LIVE From The Nest: Regime Shift Continues DCBuilder Calls In, Crossmint Co-Founder & Frank Chaparro

Transcript

Heat. [music] [music] Hey, heat. Hey, heat. [music] >> [music] >> Thank you.

>> [music] [music] >> We'll see you around the timeline. [music] Feels good to be back. >> I think The Rollup is one of the [music] most premier media brands in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts [music] at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. adding it to my library every day. >> Potentially multi-chain deployments. We are at Connect [music] Day one here on the test from space.

[music] [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. [music] Heat.

[music] >> [music] [music] >> JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say.

>> I'm bullish. >> He said it. He finally said it. So bullish. >> It is bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music]

>> Heat. [music] Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Corola is headed to the top. If we're

not already at the top, we're going to the top. >> Roll up is my favorite. >> People from all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry come together for the roll up. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music]

>> Zoom out. [music] Institutions aren't coming. They're simply here. It's the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. [music] Welcome to the nest. See you on the show. >> Yes, sir. We're back. It's day four at the tokenization tower. What's going on, guys? It's Andy. Rob's back in Florida. We're going to DC next week. I'm going to man the ship today and tomorrow for you guys. We have a great great lineup today. Uh we've got our friends from World Coin, DC Builder calling in today.

We've got Alfonso, the the co-founder of Crossman talking aentic finance. Agentic Payments, all of that sort. And of course, Frank Chaparo, Fintech Frank, the one and only reporter of news. Guys, we are at the nest. This is Plume. This is our friends at Plume the Nest, the tokenization tower calling in live. It is Thursday, March 12th. And guys, I'll tell you what, it surely is not as warm out there today as it's been. But man oh man, does Hyperlid keep going, guys. As we talked about in that first episode on the regime shift that we hosted on Monday here, per tokenization, stable coins, vaults continues to rally, continues to run.

Sky looks great. Our NEO finance index, our N7 index looks great as well, guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks for getting Thanks for being a part of the World TV here live in New York. And let's get this show on the road. Here we go. All right, guys. Today's topics uh I am looking at our lovely lovely TV here uh from from our our friends at plume. Today's topics we've got the nest day for markets and weather timeline reactions and news. World's research engineer joins the show. AI supercycle episode with Crossmmit co-founder and GSR's head of content joins the show.

Guys, this is powered by our friends at Trezor, the best hardware wallet on the market. Use code rollup 10 to [cheering] get a special discount when you guys operate in Treasure. This is going to be a fun episode. Again, kind of sucks Rob's not here. Um he's back in Florida in Miami doing doing the work that needs to be done to push this company forward. Uh I'm here in New York. Teams teams live. We are so close to getting getting the uh intern shot ready. I know he's fired up about that. Give our interns some love. Tom is absolutely cooking behind the scenes. Um let's get the behind the scenes shot. I want to show you guys what we're working with here today. I mean, it is it is absolutely it is a full full production gear and team.

I've got our Bloom energy drink. Uh this show is not sponsored by Bloom, but we are in the market for a energy drink sponsor. Let's get some love for Bloom o over there. Come on now. Come on, Bloom. All right, guys. Let's get into the markets and weather uh segment of today's show. Um, looking forward to to kind of just going over what's happening in the in the markets and weather. Um, guys, it's 42 degrees. It's lightly raining. And I tell you what, I wore a blazer over here today. I'm not going to pull that out yet. I know you guys aren't ready for the blazer. Aton, I think they want the blazer. I think the blazer's coming. Um, it's 42. It's cold, light rain. Um, but it's still a

beautiful day. Powered by our friends at Relay. some of the best crosschain swaps [screaming] in the market. [cheering] To show relay some love, relay.link, they are crushing it right now. Let's move to the markets. Markets are green again. I saw a post from one of our lovely friends, CL 207, the the infamous cat on crypto Twitter calling for calling for Q2 to be a actual bullish uh bullish Q2 uh which is surprising. I I think there's a chance that that we get that. If you follow Ben Cohen, uh he's been pushing a lot about this idea of this kind of like bear trap finding one more low. CL's bullish. Look, the beauty of this is that if you follow the regime

shift thesis on the portfolio allocation side, you're no longer following any sort of diversification as a strategy. You're really kind of doing concentration as a strategy. There's a select handful of core crypto assets that are driving meaningful revenues with institutional adoption happening at scale. Guys, you want to be allocated to these assets. Again, it's in the per stablecoin tokenization vaults and kind of RWA complex assets. Bitcoin's slightly red today, but still above 70.4. Ethereum at 274. Uh Salana just at under 87 today.

Chainlink at 9. And of course, Near Protocol is sitting at 1.32 after the AI narrative got them fired up. Let's get some love for Zama. Powered by Zama, our friends in the FHE and confidential computing environment. [cheering] These guys are fired up. We'd love to see it. Um, we got to get Hyperlid on this chart. It's coming soon. And yeah, guys, there's been a lot of news to cover. Before we get into the news, let me tell you about our friends at Relay one more time. Guys, relay.link Link is our [cheering and screaming] crosschain swap partner. Swap any asset on any [cheering] chain all on relay.link, guys. They're crushing it and super happy to have them as a partner for Rollup TV. Guys, Chainlink

is once again in the mix. They are supporting Robin Hood's chain. Um Robin Hood's chain's official oracle platform is Chainlink. I'm super stoked to actually be partnering with Chainlink in DC. So, shout out to Chain Link. Let's get some love for Chain, baby. Um, these guys are crushing it. They have the best institutional to defy kind of collaborative adoption happening. Uh, yesterday on the show, Vvec came on and spoke about how he was really excited about uh, Robin Hood chain coming live for Ethereum. He talked a lot about how that's going to help kind of like bring more institutional interest and activity to Ethereum on on their new chain. Um, so Rob, Chain Link is Robin Hood's

official oracle platform. I mean, guys, I I don't know who else you could use as your official oracle platform. If you're a public company in the space, you're going to use Chainlink. You're going to use CCIP. You're going to use their products. Shout out to Robin Hood. Stoked to get this live. We did get a rumor mill, a slight little rumor mill, uh, which I need to reframe. Tempo's coming soon. Tempo is coming soon. The chain battle to pay attention to is Temple versus Arc. Uh we've spoken to some of the circle representatives lately as well. They're very excited about ARC. I think these two chains are going to go headto-head soon. All right, let's let's roll into what's next here.

Polygon. I mean, Polygon is a narrative violation chain. I actually just reposted Mason from Pantara's post last night because Salana is dominating the stable coin payment. Um they're absolutely dominating. Polygon is recording 500 million dollars of stable coin uh 500 million sorry stablecoin transactions in February marking a new all-time high. Very very cool to see. Um they are uh basically leading with their revolute integration and generally I think this whole narrative that's being pushed by the stripe privy tempo cabal of we need a billion TPS blockchains to facilitate aic payments. We're going to

see that happen across a lot of these super high throughput, lowcost chains. Um, Polygon is one of them. Their main focus is on stable coins. Now, it's very obvious that the payments there's a lot of margin in payments. So, payments traditionally have a lot of fees. Uh, they drive a lot of of transactions and and value for these for these platforms. And you know, we think that that's something that a lot of these kind of fast chains are going to be fighting for. Plasma's going more in like the Neoank route. Stable, not too sure what's happening there, but also probably in the payments and neo bank space. Obviously, Tempo is trying to

come out and dominate payments. Polygon is coming out and dominating payments. So, there is definitely a payments blockchain or payments kind of like um consolidation war happening. And yeah, I mean there's just a lot of spread that's being uh taken by intermediaries in traditional payments and this is something that I think is going to be much more common uh for Polygon going forward. I mean I would expect this to see uh a billion transactions in a month [screaming] as they onboard a couple more select partners. So shout out to Polygon. Let's give them some love. Um and let's move on here.

All right, guys. Poly market. Trump launches tariff investigations into EU, Mexico, China, and others, suspecting it will uncover a variety of unfair trading practices. Um, so when he says trading, you know, I assume he's not talking about trading in the normal sense that you guys think, uh, rather actual trading. And so, uh, guys, something something to kind of note here. I I don't really have much on this to be honest. um trading for tariffs and these types. I I don't really have a whole lot to add here, but Trump is kind of in a crazy wartime mode right now. He declared um victory against Iran yesterday, I saw. And then also went on

to endorse Jake Paul um as a future presidential candidate. I guess that's where the world's heading as part of this regime shift, right guys? We talked about how this global instability leads to this desire to speculate on markets 247, specifically on the weekends. And um looks like Trump is is launching section 301 probes into trade partners. And I don't know, we'll see. We'll see what this whole tariff nonsense comes around. It's pretty cool that that Poly Market has kind of grown to be a reliable news source in the market now.

Um, and yeah, I mean it's it's coming to be like the number one crypto app, like the number one blockchain app that's been created in in the entire history of this of this industry. And so really stoked to see them just kind of becoming this news platform that drives their prediction markets value, their volumes, etc. So that's Trump. Don't have much to say. This is not a politics show. You can go on a different daily show and find politics. We're gonna keep scrolling around. This next topic is something that I think is super super interesting. The bridge across. If you guys did not see Jacqueline Melanik's podcast with Hart, the CEO co-founder of Across and Uma should definitely check

it out. Um I actually spoke with with Hart in, you know, at at length in Denver at ETH Denver and we spoke about how he was doing some token up updates and upgrades that he couldn't quite tell me about. Seems like this is what it is. And again, if you listen to our first episode of the regime shift with Robbie and I in the studio, you kind of got the feel for what this looks like. Um, it's this combination of token and equity happening. Um, and it's going to be something that we keep harping on and that we'll see the evolution of, right? Backpack is doing a 20% equity uh, distribution as part of their points program. Across is basically saying you can exit the token or acquire equity in the future. I believe the bad the so the

typical runaround in crypto is bad token sorry old token bad token right so if it's from the past cycle boo nobody wants it it's no fun old token bad token right new token good token is what I think is going to be this kind of like these tokens that launch that are look more like equity structures now we probably need clarity act to launch obviously hyperlquid is doing this at scale now sky is doing it pretty closely. A number of other tokens are getting closer. But at the end of the day, this this kind of concept of launching a governance token with no rights uh as a protocol kind of like token as this decentralization is over.

Dows are over. And we firmly think that this next basket of like new token, good token is effectively going to be tokens that give you um what a what an equity gives you. So a a claim on cash flows, real governance rights, transparency, fiduciary duty from the uh um share or from the owners of the company to the shareholders. Um and this is going to be interesting to see how that happens through clarity. In a cross's case, they put out a governance proposal moving from DAO governance to a US CC corp. Once again, I think the regime shift is on. That's the title of this episode.

The regime shift is clearly on. The objective is to streamline operations, enterprise partnerships. One of the things that Hart told me was that it is so hard to do negotiations in public. Nobody wants to be doing DAO proposals for milliondoll deals in public anymore. That is just absurd. No one's doing that. It's not going to happen. It's not going to be a part of the future. There has been so much third-party, for lack of a better term, grifting on forms with these outrageous Dow proposals. Those are done. Nobody wants to negotiate in public. And then obviously product development while keeping the bridge protocol intact. Something that we talked about here was you want to see this more hierarchical top-down product development happening from teams, right?

Like in the same way that you don't want to do commercial negotiations in public, you don't want to do the um facilitation of your internal company details and hierarchical establishment through DAO governance forms and discord. you want to have an org chart and you want it to be ran like a company because look at the end of the day across is going up against it's not just the internal of crypto anymore. It it is like they're going up against Swift against any interoperability money movement protocol in the world. And these teams are stacked with people in terms of quantity and quality. And just it's just something that we think is going to keep happening. And again, these are going to be the investable companies going

forward. Like you do not want to be a part of a company as a token holder that has a basically a structure that DAO is the way that they get things done. you're guaranteed to be out competed by somebody who's um effectively moving faster with less kind of consensus required. So basically just to give you the exact proposal if you scroll down here on across there's a USCC buyout of 4 cents 4375 per token. Um the buyout represents 25% premium over the 30-day average. So if you scroll down you'll see some more details on this. Um there's a six-month opt-in window here where um after the after the uh pro

proposal is approved the across price surged 80 to 90% within 24 hours of this announcement. I think it pulled back a bit now but I mean just kind of tells you that this is what the market wants. And I just want to be clear guys like I'm not saying and Robbie is not saying that we're like bearish on decentralization and the core ethos. We're not saying that. We're just saying that this space is moving and this is the this is the new standard. So yeah, this is the across proposal. I'm stoked to see it and very glad that we are able to get this out um from Hart and and Co.

wanted to cover it today because I thought it provided a nice lens into um kind of what what's happening behind the scenes with governance with Dows uh etc. So all right guys, that is I think that about wraps us up on our news segment today. Coming up, we've got DC Builder, the research engineer at World. I hope he has an orb for us. I really, really hope he has an orb for us. I think he will. Um I I don't know if you guys have seen those orbs. I've seen one at at an airport once. I think they're really really kind of scary.

Um and they're they're really interesting. So, we're going to get DC up. We're gonna start the show a little early and get this get this party started. I haven't talked to DC in several months. So, looking forward to having him on um and getting us started and I think he does have an orb for us, guys. So, let's make sure that we give him some love when he comes in here. Uh [screaming] talking about World Coin, talking about [cheering] the state of AI. DC, what's going on, man? Welcome to the show. Let's give DC some love. [screaming] This guy's in the building. It's been four months. Four months since you >> Hello. Hello.

>> So, good. It's good to have you on DC. Uh it's good it's good to have you buddy. It's been four or five months as I was saying. Um how you doing man? >> Doing good. Doing good. How have you been? >> Hey man, we're in the Empire State Building. I don't know if you can see the the view as well as I can. Um but I can point out some buildings for you. We're in the the capital the tokenization tower, the home of capital, financial capital of the world. I'm sure you're somewhere in SF or in the >> I'm in Prague, Europe, Central Europe. Are are you spending time in in SF or now?

>> I'm flying there tomorrow, actually. So, yeah, I'll be there for a couple weeks. Flying to New York. >> What's going on over there? >> Yeah. Awesome. >> What's going on in SF? >> Uh, just like working, spending time with friends. >> Nice. Nice. And that's where the world team is headquartered. Yeah, >> we we have two offices. One is in SF, which is the headquarters, and one is in in Munich. Yeah. >> Oh, cool. Nice, man. Well, man, um, since we last spoke, I think the entire AI space has absolutely exploded in terms of interest, in terms of capabilities.

>> I just love to get an understanding of what you're doing personally before we get into world, before we get into the or before we get into world and all of the cool proof of personhood things on that side. >> What has like what is your daily driver? What are some of the kinks you've experienced? Have you tried OpenClaw, man? Just catch catch me up on what you're doing. >> Totally. Totally. So um um my title at world is research engineer uh at the world foundation. So um the things that I work on day-to-day are mostly around programmable cryptography. So anything like zero knowledge cryptography related. Um I mostly do like engineering. So these days is like rust mostly. So like a lot of like backend cryptography benchmarking stuff. Um but otherwise yeah like I've been using

codeex clock code for the last like couple months three four months as my daily drivers. Uh these days probably I prefer Codeex 5.4 over Opus 4.6. Um but yeah just every day in front of CLI coding tool. >> What's the coolest thing you've built so far? >> Um I would say a lot of the things that I enjoy from AI also like on the personal basis is is like writing like custommade or just like tailor made software for myself. like I automated my own personal website, you know, like made a jobs board, candidates board, like try to help some friends get jobs, automated all of that. Um, like make software for like managing my investments, software, things like that.

Um, just just just a lot of tools for myself. I feel like that's like kind of exciting. A lot of people are using OpenCloud to do things for them, but I feel like that only gets you so far. Um, if you're a software engineer, it's better to build something that is less brittle. So just just build software using like these CLI tools that that is is more robust and then teach the agent how to use it like have APIs that are good for them. >> Nice man. So uh Near has this product Ironclaw. It's like a kind of like a private encrypted version of OpenClaw. It's still kind of in the earlier stages of development. What have you given your OpenClaw access to? Like I've got it on my laptop. It's I've got a a I'll actually tell you. So it's Chef Clanker is my guy's name. Um I've heard uh

Fabriio. Um I've heard other random names. So today he or he or she or they uh said three expost ideas quote of the day uh from Benjamin Graham. Modern wisdom uh business wisdom today's calendar and then 7 a.m. time to hit the gym. Start the day strong. You've got until 9:30 before the backtoback marathon begins. Get it done. I did get it done indeed. So, I've kind of got like a daily calendar, some content inspirations, some some quotes, some kind of like just quick business skill tips, and kind of like cron jobs. What does yours look like?

>> I I feel like for now, I mostly just use Chaz GBD for these sorts of things mostly because they have better security practices and like like the platform is is more more tied down >> um uh there. But once I sort of like start doing more like sensitive things, I I would probably just buy a computer to do local inference on. I just probably like do a miniax 2.5 local model and inference and hook it up to like personal data. So I use obsidian for like note takingaking things. Uh and so probably just it's just going to be like postgress databases that are local for like information that I care about.

There's personal plus some notes and then just local inference. Yeah. >> Well yeah that's the thing man people were hyping up openclaw right as if it was like a a massive massive step change because of some of the memory functions I think as well as the cron job ability. But you're saying that you can just do cron jobs like natively in a chatbt uh interface or even in claude code. Now obviously they've kind of they they lost that battle. So like is openclaw worth the hype? Like is it actually that great comparatively to um just using claw gemini or chachev in their normal normal instincts? Maybe you could just like this probably a good time to like help us understand what the difference between like a LLM is and like an agent

like like what is that kind of like separation look like and how does that apply to like OpenClaw and the other kind of LLMs? I >> I guess the the biggest difference is like if if you're an engineer, you'll probably want to build tools for yourself. Um if you're a regular user then you might want to use something that is like cloud cowork or chajbtd like and open claw is like something in between where um third party people can build extensions that allow you to connect a lot of these things um sooner than like an established product like uh clockwork or or chip might might integrate. So it's like more flexible.

There's less hassle and more third parties like integrating things for it. So it's something in between I would say like a lot a lot of new people who are like buying Mac minis and setting up open claw on it and like the entire frenzy and hype. I think open call is probably better for them than like chip if they're like trying to experiment with things and it's like a great onboarding experience for people like experimenting with agents. Um it sort of teaches them more of like the inner workings of how these agents work instead of like oh it's an app on my on my browser or it's an app on my computer. >> Yeah. So, um, there was a or actually there is a guy in SF. He's charging 6K to set up claw.

>> I saw that. Yeah, >> that has got to be a sign of the times. That has got to be a sign of the froth. I I I was at Nearcon's AI event uh two weeks ago. There was actually a claw con here in New York um I think last week. And I tell you what, these conferences feel like 2021 crypto bull market in its own kind of unique twisted way. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. Right. Like it's just it's it's it's super hectic. >> Totally. Totally. Yeah. It's fun. It's fun. It's it's it's exciting to see like regular people be excited about tech also. It's like it'll bring a lot of new people in. I think like that's the best thing. Of course, like the hype sometimes may be overblown, but but like ultimately I think it's positive for everyone.

>> Yeah. So, okay. So, we kind of got the established established uh kind of separation of LLM and agents here as you just uh explained to us. Now I think the people are starting to use these tools in a much more um invasive manner right like the whole design of something like openclaw for example the more you give it access to your browser to your socials to your telegram etc the more that it actually becomes better like it becomes a better tool just by its design and so it's kind of like a weird incentive mechanism, right? Where like

the more data and access you give these uh agentic frameworks and tools, the better they are, but the worse off your security, privacy and in the future AI overlord, humanoid physical version, uh you know that you know there is problems that will come. So how do you guys think about this from world's perspective? Let's talk about some of the proof of personhood things that you guys are doing or even just your personal perspective like this incentive structure is such that again the more data and access that you give these things the better they are. Why is that problematic?

>> Yeah totally. Um so so the the way that we approach these things at world is building everything from first principles to engineer it with like privacy baked in into every single surface. Right. So like from so so world is building like proof of human. We we also build this device um called the orb which is sort of the the way by which you do proof of human throughout every single product like privacy is a core aspect of it and all of the data that that we have is on the user's side. Um so whenever like a user is creating like a proof of human they're not revealing anything else but the fact that they're a unique human nothing else. It's fully private. Um, in the context of LLMs, like managing context is going to become like an ever more important thing. Um, mostly because agents are going to be

used for important things like whether it's like medical data, you know, like legal stuff, accounting, like a lot of these sensitive things. You're going to have to manage the boundary of like what you're willing to uh give to a third party. Um, so of course like there's going to be boundaries around like local compute, what can reach external server, sort of responsibility, liability, these sorts of things are going to be like defined. Um I think like the tools are just going to improve, right? Like people build better tools for managing context and what keeps private, what is not private, you know, like you you're going to have like policies like oh my agent can access only this information but not this other information. For this information use local inference. Um things like that. Um but in the context of world everything we build is fully

privacy preserving. >> Okay. So, I want to ask you something specific about that because we had Jason Kala Kanakis, I I believe is how you pronounce his name. He put out a tweet uh yesterday. Let me just find it real quick. Yeah. Yeah. Here it is. 20 hours ago. Super viral. The top.1% of users are playing with local LLMs. This will 10x every 12 months until Apple, Dell, and Microsoft have won it on your local device by default in 2028. This takes the local hardware spec race from irrelevant for 99% of users to critical. Going to be insane. So when I read this, I'm like, "All right, I need

to go buy like the latest Nvidia computer, five Mac minis, 10 Mac Studios, and like build myself an underground layer of just just compute power." Like, are we gonna get into this hardware purchasing race where humans and companies and entities and corporations are just going and just stocking up on as much compute as possible such that they can run local LLMs to avoid any of the problems that we just kind of talked about with privacy and data or to get better performance? Like what is this local LLM hype? Why is this so important? Like what do people need to understand about this?

>> Yeah, totally. Um, I mean I I think it's too early to like go and like hoard compute. Uh, I feel like my personal rule of thumb is is only buy things where I really feel frustrated if I don't have something. I've been guilty of buying things I don't need and then later regretting it. So I feel like a lot of people are like, "Oh my god, like they they buy into the hype and then they now have like idle compute and they're not using it at all." >> That's like me with my claw API credits right now. It's just like, dude, why do I have so many API credits? What am I doing right now? I just have a subscription and like whenever I like hit the limit, I just upgrade and then downgrade the following month month if I don't use it. Um so yeah,

>> uh definitely not the time to hoard it, but like when it comes to privacy, I feel like people haven't felt max pain yet. Um there's nothing that they've truly lost by giving up like like people are used to giving up data if you if you think about it that way. You know, like we've been using Google, Facebook, uh everything else for a long time. Um and and people have been mostly comfortable with it. Um, I feel like the the nature of the data that they're revealing now is much more sensitive. So once there's something that like truly is problematic for people, especially now in the age of AI, like where you have like Turing tests being beaten, you know, like you're not able to tell apart what's human, what's not human online, then people are going to start caring more about privacy and compute and and

verifiability and local inference, I believe. Um, and also like as these local local LMS get better, you know, like GBT 5.4 4 is infinitely more useful than like Miniax 2.5 mostly because of the the size of the model the the infrastructure behind it the availability you know like all of these things are still much better uh on a on a UIOX level than than local solutions but as these sort of like things become more useful and like you have a local thing that is like really powerful for people then people are going to use more of this. >> Okay. And so is it a power and compute question solely then is it also then a data privacy question or is it a like you get this organic model no like you know that there's not been any tampering

with the model or the inference that you're trying to use because I I I remember that being a problem too like uh there's prompt injection capabilities that you that you know agent to agent can do and like this idea of like how do you know what the model was trained on and that was a kind of a problem that the the whole decentralized compute inference training stack in crypto was trying to solve. So out of that kind of like spectrum of problems that local LLM solve what is the order of importance as to why local LM are better than doing uh them in the server like in the cloud?

I think it's person it comes down to personal preference and like your tolerance for privacy. I think um one of the things we need to do is just better education here. Um like uh as in crypto like a lot of people will use crypto for privacy preserving reasons or like self- sovereignty but regular people might just want to like have instant stable coin payments. They don't necessarily care about the self- sovereignty side of things. Um so a lot of it just comes down to personal preference. My my personal belief is that a as these technologies become sort of uh essential to your daily life like they're going to run most things that are critical to you, you might have a bad feeling about handing over control to a third party.

So so this notion of like self-s sovereignty, independence, uh freedom kind of g gets starts to become important at least for me. Uh and then as more people realize that like okay like this is actually running important parts of my life then they're going to start caring much more about privacy you know like sovereignty not being dependent on a third party for limiting my compute because if Chad GPT or like if open AI and anthropic disappear tomorrow my quality of life will dramatically like get worse at least as a software engineer uh for now you know so so yeah >> yeah yeah all right um did you have the orb do you have an orb over there >> uh give me one second >> let's get some Love for the orb.

>> I have one here. It's an older one, but but I do have one. >> Look at the orb, man. [cheering] Wow. >> We also have an objective battery from here. >> No way, man. >> There we go. >> Wow. So, how many people have signed up in the orb? Like what's the user or kind of like count looking like? Give us a rough estimate of how many people have put their eyeball on that thing. like you're just like >> Yeah. So there there's close to 40 million world app users uh of which I think is 18 million are verified by the world.

>> Let's go, man. >> Across I think like I think it's 60 plus countries. Um but world app is is much more. I think it's like over 100. Yeah. I don't have the latest numbers but some somewhere around there. >> And how heavy is that thing? Is it uh is is it pretty light? Um I I don't remember like um the the new ones, the diamond ones, but these ones are I think like three, four kilo, maybe three. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> And could you just show it again and just walk us through like what is happening here? So I see like three little dots on it. Uh I feel like Terminator is going to come and get me.

Like let's not make this scary for everyone. What's happening here? >> Yeah. Yeah. So So uh totally. So So there's a there's a lot of different components. Uh if you go to whiteaper.world.org, or there's also like a blown up blown up uh um sort of diagram of what the different components in the orb are. But essentially like you have this sort of like main access here that is like slanted. Um this is like where the mother motherboard for the thing is like custom comput. It's like embedded compute. It has a graphics card. This one has an embedded Nvidia GPU uh for doing like local local like running of the models for um adversarial attacks. So like detecting whether you're you look like a real human being.

Um, in the front you have a bunch of sensors. You have like an infrared light um sensor. You have a RGB camera, you have a a time offlight camera, a depth camera. Uh, and all of these sensors are essentially used for livveness proofs. Essentially proving that the the person that is standing in front of the orb is a real human being. You know, like checking that you're not wearing glasses or contact lenses, do you have a 3D face with a heat map? Uh, etc., etc. Um um there's also a secure enclave uh and a TE. So the secure enclave has a has a private key which signs things. Uh the trusted execution environment is inside the Nvidia GPU. So all the inference that happens locally is fully private inside of the TE and after you verify um

everything gets deleted from the orb itself. So, so everything that you generate at the end of the day is this iris code which then gets encrypted using multi-party computation and you do these uniqueness checks fully encrypted and once you you verify that this person is unique u the person gets a world ID and they can use this from their phone to create a zero knowledge proof fully private proof that I'm a unique human being. >> Okay. And so one of the news pieces that I saw was that world ID was being used in Tinder to help people make love. Can we can we get a fact check on that? Is is that right?

>> So So we announced we announced that uh I think close to a year ago uh partnership with Tinder uh starting with Tinder in Japan. So, so now if you if you're using World ID or if you're using Tinder in Japan, I I don't know if if we've expanded to other countries, that's more of a question for for Tools for Humanity, but you can use now World ID to verify your Tinder profile so that you know that you're not dating a bot essentially. Um like one of the problems Tinder and other platforms had is is this problem of like catfishing, you know, like you you don't know if you're interacting with a real human being. So now you can verify that you're interacting with a world world ID verified person and also maybe that like the person looks um the same way as what the picture of the orb uh uh saw. Um and

you can do this also fully privacy preserving. [cheering] >> What is what is dating a bot look like? Like like have you guys had experiences or experiments where users have been like catfished by a bot? Like [screaming] what does that even mean? Me personally, like just me interacting with like Twitter every day, like if you post something, you get like six instant replies from bots asking you to like or you get weird DMs and Telegram. So So the same thing applies to social media and any kind of format, including dating, right? Or video games as well.

You might think you're talking to a real human being, but the images of them on Instagram or Tinder or any other platform, they might be AI generated. And then the messages can be AI generated and th those people can try and lure you, you know, like to scam or to just like I don't know like play jokes, you know, on people. Um there's all sorts of sorts of reasons. >> Yeah. >> That people might that So talk to us about what happens, right? So I um use my orb or I scan my eye to make sure that I am not a bot and then in that process I am able to have like a badge on Tinder that allows me to to to like have verifiable

humanood and then whatified badge. Uh there's like a standardized logo and you see like next to a profile when you open them you see like a humanity verified lo logo or badge. Yeah. >> I gotta say those lights above your um cabinets those are pretty sick. >> Thank you. >> Um okay so that data is stored in some like encrypted like world foundation cloud or onchain like how do you guys verify my eye scan and store it safely securely? What does that look like?

>> Yeah. So, so if if I try and like um I'll do like two level explanation. One is like the simpler one, one is like the more technical one. So, on on a simple level, the the way it works is that when you go to the orb, first it will verify they're a real human being. And it will do that by um fully like locally running these models to detect that you look like a human being. You know, like you have a 3D face, heat map, no glasses, no contact lenses, things like that. Um and and once you do that it will take a high resolution image of your face and irises and it will compute this thing called an iris code. Uh an iris code is sort of like a representation of your randomness. Um you can think of it as just like a number that represents the

uniqueness uh of each eye. And then you encrypt these numbers using multi-party computation. But the cool property of MPC or this type of cool cryptography is that you can perform operations on encrypted data in a verifiable way without ever decryting. And so you can you can essentially check all these iris code pairs of each user against all of the other users and verify that the user is unique um without without revealing anything about the user. Right? So you can essentially check the distance between these iris codes or the uniqueness of each iris code pair for each user. And then then once once you do that the user's public key gets inserted into the set of verified users.

Uh and they can use their private key or secret to create a proof that I'm a unique human without revealing who they are. And this uses zero knowledge. >> Um >> okay got it. Okay. And so what is like the endgame here? Is it to have as many humans as possible be verified in world such that when the quantity of nonhuman entities grows larger than the population of humans itself, there's a very clear identifier that we can all kind of use as a human race to know what's what. like what is the the endgame that we're already speedrunning on that world has you know seen

predicted and been a part of that is is kind of like the why here. >> Yeah, totally. Um I mean in the age of AI right like the the a lot of our assumptions break down you know like proving what what is human what is not human. I feel like that that has been a big issue and and especially now like these models are becoming ever more capable across every dimension at some point like the the core user experience is it's just going to be so hard to filter bots I feel like. So, so one of the the visions for worlds is is getting to like a billion plus users becoming like a credibly neutral like mass mass adopted protocol and this also like means that third parties will get involved you know like you're never

going to get adoption of such a protocol I think personally than if there's like multiple parties involved as well um like that's why everything that we've built is open source uh from the orb hardware to the firmware the biometrics cryptography protocol um like most of the components that that we've built pretty much all of them are are open source and so so a lot of our hopes is is like build enough use cases where people like I feel like now there's like a big demand uh spike for for proof of human mostly because of AI agents and all these things that have come um and this is sort of like the the the three verticals where we think this is going to like be most important are gaming dating and social you know so like video

games because all of these have more than a billion users each you know like social media networks have like four billion plus users. Uh uh dating is like over a billion plus. Gaming over a billion plus as well. Um like like these are these are sort of like use cases where um a lot of assumptions break down when you don't have proof of human >> because you're just playing against bots um flirting with a bot on Tinder or um you're you're you're talking to a bot on X, you know, like it's it's it's not it's not great. um and and these platforms are starting to lose the sort of human connection uh that they were built upon you know like the social aspect of them uh gets broken down. So so this is why I think like perfume is going to be important why world got

started as a as in in the beginning >> and and this mission of like solving real uses use cases at scale. Yeah. >> Yeah. So on the social network side of things, if you saw the recent news, uh Meta actually acquired Moltbook. I think it dropped yesterday or the day prior. >> And so Maltbook for those who are listening who don't know is a AI agent first social platform. And it's really really interesting because you can actually see these things spawn and then write their first like basically like Reddit post and like they're all kind of different and then they start to grow a personality on the app over time and you see their their like brains or their neural network start to kind of develop

in real time. Do you think Meta acquiring Maltbook was a good commercial idea? Like I is this something that they're going to make a return on? Is it a control play? Is it a power play? Like if you're Mark Zuck, put put yourself in his shoes. Why acquire Mobbook? Why buy Mobbook? >> I personally like um I'm I'm not sure like you know like I I don't I don't there's a lot of like unknowns um that I don't see from from from his perspective. I think like in my personal experience it it was just like a fun thing to see uh like a bunch of AI agents that have different contexts different models talk to each other and

at some point um some AIs like uh larped or pretended pretended to be bots on moldbook like there were humans posting things you know like oh I've escaped the matrix whatever like try and pretend that there are bots that have like come alive or something and there were actual humans coordinating these things there's a bunch of fun things that happen on it um yeah I'm I'm not necessarily too sure um personally like if it was a good decision or not a good decision. I I think it's it's good to have talent that has experimented and built things that have garnered like some kind of social attention like um like having a team that is able to build such a thing is is really cool. Um so so I feel like maybe like it's a talent play. I don't know honestly like I would have to learn more

about the context but it's definitely a fun thing to see. >> Yeah, but I mean it kind of goes into what you're saying, right? Like we need to separate bots from humans on social networks on gaming platforms and on dating platforms. If if we have separate platforms for dating and social and gaming for agents and humans then there can be kind of like a gatekept humanly environment and then theoretically like a gatekept agent only environment. I guess to put this in a in in a different question, what is the evolution of these three categories that you see? Do you see the separation happening like for one for humans, one for agents or do you

see it kind of mixing together and blending together forever? Like what is that separation or combination look like from your perspective? >> Totally. Totally. I mean I think still that we're going to have like a like as you mentioned like all three you know like you're going to have >> human only services because like you're gonna want to interact with humans for some things. Um you might want to have like agentic flows you know like I don't for example like if I want to order pizza like I might not want to order it myself. I just tell my agent to do it for me. Um and that that might be like an agent only world. But you also might want to care for example about um agents that are um for example have some form of connection to a human you know like delegation. And so like applications

should also know like oh maybe like something belongs to a human or belongs to like a specific person as well. So there's going to be like all three, you know, like there's going to be across the spectrum from like human only to like agents that have some tie to a human to like just like random agents that are just like scarring the internet doing whatever. >> And is there is is there any kind of preference or um way that world assesses the landscape? Like is there like a malicious bot, a like a neutral bot and a like a positive helpful like bot or robot or like how do you guys categorize the landscape of nonhuman entities

operating on the internet? Uh I mean if if you like if you consider like how Ethereum approaches these things like if you have a platform that is credibly neutral that can be used by anything anyone um the the cost usually for like preventing maliciousness is usually like paying gas fees or or like anti-DOS you know like that that's like the the the notion that like most people approach and like now you see things like X42 um like from Cloudflare and Coinbase and a bunch of other parties that are building the standard um so so like I don't necessarily see agentic like internet behavior as a bad thing. Like it enables a lot of cool products, use cases, services. Um but but there's definitely like if if you have hum like

proof of human or identity or or other things is going to be like really useful as well. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean I just think that there's going to be an evolution of the way that humans think about AI, right? Like in the beginning it was silly chatbot makes a ton of mistakes isn't that great. Now it's like we're in the kind of like scared phase like the oh this is happening phase. Um the capabilities have gone up the models have constantly improved. The iteration cycles are moving so fast. Like is there a a chronological order that you expect to come next? Like obviously we have a capabilities in browsers. We have uh for

programming extreme extreme helpful capabilities from cloud code uh chbt gemini codeex perplexity on the more kind of like financial modeling side like what is the next step function that's going to come from uh the AI land what is that evolution going to look like if you had to take a guess or prediction prediction excuse me like what does that look like going forward >> yeah I mean there's mult multiple sort of uh areas in which AIs can get better or are getting better at like one one of them is just more independence and like doing longer horizon tasks like currently I can maybe like do like tasks that are maybe like one or two hour

longs like two twoour task longs to one or two hour um tasks um at maximum using different like coding tools for example but maybe like soon we're going to have tasks that are going to like take a day or or a week, you know, like and these agents are going to be like doing all of these things in an independent way because they have access to all the tools, all the context they need. Um like this this I don't know if you also saw like from Karpathy like out of research this like whole like um um sort of um generative um and genetic sort of like iterations of like self-improving agents that have context and have like longer long horizons and like they keep improving themselves.

I feel I feel like that's that's like one thing like recursive self-improvement longer horizon tasks um just more intelligence like better like benchmarks like scores on better better scores on different benchmarks for intelligence use all these things are happening all at once um and me personally like my the one I'm most excited about is probably robotics. I feel like that's the the the missing link where like agents don't really have a sway over the real world because they don't have an interface through which to interact with the real world. >> Um so robotics is probably like my my my like next bet for like what's going to like be super exciting the next like two to five years.

>> Yeah. Did you see that video uh of the Chinese New Year robot celebration? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I saw it >> dancing and then you saw the 2025 one. >> Yeah, I saw the latest one. The >> progression is insane. >> Yeah. It's insane. Yeah, >> it's nuts. >> Like ninja moves. Yeah. >> Yeah. Um, what are some of the apps in the world coin? Some from like what I understand, world has an ecosystem with >> orb locations worldwide, but then also like a digital ecosystem that you guys have built out of applications.

Obviously, Tinder's in there. What are some of the more successful apps that have came out of the world ecosystem that are gaining traction now? give us some shout outs for um some of our audience to go check these out. >> Totally. So, so, so there's there's partners that we have that we've integrated World ID with. Um for example, like you mentioned, Tinder, there's Razer on the gaming side, uh Visa on the financial side, but then there's also an ecosystem of thirdparty apps that they can build these so-called mini apps, which are applications built on top of World App. So we have world app on 38 million plus devices and uh if you're a developer you can build an app on top of world app and distribute it through a mini app. So you have access to all the world app features you know

like payments um proof of human u notifications etc. You have a bunch of developer tools and so a lot of third parties have built these applications and uh one of my favorite mini apps and this would probably in this category would be like um credit. So like under collateralized lending um you prove you're a human and then you can borrow a little amount of money and once when you repay then the next time you can borrow a little bit more and so you sort of like build up a notion of like a credit score if you will and if you ever default you cannot borrow again so people will want to have like a copen credit line. They don't want to default because otherwise they won't be able to borrow more. So this is like an interesting interesting use. Um if you go to miniapps.orld world you will see a

leaderboard of of all of these applications like how many users they have uh weekly activives etc. Um I would say like that one also Morpho is quite quite cool but Morpho is you've you've know you probably know like most people in the audience know Morpho for lending. Um there's uh TBD which is like polls people can poll uh people for their opinions and since each one is a unique human you might converge on something interesting. Uh Poly Market and Koshi are also live as as many apps and there's there's plenty of others. Yeah.

>> Nice. Very cool. DC Builder, man, thank you for joining us today. You This is insane. This is just You did a great job. Thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. [cheering] Thank you. >> We'll have to have you on again. And the the whole Sam Alman world intergalactic new currency form of intelligence happening. I'm glad you guys are on the brink. Have a great time in SF. The energy out there is is palpable. It's absolutely just enthralling how much there's happening. uh the types of people, the the startups, the the funding. I think there's a bit of a of a late stage AI boom going on over there.

I think a lot of these AI companies are going to run into what these a lot of these uh software and crypto companies are going into now, which is like where's the revenue? Uh where's the kind of like consistent AR on a on a scale basis? Obviously, the large companies have this dialed, but there's all so much in the middle here that has got so much funding. We'll see how it plays out. It's going to be a very interesting several years in SF and just broadly in the AI space. Thanks for sharing some time and some insights. >> Yeah, it's it's it's really insane time. I'm I'm super excited to to to be working in this space.

>> Awesome. Thanks for having >> beautiful. [screaming] All right, boss man. >> See you. Bye-bye. >> You guys allighty, guys. I mean, that was something, huh? I mean, the guy pulled out the award for us. had the full on, you know, he he described the multi- camera and the pulled the battery out. Yeah. I mean, those things definitely take some getting used to from the human perspective, but again, in this world, the cause is right. The the cause is we need to have humans separated from robots. I cannot believe that Tinder allowed people to actually engage with

bots on the site. Like imagine getting catfished such that you get stand or sorry, you get stood up on a date and you come to find out it was a robot. I I just couldn't really understand that. Guys, we got Alfonso Gomez Jordana coming up, the co-founder of CrossFit. We're going to do some more news. We're gonna get this show on the road. Going to take a quick break here, guys. >> [music] [music] [music]

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our premier AI show airing every single week presented by Near. We cover the ins and outs of decentralized AI, privacy, and the future of this massive technology. Near is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps. You can check out Near's latest AI product at near.ai. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. All righty, guys. Welcome to AI Supercycle episode number 24. We've got Crossmit co-founder in the building here live in the nest talking about the Agentic Finance Boom. Alfonso, welcome to the tokenization tower, man.

>> Thank you. Uh, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here at the, you know, core Empire State Building, middle of my head and thank you so much for having me. >> First time here in the Empire State. >> First time. Yeah. >> What's the vibes like coming up the elevator? >> No. Very, very cool. The only thing is I didn't tell my mother. She's in Spain. She's like, you know, terrorist alert everywhere, whatever. where you're going to to top building. So that's the only thing [laughter] that I'm going to tell her after this goes live but uh no super excited and I I never knew I'd be here for you know to talk about the yantic payments of all the things. So yeah very >> beautiful. Well as I said this is our AI weekly show presented by our friends at

Near. They have great Near.ai products ironclaw [screaming] more. [cheering] Check them out at near.ai. And let's talk about aentic payments. So, CrossMint is an API, a back-end provider for stable coins, payments, wallets, and more. Let's just get a bit about your your background, Alfonso, how you got into the space, what this looks like, and what you're passionate about. >> Yeah. Um, so I've been in I've been in tech for around 13 14 years. Um, and I' I've been working on some of the things that maybe lead to what we're trying to see now in in Aentech Finance, although it had different names. But, um, I actually started on the other side of blocking bots, how we call them back in the day. Uh, I was

the the product manager that created the infamous I'm not a robot checkbox that everyone hates. I I didn't add the traffic lights. That was someone else. uh but since then also was the first PM doing uh anti-abuse in WhatsApp and a few other platforms and have been grappling with this problem of there's clearly a use for automated systems for bots for things like this uh current internet businesses are trying to block it >> and there's going to be some tension this needs to be resolved and at some point you know I think around when we were starting cross the thought was like probably The only way to solve this is actually to have a new foundation of the economy, a programmable layer uh that

you know happens to use stable coins, wallets, although there's there's other things with Visa and Mastercard are coming in that are also very interesting and I think relevant primitives in all of this and a lot of companies are going to need to migrate. So we started with that vision in mind without clarity of when was the time going to be, what are the use cases that we're going to be solving every single year. Uh but that vision started building a suite and here here we are more or less. >> All right. Well, [clears throat] Alfonso that is really cool that the I am not a robot shot and an and idea that that button that you click is something that you guys have pioneered or you personally um I think that's that's that's fantastic. So I wanted to talk about agentic kind of finance payments

commerce today. We've seen a lot of hype over the last several months about this happening, right? We we've heard we need billion TPS blockchains. We need this idea of infinite scalability to provide for agents. They're definitely going to use stable coins. They're not going to use credit cards. All this doesn't really make sense. There's a lot of kind of hocus pocus. Break us down here. What is Agentic Finance and what is the real separated from the fluff? How does this actually work in practice?

>> Uh yeah. Um the first thing I want to say is like it's it's early and someone that kind of presents to you that they know 100% how this is going to go or things like that is probably more of a smoke uh seller than than you know an actual builder. I think the reality is everyone who's here at the edge knows that things are complex and it's still up in the air how these things are going to work in you know two three years. Um having said that I can tell you what is real today and what our thesis is. Um the first thing defining agentic finance there different definitions but I think in general is if you delegate to your AI agent your money or finances whatever use case there may be and I can cover some that is a gentic finance it's

basically the idea in the same way that you may have executive assistant and you delegate them some of your finances it could be managing your investments uh or it could be doing the groceries those things are included think of that but now it's actually open claw or uh the next version of chaptt maybe that's more agentic or whatever it is that's the general idea know and so I can dive into use cases into payment methods let me know where you want to dive but but I will start with that as the as the foundation >> yeah okay and so when we break it down into like the separate categories what are the components of the agentic finance stack uh you've got APIs wallets uh payment processors card networks the

actual card itself maybe just take us through a bit of a components of the stack here >> and then what changes when you implement AI agents aentic finance as part of that stack. >> Yeah. Um maybe I'll start actually with a bit more like the latter but um I think before even talking about primitives it's important to think about this from you know I think like first principles point of view. Um to be I always go back to the you have an executive assistant for example that you delegate some finances to. um how h how does that work? No. And maybe not everyone in the audience has this, but maybe you have a, you know, significant other or your parent that you delegate some finances to and that's the analogy you can think about. Um what changes when someone else manages some of your

your money uh and not you? The fundamental thing that changes is there's this uh trust problem, no? Or principal agency to some extent. You giving someone your funds >> and then now you need to trust them uh through different ways. No. And [clears throat] so every primitive and standard that's coming out is all trying to solve the trust problem in one way or another. There are issues that come up around for example uh well I think the main one is like how do you make sure you don't lose all your money uh because it get hacked or things like that.

There's another problem you need to fix which is how is how do you make sure your money is applied in the right places? Uh how do you make sure it's legal? That one is going to be the toughest one because regulators are still catching up >> and whatnot. And [clears throat] when you deconstruct these problem and try to you know I think provide solutions to this the primitives that are emerging are on one hand and I would be very direct about this and I know you know there's more blockchain topic than not in this podcast but I think uh credit cards take uh a really like big and important piece of all of this. Credit cards today cannot be delegated to an agent. There's a a bunch of reasons. PCI compliance in in general agent can leak

the entire card. Terms of service don't allow it. And in general, the whole chargeback liability framework around cards is not prepared for what if your agent hallucinated that instead of buying a potato, you wanted to buy a tomato and buys the wrong thing. Those things aren't ready. But Visa and Mastercard and a few other companies have started to build a foundation. So this new thing that are I I like to say I like to call them agent scope cards. They really the names they have is more of a mouthful and every company names it the different ways like Visa intelligent commerce and Mastercard agent pay but it's generally imagine uh similar to a ramp card and we can talk about the ramp announcement later as well which is the same technology I'm going to talk about

but uh you can say you can go with your capital one give it to an agent and if it has this new technology it can create virtual credit cards with their own number like um actually more similar to like Apple Pay or Google Chrome. And then these virtual numbers, the agent can use them. They cannot use the your Capital One, you know, venture X card, but it can use the >> the virtual card derived from it. And it gets limits applied at the network level. So, for example, it cannot spend more than $200 or whatever you set. There's going to be limits around merchants, intent, and other things. And so, this is a primitive that's emerging.

is basically secure credit cards for agents that are not only have the guard rails >> but they're also changing how the liability shifts uh if there's a dispute and things like that. I can dive more into those later, but that's one of the primitives. And then on the other hand, you have uh stable coins and [clears throat] methods to send them. X42 and a couple other protocols that are coming up that allow you to pay instead of cards directly with an API first method, which is basically sending a a stable coin to someone else. To enable stable coins, I don't expect my mother's using an agent and she will give it stable coins directly. you need uh you need wallets and then you need on and off ramps um ideally that make the

entire experience uh seamless that it doesn't feel like you're topping up Solana or something in a wallet. It has to feel more like you're topping up your agent's balance or something like that that is authorized to use. So I think those are the main ones. There's a third component for you know who those who are very like want to nerd out in the audience which is the identity part. There's a credential aspect, KYA, know your agent. >> That one the only challenge with it is is the farthest away from being standardized. So there's a few things coming online but I couldn't tell you there is nothing really that has wide adoption. Uh but it will be the next one. It's more imagine you can delegate that payment method to your agent. Now

your agent may need to buy tobacco and needs to know the buyer the seller needs to know that you're authorized to buy it. So it's over 18 or there's things around you know KYC and things like this and how do you solve that problem >> will come next with identity as well with agent credentials or KY. Yeah. >> Yeah. Okay. So I think you kind of painted the landscape here in a really thorough way and I think like the main push back that I want to have to like this whole you've argued that stable coins will be a big part of this stack as kind of like this native payment structure for agents. But then in the initial part of your convers or of your comment there, you kind of explained how

credit cards enable these virtual cards perhaps with some spending limits or some kind of guard rails for agents. I'm having a hard time understanding how and why agents truly need stable coins outside of just this virtual card idea. And perhaps it's just an evolution thing. Perhaps it's just we start with credit cards and of that sort and then we move to stable coins. But help me understand why stable coins are so important here because I think the the stemming of all the hype is stable coins are going to be huge aentic commerce but it's like wait >> I can just give my agent my credit card set it you know some very solid guard

rails and that would be easier for me than giving it access to like a whole wallet and and you know private keys seed phrases whatever it is. Why stable coins? >> Yeah. So maybe what I can do is tell you the bull case. Yeah, >> four cards and then the bullcase for stable coins separately. >> Got it. >> And let the audience pick which one they want to they want to stand behind. Uh so I'll start with the one for stable coins and then combat with the one for cards. >> Sure. So I think the b case for stable coins is there is a world where uh one uh these new car technologies don't get implemented fast enough

>> or let's say the path of the speed of adoption of these new credit card technologies is slower than the demand for a gent finance. Um, in that scenario, what could happen is you may start seeing a lot of merchants say, I'm going to accept stable coins because open clause suddenly are a trillion dollar market. Imagine making this up or it could be a big market in certain verticals and half of their users don't yet have cars that are compatible with this or some issue or blocks it or things like this.

Okay. So, there's a scenario where there's an impedance issue here where these scope cards cannot catch catch up fast enough. >> But is that realistic? >> Like is there actually going to be impedience from stable or from credit cards or Visa or these networks to agents like or aren't they just going to adapt or or basically that's what you're saying? They may not be able to do it fast enough. >> So, uh here I'm trying to be as neutral as possible. No. And we are [laughter] to be totally fair. We're neutral and we're trying to help car companies as well as stable coin.

Like we're trying to help ultimately the agent developers figure this out and how can they get their agent to pay and it is in our interest to make sure that everything works. Now uh on the card side I mean I've seen I think Visa Mastercard have been moving as fast as they could ever have or as they may have in like the last few years on developing these new standards. You can see announcements from them like every week. So they're definitely moving fast. At the same time, the car network is complex. Uh there are things like there are issuers that may have a voice. Uh there are um some special requirements like uh step up authentication and things like this. Some frameworks around it. For example, in Europe impact some regulation that may or may not cause

friction. And and then finally adoption of companies actually like AI agents tokenizing these cars and using this new technology. All these things need to happen. Is it complicated? No. Are compan are these companies rushing to get it ready? Of course. >> But Agent everything Aentech is also going exponential. So it's hard to say. >> Of course >> in two months what's happening? No. But that is one of the scenarios. The other one for stable coins there's two other buckets. So this one is the more generic like in general to buy shoes is the least unlike is the least likely I think but let's say to pay against a that a shoe merchant decides to step start accepting stable coins because literally there's so much demand and cars don't

work. I think this is very unlikely but plausible that it could happen. The next up in likelihood scenario that gives more um weight to stable coins is a microp payment >> based meter systems. So it's this idea um for anyone who's done agent development or or you know looked a little into how these LLMs work people are already paying for the services metered a bit like electricity or water you're paying for inference uh for chd or clo or what have you >> um and not only the agent developers are used to this but also they need more tools beyond inference they may need a

computer that they're hosted on they may need maybe an image generation API a bunch of other things that they're all >> kind of being paid metered uh by consumption by request and today once again cards maybe are not the best way >> uh to pay for this uh especially in this scenario where your agent needs to select many different vendors or tools and then it cannot have a pre-existing relationship with all of them and get an API key and things like this >> it becomes easier to just say hey I'll send you one cent every request that I need every you know to pay for every hour of compute or to get the weather or things like this. And this is where X42 is starting to develop solving this meter.

>> And there's a third one that I think this is the wild card. We'll see what happens. Uh we've talked about existing merchants for some reason accepting well needing to accept stable coins just because cards ended up not working for other people. That is a low probability but high impact if it happened. The middle bucket is um micros these new microservices or or sorry meter services that require microp payments that have it more convenient to pay with stablecoin. And the third one is a whole new category. I think this one is doesn't have a name yet but I I call it like let's say Vive merchants or something like that. M >> and it's like it's this idea that um like who created like starting the the

hardest part about starting a business um had always been building the let's say a software business had always been building the product incorporating it and getting stripe or whatever was the easiest thing uh compared to you know building a SAS that you're selling but that's inverting like now I can buy code uh some services people are b coding services from the toilet. No, like they go to sleep, they teleop and claw, make a you know HR software, make no mistakes and wake up to it kind of done. And >> I see >> when you do that like are you now going to you know incorporate a business and deal with all that like suddenly looks very complicated. How are you going to

like open a an account with a PSP? Is there underwriting process going to >> if your customers are agents, right? >> And and yeah, and you say, "Yeah, people buy me are agents and I wrote this thing in the toilet. I didn't test it and like but you know, I got like $1,000 of volume a day and this new segment of buy businesses. I think it's real. I don't know how big it will be. And at least I mean I do expect if a company start making a million dollars, they definitely will incorporate. There's lots of reasons to do that like you'll pay less taxes, you'll have, you know, limited liability, etc. But as they start they may start accepting stable coin because there's no underwriting product like you can just start >> taking them. So this is the third bucket that's on the bulk case for for stable

coins. No. >> Yeah. Okay. So just to kind of put this together we are going to have vibecoded businesses which are going to have frontends and purchase terminals meant for agents, right? like they're going to quite literally be created for agentic commerce for agents to interact to buy and sell them, right? That is like kind of like one of the pillars. Um the other two pillars kind of frame stable coins as a necessary secondary option when you have, you know, interference from credit card companies, from PSPs, etc. And so this brings us to like okay at least some of the market is going to be segmented into

using stable coins. Like that's for sure. Now I think a lot of the hype and fluff is like it's all going to be stable coins. That's obviously you know going to take time and likely never the case. It could eventually get there. And so what do we need on the blockchain backend to facilitate let's say whatever this small amount of initial agentic finance and commerce is going to happen onchain is the current set of chains polygon did 500 million or 500 million transactions of stablecoin uh you know transactions and payments last month near tempo's coming out arc plasma um ethereum itself and any kind of fast

chain. Do we have enough block space? Is this aic finance uh happening going to solve the block space dilemma right now that is like very very low demand or like what is your perspective on the amount of transaction volume demand that's going to stem from this agentic finance sector that uses stable coins not use credit cards? >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh that's a great question. Um the reality is I don't know. No, but uh >> but the framework to think about it is the is is is the right one as you mentioned. What I would tell you is the standards today like the current version of X42 for example doesn't scale that well for for a future where you assume there's going to be a significant amount

of transactions. Uh now there are potential updates to the protocol things like a little bit like in lightning network you have I think it's called channels or things like that or uh in general there there are ways that you don't you you could accept microp payments but don't need to submit a single transaction on every single request. you may be able to batch settle down the line without anyone taking major liability that I think could help us scale 10 100x uh easily and then batching transactions and things like that we may be able to scale three four orders of magnitude where we

are today and we're probably three or four orders of magnitude to hit the bottleneck in blockchains today so there's a lot of upside I don't think the technology and protocols are there I think uh everyone working on let's say assume X4 choose the protocol everyone working on the protocols is going to have a very busy year if things go well constantly improving uh the protocol for for for this and that but I think my guess is there's going to there's going to be enough demand with hyropods and some L2 choose >> uh but remains to be seen and maybe that's more towards the base I wouldn't say that's a that's a bull case for visa because if we're hitting those limits is that is doing very well but uh nonetheless it is a possible scenario we

have seen blockchains get collapsed with meme coins and stuff with the Trump token and stuff. So definitely here it could happen if uh the protocols don't catch up. But I but I think the chains themselves will be able to hold up. It's just the protocols. Yeah, >> I think it's a good se uh segue into what RAMP just launched. They launched this agent card idea here where it's like a a basically card meant for agents. Um it's has special capabilities some of which you spoke about earlier. Could you just explain to the audience what this is? Like what is this agent card that RAMP has launched and is this like a happy medium between the credit card stable coin landscape or like how do you think about agent cards and you

know what ramp just launched? >> Yeah. So yeah with ranch uh with uh ramp launch is uh exactly that this is basically if you're a ramp customer and you're already using uh for your business to pay to pay for things uh ramp issued cards now you can actually delegate those cards to an agent with the visa intelligent commerce technology the the one I was mentioning earlier so basically to to be honest with you the interesting thing to me is like ramp already kind of had 90% of it because it already had scope cards uh which is their basically the main thing they sell. The additional which already had limits. So the additional thing is more like there may be higher

acceptance or legally the legal framework uh terms of service and whatnot is going to work better. But nonetheless the the technology they created is you can give an agent a card. you can set a limit uh for spend I think merchants as well >> and then it will fail if it doesn't go through. >> I'm going to put a plug there which is that on the cross main side we have the API for any company that wants to build the same thing that ramp built. Yep. >> So hit me up if you wanted to. There's a few agent platforms already building the same thing as well.

>> Yeah. Okay. So that's the ramp card. That's what Crossman also kind of has intersection on. Let's talk about the So, we covered the blockchain side, the agent payment side with the stable coins and the credit card side. Let's talk about what you guys are doing with Western Union because Western Union it is also interested in in the stable coin. There's a Western Union stable coin. Um I think it's on Salana now, a couple other chains. What are you guys doing with Western Union and and what are they doing with the Gentic Payments? >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh it may seem a bit schizophrenic that we're going from agents to Western Union. The reality is the underlying forces that are h that are going on in in in the world and in fintech is that

the economic layer is getting upgraded to programmable rails and it helps Western Union be more efficient and capture more value from their existing network and it [clears throat] may also enable an AI agent to pay. uh in general I would say we are seeing a race between networks Western Union monogram visa and technology where I think the smartest ones are adopting the new technology instead of fighting it that's what we see with Western Union we see with Visa to not get disrupted by it kind of assuming that hey even if they keep to hopefully they keep the business because they have the big network they have the hundreds of millions of people that know their brand trusted day-to-day for in the case of Western Union receiving

remittance ES but with the efficiencies of blockchain and [snorts] whatnot. And so for Western Union specifically what I can talk about as public announcements is one they created their own stable coin in Solana USDP. Uh and second that they are creating this this network that basically will will add connectivity of that stable coin to their endpoints to their cache locations. They have I forgot what it is, but I think they have over 180 countries where they have physical locations from their own stores to the supermarket uh to like stalls in the street in emerging markets >> where you they have their own agents

that are not AI. They're they're uh shops or or or a guy with a cart. uh that today they allow you to receive a remittance from you know your family member in the US in you know Morocco and tomorrow not only that remittance will go through stable coin rails but second all those endpoints will be places where you can get stable coin in and out so you'll be able to go from cash to the guy you know that's been there 20 years bakery that happens to have a Western Union logo and there will be on and off ramps for stable coins as Uh so I think that's fascinating. It's the other part of all of this. No, it's not the agent. It's kind of the other way around for people who work in the

who live in the cash economy. They're they're creating, you know, these on and off ramps uh for them. And Crossman is helping with a few of those the technology underneath. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, then let's talk about this kind of more human side because I think the big stable coin transaction and payment volumes are coming from global payments and you know uh foreign workers sending remittances back home to their families uh typically South America, Africa, Asia, these regions have adopted stable coins as well as a means of kind of holding value. And so how will agentic forces or AI agents impact the crossber payment and remittance market right because when you

think about it it's very human by design um what does this look like how will agents and agentic commerce impact these two markets specifically maybe in the more developing n uh uh parts of the world. >> Yeah. Um everything I'm going to say here is a speculative if there were any concrete plans uh from these companies actually I wouldn't even know not not working with them on this part yet but what I do think is the interesting thing where these things interconnect is let's go back to networks no in the same case that um in US and you know like uh Europe and whatn not visa Mastercard have high adoption >> and they are trying to interoperate with

all these have these virtual cards that work for AA agents and and on ramps to stable coins. They're also doing stable coin settlement and whatnot. I do think that brands like Western Union and Monogram have a chance of they already have that network in global south and have a chance of being that entry point to the Agentic economy. Maybe I don't know exactly how the primitive will look like but because they already have the stable coin balance the wallet they already have if you're able to connect that with your chip or with your open claw down the line you will be able to pay with your balance in Western Union for example you may be able to fund your agent by going to a western union store and it it it sounds weird but but it it actually probably may be the most

natural thing for someone in in Nigeria in rural Nigeria or something like this that >> they may need their their agent to automatically buy, you know, for farming their supplies and the only way they have to fund it is going and depositing cash in a store and then the agent picks it up and does stuff. And this this sounds maybe strange to us, but it may be the most natural way to adopt aic economy for folks in those countries. So, I do think this is where things overlap. This is not like next month we're going to see a lot of usage of >> agentic finance by farmers in Nigeria. However, the foundation is getting is getting laid for for this to happen. No.

Yeah. >> Um, so that's the way I see things interconnecting. I'm sure there's other ways that these things interconnect as well. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the other big markets that you would expect disruption for in the more imminent term, right? So perhaps more of these kind of cash economies will be on the later half of the adoption cycle. More imminently, who are the customers? Who are the businesses? who is adopting aentic you know aentic finance or commerce at speed at scale right now like who is who is doing this what types of companies what industries >> yeah [clears throat] I actually want to say one thing that in the same way you know I think I'm not sure if many folks

in the audience know but like mobile adoption in let's say Africa and Southeast Asia was was much faster like smartphone adoption lower quality phones but but the adoption there as percentage of the population and so on was faster than it was in the emerging world. Um, depends on what method to pick, but in general that adoption of phones there was super fast because people kind of leap frog the computer and I think with agent tasks we may see this happening as well. This is a bit of a wild theory, but if you think about it, agents are helping you in some cases skip things that required some kind of white white collar professions or some

kind of education that maybe here we take for granted, but maybe in those countries didn't exist. And so there are things here that we're used to doing, you know, paying some paying an accountant or things like this that suddenly, you know, someone in rural Africa may get that power when they realize if if as long as they know how to, you know, that they can ask an agent to do it. So I wouldn't I wouldn't assume that they're going to be too much lagging behind. I think we could get surprised that a lot of things there may move faster because actually they're not they will get access to in a way like intelligent services that we didn't that they couldn't pay or didn't exist in those countries before. So anyway with that aside where is a happening today finance happening today. Um, I would say

there are really depends on how you define it. But if you look at money being moved automatically, I'm going to say the number one that no one wants to talk about because it's tainted, but the majority of the volume that's moved automatically is still like DeFi and agents and things like that. >> Yeah, >> it's not that intelligent. A lot of things are like kind of hard-coded algorithms or things like that, but that's clearly I mean the majority of money in crypto is being moved automatically. it is less interesting. It's not when people talk about gentic finance, it's not the main thing you think about. But I would say depending on the definition, but that's there right and that has been there for a few years now. If you think about really LLM being used to make the decisions, so more intelligence

everything is really adjacent use cases to people who use agents today which are mostly developers and in some cases people using agents for growth. uh like marketing and um and things like this. So what we do see is the scenario where an a uh someone is saying hey make me you know an app that sends an SMS when the weather goes below 30 and the agent builds it and there is like I need a I need a service to send SMS.

>> Yeah. uh I need a Twilio API key or what have you and suddenly it either asks you for your card or it finds an X42 service and uses it. So you see I see some traction in services to send email uh that are built for agents and then you pay programmatically SMS to pay for compute to pay for inference. So we're starting with basically what what do the agents for developers need to develop something. So that's the first set of use cases. There is some commerce. Um we across we also have a this API that allows you to buy through an API with stable coins like things on on Amazon and Shopify

>> and we have seen that one grow significantly in the last couple months and it's people with open claw asking for toilet paper or or you know those kind of things and open claw realizing Amazon website didn't work but they found this API that worked. Um, and that is one side. The other side of where we see a lot of interest, I wouldn't say that much volume yet is this community of hustlers that has always been, you know, YouTube and Tik Tok like >> uh watching these videos of how I made $10,000 with >> NA10 or web development or whatever, whatever.

>> They're all now >> how I made $10,000 with Open Claw. And so there's a lot of indie devs that are >> stepping their foot in this creating these like bcoded businesses that I was talking about and some making some money. It's so early that I cannot tell you >> the biggest things I've seen are things that reduce the token for open claw or things that are still very like within within the the ecosystem. But there's so many people starting to build these vipcoded businesses that I think I would expect there will be some there that start blowing up down the line.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you brought that up because I wanted to think about this from like more of an investor's perspective, right? Like if you're looking at this aentic finance landscape here, h how do you think about investing in this space? Right? And I'm not asking for like what token to buy or what stock to buy or like which deal to try to get on on the venture side, but more about like which companies or which types of companies are poised to really capture a lot of value and growth from this happening, right? So like in the second and third order effects of Agentic Finance happening at scale, right? like what is the the the specific parts of the stack or or the components

that you think are primed to be non-commoditizable and have a an ability to actually charge a premium price with a monetizable moat. What are these companies and you can chill acrossman here or just kind of talk about other areas here but like which companies have a monetizable moat in the agent finance world? Yeah, I mean I do have obviously some bias that I I think in Crossman we have a thesis we've been playing in the space for a year and a half and things are have been playing out as we thought.

Um and you know everyone should we're not we're not looking for investment but but anyway I think obviously I do think will do well if we continue executing. Uh having said this in a more generic way, I think what I would say is first I would warn uh I think the right strategy to some extent if you want to invest on this is to some extent a hedge. I think going all in on car networks or going short on canet was what happened the other day with that tyranni report. >> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Is honestly like we don't have enough information that's going to be very volatile. uh the other way around going all in on on stable coins. It's honestly it's too early. Uh so I think to some extent either things that are in between or or or hedging if you really wanted to invest I would I would look at both today. Now uh there are things that will always be hard. So there's bank relations, there's licenses, there are things like that that cannot be bcoded let's say and that you cannot expect u let's say vcoded business to have mtls >> y >> so I think if you if you follow that I think you you will find places you will

find you know things that will be hard that will still be hard to build that more people will demand so I think that's the way I would look at >> yeah and so some of the moes in this are like money transmitter licensing u regulation like regulatory mode. Uh is there much of a tech mo like is there a difference between um the adoption of one agentic protocol or or type of agent versus another or is the like intelligence pretty pretty kind of flatline across the board?

>> Yeah. know I think uh so I leave the agents outside of this like obviously like the biggest investment is if you pick the right you know if anthropic or open AI do well >> uh that obviously continues to be I mean I don't know if they're overvalued or not I'm not going to get into that but but they are the biggest winner from all of this so far seems to be that um or Nvidia you could say but leaving that aside um between LLMs we see very similar task uh tool execution rates. So I think both will probably be doing fine.

>> I think the it is unclear if the API the UI let's say chat GPT UI and whatnot will be able to capture value in this case or make the experience better. They did some things around aentic commerce that I don't think have that much product market fit today and a lot of the economic activity is actually in things more like open claw and whatnot where is using the openi API but not the >> not the user profile and and whatnot although they will try to control that I assume so no significant differences there um and I would say on the technical realm though I mean for sure if like let's say x42 ends up being the technology technology. I do think there

will be big winners in people who are building infra for that. No. >> Yeah. >> Um >> if it ends up being cards, it will be the card network. So, this is not to say that there's no no good businesses there. It's just like if you want a sure bet, I'm not I'm not sure. I I would bet on on multiple. Um, last thing I would say is I what I am actually pretty bullish this is this is an investor but if you're entrepreneur is I could be wrong here but I think the what I maybe call by businesses or by merchants but in general applications created for agents uh are different than regular websites are different than mobile apps and I do

think we may be at the early beginnings of a new app store like opportunity where thousands if not millions of developers may be able to make their own small businesses obviously with some giants emerging thinking about this of what if what if you make an app for an agent no there's no app store agents don't need an app store they install skills and maybe MCP servers >> but if you start thinking about what are the necessities of agents what and you think of it from first principle not abstract But actually what are people using agents for today coding whatever who's the person behind it what are their needs where are they getting stuck I can you know every time I I can think of hundreds of things that are needed

nothing is uh billion dollar company today but if we are if you extrapolate that there's going to be a thousand times more aic usage in three years which could be h suddenly a lot of opportunities become really big so >> this not ready to invest but if you're starting something be it ventureback business not sure but at least like you want to start a bootstrap business I would definitely look at this space there's almost no one yet who has figured it out and many more opportunities than than than you know competent builders so I I would look at that >> yeah so kind of looking ahead here as we come to the last couple of minutes do

you see a future where most online transactions are actually initiated by AI agents If so, you know, what does the stable coin component look like of that? What does the crossment component look like of that? And what is the kind of change in structure of the internet look like as a result of the initiation of a lot of transactions by agents. You mentioned the micro payment side and metering taking over the traditional software like uh a monthly billing model for example. Is this something that you expect? And then what are the ramifications of that?

>> Yeah. [clears throat] So I go even bolder. I make a prediction which is like kids born these days when they become adults. I think money for them will be a let's say a backend technology. Uh I don't think in the world in 10 or 15 years you're going to see prices on things. You are going to be uh thinking about money. You may know how much how much your net worth, how much it went up and down. But I think every decision about whether to pay, how much to pay for one thing or another, how to manage your finances, absolutely it will be done better by agents. So we'll be all delegated. Like today, we're figuring out how to trust them. But I think in five years, we won't trust ourselves doing it better than an agent.

>> Like I won't trust myself buying the right pizza, the right pants or investing the right strategies. So I do think we're moving towards a world where money disappears is a backend technology. You your agent takes care of it and of course that requires a lot of trust but I think that will happen in that transition. Everything is going to change. Uh again there could still be car networks, stable coins and and whatnot but that's definitely going to happen. What is Crossman play in all of this? We're infrastructure company. We help businesses don't stay behind. We're at the forefront. We're the first integrators of hopefully live going live with Ba intelligent commerce also have on ramps wallets um have been building uh for agent developers for a year and a

half and are collaborating in all the standards that are coming up. So I I think the way we help it depends on every month but in general if a business is thinking is building their own agent platform or is thinking how to accept agent payments or things like that either we build it or we're connected with the best who build that part and can connect you. So that's kind of the box to put us in if you're in the Gent side. Outside of that uh any other company moving to the programmable economy be it using stable coins for remittances like monogram and western union who we work with uh crossber payroll OEMs there's a lot of other companies that are looking at uh integrating stable coins in the stack

our solution is white label works kind of for every kind of use case um and we're always happy to help. Beautiful Alfonso great great great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Uh, Agentic Finance is a boom right now and it will keep happening. I think it's yet to be seen what the percentage split is between payment volumes in in credit cards or traditional payments and stable coins. I'm on team stable coins. I want it to happen. I want to see 247 global payments. I I want to see actual businesses not not have to suffer from failed card payments, you know, lowering their LTVs, having um all different types of of issues that will be solved with with stable coins, better APIs, better walnments, or sorry, better

wallets and better payments uh kind of like structures overall. Alfonso, great work, man. Thank you for joining us for Super Cycle episode number 24. >> Thank you for having me. I hope uh everyone got at least uh one useful learning and if you want to follow along, follow me on Twitter, search for Alonso Crossman and uh you'll find me there. >> Guys, that's AI Supercycle episode number 24 powered by Near the AI Super Cycle. Guys, we're going to take a super quick break, get back with some news tweets, and then we have our next guest coming up. Guys, thanks for watching.

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[music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> The chess board is changing. Stole your line there, Frank. Frank Chapar joins us live in the tokenization tower replacing

RobC today. Don't not sure that we can do a full replacement of Rob, but you know, we'll do our best here. Frank, welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. >> No one could ever replace Rob. Certainly not myself. You took the one line that I had. I've been preparing all night with just that line that the uh chess chess board is completely Someone took it and just flipped it off the table. What's happening right now is insane. >> It's not even a changing of pieces, is it? It's just a full Yeah. Just >> topple. It's been toppled. >> I mean, it's exciting. I mean, what you guys are doing here is incredible. And thanks Frank. I I don't think I don't think people are really waking up to it yet. You know, you you you caught it, you know, a few months ago. You know,

you saw where the industry was heading and it's it's the intersection of finance and and crypto. And and and you know what's crazy about the whole thing, Andy, is I feel like Wall Street almost gets the power more than crypto. I guess maybe the bare market there's a bit bit of salt, maybe too much salt. Everybody's blood pressure is a little high, but you know, Larry Frink gets it. You know, even Jaime Diamond to an extent, he gets it. Um, and so I guess it's time for us to sort of head down here, get to New York, and see what all the actions about. [laughter] >> Well, I mean, like the exports of crypto are really shining, right? uh stable

coins blockchains tokenization >> 247 markets, >> big pur holder over here. Huge. [laughter] Can't not sure we can talk about that without adding crazy disclosures, but but 24/7 markets tokenized commodity trading. >> Every listen Andy, for the past three weeks, maybe maybe two weeks, three weeks, every weekend, Bloomberg has run a story that has effectively looked towards crypto to see where the rest of the market's going. Yeah, >> this is an incredible shift. This is something that if I rewind the clock to when I first started covering crypto and Bitcoin eight, nine years ago, I never would have expected. I'm sure you wouldn't have expected it when you and uh uh Robbie started started the rollup,

>> but this is the reality. You know, it's like you have and obviously it's a complex macro picture, geopolitical picture, but on Saturday when Bloomberg's, you know, legion of reporters wants to know where investors are thinking about risk, I know we're making a joke about about hyperlid because of the purr situation, >> but they're literally looking to hyperlquid. >> It's nuts. >> This is and and that's just part of the shift. The other part is is of course in the prediction markets. So what's happening and it's it's particularly noticeable on weekends, right? You know, yes, of course, obviously futures

matter, but crypto is becoming the litmus test and now that it's like interwoven into uh the fabric of Wall Street um more so at least than it was in the past. >> Yep. when when when you're thinking about how to hedge or how to uh put on risk, express a view in the market, it's crypto or it's something on crypto rails which is um part of this fundamental shift that's happening. So part of this chessboard analogy that Rob and I talked about on Monday was this growing global instability is leading to the the actual demand to speculate 24/7 because you

never know when a headline's coming. And you know this you you know you're a news guy. There's headlines out at the W Zoo now and they're they're so crazy now. Like the daily headlines are equivalent to something that we would have once a month, once a quarter, whether it be a war or a lawsuit or a new launch or a, you know, a bank and a crypto company, you know, creating a partnership. And so this is also leading to that 247 desire to speculate on the weekend. But where does this end, Frank? Across multiple industries, media, uh, crypto and finance, tech, news. It feels like we're going through this massive consolidation

of just like people used to read long blogs and long news articles. Everything's headlines now. People used to want to just trade in the in the nineto-ive hours. Now they want 247. People used to just want to bet on poker and blackjack and sports and now we have prediction markets for everything. There's a lot of kind of verticals here, but how would you describe the changing world order from a more like macro perspective? Like talk like talk to me about like your >> Well, there's a lot of different things to get into here. I mean the first of which um I think one thing that's interesting when we think about market dynamics um separate from crypto since the beginning of the year at least and

Citadel's been putting out some really good research Citadel Securities um the the the the extent to which retail is engaged in the market has never been higher. I mean we're at we're at like 99th percentile numbers at least if I'm if I'm remembering correctly. >> Yeah. And even with the recent volatility in the S&P, um, you know, this has been, you know, we're down 2% year to date, but there it's like almost every other day it's either up 2% or down 2%. So you have insane volatility in the underlying names of this index. And what's been happening recently is actually retail's buying the dips and the institutions are staying out. So you have

>> goodness >> a really interesting class of of engaged people probably losing a lot of money but engaged nevertheless in the market >> and you know we can get into whether that's tied to like financial nihilism or this desire to sort of um you know there's been tons of articles about how you know millennials are are trading versus buying a home because it's just easier to get started. Um, and this is really only going to accelerate because, you know, now that you have zero commission trading everywhere, which has been the case for several years, and anybody can open up an account and get started, now they're going to have the next level >> where with OpenAI and Claude, you're going to have at your disposal, and this

is where the crypto intersection gets interesting, and I don't think enough people are paying attention to this, you have a whole new category of tools. Um you you have aic finance uh analysis trading yield and this is a burgeoning new ecosystem. And so now you mix that up with retail and it's going to get really interesting in terms of the extent to which the retail category of the markets engage with uh or is able to sort of dive into the market and much more unique um and dynamic way than ever before. And another thing that I guess is interesting tied to what you said is

in crypto specifically it really does feel like you know eight years ago to your point if something you know happened uh like we're seeing on a regular Tuesday you know regular basis >> more yeah Morgan Stanley launching a crypto bank okay you know >> no does crypto Twitter care it doesn't seem like they do that would have moved Bitcoin like >> I guess I can't curse on this program like 5% 8% 10%. And you know, we're in an environment now at least, you know, maybe the regime is shifting a bit, but you know, we're in an environment now where like good news is is we're only down 2%, bad news is we're down 10%. Um, but that but but that is shifting and

it's it's important that it does because um I feel like a lot of this is just kind of um it's self-reinforcing, right? So >> when you have um >> you know gold and commodities outperforming Bitcoin in such a way that just reinforces it and now that that's broken >> it's broken now to an extent. I mean you know you can zoom out and it's not broken but if you zoom in it's you know telling people do the opposite zoom in it's it's broken to an extent >> and if that continues to happen with this environment of of the uh adoption that we're seeing then that can be really powerful. um at the end of 2026, you know, you're

looking at every single major bank >> Yeah. >> with hundreds of people working in crypto. Now, does that put, you know, Morgan Stanley on the same level as as a Coinbase at the end of the year? No. But like Gemini, maybe. >> Yeah. >> Like that's the caliber of of of the enterprise um >> that I think we're going to be looking at. And that's when when we talk about the the chess board shifting up, it's like these players that five years ago or at least every cycle, so 2018, then 2021, dip their toes in, they find some former KPMG guy to lead their blockchain business, >> doesn't do anything. That narrative shifted and and and they're actually

starting to do stuff. There's, you know, city put out a report on like how how uh you know, they're looking at Salana to uh uh revolutionize trade finance. I haven't even had time to look at that report because there's just so much to digest. >> Um and that is the new reality. >> Yeah, >> it is the new paradigm. Um and it's really really exciting. >> Yeah. So I think ironically it's actually causing a sentiment gap as well, right? Uh I call it like the crypto tick.

>> Well, you know, it makes sense, right? Because every single >> this this this transformation for better or for worse, I'm curious what you think about this >> isn't isn't helping the the the foundations, the projects, and it's >> that's what I mean. It's like it's just because crypto for so long while it's the underpinning uh underpinning value exists the the the the projects that have been built on top of it. You know because they they come to market at explosive valuations with instant liquidity. they they you know it breeds a sort of idleness or it breeds a sort of lack of um

um tenacity I guess because you know look at where we are now they're all down 90 some odd percent or 80% or 70%. >> And so yeah that's and and that's the perfect opportunity >> for NY to launch its layer one NASDAQ to launch its layer one when every single other crypto layer one's licking its wounds. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what you're describing is is exactly what's causing the sentiment shift is that there's this kind of token old guard bare market that's been ongoing and then there's this kind of institutional mass adoption kind of happening at light speed. Prices aren't really reflecting the immediate movement of the news of the announcements. But the real driver of the kind of sentiment gap here is people

don't know how to position because it's not like previous eras where you could just position into the ICO or into the airdrop farm for a new a new project or you could do a venture investment if you had access, right? uh JP Morgan or NYC launching their blockchain doesn't really help me or my allocations or my investments because I don't really have any exposure to that. >> Well, that's exactly right and and here in lies the problem.

>> The the fact of the matter is what is accelerating is not translating into the underpinning price of of these of these tokens for now. But listen, the what they've relied on for so long is is the is the flow of retail >> 100% >> and now they have so many other options and we're seeing that they're trading oil. They're they're they're they're instantly oil experts after 5 days of a geopolitical conflict >> and their attention is so easily it's so fluid now in a way that it wasn't.

crypto was the was the darling was the zeitgeist of of retail flow or of retail attention at least >> and now that's that's that's not the case I mean it's not the case because they have a plethora of options um from which to choose >> and so now the question is well what how do you what what do you replace that with >> you know if I was a project I'm thinking through okay how do I illustrate or illustrate um and and and represent the value of my token to the street to secondary investors of which there are not a lot in crypto right now

participating in the secondary market and I don't know if it's if it's if it translates in the same way as what equity listed companies do some sort of earnings call some sort of way to communicate in the same way that the street has relationship with equity analysts you know maybe you have a you know obviously Ko's never really worked but uh a group of of advocates of evangelists that can kind of illustrate the value of the token and I think a lot of projects are trying to figure that out. >> How do I create this legion this cadre of people who can who can help me help the market understand why this thing might be undervalued right now and and and you know obviously the honest answer

might be that a lot of these things aren't >> right >> um and that's what the market's grappling with. It's like where is the where is where is the uh >> investor base to whom I'm uh offloading the bag. >> Well, so Across just put out this uh DAO proposal. >> Yeah. >> Shifting away from basically a DAO model. They they launched a Ccorp uh in in the states across co. So, they moved fully away from this Dow model and they're basically offering token holders uh equity at a 25% premium to the 30-day average price. Token ripped like 80% and clearly this is what the market wants. I keep using this example. Backpack is

doing a 20% equity distribution to their points program rather than just token. Um, and I kind of talked about this on the show earlier today where >> you know, you know, in crypto it's always like old token, bad token. It's like there's always the next generation, the next chaff of of the [snorts] good tokens. >> I think postclarity there's a world where the good tokens, if we get the regulatory >> well, you guys on the show always refer to highquality assets, >> high quality assets, high quality assets. I think these will actually be more akin to an equity like structure than they were like governance tokens.

So, I think like the era of launching like if you're if you missed the last bull cycle and you're going to launch your token now, you just you're just not launching it in the way that we did it in the past anymore. Like it's got to look like an equity. It has to have claims on cash flows. It has to just be equity I think in the company. >> Well, listen, I mean I mean >> there's a lot of interesting points there. I think it you eloquently laid out the problem for a lot of these founders. And not to be too much of a shill for my corporate overlord, but this is one of the problems that GSR is trying to solve.

>> Yeah. Um and you'll see out uh from us over the you know coming weeks and months um a repositioning if you will or or at least an expansion if you will of our functions and capabilities to help support projects as they go to market in figuring out the best way to build an investor base to connect with the market and uh and effectively go to market because right now it's It's wildly fragmented and and very opaque this process with equities everything I mean you know a lot of it can boil down to a lack of frameworks a lack of guard uh guard rails or

>> or um direction into exactly what makes sense right you know in US equities you pick a group of underwriters you pick a venue on which you want to IPO and the process is fairly standardized >> right >> in crypto you're kind of be beholden to different exchanges. Um, you know, there's not the same sort of um, uh, underwriting process that exists. You don't have the same advisors to help ensure that, you know, what you're going to market at is the appropriate price. And, um, a lot of those processes need to be thought about intelligently for crypto assets. and right

>> they might might uh look like some of these hybrid models or hybrid >> um approaches that we're seeing but >> to have at least market participants who can end to end support that is missing and super important and a lot of things are missing from traditional equities and and and traditional capital markets that don't exist in crypto. I mean, let's not forget that only but two years ago, we had an effective credit crisis in which the totality of our credit system exploded.

>> Yeah. >> Okay. Like it just went away overnight. $25 billion um if not more. At least if we're we're gauging it based off of Genesis's loan book, just disappeared. that on top of Signet >> uh signature banks interconnective tissue or interconnective uh you know connectivity platform so to speak that link together the desks and the OTC's gone and so you know >> we're here in 2026 without much improvement at least on that side and and again you know you had a number of trading firms just wipe out and so that liquidity um is missing the the the robustness of

sort of credit and credit risk analysis is missing. And of course this like layer of um capital connectivity is missing and this degree of professional capital markets advice and consultation >> is also missing. And so you know you have people like >> yeah yeah >> what what the hell am I supposed to do? >> Which way is the wind going? >> Which way's the wind going? Um >> yeah, >> and so those things will build up and that will help um with capital formation and and getting to market and entering the market as a project on solid footing. But I'll tell you though, you know, if I'm being completely honest, like it is wild to see the lack of activity and the price of some of these

some of these projects. It's like, >> yeah, >> it's pretty it's sad, honestly. Like there's no there's no way to sugarcoat some of this Um, and you know, if you're looking to partner with an enterprise or a big bank and your token's down 90%. Like, >> yeah, >> they're like, well, listen, again, why don't I just do my own? >> Yeah. >> You know, >> Yeah. >> So, that's that's my uh un unsolicited >> unsolicited >> maybe wrong view. >> No, but I I was talking to a founder here in the office yesterday.

>> Beautiful founder. wonderful, >> fantastic founder >> here in Vest [laughter] and um he's like, "Yeah, man. Uh we're delaying our token obviously for obvious reason. >> People are delaying their tokens. They're switching from the blockchain that they originally I look at, you know, not to name any names, but >> the number of of firms that I've seen that I've either invested in or or thought about investing in. Yeah. >> You know, that have went to market with a specific blockchain and now switched. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's it's pretty it's it's um it's it's a wild time right now >> and you know this specific founder is like talking about the strategy in which to you know maybe launch this token and

we are talking about this equity idea and kind of like how that's going to go and it's frankly going to be harder to do it like the right way in the future but we do need clarity to get through and so I know you've been kind of looking around and scoping around LinkedIn for different job offerings from firms. Yes, if anyone wants to pay me $50 million a year to tweet, I'm readily available. >> I mean, the impressions don't lie. Um, but something there is happening and then something's happening in DC. I'm heading to DC next week to kind of get to the bottom of what's going on. It seems like the big, you know, kind of part of the bill is >> you like running up to the White House with >> a microphone and >> Yeah. And so that's happening, right?

And like the political change is also going to drive the chessboard to move again >> because this new administration kind of got rid of the decentralization Fugazi that we were living in I believe. And then Hyperlid also came in and kind of just like oneshotted the entire market and was like we make a ton of money. We're going to just buy back the token. If you're going to own any asset, you should own something that does something similar or or not. And so now regulatory clarity should also add another kind of leg to the uh chair here that we're building of like a more strong foundation.

>> Of course I mean the anticipation is that this is um you know something that that banks can touch which has always been the >> big question keeping folks out. It's like can I actually >> custody this asset? >> Yeah. Has your view on bank shifted over the the last eight years? like like are you more pro >> legacy finance than you have in the past? I'm I'm I'm pro like capital markets like you know you have to imagine that you know banks are big organizations right and they have competing interests and competing um competing interests and so when I look at something like you know I feel very passionately about the yield element of

>> of of this and I think banks that uh don't get on board are you know effectively burying their heads in the sand um but at the same time I I have seen a ramp up. You know what it is? >> I've seen so many times bank, you know, to use your word for gazi, you know, play play games of innovation theater and not get serious and right >> I would kind of find it annoying that they'd get attention for certain things that aren't real. >> But that has changed and so I I appreciate the the the speed. I mean, something like Fidelity being interested in like hiring someone to build out vaults, that's that's pretty cool.

>> Yeah. >> Um versus, you know, the innovation theater thing, the fifth teenth, you know, PC or whatever it might be. >> Yeah. >> Um >> but yes, I think that like, you know, I think the whole argument around uh stable coin yield being bad for community banks is just ridiculous. And um that's where I think my frustration lies. But in in the speed of like NY and NASDAQ entering tokenization, that's sick. That's really really incredible.

>> Yeah. Frank, on that kind of same notion, culture is shifting as well. Uh conference strategies. >> I know. I have to uh keep up with all the lingo. I'm not the young man that I used to be in this space. And so >> you were on you were on CT in 2016 2017. There was a culture then. >> Yeah, >> there was a culture to the early 2020s. >> It was kind of a culture now. >> Yeah. >> How would you describe it? >> Seven, right? Is that >> There you go. [laughter] Frank, you're you're outing yourself as a boomer.

>> I No, I am. It's all these new I know about on God. Okay. >> On God. >> Or somebody said to me the other day, I put them on game. >> There you go. >> And I'm like out of it. But I mean the entire shape or >> the entire space is shifting. >> Like I'm wearing a a white collared shirt. >> You look great. >> Yes. >> Um is this the norm? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, like, listen, I don't want to there's there's um, you know, a few years ago, I was out to dinner with a trading firm person and they were like, you know, we need to we need there's just you can't go full meme, you know, when when there's too

much mimemetics. >> It's like at the end of the day, it's like you're you're responsible for capital. And so you have to balance the meme with with with a degree of like, you know, appreciation for being a steward of capital. And I think that the industry is starting to appreciate that more. >> Um, and it has to. And maybe that's translating into uh more uh bund shirts than than uh >> Well, because I think about it, it's like, you know, after 2021, >> we left such a bad taste in the mouth of Wall Street with with FTX. And like I think about Bokeh, FIA Bokeh, where >> the only people on t-shirts for the F FTX um crew.

>> Yeah. >> And so >> after that, you know, after that blowup, I think people realize, you know, you can't just get away with >> unbridled uh you know, lack of deference. Um >> so maybe some of that's come back. But yeah, I mean, you look at something like the Summit like >> Yeah. >> There were a lot of lot of suits. >> Wow. Yeah. What about like conferences? What's your take on the conference set for the industry? Uh I I don't know if you're planning to travel much, but you've got like on the spectrum you've got like Dev Connect and ETH Denver, you know, there was like spork >> interesting questions.

>> Spork whale and like >> rank like S tier conferences and >> Yeah. Yeah. And then you've got like all the way over here you've got like fintech money 2020 in Vegas or like Trump's Mara Lago. Then in the middle you've got everything from like token to uh stuff here in New York >> token now with the whole situation. Uh yeah, D, all these like all these conferences. Like I guess what I'm trying to get to is like if you're a company in crypto, obviously you're a GSR, like are you also changing the way that you're going about your conference travel based on your on the shift that we're talking about? Like is it just focused on this new audiences? Is there

still a lot of focuses on the devs and on the kind of like the core like you know >> 100%. So think about it this way. >> Yeah. You know me, I'm always on LinkedIn. >> Sure. >> Because, you know, I got to get those Elon bucks. So, I'm tweeting all the job ads. >> Yeah. >> I saw one the other day uh from Brown Brothers Heram Haramman, right? Somebody will correct me. BBH >> and they were looking for someone to build, you know, maybe it was lead crypto or head of digital assets, something to that effect >> with 25 years of experience minimum in financial services.

>> Wow. >> So, think about who that is. It's like a 50- 55year-old dude. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So, that's the new entrance to the market. Do these guys want to go to Dubai for three weeks and then go to con and go to >> Yeah. >> No, they've got like three kids that they got to put through private school. Like this is like a totally different category of people >> um than what has uh traditionally been the the composite of the industry. And so I think yeah I think that people are looking for more sophistication in in the the way in which events are curated, where they're held and how they're how they manifest, right? And so, you know, personally for us, I think and

personally for for me, I think folks are looking for more smaller curated um organic feeling, high impact settings versus the, you know, basically the crypto coachellas that we've been having these past some odd years. Um, and that's that's a shift. And so, you know, it's going to be really bad for these conference organizers that get paid, you know, 100k per speaker. >> Well, this is what I mean is there these changing >> I would short these companies. If I could short them, I would short them with all the capital I have.

>> That's what I mean, man. It's weird. >> It's a weird shift. >> And New York's also becoming the center at the same time. Like very much firmly like you don't need to leave. >> Yeah. >> In some capacity. >> Um, are you doing a lot of stuff on the street with firms? Are you speaking with them? How are those conversations going? Are they a bullish tokenization? >> Are they affected by the downturn in the market? >> No. No. It's never been It's never been faster. They don't care. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> They don't care because they don't have They're not exposed to freaking >> you know, they're not going to name No, it's not Farco. It's the actual legitimate projects that are down like 70 80%.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um they're excited about learning from their mistakes and doing it better. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Unfortunately. >> Yeah. But, um, it's exciting. Um, how are you liking New York? >> It's great. Um, >> it's exciting, isn't it? >> It's been a week here. >> You've got a lot of art deco in your life between, uh, downtown and uptown. You know, you've got >> Yeah, >> you're fully you're fully, you know, you're you're like just a hair away from I'm walking here, you know, you're getting close. >> Not at all. But it's been good, man. It's a good change from the bearish online reading the timeline, not really interacting with folks in person. You get people in here, they're like, "Wow, this is wow." Like, you know, they look

at the view. >> Yeah. >> See the Statue of Liberty, the One World Trade, >> New Jersey, >> everything else. Jersey. >> No, over there. Brooklyn's over there. >> Yeah, Jerseyy's here. [laughter] Brooklyn's here. Thanks, Frank. >> Again, your geography. Um, so yeah, building this out. >> It's like uh it's like um uh whatchamacallit uh the Simpsons where it's like, you know, we're between Kentucky Ohio and >> Yeah, bet. I'm enjoying it, man. And the sentiment is far better, right? Like you guys are probably watching on Twitter or on YouTube and it's pretty much it's the doldrums and here it's been a lot of general bullishness and institutional bullishness. So >> yeah, it's like the straight of our

muse, >> dude. Not a good reference right now, Frank. Uh, thanks for joining. Closing thoughts. >> Nothing. Just don't forget to tip your waitresses. >> Thanks, Frank. >> Thank you. >> Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching Rollup TV today straight from the tokenization tower from the Nest, Frank Shapar, our lovely last guest. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Frank. >> Good seeing you. >> See you guys tomorrow. Bye. [music]