🚨LIVE: HYPE x ZEC Barbell? DTCC Onchain, Variational Raise, CLARITY w/ Digital Chamber & Plume Joins

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>> We'll see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. I think The [music] Rollup is one of the most premier media [singing] brands in crypto, and Andy and Robbie are great experts at everything they talk about, and it's my favorite podcast. [music] I'm going to add it to my library as we speak. Potentially multi-chain deployments. We are at [music] Def Connect day one here at the Consensus from Base. >> [music] [music] [music]

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the entire thing was just institutions. It's just It's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish. YOU SAID IT. YOU FINALLY SAID IT. I'M SO BULLISH. And he's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. >> [music] [music] [music]

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[music] >> The Rollup is headed to the top. If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> Rollup is my favorite. >> From all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry, [music] come together for the Rollup. >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

[music] >> Survive your mouth. Institution They're coming, they're simply here. Taste the Rollup and just crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. >> [music] >> Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. Welcome back to the Rollup. Happy, happy Wednesday, happy hump day, my friends. It is a beautiful day in the tokenization tower. If you're a Zcash holder, if you're a hype holder, we're going to get Rob back in here. Don't you guys worry. Call me right back. But guys, it is a lovely, lovely Wednesday, man.

>> [applause] >> Shout out David Schamis. We know Itan loves David Schamis. Guy lives uh Guy lives just down the road from the boys, huh? Come on. Got to give some love to Plume, The Nest, powered by Plume, building infrastructure for on-chain asset management, tokenized RWAs. Salmon is going to come on today to talk about their Bermuda license that they just received today. We've got a stacked show, guys. You're watching the Rollup broadcasting live from the financial capital of the world. Today's May 20th, and we have a great show ahead. Let's get Rob in here. Let's get Rob in here. We got Mark Wernlin of Canton Strategy, more that companies. Canton's probably one of the one that one hype Zcash Canton, maybe the only that's above water. We've got Lucas

Schuermann of Variational following their $50 million series A. And their RWA perps launched. That one's going to be a banger. We've got Cody Carbone of the Digital Chamber joining the show as well, the CEO. And then like I said, Plume general general counsel Salmon joining the show. I'm fired up on orange Celsius today. [ __ ] slaps. And our topics are powered by Trezor. trezor.io, use code rollup10 to get your Trezor. Rob, what the [ __ ] is up, man? We're pumping face, brother.

Make it all back in one trade. I'm pouring Zcash, baby. Let's go. It's good to have you back in in crypto, man. It's good to have you back on the digital assets. You got caught up there in the commodities. Not going to clown you too hard because the timing the timing's impeccable. The timing is absolutely impeccable. Zcash hype. These are things that are flying. They're absolutely flying. >> Uh which is very very cool. >> whole industry is piling into the same trade. What could go wrong? Like, you know what I mean? It is a whopping 88° in New York as well, Rob. I'll tell you that.

>> Yeah. Uh Yeah. Yeah, it's >> hot. >> It's summer in the city. Uh we're going to need to keep a tracker. Uh you know, we're cooking some things up on on these visual overlays. Maybe we're going to get a thermostat that just continues to climb on the screen. Shows people really so that they can feel the heat of the market inside of the tokenization tower as these markets continue to heat up. Uh, pretty good show today. Don't We've got a banger, a heater, if you will, on a nice summer day in the city.

And and the Knicks come back from 22 down to uh, win in overtime. I fell asleep. I I didn't even watch it. That's two That's two in a row. I I was busy and then I turned the game on. Uh, there was 3 and 1/2 minutes left in overtime. The Knicks pretty much had it sealed up at that point. You could tell uh, the Cavs were just out of momentum. Although I did notice Donovan [snorts] Mitchell just didn't get the ball. James Harden was complete ball hog uh, the entire overtime period. Yeah. I saw I In the last 3 and 1/2 minutes of overtime, it was still like a four-point game. I saw Donovan Mitchell get like the ball one time and I think he he had an assist.

All right. Well, we're going to talk about that shot and some other things as as well from the Knicks. Before we do that, let's get into the markets weather. Let me tell you about Frax, our premier stablecoin partner, open, stable, borderless, the future of digital money. Guys are cooking. They're always on. The The future is on, Shane. Yeah, as as I said, Rob, it is 88° in New York City. It is a heater. It is warm. It is windy and uh, it's summer. And I think it's a bit of a tease. It looks like the whole the whole East Coast is going to have a bit of a gloomy Memorial Day weekend, unfortunately.

I've got a Memorial Day brunch that I will be going to in uh, my new hometown uh, in a couple weeks or in next week. Um, and then of course, our friends at Relay are powering this warm weather. They powered the cold weather. Now it's 88°. Uh, it's a pretty similar temperature here uh, in South Florida. Uh, and of course, uh, the heat is powered by Relay. Send ones arrive anywhere relay.link will take you where you need to go and it'll bring you the weather.

Uh >> It will. And new type says Ondo longs are looking great. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get to the markets. I do not have an Ondo long, but I'll tell you Zcash and hype both look very very very very good. Bitcoin holding above 77 just barely. We need Sailor to keep buying so we can keep the fun going. Near, the one outperformer again we've we've been hammering that. You guys have been seeing that. Zcash hype Near, Zcash hype Near. >> this the three-headed dragon. Zcash hype Near, they're calling the three-headed dragon. We've got a special episode for you guys later this week. We're going to be talking about the three-headed dragon thesis. Near, hype, Zcash. Yep. So, that looks good. Chainlink's firmly above

9.6. Feels like Solana, ETH, and even Bitcoin since the last time we were in the Empire State Building are pretty much the same. I mean, they're they look relatively They're pretty much at the same price. Um hyperliquid is at number 11 in the top digital assets by market cap. It needs about another 30% move to overtake Dogecoin and land in the top 10. Zcash is at number 14 in the top market cap coins. It's sitting at about 10 billion. Uh hyperliquid at 12 billion. Dogecoin is at number 10 at 16 billion. Quite a bit more room there, uh but obviously these things are on the

move. I'm finally back >> looks ready, man. >> It looks insane. I'm back above water on Zcash. It's about time. I bought the pico top of about $600 the last go around, uh and I had the patience. Yeah. Thankfully. Feels Feels good. It feels good. Um You didn't buy any more down there? I did not buy more down there. Maybe that was my mistake, but I did buy some other things. Akash looks good as well among some other coins. Uh I thought it was Zcash hype and VVVV. Yes, VVV is definitely a part of this, of course. Um that thing is absolutely ripping. If you guys watched that show from Smart Con in San Francisco, we had them on. We had

Eric Con and the thing ripped. So, yeah. Look, oil is looking strong. The yields and bonds are looking strong. There's some things macro wise I think macro folks are a bit worried about. Um We're worried about macro? I'm not. I'm I'm worried about the two assets that are just ripping face right now. So, that's all I really care about. Um shoutout to Zama, private confidential asset transfers on chain coming very, very soon with their portfolio page. Allows you to Allows you to send stable coins to any EVM wallet privately and confidentially. So, stoked on Zama, stoked to be here. We got news.

Let me tell you about Near before we do our premier AI partner. I love the air horn. Blockchain designed for AI native applications, autonomous agents. Shoutout to Near bringing AI crypto together with great founder and Illia. James Harden on defense [laughter] is just not going to make it, man. Let's play this video. >> James Harden on defense is Ethereum's price action in Yeah, I mean, I still >> [laughter] >> holding Ethereum in 2026 is just wow. Yeah. I I I don't know. You you keep being bullish on that thing. I'm I Look, man. Look, I'm bullish on tokenization.

I think Ethereum is the winner for tokenization. This is where a lot of tokenized RWAs will end up. Like you said, we have Variational coming on later today on Arbitrum, obviously Ethereum roll up. This thing is just it's just like You know how if you press the if you press the first link on every Wikipedia article, it always goes back to the same article? That's like that's like Ethereum. If you click into anything, it ultimately all goes back.

It feels like the value proposition is very indirect. It will be a late mover. Um maybe I'm just biased and convincing myself I have bag bias because ultimately uh I do think that there's benefit there, but it is taking quite a bit of time to play out. Uh I don't own really any Ethereum. I don't really plan on owning any anytime soon. Uh I have my Pudgy Penguin, maybe a little bit of ETH stored away somewhere, but yeah, I'm all good on that for now. Let's watch James Harden and uh So, the Knicks are down by Down by 14, the Knicks.

>> 5 minutes left and then THEY WENT AFTER JAMES HARDEN EVERY POSSESSION. JAMES HARDEN IS THE FATTEST, SLOWEST DOUBLE CHEESEBURGER I HAVE EVER SEEN. IT'S REALLY A simple game. >> clutch time. the royal cream pie >> of these some of these floaters off the glass are UH AND THEN ROAST THEM LIKE THAT'S ACTUALLY decent defense, that last one. Jaylen Brown just hit it over his head. The the the little undisclosed Cal shadd.

>> [laughter] >> PLAYING DEFENSE LIKE THAT. >> OH, HE leave the feet. What? That is not a close out. >> close out, bro. That was so weak. Splash. THAN EVERYTHING HE'S EVER MADE IN THE NBA. Look at that. That's That's a round him. DOWN THE STRETCH. HE WASN'T EVEN TRYING. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? >> OH MY GOD, NO HELP. YEAH. DUDE. >> THIS IS AWFUL. And he has no remorse for taking every off What? [laughter] Just right behind. Defense is horrible. >> [gasps] >> Wow, dude. Harden is so fried. Let's flip to the next one.

Knicks down by 22 in the fourth. Believe the score was 93 to 71 with 7 minutes left. I've not Eric Balchunas says he's not sure if he's ever seen a 99.9% chance blown. So, up until about quarter then the Cavs had a 99% chance of winning and somehow they blew it. I wouldn't be I mean, Donovan Mitchell was completely non-existent in overtime and I wouldn't be surprised if he's injured or something because he just they weren't even passing the ball. I mean, I've seen Donovan Mitchell I think he scored like 60 something points

sometime during the regular season. The guy's a machine. Yeah, to not even pass him the ball James Harden like I mean, we've seen we've seen plenty of that guy in post season early stage playoff moments. So, yeah. Yeah, I would be relying on Donovan Mitchell if I'm the Cavs. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to just go into this next chart here from our lovely friend McKenna. So, Hype Spot ETFs have reportedly saw $28 million of inflows with zero outflows. Zero outflows. This is just in one day. About $5 million average daily inflow. About a $46 cost basis on average. Um

I mean, look. This is one of the most successful ETFs we've seen. We've seen people launch Avalanche ETF, Cardano ETF, Ripple ETF and everyone's wondering like who's the buyer? Like Like, okay, great. Like there's this supply available to institutions to buy. But, who's the buyer? And now it's very very clear that there's a direct buyer here. And so, yeah, I mean all in all, this is one of the most successful ETF launches I've ever seen.

Yeah. >> And I mean, very very stoked on it. >> So, Andy, I I want to prompt you with a question here. Um I understand that the portfolio construction is uh allocated to PER, right? Not not necessarily spot hype. Can you just explain why you or someone might want to allocate, you know, if if they're looking for exposure to hyperliquid, why might someone allocate to PER versus the spot hype asset? Look, I think the spot hype is totally probably the the right way to do it.

>> click into anything in all Um And yeah, one sec. I'm I'm I'm hearing our lovely guest here. Um and so, on like the thesis around PER is uh that MicroStrategy is the um W- one sec, Rob. >> [laughter] [gasps] >> Guys, well well, we're just going to take a a bit of a uh a bit of a a break here. Um we're get we've got some James Harden clips playing in the background. Not sure if not sure if you guys can hear if you guys can hear that.

Uh yeah, so let me set you up here, right? So so, as I understand it, you know, we've reallocated away from the commodities, you know, uh according to Arthur Hayes, this is a bull market. Hyperliquid, Zcash, Near, VVV, these are all part of the the thesis here. Hyperliquid, of course, has incredible fundamentals, the DAT uh and ETF launches are extremely successful. So, you know, based on your own portfolio construction or why might someone choose to allocate heavier into PER versus the spot hyperliquid hype asset if they're looking for exposure to hyperliquid? First of all, Mr. Canton OG, good to see you, man. Um listen, I think that the reasoning for PER is that

it has the chance to actually outperform hype. Like if you watch what happened with MicroStrategy and Bitcoin previously in bull markets, MicroStrategy got up to like a 1.5 to 2X premium on the MNAV, which means it outperformed Bitcoin by anywhere from 40, 50% all the way to 100% in a bull in a bull phase. And so I think there's like a it's a much more convex, like there's a lot more convexity in the trade. If hype keeps going well, PER should significantly, right now it's about 1.2X premium to MNAV, but [snorts] what you can get is 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.7 even, which means hype goes up, you know, 20,

30% PER can go up 40, 50%. And so you you get this like extra upside and it also works to the downside um that a treasury company like PER can get because if they're able to get more earnings per share, more hype per share, they can also activate their ATM. Now that they're actually above MNAV by quite a bit, they can actually buy more hype that that you know, they can activate something that all these DAC cos were doing before they all got wrecked. And so PER gives you this asymmetrical upside on a bullish hype movement and allows you to have a MicroStrategy-like return on Bitcoin.

Got it. Um yeah, make makes complete sense. Effectively a leveraged bet on the underlying asset. Not sure if the use of the word convexity was entirely accurate, but we'll put put that aside. And >> [laughter] >> we'll we'll >> Let's get our first guest up here, man. Let's get him fired up. We got the We got the Canton Canton Strategic Holdings. Okay. >> So, Mark Wenlin is the chairman and CEO of Canton Strategic Holdings, which is Nasdaq ticker CTN.

Uh and Mark is previously a partner and chief operating officer at DRW, which means he knows our friend uh Eric quite well. Uh Eric and I had drinks at Soho House maybe like 3 weeks ago and had a lot of talk about Canton. Uh previously was also a senior at Citadel. Uh you know, focused on global fixed income and more. Um Mark, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be there. I think Sarnacki was actually your first guest in uh Tokenization Tower there at the Nest.

>> That's right. That's right. That's right. Pleasure to be here. Go ahead. He uh I think he got him on the wall of fame there plastered up there. That's a That's a special one. You can only the the wall of fame is only visible there in person. Uh Mark, we're going to get you in there very very soon. But, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you. We'd love just a a quick uh introduction into yourself and generally how you got uh involved in the Canton network. Sure. So, as as you said, my background spans over DRW and Citadel. I think both firms uh large trading houses cover kind of pretty much every asset class. But, one similarity is their investment in technology and how to use technology to

scale. And obviously with with blockchain and kind of crypto, it is a disruptive technology and kind of changes the status quo of how we look about things. And and so, it's it's one that I view it was always about how to build systems that scale kind of through market cycles, through different stress tests, etc. around that. But, how do you do more with less? And, you know, blockchain I think is one of those technologies. AI is obviously another one but you know, this is a powerful technology, and we care about market structure of both the firms that I worked at before.

And so, it was a natural kind of transition to Canton to focus on that effort about how we can use that technology to really change and upgrade our systems. More about rewiring our our financial markets and the plumbing associated with it. Yeah. Yeah, man. One of the things that that Canton's been really kind of known for is their work in the in in the repo market, right? And just kind of like all the things that they're doing there. I think also as of late, DTCC plans to tokenize part of its treasury on Canton as well.

So, the next are down by Yeah, sorry, guys. Um maybe you could just talk about the DTCC plans to tokenize, what that means uh for Canton, and kind of like how that growing relationship between obviously, you know, what what one of the largest institutions in the world, uh how that came about, and what that means for for Canton. Yeah, I mean, I'll before I get into specifically with DTCC, maybe just kind of double click a little bit about what I think of tokenization kind of means because it can mean different things. And And one of the use cases uh that I'm going to talk about about tokenization is tokenization of treasuries, which as it relates to the mobilization of collateral. So, collateral being used across like even just the derivatives marketplace is just

a huge opportunity. So, that collateral used for OTC and listed, uh it's over $2 trillion worth of of collateral. So, it's lots of TAM that can be used associated with that. And when you think about non-cash collateral, the number one use case of non-cash collateral is treasuries. And through DTCC as the largest CSD in in the US and frankly I think the globe and and all kind of US Treasuries flow through their their four walls. And so by them tokenizing a treasury is as native of kind of issuance you can get on chain in in that kind of waterfall. And so it gives that

you know it is a security it doesn't matter whether it's a tokenized security or it's fedwire or other means. It's just one security. And that is key component to make sure we don't have fragmented kind of systems and liquidity pools associated with that. But I think one of the the biggest use cases is again around this mobilization of collateral which isn't necessarily the most sexy piece cuz there's other benefits of tokenization of assets about operational liquidity making access to assets that otherwise weren't there. But the collateral mobility is often lost but there's a huge benefit from financing costs. So just talking about how the margin process works for

you know the derivatives industry when you post non-cash collateral to the exchange or to a counterparty you can do so same day but when you have access to the market moves in your favor and you want to pull back that that can take multiple days according to their rule book or their the the structure of the transaction to get that collateral back. And so you're just sitting on exposures so from a credit risk perspective that reduces the friction there but the funding cost of then being able to deploy that that capital or that collateral more thoroughly in your system like that's a huge unlock.

And obviously you know crypto's been very heavily involved in in kind of the evolution of blockchain technology it's just now trying to get that into our traditional markets which are just built off of legacy systems. Yeah. You know Mark the the thesis that we've had is is that, you know, first the the tokenization thesis will play out in in such a sequence to the extent where, you know, first we'll we'll tokenize these things and we'll do that essentially start with the lowest risk things and go down the risk curve. And we had Carl from Six Man Ventures on here yesterday talking about the attractiveness of some of these assets follows a barbell approach. There's things like equities on one side of the barbell and things like cash and treasuries on the other

side. Eventually, we will tokenize all of these assets. They will be on chain. The next step in the sequence is that these will flow into these DeFi primitives, these lend borrow things, become composable with one another's across venues. And so, for instance, you know, given that the DTCC is sort of in a position where it is central to a lot of, you know, the financial activity that's happening in in the traditional world, you know, I take it they're going to take a rather conservative approach. They're not They're probably not going to be looping or staking or, you know, lending out or doing some of these things with their holdings even though that that, you know, being on chain allows them to do so. So, what would be

the primary benefit for this tokenization process? Is it a direct benefit to the DTCC itself or is it kind of laying the foundation where it would allow a lot of the companies, the issuers, and the tokenization companies to operate more effectively on a tokenization foundation? Yeah, so I think it's the latter is the short answer to what you were talking about there, but I think the way that you laid it out is it's an evolution around it. It's not going to just automatically jump to the end state where we get some of the benefits in the DeFi market around looping, staking, et cetera. It's going to be a progressive approach around that. And I think even from DTC's, you know, pilot program that they've talked about, they're starting with treasuries and then obviously they

have other assets like equities, corporate bonds, munis, etc. that can benefit from as well. But let's start with the basics. Let's actually show there's value, there's a there's there's this this technology can work. And here's a simple example around financing benefit that relates to anyone that kind of post margin has to use collateral to to means to support their business and and prove that value before we invest so much more to integrate that across our other workflows and other assets that we will go across it. Like equity market structure is just more complicated than the treasury market. And so I think it's it's a good starting point. And again, you can show that economic value to warrant the continued investment to go

down the spectrum as you said, risk spectrum of different assets and so forth. But I think the easiest one and it's kind of like very obvious to anyone that's been in short-term markets, repo markets, financing markets about the drag associated with that. And once you kind of see that play out in real work, then you want to say how can I leverage this across all these other things that I do? And that's just again from financial transactions. There's operational workflows as well. Smart contracts are just a very powerful disruptive technology. Yeah. So you know, I I think there's plenty to say about Canton network. But you know, like we said, we had Eric Saranac in the tokenization tower. We talked at length about the validator set, you know, the

permissionlessness of the network and ultimately what the vision is for Canton as well as all of its validators. Given that you know, you're you're at the helm for Canton strategic holdings, let's talk about CC, you know, the Canton asset. I'm I'm curious what your vision is for Canton the asset given that you know, it's got this large set of validators coming from essentially every swath of you know, the the the economy. There's a lot of potential here, but it feels as if none of this has really been turned on or activated, at what point do you foresee Canton the asset really starting to capitalize on the growth of the Canton network? And as an allocator, as part of this holdings company, how do

you plan on playing a role in the network? Yeah, so let me first just kind of describe what I think of Canton strategic and what we are and how we play. So we're the first publicly traded company to leverage Canton coin and support the Canton network to advance this institutional blockchain adoption that we talked about. Um and so obviously there's an element of digital asset treasury supporting the coin, accumulating the coin as a feature of it, but that's not the sole purpose of it. It's also to help grow and participate in, you know, a healthy, vibrant lending market around Canton coin. An options market. All of these things very early days associated with the launch of the network. The coin uh just was listed back in November shortly after our launch. So very early

days. We're helping support these, you know, activity. We have access to capital markets. Um and then also investing in the ecosystem, investing in applications that are building on top of the network. There's been some uh you know, new CIPs over the last several months that kind of uh align incentives uh amongst different market participants. So super validators in order to participate that you have to lock a significant amount of coin in order to participate that, which I think is a good uh aligning incentives. And obviously as a holder of a large portion of tokens, we have the ability to help out those that potentially need tokens in order to do that. Uh there's one that's being actively discussed right

now about applications uh that featured apps would also have to lock uh tokens around that. So those are all kind of evolution, I would say, of the Canton ecosystem becoming more mature, more uh you know, auxiliary markets around that where we can help participate, but then also investing in applications um that are going to build upon it as well to give shareholders shareholders a diversified enhanced revenue stream associated with it than just buying the token itself. That's how I kind of think about that. I view it's still early days associated with that. We published our Q1 results a couple weeks ago.

We also in our PR release tried to talk about a little bit some of the Q2 things that that have happened because I think this is a very you know fast time and evolution of an early chain. Yeah. You know Mark, one of the things that that Rob asked me earlier was about you know this idea of buying the underlying or buying kind of like the treasury company or this kind of like strategic company. And I'm curious you know you kind of just got into it there, but when it comes from an investor perspective from an idea of understanding like the benefits of owning the underlying versus owning something like CNTN. Obviously not financial advice here.

What what what is the core reasoning for understanding the investor who wants to allocate to CNTN versus the underlying? Is it exposure? Is it access access question? Is there something more that Canton Strategic Holdings can drive rather than just owning Canton itself? How do you kind of think about the discrepancy in ownership of the underlying versus the treasury company that that's you know traded on the Nasdaq? Definitely happy to. So the short answer is I think you want exposure to both. I think they're both great investments obviously.

But I think about the investor has to look at what is their primary objective? What is their risk tolerance? What is their you know operational means? Do they have a broker account or do they have a wallet? Some don't still invest in in crypto assets. That's not necessarily that will obviously continue to evolve as it becomes more mainstream. So if you think about there's other examples where there's different look-alike type instruments that give a slightly different aspect. So, if you look at the fixed income US Treasury market, you have the US Treasury. You can buy the bond itself. You could also buy a future and you have different characteristics that investors like. The tax treatment associated with future versus the outright bond or they do an interest

rate swap as a an element to invest as well. So, I think it comes down to their uh you know, goals and objectives. I think, you know, CNTN gives again a more enhanced return on top of the coin. It's a publicly traded stock. So, you're able to hold it in a broker account. You're able to probably use it more as means of collateral or cross margin against other types of assets, getting leverage if that's something that's important to you than doing on the coin itself. But, I think again this whole ecosystem as well will continue to evolve around it. But, it goes to what your tolerance is around that. And we haven't talked about this, but obviously uh there's also now ETF as well associated with it. With again, you

know, there's pros and cons about that as well. So, now you have two publicly traded vehicles associated with it. The ETF is meant to mimic more the coin itself. And so, you you pay for that access and there's a management fee and so forth. Now, CNTN is a cheaper way. You don't have that aspect of it, but you then have uh you know, an enhanced return on top of the coin. If you're getting more exposure to the ecosystem as a whole I think from BSC and TN. So, it comes down to what each investor's appetite is and what their goals are, but I don't think you can go wrong with any of the three that we just talked about. Yeah. You know, just a more general question here.

You know, given that you've got an extensive history in finance, you know, you were you were, you know, COO at at DRW. Um and and just generally through your experience, what do you find most compelling about Canton Network that's not, you know, offered by other blockchains. What what do you find most exciting about this? So, I I view what Canton did very well is they listened to what institutions were what their requirements were. And so, you know, that configurable privacy element was something that they that was a gatekeeper. That was like you allow us access through this. That was the only way you could kind of crack that. So, what really interested me personally associated to Canton was because

I like uh thinking I like solving problems. I like uh figuring out how to improve. Like my entire career at those two firms, that's all I was focused on. How do you do more with less? How do you really scale those things? And doing so that improves market structure. And I think this is an example of where Canton listened to what the requirements were when you're dealing with regulated institutions, with regulators, and built a product that was focused towards that. That doesn't mean that Canton is the blockchain for everything. I think that's also a common misnomer as that at one blockchain can do everything. I don't think that's the case. And I also don't think if our financial markets are

all on top of Canton, obviously that would benefit us, but that's also a bad market structure to have too much concentration on one blockchain versus others. So, I'm sure there will be an evolution around that as well. Um but I was really drawn to Canton because it built a product that I think could be a game-changer in rewiring what was a very archaic way of settlement flows uh on top of, you know, legacy rails. Yeah. And Yeah. you know, what one of the things that we've seen come out just over the last couple days is this proposed innovation exemption from the SEC.

Um this seems to have, you know, really accelerated tokenization uh because we may not even need issuers to opt in. It could just be done at a third-party level. Uh but there is a configuration, as you're talking about, uh to maintain the shareholder rights of a lot of these products. And it seems like maybe Canton is more in a position than others to configure certain parameters that could help to maintain shareholder rights, whereas others are hands-off. They say, "No, we're not going to touch this. Anything Anyone can deploy anything. Doesn't have to hold any rights, uh you know, to these assets." Um how How much do you think it it makes sense to enforce some of these rules at

the asset level versus just stay hands-off and and just kind of let these builders, uh you know, do what they think is right. So, I I think the SEC, how I read that article and that announcement there, was just another example where this administration is, you know, leaning in and trying to promote innovation. So, they've talked about this innovator's in exemption about it. And to be seen as propelling that. Now, the flip side of it is that the details actually matter associated how they plan to do that. But I do think that they have shown what they want to do is they want to create, uh you know, this this right balance between the innovation that this

technology can can deliver and then also preserving the investor protections that the SEC is mandated to do as well. And so, I think the details will flush out exactly what that looks like. And I'm not sure exactly which way the wind's blowing. I don't think anyone can kind of see exactly which which way this administration's going to going to go. But uh I think what they do believe in in from conversations as well is they believe in one market structure, if done right. We're not talking about whether this stock or this treasury is tokenized or whether it's on the old rails or not, because I don't think it will ever be 100% one way or the other, but it's just an asset. And so that's the dream

scenario. I think there's definitely been some efforts now of some tokenized assets and so forth that have different risk associated with it. Look alike, does it have the same protections as you would have through the old rails? And I do think we will get to the right answer around that, but I'm I'm very interested to see what the details they flush out. I know they wanted it to continue to make sure that it comes onshore versus going offshore, which is obviously what's happened in the past, but I think the details actually matter associated with that.

Yeah. You know, one thing on on the privacy side, I'm curious if you've had, you know, or seen or talked to the team about any kind of, you know, pushback from institutions or folks who are looking to use the network with regards to the private payment model or the kind of privacy model. Has it been mostly positive? Has it been pushback? Like when it comes, you know, you talked about the the configurable privacy being very important. When it comes to that aspect, what has been the response from the institutional allocators and clients, you know, that that you've pitched this to on the buy side or that, you know, teams that have have been working with more directly as super validators, whether it's Visa, DTCC, Nasdaq, etc. Just kind of get a bit of a

a temperature check on the on the privacy side of of um institutional allocators. So I would say they've all kind of unanimously said that it's a requirement. It's more this is what we need. It's a table stakes. We need this in order to kind of get comfortable with putting our flow on top of this and in in large scale. So I think that's the overwhelming kind of consensus we've seen from from those conversations, but I will say like part of this has been an education about explaining what it means and how it is.

You know, I thought there was actually a good piece that came out that this morning that was a good overview of the Canton network as well, but I think that's frankly, a lot of the time over the last 6 months has been about educating people about what the network, how it works, the tokenomics policy associated with it, and we continue to have those conversations. It's definitely gaining momentum around it, but it's still not quite crisply understood. Um, but privacy as far as that, I think it's a table stakes. Everyone's kind of said this is a requirement we have to have. And I I think this is true at the enterprise level, institutional, and retail. I There is a tweet that went pretty viral just this morning about someone paying their like crypto card statement. And they paid, you know, like a it was like

pretty pretty pricey, so they got some good cash back. But I I everyone, you know, payroll, credit card statements, all enterprise payment, you know, all all of these things are they require some semblance of privacy. It's just the way that our world works at this point that, you know, we don't have our financial information publicly available. How you know, what I guess my question here is the one of the main value propositions of blockchain is its composability, and this can be both a feature and a bug. How how do you maintain some of these things where we can get, you know, open composable finance where these things move really efficiently, everything works together in tandem, but you maintain privacy? You know, this this

feels like if we can harmonize these two things correctly, there's a really really big opportunity, but we know institutions and really everyone need privacy in order to operate effectively. They're also kind of foregoing one of the main value propositions here. How how do we square the circle? Yeah, so I think you hit on two different type of topics, so I'm going to answer them both. So, the first is on more of the composability, the interoperability. And so, as it relates to Canton, it's all kind of one L1 network. And so, you have kind of a network of networks where each application has its own configurable privacy element of this application has 10 fields and eight are public and two are private. And this other one over

here uh has its own set of rules of what are public and private. But, all of it is collectively composable across. You don't have to transition across an L1 to an L2. You don't have some of those bridge aspects of risk that can come into this system. But, you have the composability across that. So, a network of networks that kind of solves for some of that interoperability kind of component. Um you know, and then again, the the second part of your question about how to um you know, do it in scale and do so where you get that confidence associated with balance between privacy versus what's public in in you know, trade reporting in the fixed income market,

equity market, the tape, and so forth. There's there's already transparency out there. Now, what the time delay around that activity is is been debated and so forth. And so, if done right, you can have, you know, the right people know uh all the information. Like, if you think of a regulator, they can see all of those 10 fields on that first application that I was talking about. Those two that were private, but uh the the public sees the a trade took place at this price and it's it's public out there. The name of the person who does it doesn't really add much value associated with it. So, it's using that kind of atomic settlement that it real-time access to the information that you really needed know, but it doesn't do the disclosure of the names.

Yeah. Very cool. Um Mark, this makes a ton of sense. I'm I'm just, you know, curious if you have any closing thoughts here. You know, there's quite a bit of fervor uh around a very tight subset of the market. Privacy is very very important to this. You know, we've got the Zcash's and the private uncensorable AI. You know, there is a uh uh uh uh uh quite a bit of interest and demand around privacy in the current market. Um And and so I'm curious, you know, given that it feels like it's a really, you know, it's a really intense bull market for, you know, kind of a choice select assets, you know, how are you making sure contributing to, you know, getting CC, Canton, CNTN, you know, a seat at

that table? Uh because it feels like there's like I said, there's a lot of attention and interest in in a small cohort of assets right now, but not necessarily broad spectrum. So, how do how do we, you know, ensure that uh Canton makes it into that subset? Yeah, so for for myself and Canton Strategic, we're participating in all areas of it and evolution around that. So, we're participating in the foundation, um a board member of the foundation, participating in the governance of the the network, participating in the infrastructure by being a super validator or validator uh around that, investing in the ecosystem, trying to make this happen. So, how do we actually get this to be success is continued more volume. So, we need uh

you know, some of these kind of milestone uh that we talked about before, DTC, tokenizing a treasury, then moving on to other asset classes around. That will uh be huge unlocks to get, you know, from a million transactions a day that we're doing now to hopefully two, five, 10 million transactions as it looks to scale. Uh and that's what we're trying to do. Again, this is early days associated with that. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Uh because when you deal with these regulated institutional type flows, you get one bite at the apple. Uh and that's I think the way digital asset and kind of even their creation and evolution around Canton is, you know, digital asset's been around since, you know, 2014, I think it was. And and you you it wasn't rushed to market to pick

up some momentum. It was frankly a learning from others mistakes and their own mistakes and trying to then get to a point where it's ready for prime time to be used across this this flows and you know, it's early on that that safe spin around for 2 years. I'm really excited about what the next 2 years is going to look like. I think it's going to be fast and furious and a lot faster than than probably most anticipate. But you know, we have the groundwork now we just need to execute. Love it. Mark, thanks so much for coming on, man.

We're going to have to get you on when Canton hits a dollar, man. There we go. I like it. Absolutely. Let's do it. Yeah, so yeah, we'll do that next week. >> [laughter] >> Sounds good. Sounds good. All right, Mark. >> Thanks, Mark. We'll see you next time, then. All right, buddy. Bye. All right. Man, Canton just is so stable. Like it's so it's so just out of just a 15 cent stable coin. >> It's been that way for so long and it feels like they've just got a tight control of the supply over there. Market makers are putting in some serious work whenever it's whenever it's time for that thing to go, whenever they choose to dial Z pump. Man. Yeah. It feels like it's going to go. That is how it

[laughter] feels. So. All right. >> I mean the that trade while it's been you know, in shambles for a while. There's a couple of these that are at a really strong spot still. So. You got to love it. >> Yeah. Um well guys, we got Lucas Schuurman of Variational up next. He is the founder big launch, big raise and let's get Lucas up. Lucas, man, welcome to the show. Good to have you. Congrats on the raise announcement. Great. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. Absolutely.

Congrats. Appreciate you working with us through the time zones. >> [laughter] >> Absolutely. Yeah. Um Lucas uh I mean perps feels like the modality of the future. It feels like everyone is excited about bringing what we've called high-quality assets on chain. You guys have raised $50 million to do just this to bring RWAs on chain in a perps modality. Would love, you know, a bit about the story you know, as first maybe you know, about yourself and variation and then we'll we'll get into the raise in particular.

Yeah, let me let me share a little bit about that. It's one of my favorite topics. Like who doesn't like talking about themselves, right? I'll try to keep it exactly. I'll keep it succinct but there's some fun nuggets here. I've actually been in the broadly like quant trading high-frequency trading and crypto space for the last 10 years or so working the entire time with my co-founder Edward Yu. We started out after meeting at university at in Columbia at Columbia in New York. We were kind of a dorm room founding story. I was the first person he met on campus. We were adjacent in the dorm and halls and we quickly became friends. We were in similar research labs. He studied applied math. I studied computer science and we were all working on kind of topics in machine learning and Bayesian stats and kind of these types of things.

We ended up you know, being very close throughout college and we started a hedge fund. We were crazy enough right out of university. This is called Q Capital. It was in New York. We ran that for a few years, raised some pretty large rounds the GP and then large LP seed. We were actually acquired by our series A investor Digital Currency Group Barry Silbert's firm and then I spent some time at Genesis Trading as the VP of Engineering at this that I have quant research. Genesis Trading was one of the largest OCC desks in crypto at the time. So we helped them build out their single dealer platform electronic market making system lots of other really fun infrastructure. That was kind of during their hyper growth phase from 2019 to 2021. So it It a great seat in the ecosystem to uh kind of see everything

that was happening, build up many pieces that are similar to the things we're working on now, and build a great view of kind of the ecosystem. Uh in late '21 heading into '22, we left Genesis after kind of finishing our our time there. And we started Variational. Variational's early time was actually, this is not as well known, was actually as a prop shop, like kind of a prop trading firm. We were very active in OTC derivatives, like OTC options, as well as on a lot of other DeFi protocols. Kind of from the '22, '23, '24 era. Um so, if you can name one of the protocols from that era, we probably had some form of a tendril in it. We had some wins, we had some losses. It was a very volatile time in the markets, as I'm sure you guys remember with uh you know, Luna and

FTX and everything, but also tons of innovation happening. You know, that's when dYdX was really hitting product market fit, and also the earliest versions of Hyperliquid. So, we've been around the block, we've kind of seen it all, and you know, I like to sometimes compare our DNA, our story to a few of the other successful teams in the space coming very much from a trading background of the last 10 years. HFT, and then kind of that dorm room founding story and bond that I built with Ed. So, it's uh it's a fun one. Yeah. Robbie and I also share a similar dorm room founding story from freshman year at the University of Florida. Um we you know, we don't need to get into all of that now, but um what what has been one of the biggest obstacles or challenges to building Variational through the years? Like, what has been

a persistent kind of obstacle, or what what wasn't as easy as perhaps you had anticipated to be up to this point? Um and then similarly, what was easier than you expected to build such a successful app? Mm. That's a great question. Well, to be honest, I mean, the crypto markets are brutal. Um you know, I feel like all of us have been through so many ups and downs and phases and cycles over these last, you know, 5 to 10 years that we've been in this market. Wouldn't trade it for the world, but that's the the real answer to your question. So, you know, truly, which do I even pick? Um I'd say one of the biggest challenges probably was trading through and being very active in DeFi and and even on centralized exchanges around the time of the Luna collapse, the FTX collapse.

Um it taught us a lot of lessons uh about risk management, about kind of mistakes that were made um that we saw uh that have informed our perspective on um you know, how to to run a successful protocol in the space and how to try to defend against that. Um I also think this is where we started, you know, having the first seedlings of idea of moving from doing more of like quants and prop trading, which we had done for you know, 6 to 8 years to that point, and starting to think about building. Uh we saw some gaps in the market, right? Uh we saw that uh there were pretty limited tools for people to uh kind of face each other peer-to-peer, to settle and clear things on chain. And I think this is one of the big reasons we saw not just with us, but with Hyperliquid

and many others, a kind of a new renaissance and resurgence of DeFi as uh you know, trustless way to be uh interacting or transacting in these types of derivatives. So, that was one that I saw among many other stories. Um I'm sure you guys, you know, remember that time in the market, but uh those were crazy crazy days. Um on the plus side, I would say I've been really happy and proud with how the team pivoted from frankly like very very different types of products. Like of course, there's a lot of pieces within Variational's overall architecture that look like trading and prop trading infrastructure and we're solving a lot of the same problems, you know, that's why so many trading teams I think end up in uh having a lot of success kind of building in uh DeFi. But on the other hand, um there was a lot to learn, right? Uh

everything from consumer marketing and growth all the way over to uh how we interact a little bit more with directly building and deploying on chain primitives, the security related to those things and so on and so forth. Um but I'd say that that the team really spun up very quickly there. And at this point, now that we've hit some product market fit and had some success, you know, the the growth story's compounding and it's really great to see the team kind of come into its own. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. Uh Lucas, let's not bury the lead here. You guys uh closed one of the largest uh fundraise series A rounds for DeFi in 2026.

Uh Dragonfly is the lead. Dragonfly is one of the the few funds that is able to uh close or lead these these rounds at this scale as DeFi matures. Um you also Variational also launched RWA uh perpetuals today. And so it feels that like these are related. This was a strategic decision to announce the fundraise at the same time as launching these perpetual markets for RWAs. Why choose to launch these two things together? Why the RWA focus and the fundraise here uh at the same time? How are these related?

Yeah, great question. I mean, we really view these as two sides of the same coin. All right, like our investors kind of arrived at their conviction because of our RWA roadmap. This is something that Variational's been building towards for quite some time. In fact, um as I'm sure we'll cover a little bit later in the pod, Variational uses a very different type of overall design. It's it's not a club, it's not an order book, it's RFQ with kind of aggregated liquidity. And we've been using that architecture intentionally with an eye towards uh bringing some of the TradFi liquidity or let's say all the TradFi liquidity on chain. Um so this was the vision we were pitching when we talked to, you know, investors not just recently but honestly many months even years ago. And I think that's uh kind of the the big the big thing that

everyone's been waiting for. Um so why, you know, why why work with Dragonfly, why announce these things at the same time? I mean, I think principally we partnered together to tackle RWAs. We partnered together to um bring TradFi liquidity on chain. And I think it makes the most sense to tie these and show like, "Hey, this is the level of buy-in commitment and institutional capital that we have to deploy. And we're very serious about solving this problem." Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, Lucas, I'd love to just have you extrapolate a bit about the vision that you have for Variational. Um I think that a lot of the industry has been kind of pigeon-holed into this idea of we're building all of these D5 protocols and applications for the crypto asset ecosystem and kind of what that entails.

All of the traders on chain, all of the assets on chain. But Rob and I have been very firmly, you know, pushing this idea that this tokenization tokenization spectrum starting with stable coins, high quality, low risk assets, moving all the way down the risk curve to equities, to private credit, to anything that you can really kind of fathom from a higher risk perspective is well underway. Uh and just yesterday there was some news from the SEC that came out about a tokenization innovation exemption as well. Kind of what is the broader vision here for Variational? I have a feeling it's not just trade Bitcoin and ETH hunt up to 100X 24/7. I think there's something bigger here. What is your What is your

kind of like top-down vision for what this app can become? Mhm. I'll answer that in two parts. So, I'll give you on the consumer side, right? I think as you said, it comes from being user-focused, right? We're We're not interested in building tech for tech's sake. We're interested in solving problems. Um and like what do on-chain users actually want to trade? And I think exactly as you said, on-chain users want to trade not just uh what we have currently, which is 450 different crypto markets, all with market-leading liquidity, all with zero fees, all on chain as perpetuals. But they want to trade the same level of UX, deposit and go, zero fees, etc., but on perpetuals and CFDs for hundreds of different uh tradfi markets, right? They want to trade stocks, they want to trade

commodities, they want to trade global equities, not just in the US, but they want to trade them in Korea and Japan and beyond. Um and we've seen this demand. I mean, you know, let's also not talk about the elephant in the room too much, but of course Hyperliquid validated that this is like a massive massive market, and I think I agree with you that it's only going to expand. But fundamentally, what we see in the market It everyone's kind of uh solving it in the same way with the same limitations, which is every time we build a new order book, we have to bootstrap liquidity, which means it takes some time to find those dealers, find those market makers.

And for the majority of listings that we've seen in the market so far, we find that they're they're pretty thin. They're difficult to trade. They have high execution costs. So, we're listening to the users. We're seeing the exact same thesis that I think you just mentioned that, you know, users want to trade everything in one place. They want to have access to global markets with the same quality of liquidity that they're used to in TradFi. So, this is bucket one. I promised a two-part answer. This is for the retail side, let's say for the you know, the everyday trader. We Our vision is trade hundreds of different perps and CFDs, not just crypto, but all of the global markets that we can get our hands into with TradFi quality liquidity, and that's what our model enables. The second part though, as you alluded to, is

we actually have a product called Variational Pro, and it's something that we don't get too deep into right now since there's so much in that we can do with Omni and so far that we can take the retail perp trading side. But, as I mentioned, our background actually comes from institutional trading, you know, OTC derivatives, structured products, options. And we see a world out there applications of Variational Protocol not just to retail trading, but actually to helping to solve the ways that institutions trade options, hedge with structured products and beyond. And I share that exact same idea, you know, as we see more tokenization, a better kind of regulatory framework, we'll see not as retail but institutions having a massive uptake in these things. And we can give the we can build a product that helps solve both at the same time. And that's something that really excites us

going forward. Yeah. And Lucas, let's kind of just get your opinion on why perp as a product is a superior product to you know, zero-day options or very short-term options. Why do you feel that perps are a superior product? Perps are simple. That's really the the key idea, right? What what do what do you want when you're trading a derivative as a retail investor? You want the ability to long or short, right? You also want the ability to trade with leverage and it can have expressed a size in your position. But what you don't want is to necessarily think about all sorts of time decay of your Greeks and your higher order risk factors and you know, these very nuanced things that relate to options trading. I think zero DTE options and some of the other types of

tools we've seen built for retail traders are amazing. I actually think with AI we'll see a little bit of resurgence of retail users trading these things as AI tools and LLMs can help them with trade ideas, with you know, digesting and thinking through different types of constructions. But A, we're not quite there yet. I do have some interest in solving that problem later down the line. But B, the reality is perps and CFDs are simple. They change linearly with the underlying. They give me everything I want as a retail trader, which is again long and short and some leverage and the ability to use USD as collateral, USDC, but without kind of adding all that extra complexity that I think a lot of users honestly fall prey to. Yeah.

Um Lucas, looking at some of the stats here, you know, obviously this is uh with very, very recently launched RWA markets. Uh so the the full suite of products is is starting to become available. Um I think also it's still restricted in some geographic locations. Uh but even despite all this, uh upwards of four and a half or so billion dollars of volume over the last 7 days. Uh and I think upwards of 16 or 17 billion dollars over the last 30 days. Uh so there's still significant, significant volume here.

Um with the most recent raise, 50 million dollars from Dragonfly, how do you plan on utilizing this capital to accelerate open interest, accelerate volume and and you know, take this thing to to 50 and 100 billion dollars? Yeah. I I point out that um our first set of RWAs, as you mentioned, just went live um quite literally last night Asia time. Um so, you know, let's call it 24 hours ago or so. Um what this means is the existing uh of traction you see on the platform comes from our zero fee model, our aggregation of liquidity, which gives high quality execution to our users, and the huge menu of things we have to trade on the crypto side, these 450 different perps. Um but fundamentally, the thing I'm most excited about and Dragonfly's most

excited about and we're really happy to be getting out into the world today is that, you know, the the vision here is not just 450 uh crypto perps, but it's hundreds and hundreds of additional um RWA markets to trade. So, what are we using my capital for? Well, fundamentally, the problem that we're solving, to put it more succinctly than than my earlier anti- answer to Andy, is we're bringing TradFi liquidity on chain. All right, that's fundamentally what our architecture enables, and it's fundamentally what I think is missing, kind of the missing link to not just have five or 10 different tradeable assets like we do currently on chain, but to have that huge menu. Um so, it takes capital, it takes real institutional might to partner with tier-one US institutions, with those big TradFi players, dealers, market makers, and others that you have to in order to

solve that. We've solved it on kind of the protocol architecture design, and we've proven the model to to what you just mentioned um in terms of our existing volumes and stats, but I think we'll see an exponential increase from here. Um of course, that's what I hope. I'm drinking my own Kool-Aid. Uh but I think the demand's there. I think that the product is really going to be a step function uh once we start rolling out these phase two markets, as what we call it, these uh TradFi liquidity porting on chain, and that's coming in the coming next few weeks. Yeah, and we we know that there's significant demand for this modality, and and this can be applied to all asset classes, given the size of the asset classes that are starting to become available on variational, and the quality of those asset classes. I'm

curious, do you anticipate that trading volume open interest will in in these RWA markets will eclipse that of the native crypto assets? And and if so, you know, how long do you think until you end up with, you know, greater than 50% of the the open interest on variational is in these RWA either equity RWA commodities markets? The short answer is very soon. And I can give you some data on this, right? We'll we'll see a very similar path to what we've seen on Hyperliquid with HIP-3 and and Trade XYZ.

Love their team, love that what they've been doing, but to the point of them validating the market, I mean, to my knowledge, more than 50% of Hyperliquid's volume and and probably pretty similar percentage of their OI is now driven by RWA markets. Probably changes a little bit on a day-to-day basis. But I think Variational will achieve a similar parity very soon. Frankly, you know, depends on the market cycle, but right now I think many retail traders are more interested in trading, say, AI stocks, memory stocks, semiconductors, these types of things, than at least certain mid and long-tail crypto assets. Of course, cycles change, you know, there's always kind of a a hot new thing, which is great. But our goal is to give that full set of optionality to retail users on our platform, so so they can trade whatever they want all in one place. Um but it's I really think as

we roll out more markets in the coming few weeks, it will happen very very soon. HIP-3 showed the adoption curve here is fast if you provide high-quality products. And again, I I think they did a great job, but I'd say there's high-quality execution on five or 10 markets right now there. I think we'll be able to do so on 100 plus, which is going to be very very exciting. Yeah. Lucas, let's talk about some of the design choices that you guys have made. Um specifically around the way that the the taker and maker orders happen, as well as around kind of the the RFQ system, which will kind of lead us into the revenue and buybacks and this whole conversation.

Why Why do you feel that the Variational RFQ model is superior to the order book model of something like Hyperliquid? Yeah, I think fundamentally um RFQ and and order books are they're different sides of the same coin, right? They're they're at the end of the day ways to to match orders. So, I also want to draw a distinction that limit order books are great. We rely on limit order books. They're used for price discovery. Exchanges are necessary to variational and into the markets in the same way that I have hyper liquid in uh crypto, but we also have you know, Nasdaq and uh NYSE and CME and all the other, you know, traditional exchanges

that you might uh be very familiar with. Um but also in traditional finance, we have this idea of kind of brokerage style um let's call it uh liquidity aggregation or routing, which essentially means that rather than being the infrastructure layer play um for most retail users, what they want is access to the most liquidity. They don't want to trade on just one book, which might not be the deepest book in the world. They want to trade on as much liquidity as possible. In other words, get the lowest execution cost so they keep more of their profits. Um this is really what we're solving for with our model. So, what's the difference is we're not trying to be the venue for price discovery. We're trying to be the venue venue for best execution. And what that means is rather than building a limit order book, which is again used

especially by algo traders for that price discovery and really rapid level trading, RFQ allows us to quote a really really excellent price all in to the user on the one side and then aggregate the liquidity on the other end for hedging on on the other side. Um so, this is the fundamental difference in our model, but it's also the fundamental thing that allows us to bring that hyper liquidity on chain rather than trying to rebuild it every single time we do a new listing in a new order book. Two And then does that because you have a zero fee model on that uh you know, on the platform at large, does that end up looking something similar to how Lighter has a zero fee model, but then earns revenue via the effectively by market making and then is able to to do their

buybacks? How do you How How you guys generate revenue that will uh ideally for the community end up being used for token buybacks for a future token? I know you can't speak probably on the token side, but how does the revenue generation on Variational work and kind of generally do you have any plans to change that to accelerate that? How does How does that process work? Yeah, so Variational is revenue generating right now despite our zero fees. And our goal at the end of the day with this model again as I said is liquidity aggregation and high quality execution for users. And a big part of high quality execution is is zero fees.

So, but it's a great question and very fair question. It sounds sometimes too good to be true. If there's zero fees and great execution, how does Variational make money? Just a quick point of kind of explanation. You were mentioning Lighter and I'd also use the example in traditional markets of say Robinhood. These are other zero fee trading platforms that make what's called a payment for order flow. So, that's what you were just alluding to which is the idea that they don't have to charge their retail users fees, but they make money by selling the order flow out to market makers who are filling the other side of the order. Selling the order flow I think is let's just say there's been many articles written by people smarter than myself about the potential game theoretic misalignment there. Let's just say the money has to come from

somewhere. And the market makers are are the biggest beneficiary of this arrangement. In fact, they're usually kicking back a small portion of the profits that they make to the the platform where they bought the order flow from. It makes intuitive sense, right? They're not going to pay more for the order flow than they can monetize themselves. On Variational, this is the other side of our you know coin for the architecture we talked about RFQ and liquidity aggregation, but the other big kind of difference between Variational and other platforms is that OLP, Omni's liquidity provider on Variational, is the system that takes the other side of retail orders immediately. So, for every retail trader, they're what we call taker, OLP is always the other side of the trade, the maker. OLP's job is to then go and aggregate liquidity to hedge it as cheaply or as quickly as possible.

But in other words, we're able to so-called I like to say squeeze the limited juice the lemon before we do that. Uh, we are the maker that can kind of uh, juice the quality of that uh, retail flow a little bit before we pass it along. But, this is a win-win. We provide zero fee trading to retail users. We aggregate a lot more liquidity, which gives them high quality execution. And then, we are able to kind of keep it within the platform, this uh, monetization of the retail flow is what we'd usually call it, um, to a very small degree. And then, we go and hedge it ourselves. Um, but, in the past we've used mechanisms like loss refunds. In the future, we're planning on something called a uh, spread rebates or other types of rebates on the platform. But, our overall vision is to keep that

revenue source within the platform rather than leaking it out to the market makers and then having them kick a small amount back through PFOF. We want to monetize it within one platform and be able to share some of that with the users. Or, frankly, just take a a smaller spread at the top line and zero fees, which is another way of sharing the value with the users. And then, you plan on having zero fees, you know, no pun intended, but perpetually for the existence of the product? Yes, correct, correct. Um, Variational is, you know, stable and revenue-generating uh, without fees. Um, and again, conceptually, we can compare it a little bit to payment for order flow. But, imagine instead of uh, sending the order flow mostly to be monetized by the external party and then getting a little bit of a kickback, Variational attempts to squeeze that

lemon uh, on the other side of the retailers directly before hedging. Um, so, this is the fundamental mechanism by which we generate revenue. Uh, but, it's a kind of a win-win-win. What do you mean by squeeze the lemon in this case? Like, when when you're talking about juicing the order flow before passing it off to the market makers? What what what is that process? Fundamentally um it just comes down to the efficiency of hedging and uh, you know, how we can um, efficiently aggregate that liquidity out. Um, so, this is the same that any other market maker would do. In the same way I, you know, Citadel might be on the other side of a Robinhood trade. Once they assume the other side of the retail order, their job is to either internalize that trade or hedge it onto another venue as

cheaply and as quickly as they can. But obviously in some sense they're they're being compensated for that. Um so we try to do that ourselves a little bit more efficiently sometimes and also a little bit more within the same platform before it goes out to these external parties for hedging. And what that allows is again we can keep more of it within the protocol. We like to call it not leaking the value externally. Right. Right. So you can internalize some more of that activity rather than hedging it out to some third party. You can fulfill more of it yourself. Um and Lucas does that just scale based on volume?

Your revenues are simply scalable linearly based on volume? Roughly. Um I don't want to over promise here but you know, one thing that we're excited about uh I'll just use the the general comparable that market making is a business that gets more efficient at scale, not less efficient. Um so we're excited about the fact that we've already been able to achieve some reasonable scale with OLP and variational at our current activity in crypto. But as we get bigger, uh we're able to offer even better and better execution to our users because of the economy of scale, because of internalization as Rob was just mentioning and a few other things. So these are, you know, one facets and I don't want to get too technical uh but these are like a few facets of the way in which we can, you know, kind of again have that virtuous cycle of providing

really really high quality execution, zero fees, great aggregation of liquidity, but still generate revenue. And over time I hope, yeah, indeed more revenue as volumes go up. Lucas, this might be a silly question but the Robinhood example uh feels like it's a good comparison uh for for a variety of reasons. You mentioned, you know, payment for order flow. You know, the the Wall Street Bets era 2020 2021 GameStop mean stock craze happened on Robinhood um and it was it was very very uh, at the center of, uh, that that whole wave. I'm curious because, you know, Variational is also doing payment for

order flow. Robinhood was doing that. Um, you know, Robinhood kind of got in this situation where it halted trading on GameStop because it was maybe favoring market makers, right? Because that that those were ultimately the customers. How do you prevent Variational from falling into a similar position where, you know, you guys are halting the retail traders because you've got to protect the market makers? Mhm. Well, a few key points here. Um, number one is not to nitpick too much on technical terms, but I would not call Variational payment for order flow. Um, since as I was saying, it's very conceptually similar in terms of where is the money coming from or the revenue coming from, uh, but we are, uh, kind of filling the other side of the order ourselves and then passing on the

hedging flow as opposed to letting a market maker fill the other side directly and then paying us for that. That's the payment for the order flow side. Um, but, you know, again, very close in terms of concept, but it does allow us to get to keep that revenue within the platform and return some of that value back to users over time. That's that's part of our vision. Um, secondly, as as far as it relates to the GameStop and so on. Um, what one interesting thing that I'll point out which, you know, might be a little bit too much of debate tactics, just attacking the premise, but, um, I think this does become more and more of a concern when we're talking about non-linear derivatives, things like options, and so on. If I recall correctly, that was, uh, the main instrument being used by a lot of the

retail speculators. Um, yes, it's it's possible to very quickly have certain dealers get into hot water, um, let's just say broadly with the trading dynamics that we had around that time. Um, this is very different for linear derivatives. It's very different for the types of relationships and even, um, the way we have constructed, you know, settlement procedures and the relationships on the other end of the flow. And it's also a reason why we're working towards, you know, redundancies on the liquidity provider side, um, and all sorts of mechanisms, too, to fairly protect the users. So, it's top of mind. I think it is something we think about, but on the other hand, at the risk of dodging the question a little bit too much, um it doesn't have as much of a direct analog to to risks that I would necessarily consider day-to-day on on

the the things that we're listing right now. Yeah, understood. One of the things that I and Rob, one of the things that I love about this whole perps kind of dynamic that's ongoing right now is that it almost resurfaces this like integrated versus modular or modular versus monolithic kind of conversation. You know, you could argue you've got a couple of these lighter hyperliquid operating on their own chain. Hyperliquid 16 nodes, much more of like, you know, less secure than a lighter lighter's ZK proofs have just been uh re-ran effectively as of like this week uh suggesting that you can exit the the chain, you know, given any any event.

You don't need any help from the uh admin wallet or from the multi-sig. And so, there's a lot of like ZK things happening there that make that pretty cool. Hyperliquid on the other hand, much less secure. I think you could argue in terms of their node architecture as well as their multi-sig design. And then, you've got Solana's been absolutely at the helm the last week with Tally and Phoenix Trade, just a smart contract on Solana. Variational, similar, built on Arbitrum One uh kind of has a has a interesting tech uh technical setup there. Lucas, I'm just curious like where you stand on the optimal infrastructure design for perps, right? Obviously, you need extreme

extremely fast execution. Uh you want security. You want um you know, you all of your users to be safe. And then, there's also the composability question. How do you How do you think about the optimal design for uh a perps exchange? And why why have you chosen to build on Arbitrum and kind of do things in the way that you have? Yeah, there's a nuanced answer to this question, which I'll I'll try to unpack a bit, but I I think it's an important one to ask, right? Because at the end of the day, what this really gets at is two sides. Um one is user experience, and the other is security and trust, right?

On the user experience side, you mentioned things like quick execution. I'd even just say like easy deposits, right? Like bridging, what's the wallet infrastructure look like? Of course, for any kind of uh large-scale like L1, um you know, like a Solana or any built-out L2 like an Arbitrum, um these are relatively solved problems, so let's kind of check that box a little bit. In terms of transaction throughput and some of the more nuanced reasons why, for example, Lyra runs on their own L1, and it's very impressive technology. I did see the the ZK proofs as well. Like I think their team's doing a great job. Um but, you know, they make specific technical decisions because what I was saying earlier, like they're building a price discovery venue. They're building a limit order book. They have to build for high-frequency traders and different use cases than what we're considering.

Um at the end of the day, on Omni for perp trading, we're obsessed with you know, the idea of like a retail trader, right? Not an institution, not a high-frequency trader. We try to solve user experience problems, and therefore the technical problems that come up for that use case. For RFQ, um RFQ common misconception I I see taking a small detour is that RFQ is uh for example, like has extra extremely high latency or bad execution. Um on Omni, your quote request is getting refreshed in real time. You know, it's a few milliseconds, right? Like for any normal trader, this is a very, very fast, right? But it is true that like Omni is not built for HFT. So, you know, certain of our technical decisions as it related to building on Arbitrum one and and our

ability to do that in terms of the block times, uh did come downstream from the fact that we use just a completely different architecture. But again, the architecture's solving for TradFi liquidity on chain and the best use case for for retail, not for HFT price discovery, um which is just very different. As it relates to the other side of your question, which is kind of the the privacy and security, let's just call it safety side. That is a big reason why we chose Arbitrum. And again, this isn't to the detriment of other great chains like Solana and many others, but in particular, right, I think users can trust like we are running their capital or running the the system transparently on Arbitrum one. If you sign up to Variational, you deploy your funds into a what we call settlement pool. It's a new smart contract that we spin up for every

single user. You can see it there. It's on the the main Arbitrum one chain. You know, there's some there's some value in there that I feel. So, this is a very high-quality, I think, substrate for us to build on. And in terms of kind of the the spectrum of, let's say, Hyperliquid to to a lighter, and there's a lot of things that could go into how we compare those, but I think that they're built with different sets of trade-offs. I think Variational kind of straddles somewhere on that spectrum. But, the bigger things we were thinking about was again, how do we solve for trust and security, and then how do we solve for the UX side? And I'm I'm happy that with the decisions that we made there so far.

Given that there's a lot of trade-offs that are made, you know, across this entire spectrum, some are built more high-frequency, some are built more for execution. We've also been talking a lot on the show about the power law, and how, you know, the the market feels as if it's getting more mature, and you have the leaders that are starting to run away with, you know, with the game. Do you think that there's room for, you know, several perpetuals exchanges to all compete for market share, or do you think that this follows the typical power law kind of four to two to one ratio of, you know, what a two to three winner market could look like?

Mhm. Firstly, I'll separate that question into exchanges versus brokers like models. We're we're really competing in a in a second piece. In fact, the fortune article that went live a little bit earlier used to an important quote where I think I was saying, "We don't view Hyperliquid and Ledger as direct competitors in many ways." As I said, exchanges are an infrastructure layer piece, they're a very necessary piece. We can and will trade on those types of venues in the future in the same way that we trade on many other exchanges. Just like I'm mentioning how we're aggregating tradfi liquidity, we're not a we're we're a user of, you know, downstream in some sense of CME and CBOE and these types of exchanges um kind of through our our tech stack. I'll hand wave a little bit. Um but, you know, we don't we don't see that as a

direct competitor. To answer on the exchange side, cuz I think that's an interesting one. I personally think that there is a power law and that there will be a small set of winners. Um and there's a lot of economy of scale there. Um right like as we described, order books have to build up that liquidity and and have those maker relationships and there's a lot of an economy of scale. So, do I think it'll just be one? Long-term, not necessarily. Uh but, do I think there's going to be 10, 15, 20 exchanges, specifically limit order book exchanges? Um maybe not, unless we are really segmenting by product in the same way we have different global exchanges or exchanges for derivatives versus spot in the US.

As it comes to brokerages, um firstly, this is a wide-open category. It's something where we're really excited about, or broker-like, let's say. Um so, this is asking a question like, you know, if you build a retail-facing product and try to again solve for aggregation and zero fees and so on, it looks very different. Um I think we're one of the the first in this category that that's going to scale out and we're very excited about that. I'm sure there will be more. Um brokerages are something that we see specialize in various geographies and product types. I mean, think of how many you can think of the top of your head, say in the US market, Robinhood, Fidelity, Schwab, etc., etc. Um you know, we'll see different carve out different parts of the ecosystem, but at the same way in in the same example, of course, there are a few big winners and

they become durable because, you know, users are sticky and we think we can give them, for example, for us, a great product and uh have a very durable edge there. Beautiful. Lucas, last thing from us, um anything any words to the variation community, the early traders, the early OLP adopters and depositors and users, big rays, RWAs are out. You know, there's there's a lot of excitement. People are kind of coming back to the market. If you're If you're watching a few markets, it's a gigabol. If you're watching the majors and some other markets, you're down bad. People want to feel something, anything Any words to the community?

Well, our community, I think firstly always has to start with a thank you. Um, you know, as I think Rob was mentioning quoting a couple stats a little bit ago. Um, you know, it's been amazing to see the the adoption of Variation platform. It's been great to see it hit product market fit to kind of prove out our brokerage like model or zero fee trading model. And then, you know, this is what we're delivering our our ultimate vision. Um, we partner with Dragonfly, we have the capital we need, and the partnerships we need, and we're bringing the TradFi liquidity on chain. But, it's a big thank you to everyone who's been there early in the process with us using the early versions of Variation. Helping be part of that journey, helping prove out the model. And it's it's up to us to continue to scale it from here. Um, but

to the community and and even to people who might be familiar with Variation for the first time from some of the the press we're doing today and in this great conversation. Um, try out the platform, share the feedback with us. There's tons of new RWA markets coming soon. I hope more than a hundred. We're actively hiring. Um, we check Discord every day. We are a crypto native team in that that sense. We are deeply plugged into our community, and we're constantly watching. So, many of the best ideas, listing requests, etc. come directly from our community. We love for more people to be a part and to help us usher in this new era of of RWA trading on chain.

50 million dollars, Series A. Shout out to the new hire, Justin. Let's go, man. Yes, [laughter] sir. Let's go, Lucas. Great episode. Thanks for joining us, man. Yeah, thanks so much for the time, guys. Really fun chat. Thanks. Yes. Variation man, what a way to end it. million dollar raise. Series A. Huge raise. I mean on the heels of Hyperliquid just humping. It's incredible to see. >> Justin some love, the new hire. Steady lads. Steady lads. Sorry, what were you saying? I just think it's incredible to see, you know, obviously perps as a category is exploding, Hyperliquid's leading the way, and I'm just, you know,

I I think, um, what is currently being slept on is this category of brokers, and I I personally was unfamiliar with how these are ultimately going to benefit and be complementary with Hyperliquid and exchanges. Perps as a category is so much bigger than just one of these components. I mean, yeah, what Hype's at 52, Lyra's up another 12% today, Variational announced their raise. I mean, look, it's it's all coming together, right? I mean, these valuations, I mean, Hype's now what, 50 billion, Lyra's at like a billion. Exactly.

Variational is kind of like the third musketeer. They're really in the race. They're it's those are the big three. Astor was once part of the question, but I just don't really think anyone takes them seriously. And the technical design is not there. I think Variational's technical design is definitely there. I think Lucas is really really bright. I [snorts] think the biggest breakthrough is order books like Hyperliquid, like like a Lyra. You need to get liquidity for every new asset. The RFQ model, you can have dozens and dozens and dozens of TradFi assets on chain, and you don't need the same liquidity management system because you can aggregate the liquidity through the RFQ model, which

is kind of like the main breakthrough, I think, from their design, and probably what got a lot of the investors excited. Exactly. Yeah. Well, we've got our next guest on the heels of something that is going to help out uh, quite a few projects, quite a few asset classes. Clarity uh is coming. And we're going to hear from the leader of the Digital Chamber of Commerce, Cody Carbone. Let's go ahead and bring him up. Uh friend of the show, Cody, welcome. What's going on, guys? How are we? We uh we promised that we're not going to talk about clarity at all on the show until something happens. But here we are, things are happening.

It is Clarity is my my breakfast, lunch, dinner. It's all anyone asks me about, so I'm I'm ready for it. Good, man. Let's Let's talk about it, Cody. I mean, we heard some news is happening underneath the surface. Things are progressing through Congress. Could you just Just give us the updates. That's what everyone wants to know. What is the latest on the Clarity Act? Sure thing. So, it was a huge week last week. We're coming off a little bit of a high. We had a bipartisan vote out of the Senate Banking Committee, 15 to 9. The bill now progresses. And so, where we are right now is that there's really two pieces of this bill. There's the portion of the bill that passed out of Senate Banking Committee last week.

That's the portion of the bill that has jurisdiction over the SEC. And then there's the portion of the bill that has jurisdiction over the CFTC. And that it passed in back in January out of the Senate Agriculture Committee. So, what has to happen next? We have to take these two bills and make it one. We got to put it into one bill. We have to reconcile the two bills. We need one product, so the Clarity Act needs to just be one bill. That's ultimately going to be voted on on the Senate floor. So, over the next two to three weeks staffers in both the Ag Committee and the Bank Committee will be putting these two bills together, continuing the negotiations to get ready to put this on the Senate floor, where they're going to need 60 votes. So, while it's great that we had two Democrats vote for it out of Senate

Banking Committee last week, we need at least seven. And that's if you have every single Republican, 53 Republicans. You need at at seven Democrats. There's a group of 12 Democrats that have been working on this over the last few months. So, the goal over the next two to three weeks is to finalize negotiations with them, bring this one product to the Senate floor, hopefully the second or third week of June is what we're looking at, pass that bill on the Senate floor with a bipartisan vote, then it's got to go back to the house one more time because what the house passed last year, which feels like decades ago, is a substantially different bill. So, the house is going to have to vote one more time. And after the house votes, and you would hope that if it passes the Senate with a bipartisan vote, the house will

pass it with a bipartisan vote as expected, this thing goes to the president's desk, and they're hoping early July, July 4th signing ceremony, but sometime sometime in July President Trump signs this, and CLARITY is enacted into law. Incredible. So, July 4th seems like the target. That would be ceremonious indeed. Uh you mentioned uh if we work backwards here, obviously we've got to pass pass the house and the Senate, then it goes to President Trump's desk. Uh it seems like if, you know, we pass the Senate, the house is a foregone conclusion. So, the the blocker right now, and you said the time frame here is the first couple weeks of June. We need 12 Democrats, and that's assuming all 53 Republicans.

Break this down for us because Polymarket is still just pricing a 56% chance that CLARITY Act is signed into law in 2026. Uh before the high of last week, we were at 46% chance. So, we've jumped 10%. This is movement in a positive direction. When we're going from, you know, the subset of the Senate to ultimately, you know, the full Senate, and we're going from, you know, this uh this this uh initial cohort that voted this and passed it, and we're opening this up into all Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, who who are some of the swing voters here? What is the likelihood that we ultimately get this past the house on the first try.

I focused on that group of 12 because I feel confident that maybe all 53 Republicans are are unlikely, but at least 51, 52. There's only really going to be one or two Republican defections. So, who are this group of 12 that can carry this to the 60 vote threshold? You need 60. 60 is the end game. It's all about getting to 60. So, if you look at the two Democrats that voted for it out of Senate Banking Committee, Senator Gaiego and Senator Ossobrucks, it's a great start. But, there was five other Democrats in Senate Banking that voted for some bipartisan amendments to push this forward. Right there, you've got seven Democrats. If you get all 53 Republicans, that you only need those seven. So, you're looking at Senator Warner from Virginia, Senator Kim from

New Jersey, Senator Cortez Masto from Nevada. Then, you're looking at some of the other senators that are not on Banking, but have been a part of this cohort of 12 that have been really trying to push this forward. Looking at the Senate Agriculture Committee, Senator Warnock, Senator Booker from New Jersey who's been leading negotiations on the Ag side, Senator Klobuchar who's the ranking member on the Ag side. I'm focused on the Democratic votes. I I think if you can pick off and I I think you see the path right now and that's why I'm so optimistic and actually I think the Polymarket odds are a little low right now if I wasn't betting person and I am. Uh but, you can find the path by looking at the Democrats and that's not even including Senator Gillibrand who's had

her name on this bill from the very beginning who's not on one of those two committees. So, there is a path. I would focus on those group of 12 Democrats who have been working on this. We met with Senator Gaiego who was one of the two Democratic yes votes in the Senate Banking Committee. We met with him at Consensus in Miami and he said, "Hey, I think there's a path here to not just get 60 votes, but to get 70." I think why I'm so optimistic is that these senators, both Republican and Democratic side of the aisle, have been prioritizing this. This isn't an issue that they came to a markup and we watched thousands of markups like this where they said, "Okay, this is going to be a partisan exercise. All the Dems, hey, we're just going to sit here and vote no. All the Republicans vote yes or

vice versa." The Democrats are engaged. Now, even though it's only been, you know, about 6 days since we've had the markup, we've already got staffers on both the Republican and Democratic side figuring out, "Okay, all right, what's next? How do we get to yes? How do we continue to negotiate on ethics? Or how do we continue to negotiate on developer protections to make sure everyone's aligned there." So, I feel really optimistic that there is a path. Obviously, things can go wrong. It's not done until it's done. DC is famous for missing deadlines. There's a lot of things that still need to happen, but there's a huge opportunity for every single one of your listeners, every single advocate out there to continue to reach out to their senators because I can tell you, while we've been focused, to your point, Rob, on

the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Ag Committee, there's about 60 other senators who are not focused on digital assets whatsoever, who probably haven't thought about this since they had to vote for the GENIUS Act last year, who need to be educated or reminded why they care. And the one thing that we want to make sure at the Digital Chamber that never happens is that a senator goes up to vote and goes, "Man, I haven't heard from the crypto industry at all." Or I didn't hear from any my constituents why they care about this bill. So, what's my incentive to vote for it? I'm not hearing from the constituents. I'm not hearing from the businesses. I'm not hearing from anyone, so I I do not take this seriously.

You've got to reach out. Call your senator, tell them why you care about this, tell them what this will do for either your business or your own personal investments and holdings, and the different use cases of this technology. It can make a world of difference, but I feel sitting here, you know, May 20th, uh at you know, 2:30 in the afternoon, I feel pretty good that we can get this done. Yeah. Hell yeah. And and are are you satisfied, Cody, with the current form of the Clarity Act? You know, I think I know there were some changes and there were some negotiations and some, you know, tug-of-war going on. Are Is Is the Digital Chamber Is Cody Carbone satisfied?

We feel good with where the bill is right now, but that the key part of that phrase is where it's at right now. I mean, what we will not be willing to sacrifice, where there are some discussions of, you know, behind-the-scenes negotiations, are sacrificing developer protections, sacrificing the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. If you're a non-custodial developer out there, you need the protections that are in this bill. We can't weaken some of those protections. You can't negotiate our way out of the US being the crypto capital of the world. That can happen very easily here.

I've watched it happen over time, not with this bill, but when you're so desperate to get to 16, you're so desperate to get to yes, you're willing to sacrifice some of the key components of the bill. That can't happen here. To the credit of the White House crypto council, the Republicans who have been pushing for this bill, like Senator Lummis, Moreno, Scott, the Democrats who have been on board since the beginning, they haven't gotten to that place where they say, "You know what? We need to sacrifice something that is really going to kill the key tenants of this bill that allow crypto to flourish." I'm most focused right now on those developer protections, on the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, which would exempt certain infrastructure providers, miners, validators, node operators from being financial institutions. We can't sacrifice those. We can't weaken those.

As long as the DeFi protections, developer protections stay strong, we'll feel continue to feel good. Overall, I do feel like this bill provides the clarity uh that the the market needs where the US can continue to flourish, but we'll be watching very closely and we'll be a part of the negotiations going forward to to make sure it remains that way. Yeah. And following up on where, you know, we we had sort of left off on the Clarity Act. And like Andy mentioned, we had been talking about it for, you know, almost every day. And then it felt like, "Okay, we got to take a break here until something really happens and we can revisit it." The last we heard, you know, was effectively that this yield issue was the hang-up. We've We've overcome that hurdle. Can you just, you

know, give us a synopsis on what the the the outcome was? What was the conclusion that we reached with the the yield issue? Is that a done deal now? It's a done deal if you ask me. Now, I know there are some Democratic offices and the banking lobby has been very, very vocal that they are going to continue to push to alter the yield language because they were not satisfied with it. To your question, Robbie, of where like we ended up and why I think it's a done deal. So, what the provision of the bill right now, it's section 404 in the banking bill, says that it is prohibited to offer stablecoin yields rewards that are economically or functionally equivalent to an

interest-bearing deposit. So, effectively, if you're holding USDC ideally in your Coinbase wallet or whatever, you're holding your stablecoin and you're not moving it, you're not just going to get rewards for just holding it. The only way that rewards will be permitted is based off activity or based off transactions. So, if I'm going to send, you know, you or Andy a stablecoin, I can get rewards for that. If I'm going to lend, if I'm going to use stablecoins as collateral, if I'm going to stake my stablecoins, like if I'm staking USDT on MetaMask, I can still get rewards for that. Why I ended up feeling comfortable with the final language, again, it's not perfect. I would love if there was no prohibitions

on rewards and we kept the status quo, but it just wasn't going to be the case. I felt comfortable because there's also a rulemaking right now that's part of this bill that says, "Okay, Treasury Secretary, SEC Chair, and CFTC Chair, in addition to those permissible activities to pay out rewards that I just mentioned, come up with a longer list of what else is permissible where you can pay out rewards. And I'm sitting there and I'm looking at them saying, "Okay, you got Paul Atkins, Mike Seelig, Scott Bessent, these three agency heads, who better than to come up with what is permissible to pay out rewards than these three guys who have been huge advocates for stable coins and stable coin rewards and stable coin

payments?" So, I I feel good. Again, it's not perfect. The banking industry has been very clear with us or I should say the banking lobby has been very clear with us. They were never going to be happy unless there was a blanket prohibition on all rewards. Any type of rewards or stable coin yield that exists, they're going to be unhappy with and they've made that clear. So, they're still fighting, but why I feel confident that this is now done is that Senator Alsobrooks and Senator Tillis, the Republican and Democrat who put this compromise together have been very clear like, "Hey, banking lobby, we asked you to come to the table. You were refusing to negotiate with us. We think this is the best compromise. We like stable coin rewards. We think there is a a good use case for them. We think this is positive

for consumers. We're not going to ban them. You were never willing to negotiate. This is a done deal." Republicans and Democrats, the White House, they're all saying that now. So, the bank lobby had their chance. They missed it. There's still some supporters they have on the Democratic side who have been pushing amendments, but they all were voted down in the markup and I feel confident that they'll all be voted down as this bill progresses. Yeah. Awesome. And uh you know, you mentioned a couple of the other issues here that are still up in the air. Developer protections is one of them. Is that Are Are these the most contentious issues now? Uh we're past the yield for the most part. Maybe, you know, we get some some uh reshuffling there, but what what are the most contentious issues now that are holding up some of these some of

these Democrats? Yeah, you just mentioned I would say probably the most contentious substantive issue and then there's ethics. Okay. And ethics, you know, we've we've stayed out of that. It is a direct negotiation between Senate Democrats and the White House, and it all is around government officials, the president really, but government officials and how they interact with digital assets. That's more of a a political issue that again, we're we're staying out of. That's that would be the number one issue to get Democratic votes on this. That has to be resolved. I feel confident that it's on a path to getting resolved because the Democrat that is leading that is Senator Gallego who voted yes in the market.

>> Okay. So, that shows me that there is a positive uh there's positive momentum and this can get done. But, developer protections and then say DeFi as a whole. There is still a lot of misunderstanding, misconceptions that relates to DeFi. There is still a lot of offices who are scared about DeFi. It doesn't help that there have been some letters from different law enforcement groups over the last few weeks coming out against some of the developer protections in the bill. I actually think this bill is overwhelmingly net positive for law for law enforcement, creating clear rules, more regulations, enhancing the Bank Secrecy Act in some section. So, it's it provides more transparency for law enforcement, actually provide more tools for them to do their job in finding criminals. We shouldn't be messing with non-custodial

developers. We shouldn't be treating them like financial institutions. We shouldn't be treating them like broker-dealers. What's that what like what is that going to do if anything but send these developers offshore? That doesn't help law enforcement. Law enforcement can't go after bad actors if they're operating offshore. So, we it's a lot of education that needs to be done for some of those offices. I'm confident that we'll get to a good point, and the fact that that we have the bill right now still has preserved those protections makes me feel good. So, that's by far the most contentious is ethics and then and DeFi. Yeah.

Cody, kind of a flipping into the more recent kind of rumor announcement from the SEC that was kind of leaked to across a couple news channels as this innovation exemption for tokenization. Not sure if you had a chance to really kind of dig dig deep into that one, but essentially there was this ruling that came out about, you know, issuance of tokenized stocks and securities and equities on chain without requiring permission from the issuer to do so and kind of this evolution of ruling that supposedly could come out as soon as the end of the week, sometime next week that would suggest that these tokenized equities on chain would be required by the SEC to fulfill the fullest extent of their

voting rights, shareholder rights, dividends, etc. And platforms or venues which do not uphold this same level of shareholder rights would have their rights removed to be able to offer these products on chain. And so there was kind of a couple different, you know, lines in the sand here that were drawn, but I'm just curious if you've heard any rumblings in DC around this innovation exemption. Kind of what is happening here behind the scenes? How How is this progressing if at all?

Yeah, and it's it's hard to comment on the substance to your point, Andy, is like we haven't seen it yet. But what I can offer is that we have heard it is imminent. And it's not breaking news. A lot of people have talked about it, but in our conversations with the SEC, it does seem like it is imminent that this will be released very, very shortly here, if not by the end of this podcast, the end of this week. So that'll be that's it's pretty fascinating. What it tells me, and this sentiment has been echoed from the Chairman Paul Atkins, but really from the SEC crypto task force when we first met with them. This is even before the Trump administration came into power. But in December of 2024, when we first met with them, they said, "Hey, everything is moving on chain.

Everything is being tokenized. We need to find a way as a regulator. We're not Our goal is not to stop these products or to stop the innovation, but our goal is to make sure that it can be done safely and within the rules. And so, it is no surprise to me that as more people are offering tokenized equities or that there's more retail and investor demand of tokenized equities that the SEC is saying, "Okay, we need to find a way that people can offer these in the United States, do so safely, and then what are the rights that are required for people who are going to invest in a tokenized Apple stock or Tesla stock or whatever."

>> [snorts] >> So, I I think there's going to be a lot more of this from the SEC in finding opportunities for some of the innovations and disruptions that we're seeing from the blockchain community, digital asset community to find a way to not say, "Hey, you can't do this." cuz that is not this SEC's role, but saying like, "Okay, that you're doing this. We understand there's demand for this because you're doing this. How can we make sure that as a regulator we're keeping up so that you're protected?" So, I think tokenized equities, tokenized bonds, tokenized really every financial instrument will start to have more guidance and rules from the SEC of how those could be offered in the United States. 24/7 trading is already happening. We'll probably see that and I would imagine

there's going to be a lot more uh guidance from both the SEC and the CFTC on on 24/7 trading, but we are moving into and I wouldn't be surprised by the end of the Trump administration is if that all markets are on chain and we're moving to 24/7 trading 7 days a week for everything. >> Yeah. Fascinating. embraced it. Yeah. It It It really is happening and it feels like this is accelerating uh that trend both, you know, the Clarity Act coming through and the Innovation Exemption. Uh Cody, my last question here is, you know, obviously the the draft of the Clarity Act is already publicly available. We can all read it. The Innovation Exemption is rumored. You know, we're starting to make, you know, uh get a better

understanding of what the rules are. You know, signing these things into law would help to cement that. It would also help regulated entities come into this industry, and it would add more competition in that sense. Are there any large changes? Like, you know, we know you speak to policy makers and legislatures, you know, very very frequently. Kind of speaking to the builders for a second, what what are there are there any recommendations that you can make as to say, "Hey, here's something you need to prepare for. Here are things that you should be, you know, thinking about as you guys are starting to reshape your business post clarity, post innovation exemption." You know, what are these things that people

should have in mind for the changes that we can expect once these things are signed into law? The biggest one is, I think what clarity being signed into law allows is comfortability. That if you're building in the United States, or if you're building offshore and you've always had intention of coming back to the United States, that you now know that you can do so safely. It's going to take a while before you know the full effect and force of the law. So, in Clarity Act, there is 40-plus different rule makings that the SEC, CFTC, some other regulators are going to have to write the rules to how to make the law come to life. That's probably going to take 2 years. They're probably going to have in

in the bill saying, "Hey, you need to have these done before this administration is out of power." So, we're looking at, you know, like 12/31/28 before this bill is truly implemented into law. It's just similar It's very similar to the Genius Act right now, where there's an 18-month implementation period before you can truly be Genius Act compliant is not till January 1, 2027. So, I would say be comfortable, be ready to come back to the United States, or to continue to build here. You should feel very safe and secure. However, pay very close attention to those rule makings.

Participate in those rule makings. Don't just let I I mean, you can join the Digital Chamber, gladly take you and we'll be your voice in some of those rule makings, but respond. I mean, this they all have to go through a public notice and comment period and I can tell you from talking to these regulators, they will read every single one. They'll read every single response. So, if you're building in this space and you think that there is a way that they're going to implement regulation crypto or that they're going to implement, you know, the licensing regime for a a a new digital commodity broker. If that's you and you're going to be affected by this, participate in that because you'll have 2 years to make sure and to help the regulators really make this law come to life. And if you sit that out and then you come back or

you're you know, you're operating in the United States just, you know, January 1, 2029 when these rules are in effect, you say, "Hey, this doesn't match my business or I can't comply with this." Well, if you didn't participate, you've really got no one to blame. So, pay attention. The Clarity Act being signed into law is huge. It can give you the comfortability that you can build here in the United States, but there's going to be a lot of steps that you need to follow and pay attention to to for how your business is going to comply. Yeah. Beautiful. Cody, thank thank you so much, man. Uh it's really helpful to get, you know, the the on the ground in the trenches insights, uh you know, from the guy fighting the good fight. Really appreciate you taking the time to to help us out understanding this.

Anytime, fellas. Anytime for you guys. Yep. And if you guys are watching, make sure you call your senators in the states. Give them a call. Is that how it works, Cody? You can just give them a call? Give them a call. It is the most effective way. I can tell you from working in a senator's office previously that every time the senator leaves and it doesn't matter who it is, they'll say, "Hey, any calls today and what they called about?" And if that staff assistant sitting at the the front desk who's answering the phone say, "Hey, we got 20 questions on crypto. You really got to pay attention this Clarity Act." That changes everything. That's where they start to pay attention. So, give them a call. And and who are the five you mentioned, you know, there's 12 but we we got to get to at least like seven

or 10. Where What are the states that are the most the most contentious right now? I would say Virginia, Georgia Arizona um Minnesota, New Jersey. Okay. Anyone there. And I should make a shameless plug. The Digital Chamber will have a call to action feature on our website that you can find where you can go on, find who your senator is by putting your address and it'll give you a prompt and a script and the number to call your senator. So, go on our website >> That is elite. Yeah. Beautiful. Cody, thank you, man. Thanks, Cody. Have a great rest of your day. I know you're busy. No, it's great. Great being with you.

Cheers, buddy. See you next time. Thanks Cody. Bang man. It's a great update. Bang, Cody. There we go. The man. There we go. The man, the myth. Well, >> The Digital Chamber CEO. >> He's in there. We're making progress. We're making progress. It sounds closer than ever. Yeah, it's very cool. Um it's going to make some impact for sure. And uh I think I it's exciting to see. Um it's exciting to see it move up. Based on what he's saying and obviously he's pushing on this, 54% what we're seeing on Polymarket does feel a little bit low.

I was almost like, "Hmm, is that insider trading?" But it's like, "Nah, [laughter] this is a public podcast." All righty, guys. We've got Plume's General Counsel, Salman. We had him on last week in Bermuda. You know, needless to say, whatever happened in Bermuda did not stay in Bermuda because they got something done. They got a new license to basically expand tokenization. We're going to hear more about it from Salman. We're going to get down into exactly what that means for Plume, for the tokenization of all assets on chain. Again, we've seen multiple announcements this week that are just signaling to the market that tokenization is a very very important priority. So, let's get Samon

up on the show. Um, and last last but certainly not least, Samon, welcome back after Bermuda. Good to have you, man. Yeah, thanks, guys. Glad to be here. Yeah, man, big day big day. Let's not bury the lead. Congratulations. Plume has been granted a license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority. We were talking about this last week as well. Um, generally just after they put out this tokenization report that I know you guys helped with some of that. What does this enable, Samon? How did this happen? Give us the story here a bit.

Yeah so um the license uh lets us tokenize assets out of Bermuda. So, at a high level, um, you know, we will be enabled to launch new RWA, real-world asset, tokens, um, out of our Bermuda entity, um, in a regulated way, subject to the uh Bermuda Monetary Authorities' oversight. They have experience regulating a variety of different digital asset businesses. Um, the the the two templates, um, that they drew from in in looking at how to regulate Plume, was uh Kraken, particularly Kraken's work with X stocks in terms of tokenizing equities, um, distributing them through Kraken, and then, um, those tokens being

permissionless, so they they flow into into DeFi. And then, the the other template is stablecoins. So, stablecoins, uh primary markets, uh primary distributions uh come under a KYC, but secondary distributions into DeFi, um, are subject to AML, um, at the blockchain level. Um, so, at at the token level. So, um, so, yeah, those were those were the the the two templates. Um, we uh we really focused on one particular use case, which is uh the Nest protocol. So, the Nest protocol is a vault protocol that we've developed.

It's basically on-chain asset management software. It lets curators use the protocol to create vaults. Vaults hold reserve assets that appreciate or generate yields or depreciate or, you know, have negative yields. Um And so, it's basically a on-chain native way of creating asset management products with, you know, either portfolios of multiple assets or the structure is also used because it's asset management native to create feeder funds for, you know, let's say US or Hong Kong or other jurisdictions as asset management products. And that's actually been the primary use case of of

Nest so far. Um and so, yeah, we're we we had to work with the BMA to come up with a regulatory architecture. There's elements of crypto regulation here. So, you know, the cybersecurity approach the BMA is very sophisticated in thinking about, you know, the the on-chain supply chain and the cybersecurity risks at all of the different levels of the the supply chain. So, we had to do, you know, a number of different things, audits, penetration testing, things of that sort to meet kind of the that cybersecurity. Then there's AML. As I mentioned, the AML is embedded at the token level.

And so, the the approach there is very much aligned with what we see in the genius act for stablecoins. So, it's a transaction monitoring and freeze and seize and burn re-mint capabilities that need to be implemented subject to policies and procedures. Um So, it's it's pretty robust on the on the crypto side of things. And it's also robust on, you know, what I'll call the more trad-fi side of the right right regulation regulatory regime. So, um effectively we we will be as a vault curator um acting as an asset manager. And so, the key regulations there around asset liability management, proof of reserves, um conducting liquidity testing,

um making sure that the liquidity of the token matches with the token the liquidity of the underlying uh and thing things of that sort, uh which we see in um you know, the SEC's liquidity risk management rules, for example, as well as the the BMA's rules supplying to uh uh to funds operating out of out of Bermuda. So, um it all came together quite nicely. Um and uh our goal has been, you know, to uh for the asset issuers, for the asset managers, to provide them a uh a well-regulated uh feeder vehicle that they can work with. Um also gives us the option of creating our own um asset management products.

Um and the license will also be useful as we look at tokenizing other types of assets that may not may not even use the uh the vault infrastructure. So, um yeah, we're we're very excited. It's uh and and we plan on making uh great use of this this license to increase confidence in in vaults and in tokenization generally. Yeah. It It feels like the first of many. It feels like this is the first step in uh what we're going to see as the new standard for vaults on chain. Um I think it's worthwhile just kind of reading a bit from the announcement itself, so people get an understanding of how it works. Uh the Bermuda uh you know, subsidiary of Plume uh is eventually it's effectively this regulated on-chain vault effectively like the next evolution of an ETF. Uh

users deposit assets, receive proportional shares, they earn yield, and they can redeem it at net asset value. Unlike traditional funds, everything runs on smart contracts on chain. Um curators can manage and rebalance these assets uh within these fixed hardcoded rules amongst these vaults. Uh the the subsidiary is the first regulated vault curator licensed to create and distribute vault tokens under AML standards. Um Solomon, I have I have two questions, uh somewhat unrelated, but but the first one is you know, we we've obviously got on-chain vaults right now. Uh these are present in DeFi. The The fact that this is a regulated on-chain vault, I'd imagine that you know, the primary

change that you know, we go from unregulated to regulated is access. We open up access to a new cohort of potential depositors and this increases the potential size and market size of these vaults, you know, maybe tenfold, hundredfold, you you know, I'd love uh to hear you speak to that. And then the second question I have is a little bit more in the weeds around how this token-level KYC AML works. You know, is it freely transferable? You know, if you know, I have this asset, I deposit, I get this vault token, can I just you know, send it to you or send it to Andy?

Do you guys also need to opt in or KYC? How does the transferability of uh you know, token-level KYC work for these RWA products? Yeah, that's a that's a that's a great question, Rob. Um so, I'll take the first one to start, um which is you know, how do we see the vault market growing? So um I'll just give you a little bit of a timeline on how vaults have kind of moved to the fore of the policy picture, um which indicates kind of their moving movement to the to the mainstream. So, um back in January, um the Senate Security Act bill included a definition of vault tokens and asked the SEC to update their their rules.

Um the that prompt to the SEC um made its way into the the version of the bill uh that got voted out of committee last week. Um so, this is and then Chair uh Atkins, I think this was about a week and a half or two weeks ago. Um also indicated that as a part of his project crypto that they were looking at rules around the use of vault protocols by asset by US asset managers. And so Bermuda has you know in a sense front run the SEC and Congress on this front. Um and just like we saw with the rise of regulated capital markets, it's it's only when you have this third party assurance

that the asset management product isn't a rug pull or are you going to see new sources of capital moving into the space. And so that's that's one of the big unlocks. And as you know the asset management industry is multi-trillion as it moves on on chain. Vault infrastructure is kind of the natural place for asset managers to to move their fund administration capabilities. So we we hope to chip away at that you know multi-trillion dollar asset management market piece by piece. And and so this is an unlock there.

And then on the AML piece, so um we got to put an asterisk. I think there may be some other vault managers that that that have regulatory licenses. My understanding is though ours will be the first that enables permissionless distribution of these assets. So the token itself does not require white listing. Um these tokens are built in the same way as for example the X stocks um tokens that that that trade through through Kraken with primary distribution happening through an institutional partner such as a centralized exchange.

And then the token itself having within it embedded AML controls. What are these AML controls? So we will screen every transaction involving the token against an illicit wallet database um provided by TRM Labs. Um so making sure that transfers don't happen to illicit actors. Um and then uh embedded within the token is automated logic to uh freeze and uh enable law enforcement to seize the assets and also to burn and re-mint tokens um if they uh if downstream we find out that um you know, there's an illicit actor um you know, type type situation uh involving the token. So, it's uh very

much aligned with the uh the the the emerging standard for stable coins and um I'm hopeful that as regulators think about how to balance uh AML risks with tokenized investments, tokenized securities, um they'll use a similar approach um you know globally. Um so, yeah, we're we're uh we're we're pretty excited to be pioneers um in in that space. Man, most definitely. And I think you know, I had been asking people about are vault curators and vault managers something similar to an RIA? Like, how do you differentiate this? I'm sure there's going to be regulatory uh clarity on this or action on this.

One of the you know, one of the two. It seems like this is kind of a step in that direction as as far as defining what a vault manager really is, right? And so, I think that's super important for the industry at large, not just for Bloom, but for the industry. And someone I think, you know, this week has been uh insane on the tokenization side because the SEC also just put out this innovation exemption. Last thing from us here is just, you know, curious. I know it's not really defined yet, but I'm just curious how you're thinking about this uh lack of permission required from for issuing tokenized equities from the issuer itself, requirements of uh dividends, voting rights, full shareholder rights on chain, or risking

a revoking of rights to list these uh products in certain venues and platforms. It's kind of how we we saw it be described at least kind of in the rumor mill, If if you will. Just curious like what what you think about this innovation exemption kind of news and hearing it's very imminent from Cody Carbone, the CEO of the Digital Chamber, just a couple minutes ago. Any thoughts, insights, what this could mean for Plume, for the industry, for tokenization here as we kind of come to a close? Yeah, I think you know, the SEC is subject to a number of constraints, um you know, particularly around the Bank Secrecy Act and the rules around transfer agency.

Um both of those require uh KYC from, you know, different perspectives. Um I think the innovation exemption is moving faster than maybe revisions to those rules. Um and so that constrains the SEC's ability to uh create a, you know, a broader exemption that would be maybe more DeFi native. Um so what I'm expecting out of the innovation exemption, um based on public statements that Chair Atkins has made, is that it's it's going to basically uh allow for um uh uh conditions that mirror the conditions that an ATS um would have to comply with, um but using a DeFi protocol.

Um and so uh ATSs are subject to the Bank Secrecy Act um as broker-dealers. And so they they they have to discharge that duty, you know, by ensuring uh that all the participants in a particular uh trading system, in the case of a traditional ATS, or or in this case uh uh whitelisted uh liquidity pools um have been have been KYC'd. Now, that's suboptimal from a ability to get these assets um into the wallets of users outside the US that may be unbrokered or have difficult access um to US products that might otherwise want them.

Um and so what I what I see emerging is um pathways to get those assets uh permissionlessly on chain, you know, perhaps with controls similar to stablecoins and and the BMA as it relates to tokenized investments. Um And so, what you may end up seeing is you know, tokenized ADRs. Um you know, that would be you know, if I were the SEC, that would be a superior approach um than um you know, an a less regulated um model where you know, you may or may not as a as a as a holder of these tokens have any um have a claim on any um asset. Um And in the case of ADRs, you know, the

economic or I should say the certain rights associated with the equity are stripped out um in order to facilitate their the distribution of those securities outside the US. And so, we we may end up seeing something like that emerge outside the US. Got it. Interesting. And so, you think this innovation exemption when it applies to US investors could look differently from what an abroad or international exemption could look like. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. This is this is this is speculation on top of speculation.

But I I if I had to predict today, you know, what the market structure for US securities will look like, I think we'll we'll very clearly see a US market structure and then a global market structure that lives in parallel with it with the latter designed to maximize distribution and the former maybe balanced more heavily to address you know, traditional US financial regulatory goals. Makes sense. Um congrats again, man. And this is supposed to this is supposed to you know, release in the next week or so. So, we'll have we'll have to get you back on you know, pretty soon once once we can get some clear guidelines and not speculate.

Yeah, for sure. I'm I'm excited to see it. Very cool. Us as well. Congrats, man. It sounds like the trip to Bermuda was well worth it. I know it was hectic consensus to Bermuda back to the EC, but congrats on the license. Big moment for Plume, big moment for tokenization at large. And now excited just to see what Nest could be, right? As a result of this as being a licensed vault manager. So, shout out to Bermuda as well and the premier. He's he's a character, but he gets stuff done. He does. And yeah, he I don't think he had a hand in this, but he was definitely excited about about this. So, we we talked to him a few times about it. So, yeah. Very cool.

Great to have political leadership like that. Absolutely. >> Definitely. Congratulations again, Solomon. Thanks for joining us as always and we'll see you again next time. Very soon. Thanks, gentlemen. Take care. All right, sir. See you. Man, the the space is just going. I mean, it's going. I mean, it is going. Let's check in. Zcash 650, height 51, tokenization innovation exemptions, Plume Bermuda license clarity act. I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know.

>> I don't know. I I think you might know. I think we might >> the chat. Variation >> might have something going on here. It's a variational summer is what we're seeing in the chat, Raoul. That it certainly seems that way. That is for sure. I mean, you just look outside, you see the sun, you see that it's a variational summer. You can tell just by looking out the window. You look out one side, you see you know, the the Statue of Liberty, you see variationally. You look out the other side, you see New Jersey, you see hyperliquid. So, it's uh it is an absolutely buzzing out there in the heat, summer in the city. Ladies and gentlemen, that's the roll up where digital assets meets finance. If you're watching on YouTube, hit the like, hit

the subscribe. We'll be live tomorrow, 12:30 p.m. Eastern. Rob signing off here, man. Always a pleasure. Pleasure as always, all mine. Guys, keep your hands >> HyperCash and HyperLiquid Warriors. Good to good to have you here again. Back back into the real digital assets. Let's go. See you again tomorrow, guys. See you guys. >> [music] [music]