so there is a smart order routing component at the same time lei to a large extent to 50% we are a data company so so we before someone can trade anything they need to know well what is available

right so we start by by aggregating all available assets across all chains and after that these assets have prices you need to know the prices >> in in which into which asset are they even swappable >> right >> the next step and then the third step is all right um what are the rails that take it from A to B and do I need to swap or bridge or whatever >> um so so there's so many components and then the last step is okay can I compose this flow within one transaction And there's like the final step um which then gets signed and executed. >> But yeah, it's it's it's very multifaceted problem. >> Yeah.

>> It it it's fascinating to see how the space has evolved from just you know simple interop into more of this this universal liquidity layer as as a a company that's integrated with you know so many of these asset managers, these issuers, these wallets, these exchanges. You know, there's a lot of order flow coming that needs to be orchestrated across all of these different venues. There needs to be credibly neutral infrastructure that is able to serve all of these venues. Is Lei the place to do that? >> Exactly. 100%. 100%. We have always been uh trying to be as fair as possible in our routing. We also what we do is um and which is more and more becoming more and more important to us as we implemented hundreds of APIs. We are obviously exposed to to to their quality of service, right? So,

we are becoming better and better like literally week over week by now where we simply are getting better assessing failure rates and automatically shut down solutions and then shut them on again or shadow transact with them and like we do multiple things and trying to understand in an automated way what is available to which extent. We also track latencies and if suddenly an API becomes too slow that ultimately means our API is waiting for this specifically specific partner for too long and so timing that out in an appropriate time and and all of these things are becoming more and more dynamic and automated and that really what I'm saying is transaction transaction delivery or transaction quality is something we're really focused on this year and uh that sometimes might appear like it's not credibly neutral Now it is it's all

automated. It's all reasoned. And this is something we're really working on that we this reasoning on why things are shut down or not being talked to that we make this auditable >> and that we can really say hey we made this request we spoke to these following 10 vendors. We could have spoke to the other five but they were they were deactivated at that moment in time because of because they had latency issues which can prove as well and like all of this. We really want to become sort of a system of record. Yeah. Um for this multi-chain environment which is super important for for tre to understand why are why did things happen as they happened. Yeah. And and that's a huge data challenge. It doesn't make money today but it's important work that needs to be done and that's what we are leaning into.

>> Is this crucial for the next thousand customers? They want this auditability >> for the next 10,000 customers. >> Next 10,000 customers. >> For the next 10,000 at least. At least my friend. Global finance is coming on chain. Do you mean? >> Let's go. >> Super excited. >> Yeah. Um, man, this is this is a blast. Any closing thoughts, you know, a a as we sort of wrap up here? Anything on AI? Just, you know, give us a sense of what's coming what's coming next. >> Obviously, AI has the same challenge as enterprise, right? It needs policies in which way it is allowed to engage. It needs to find the best routes. It needs to be able to rely on as as little third party APIs as possible. Um so here again Leifi is extremely well positioned. We recently released our first MCP um

version and uh we already have agent frameworks building on it and sending sending us uh um samples and demos and so it's really cool to see what people are building with it and yeah our team is very engaged around commerce and so on and Leifa is going to be very strong enabler especially because everything is so fragmented. Yeah, man. We just continue to hear, you know, distribution is the moat and you guys have, you know, a thousand customers in this space and I I I love the the mindset of 10,000 more doing what what it takes. Uh, congrats on all the all the success so far. Really appreciate you coming on. Look forward to the next. >> Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. All the energy and uh yeah, thanks. Until next time.

>> Yeah, we'll see you again soon. Thanks, Philip. >> Thank you. >> All right, guys. We're going to keep it rolling. Shout out Philillip. Uh, another great appearance, friend of the show. Philip first came on, I don't know, it was 2022, 2023. Absolutely incredible. Uh they're doing great, great work and uh I I anticipate they will continue pushing forward. We'll have them on again soon. Uh all right guys, we are on the home stretch here. Um the final uh the final guest, the final guest here. Um of Digital Asset Summit Day 2 is coming up very very soon. We're going to bring Parker up. He's ready behind the scenes. Without further ado, let's get him up

here. Parker Edwards on Framework's RWA Shift. >> How are you going? >> Absolutely. It's going going really well. You're closing us out today. Final final guest of the day. >> Look, it's uh I've been following along. You guys have been crushing. So, thank you, man. Always always good to uh come on here. >> Really appreciate it. You guys had a uh an epic uh announcement earlier today. Yep. >> Uh OEX, we've been uh we've been locked in here and so uh why don't you just take us through what you guys announced earlier today? >> Yeah, so um we just announced we're deploying a billion dollars into Obex's first cohort of eight projects.

um OBEX just so you know for anybody that doesn't have context we work with the Sky ecosystem um and administer OEX as an incubator for Sky for institutional grade you know call it like yield products >> um this first cohort we have kind of a a broad range of companies from we have publicly traded companies included in the batch all the way down to seedstage companies with people that have built been building across finance for you know 10 plus years we're covering a bunch of different, you know, areas, energy, fintech, uh, AI, infrastructure lending, crypto capital markets. Um, we're we're super excited about it. >> So, you guys here at Framework have been, uh, big supporters of our Neo finance thesis.

>> Totally. >> Uh, Andy's on a panel right now giving uh, a talk on Neoance. And one of the really core pillars of Neo finance is this idea of exogenous yield. Um, you know, we we've seen how uh right now there's this entire hyperscaling uh race uh deploying a lot of capital. I'm curious how digital assets, tokenization, and onchain credit can help to fund and and ultimately we can pass a lot of this yield and interest as a result of lending and helping to hypers scale. Uh how can can digital assets play a role in this? So, first of all, I think that we're at a time in the industry where we've matured enough to start lending at scale.

>> Yeah. >> Um, you know, something that DeFi has struggled with, I'd say, over the past, you know, five or six years is this adverse selection issue of like we're getting the bottom of the barrel assets traditionally. And I think finally, I mean, quite frankly, like what Sky unlocks is we now can go compete with the banks and credit funds that uh are currently funding like top tier assets today. You know, you talk about like hyperscalers, you know, USDA is a part of the patch, uh, funding AI infrastructure. Um, super excited about them. Energy also like pretty hot topic. Um, daylight a part of the batch. And then, you know, we have a bunch of things around like structured credit. We have a team called River that is going to be a part of the batch as well. Um, so yeah, I mean, we have like a very

broad range. I also just think you have a totally different type of founder um, coming into the ecosystem now. You have people that have previously built these products offchain that now are looking to tap DeFi liquidity. Um, and at some point we're going to stop calling it DeFi, by the way. >> Oh, no. We're calling it Neoi now. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, Neoi way better. >> Yeah. >> Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, we're we're kind of powering this next wave, I guess, with OEX. Uh, I mean, look, it takes a ton of capital to be able to compete at scale, and we're finally there. >> It it's really incredible. Um I I think a a good practice here is just let's let's speedun through the list of the eight. >> Um and then we'll talk about how all of these uh all of these companies are using uh Sky ecosystem, how this

flywheel and framework ventures ultimately helps to propel this entire cohort and and Neo Finance as a whole. U let's start with Maple. >> Uh you know been around since 2021, one of the largest onchain asset managers. Uh you know lots of traditional financial experience. Um, tell us why Maple is a great fit for this OBX cohort. >> I mean, look, Maple has a track record that is pretty much unmatched when it comes to onchain lending. Uh, today, I mean, they have like $2.8 billion in deposits, $800 million in outstanding loans. Um, they've also been extremely resilient. And so today, actually, we're deployed right around $600 million into Maple today into Syrup USDC and they've been they've been a great partner. So, super excited to continue working with those

guys. Incredible. Shout out Maple Sid, friend of the show, going on for years. Uh, Securitize, second uh, company here. Listen in the press release. Huge announcement, maybe the biggest one this week. Partnership with New York Stock Exchange. Uh, the leading platform to for tokenizing real world assets. Uh, over $4 billion. A lot of that coming from Black Rockck, also Apollo, KKR, uh, and Van. And, you know, just just out the wazoo. Digital transfer agent, you know, registered with the SEC. absolutely crushing on all fronts. Hockey stick growth in recent months. Uh and and just a leader in the tokenized uh the entire tokenization front. Uh why does securityuritize bel it feels like maybe they're going on the tokenization front. Why does securityuritize belong

in this cohort? >> So I'll I'll talk about both securityize and centerfuge who are both um in this batch. I think >> a lot of the asset managers are looking for ways to come on chain. This is no secret. It's pretty consensus. Um but they're looking for partners to do it with. I mean securitize they're working with Black Rockck today. They're working with KKR today. Um we currently work with them on the Sky front. Uh I think Sky has deployed you know a billion dollars plus into these onchain products through both Centerfuge and Securitize >> into products like Biddle and and Centrifuge. >> Yeah. And Ja. Yep.

>> Um >> what I expect here is like we will we will work with both centerfuge and securityize to expand the amount of products that will come on chain. We I talk to asset managers every week. They're looking for new products to be able to deploy with and like they they need these infrastructure partners. >> Incredible. Um, next on the list here, Daylight. Uh, we've had Daylight on the show. >> Jason's great. >> Jason, love what these guys are doing. um you know they're ultimately they they saw the energy buildout happening in the United States and they said look we have onchain uh credit technology that can help fund this and ultimately build a decentralized network that helps facilitate the growth of this energy company and redistributes a lot of those incentives across the entire network. um daylight uh distributed energy onchain asset class. Um just you know talk to us about why framework chose daylight as

part of this cohort. >> I mean we we've known Jason uh for a while. I think what they are doing is incredibly impressive. Me personally I ran an energy fintech company before joining Framework and so what they're building is super close to home and just like with them USDA who we'll talk about as well. Um >> we're choosing asset classes that from day one can scale. I mean funding you know things like distributed energy uh not a new asset class but it is new for it to come on chain. >> Yeah. >> It's also just like um you know when it by by deploying via Sky I think we're able to unlock um just scale throughout this that I don't I don't know if anyone's ever been able to do this uh to the scale before. Yeah. >> Um I know like USDA we're probably going

to cover. I think they're kind of in the in the same bucket >> where you know just the ticket size to be able to get in to be able to fund things like data centers and energy >> like you better be showing up with some serious capital or >> once again we're going to keep continuing to face this average selection issue. I think we're going to fix that through uh through Robux in the sky. >> Yeah. and and like you mentioned USDA uh you know collateralizing GPUs, stablecoin protocol channels onchain capital into AI infrastructure again hyperscaling this buildout of data centers, GPUs is is a crucial part of the entire energy crisis here in the US. Uh and on onchain markets are helping to finance this buildout. Um it it really is incredible. Um and you know we we saw uh Nvidia and Jensen and Chimath talking about Tao and you know decentralized. Do

you think eventually they're going to go a little bit you know further further around the stack and and talk about USDA and collateralizing these GPUs? >> I'm super bullish Connor and David what what they're building. Um yeah I I I do think that we're going to I mean capital formation just in general like should happen on chain. Yeah. And you know, financing infrastructure is literally the most capital intensive process that you could choose from. And uh I do think that they they have the potential to really kind of break out here. So >> and and just quick side note here, what what is the benefit to capital formation on chain versus, you know, the current private market landscape? >> I mean liquidity uh is is one. Um, and also just I mean like if if you're looking if you're somebody looking to

get access to these types of products, you know, USDS now will be backed by real world cash flowing assets. Um, there's something pretty special about kind of opening this up to anybody to be able to, you know, deposit into. Um, you know, obviously not financial advice, but you know, obvious we're uh we're looking to kind of expand that, I guess, on what kinds of assets people can actually get access to here. Yeah, incredible. Only a couple more here to go through. Better Home and Finance. This is a public company, first AI native mortgage and home equity finance platform. Why are they included in this cohort? >> You know, I uh you know, Vashall uh is is one of the more determined CEOs that I think I I've met today. He they're

they're building really like the first AI native mortgage platform, mortgage originator. I think they've now originated over hund00 million in loans to date. Um once again just an asset class that I think should should be a available on chain. >> Incredible. Uh River you mentioned earlier structured credit cap capital C capital markets. Um just tell us a little bit about about River. >> So yeah we uh you know the founders um Brahham Meta and and Simon Bakara they uh we we've been we've been going back and forth with them about some ideas over the past call it like six months to a year almost. Um and both of them have have a lot of experience kind of going uh looking at structured credit markets. You know, Braum has has specifically

underwritten you know billions of dollars in transactions comes from uh like a tier one fintech company uh before and actually I think this is kind of what we're seeing like the best early stage companies are actually the founders who have really just been in their space for a very long time that just happen to now be building on chain and they're uh >> they're they're definitely one to watch out for. Yeah, I mean bringing industry experience from outside of the cryptonnative world is almost like bringing capital formation in non-cryptonative use cases. It's it's again it's exogenous yield exogenous experience and knowledge bringing that when when they find that blockchains are organically the best place to build they can weave in and intertwine together a lot of the domain expertise that they've

found in int their respective industries. >> Yeah. TVL Capital, last one in the cohort, uh chain traded products, uh institutionalgrade secured structured products issued onchain. Um I believe this is going to be a a sector that is just going to explode in growth as more high quality assets are tokenized, end up in neoinancial applications, end up in vaults. Um TVL capital is is doing exactly this. Totally to um once again requires the amount of capital to be able to compete with people like banks and um yes they're they're currently in stealth I think uh they also have just a very unique team to go after this product and we'll have we'll have some more news about them here in the next next month or so.

>> Very cool. Um and so now just generally are all these companies using uh Sky the same way or are they all doing things a little bit differently here? So obviously we have like a very diversified pool of assets which first of all I think is incredibly important from an ecosystem perspective. Um I think you know Grove and Spark have done a really excellent job kind of like paving the way for us to be able to go do this stuff. You know Spark obviously very focused in DeFi. Grove is doing a bunch of things around onchain credit um and offchain credit as well actually. Uh I mean yes. Are they all kind of using Sky the same way? I mean, at the end of the day, we're we're almost standardizing the way that these companies can access like a global balance sheet, which now is, you know, over 11.5 billion in supply in USDS

supply. Um, you know, Sky Frontier Foundation went and published a report back in January. USDS growth is up over 80%. Um, this past year, they projected, you know, 20 billion dollars in USDS supply. I think kind of the role that we get to play here is by bringing these assets on chain, we get to match the inflows with the types of assets that deserve to to be the sources of the of this type of liquidity. Um, >> and where are those inflows coming from? Like as USDS scales from 12 billion to 20 billion, how where does that 8 billion come from? >> Yeah. So, if you go look at what's backing USDS today, you know, actually a large very large percentage of it um is stable coins. It's USDC and USDT which is new. So just over the past month or

so we've seen a large amount of inflows come in. We've went from 9 and a half to you know 11 plus billion dollars in USDS supply and now we have a more diversified kind of asset uh pool of assets and USDC and USDT. I think look people are looking across DeFi and just seeing yields tank um to put it lightly and uh they're also looking for kind of places that have uh that have been battle tested. I mean Skye's been around for now like 10 plus years. So you know I think as people are going and kind of like comparing apples to apples um you're seeing you're seeing people obviously kind of wake up to the fact that Sky is is probably a pretty good option. There's a reason uh USDS was not affected in this resolve USDR uh uh shenanigans. Um and the reason is

because it's battle tested. Uh it stands the test of time and that's why we've seen almost $2 billion uh come in as of recently. Uh man, Parker, anything anything else here to close this out? I I guess uh anything on supernova that we want to that we want to talk about? Is that relevant here? >> Uh I don't I don't have much I don't have much there. What I what I would say, you know, if uh people want to go check out kind of what's going on with Sky, I mean, there it's very transparent. You can literally go on info.sky. You can go track USDS supply um up and to the right to be very to be uh very clear. And you can also kind of see where like each star is allocating capital and and in what size. It's really the only place right now across

DeFi where this is happening at size all on chain. So, we're super excited about it. >> Incredible. Uh you don't have to say it. I'll say uh Sky is part of the institutional T-W. We've got them in our N7 neo finance index. Uh they are one to watch. Uh as well as a lot of the players that are mentioned in this cohort of eight uh teams that are the initial cohort. There's more here to come as I understand it. Uh up to a billion dollars earmarked across these eight protocols. Maple, securitize, centrifuge, daylight, USDA, better home, river, and TVL capital. So plenty more to come. You guys have been absolutely crushing it. Thank you for all the support on the Neo Finance uh thesis and uh we will keep our eye out for plenty more to come. >> Appreciate it, man.

>> Absolutely. Thank you for joining. >> Yeah, >> that's it. >> Parker closed us out. >> Digital Asset Summit day two. The entire Digital Asset Summit has come to a close here over the last two days. Um, absolutely incredible. Uh, I think Andyy's still on a panel, so I'm going to go ahead and close this out. We've had upwards of 40 guests. 40 guests, maybe closer to 30. 30 to 40 guests over the last two days. Big numbers here at the rollup. Couldn't have done it without our team behind the

scenes, Megan, Brick, Aton. Shout out to you guys. Uh, shout out to the whole team watching behind the scenes. Leo, Nero, Aliona, Alex, Marcelo, guys. Big shout out. You guys, you guys rock. It's a team effort out here. Shout out to Block Works for having us out. Shout out to OKX for sponsoring the show. Check them out. Uh that is uh okx.com the leading exchange uh in the eastern market and making a big push here into the western market as well. Shout out to all of our sponsors from behind the scenes and guys I mean every guest. I think I think we did a pretty damn good job covering what has been happening here in the digital asset summit. Uh the entire

digital asset world came together in New York City over the next couple of days. We're not taking a break. We will be live from the Nest in the Empire State Building over the next two days and then we're flying out to Can. So, we are not going to miss a thing, guys. Stay tuned for everything that we have coming up here at the rollup. We've got plenty more to come. We are just getting started. Lots more action only here at the rollup. Can I get some air horns? Can we Can we blast? What a what an absolutely epic last couple of days. Incredible the energy here. It is not a bare market. That is the institutional FOMO happening right before our eyes in the institutional bull market. It is happening in New York City. And the rollup is at the center of it all. Guys,

thank you so much for watching. We will see you tomorrow on the rollup. Cheers.