🚨LIVE: RETURN TO FUNDAMENTALS! HYPE, LIT, SOL Leading The Bounce. Sentora, Nest, and Portal in Tower

Transcript

[music] [music] Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> 17 floor.

[music] We'll see you around the timeline. 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 at everything they talk about and [music] it's my favorite podcast. >> Adding to my library potentially multi-chain deployments. Here we are at the connect day one here. I'm guessing from base. [music] [music]

[music] Heat. [music] [music] Heat. [music] >> [music] [music] >> JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity,

the entire thing was just institutions. It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. >> I'm bullish. >> He said it. He finally said it. >> So bullish. Andy's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. [music] >> [music]

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

[music] >> Corola [music] 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 [music] come together for the roll up. [music] [music] >> [music]

[music] >> Zoom out. The 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 next. See you on the show. >> Bada bing, bada boom. My lovely roll up army live from the tokenization tower. Happy freaky Friday to all my freaks out there in the world who love to get freaky with it. It is a beautiful day in the summer paradise of hype above $65.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not messing around here. We held the line. We said we're going to get a sweep under that 60 level. We got the sweep now. Lighter up 13%. Looks ready for all time highs. Hype back above 60. Good morning, Rumps. So underrated show you guys have W's in the chat. Rumps, welcome to the show, man. Good to have you. We're missing Robbie again, guys. He's in Peru probably doing Iawaska. We may never get him back. If Robbie goes to Peru, does Iaska, ladies and gentlemen, freedom guy, I know you're a big Robbie fan, we may never get him back. So, let's hope

we get him back. We're watching, you're watching the roll up live from the tokenization tower, broadcasting from the financial capital world in the nest, powered by our friends at Plume, building the most innovative onchain asset management infrastructure. Visit plume.org or to learn more about what they're doing and their Nest Vault product that the studio is named after. We've got a great show for you guys today. Let's get right into it. Welcome to this organization Tower Markets and Weather per usual. Centur's co-founder Nest Exchange on Hyperlids co-founder is joining. That token has been on an incredible run. Portal venture founders head is in the tower as well. We're talking about investing in the age of AI. As always, our topics are powered by

our friends at Treasure. Use code rollup10 at treasure.io to grab yourself a hardware wallet. Guys, we're winning. We're up. We're doing well. We held the line. We held the line. That's what matters. We held the line on hype. I mean, people have been calling for 40s, 30s. I mean, I saw some 30s calls on that, but no one's really paying attention to lighter. And we've been talking about lighter. It's leading this bounce. I tweeted about it yesterday. It's doing well. Let's get into the markets, into the weather. Before we do, I'm going to tell you about our stable coin partner, FRA.

Building infrastructure for the future of digital money, open, stable, borderless. Visit fracks.com to learn more about what they're doing there. Guys, it's beautiful. It's 73 degrees. It's the end of June. Last year in New York, the end of June, it was 95. It's beautiful. It's 73, partly cloudy. It's very, very foggy out. So, you guys can't really see the the tower view today as much, unfortunately. It's quite foggy. Uh but that's all good. That is all good, guys. Uh because what's not foggy is our portfolios because we're holding the line. We're reestablishing the trends that need to be reestablished.

We're holding the supports that needed to be held. And we need a Bitcoin daily close today above 60K. We need a 60K daily close to get us to where we need to be to complete the sweep and set us up for some more upside. Guys, as always, our weather is powered by our friends at Relay. Visit relay.link link to learn more about start swapping seamlessly on relay.link. Let's get into the markets. I know that's what we're all here for. Before we do, let me tell you about dinari. Building infrastructure for the future of tokenized equities onchain. Trade SpaceX on Hyperlquid spot using dinari space XD product. All right, guys. We're green today. Um I don't have a whole lot for you on these pairs here near Chain Link.

Uh Salana, Salana notably up 10% today. Um Anom is trying to single-handedly CTO Salana right now and honestly the sentiment around Salana couldn't be any worse and I can you know I can get behind it. M also went on their show. He said that his top holdings are Hype, Soul, Near, Bitcoin, and Zcash. Interesting. Five. I think we're quite aligned there. Um, and I feel like a lot of a lot of these guys, a lot of the good traders in the industry, I think, are rallying around the same assets. And that's why today's show is called Return to Fundamentals.

We're going to talk deeper about our fundamentals thesis and why that matters to us at this market, at this current juncture in this market. Rocky, what's going on, man? Good to see you there, buddy. Uh, happy Friday. Happy Friday, my guy. Uh what a beautiful day in New York. Went to the World Cup game. So, I got I got tickets to the World Cup game yesterday at 2:30 p.m. By 3:30, I was in a taxi to Metife, pull up, and Joey Moose is there behind me. Steve from Pump Cades behind me. I met the Clipper guy, Jack, as well. He's sitting right behind me. So, we're just

slamming beers, watching Germany get upset by Ecuador. Then I full send it back to the office, power hour, happy hour, straight to MSG for Rufus concert, then straight to the bar to watch the end of the USA game. And I've been having this thing where like I don't I don't chew my food properly. And so I I got these palmless wings. You know, this girl loves boneless wings and um I I completely got it stuck in my throat. Last time this happened to me was in Hawaii. I had to go to the ER and I had to get a scope down my throat. I had to go under and it costed me like

$1,200. >> Embarrassing. >> And uh this time I was like, you know what? I'm taking sips of water. I mean, I was pulling trig on Houston Street last night for like 10 minutes. It was terrible. Um, and so got it out this morning. Woke up, hype's flying, Bitcoin's holding the line, charts look good, lighter looks great, and the boys are up. Another World Cup game on Saturday. So, that was my night. It was pretty hectic. Um, that was BS. They let that game go an extra minute. Yeah, that's why the US lost. I know. I know.

It was rough. All right, guys. So, let's get into the news. Just before we do, do let me tell you about Near. Your home for building discovering apps onchain. [cheering] Near.com is one account. Your financial life onchain. No borders. 35 network singlenear.com account. Do it private as well, bro. Just chew your food better. Yeah, I know. I know, buddy. I know. I know. I know. I'm on these Nexium pills. They're like these like acid antiacid pills. So, I've got my open claw sends me a reminder every day at 6 p.m. Take Nexium before dinner. Take Nexium before dinner. Take Nexium before dinner. So, trying to trying to reduce the esophagal inflammation here. All right, guys. Uh

interesting, right? So, um Paulo and Tether launched this Dreamcash product, right? and it is a uh hyperlquid uh HIPP3 product and their thing was look we got to bring USDT pairs to Hyperlid and we're going to build a uh exchange for it as well and basically they're shutting down and I think there's a couple reasons here like to be honest I think I think trade XYZ is just so dominant that it's nearly impossible to compete with trade XYZ like it's just

not going to happen. Uh so that's one thing and they argue that in this piece they argue that basically they came to light to life with the ambition of bringing millions of new traders on chain [snorts] and when they launched it was this big kind of moment for HIP3. It was this big competition. Everyone was trying to win the race, but of course trade XYZ is just so dominant. And now with the deal with Coinbase and Circle, I don't really think there's a chance for Dreamcash to exist. And I think they realize that as well. So you scroll down a bit, they kind of give some of their reasoning here. I don't know if you guys ever traded Dreamcash

markets on Hyperlquid, but they were trying to bring the um they were trying to bring USDT pairs to the market. And so they talk about how HIP3 grew, cash markets became a clear number two, and they're kind of blaming Hyperlid for not being neutral. They're kind of saying that basically they were second in line always to trade XYZ and once the Coinbase Circle deal happened, they realized that that they weren't going to really be able to sustain. And so my take here guys is that this is the biggest circle versus

tether win for circle in the public open markets that we've seen in a long time. Like this is a significant significant win in that circle got hyperlquid is the primary trading pair USDC and USDT the largest stable coin in the world is going to be sidelined on the fastest growing perpetualist markets both lighter and hyperlquid and so USDT obviously has a dominant force in centralized markets But they will not be the dominant player is what it looks like in the per place

in the per race. Airrop alpha trade trade XYZ with trady for future trade XYZ token. Trade XYZ is the main HIP3 deployer right now. It is what it is. Honestly, I'm going to fade that. I'm going to say no trade XYZ token comes. I'm gonna say they are it is in their best interest to keep the hyperlquid token the center of the ecosystem and to not kind of fracture it. So all right guys, let's keep it rolling uh into some more market stuff. I think we have a clip here from uh Anom show which I think is very aligned with what I have

to say right now and what I've been saying to you guys this week. Actually, I don't think it's a video. I think it's just a tweet. So thesis around buying Bitcoin spot is the same here as it always is. Hardest form of money non-seasonable governments transferable cross borders instantaneously without hassle. Not affected by persistent devaluation of dollars and long-term store of value to preserve wealth. The digital gold thesis took a hit in 2024 and 2025 as gold outperformed during its first real rally. Not making new all-time highs since 2011. I believe all that would take for confidence to return to his thesis would be momentum to the upside. Totally agree. agree with on dollar strength and upwards movements in rates dragging down gold. But we are near peer peak hawkishness as inflation should subside and straight of hormones

reopens blah blah blah blah blah blah. I've been very bearish Bitcoin because of sailor and didn't think 60k would hold at the beginning of June but I but I am reacting as buyers stepped in at a key level. feels like we're currently pricing in the peak. Worst scenario of him having to sell, even if he does need to sell Bitcoin, won't have to do for for six months or more. Buying Bitcoin here into the beginning of Q3 is a good trade setup at long-term historical support converging with worst sentiment I've seen on the asset. And so guys, oh my gosh, I am pleased to report I was 50 cents away from getting liquidated on my STRC 5x long Edward and you survived.

And not only did you survive, Edward, but one of your biggest bags, lighter, one of the things that we love on the show that we've just been returning to fundamentals hardcore on is about to break to alltime highs. >> W's in the >> So, you're cooking, bro. You're cooking. You look great right now. Good Um, so guys, look, I've been I was saying yesterday that I think we're going to have a sweep into the lows. We got the sweep. Today's daily close is massively important. I know it seems silly to like overfixate on the daily closes, for example, right? Like just one day. It's not a

huge deal, but Hype's daily close yesterday going green was huge on these massive wicks to the downside. And then Bitcoin we just want to see close above 60 today. Bitcoin closes above 60 today and we get any sort of weekend rally or early next week rally. I think Anthem's right and I think that's it for a while. for a while. We'll see. All the quants still think Q4 lows are coming or late Q3 Q4 lows, but I think for now I think Anom's right. Daily close, weekly close above 60 here on Bitcoin and we're

looking really strong. G lighter. Yes, sir. G lighter return of fundamentals, guys. All right, guys. Let's keep it rolling. Before we do, let me tell you about Infinifi. building DeFi infrastructure for simpler access to onchain yield, liquidity, capital allocation, higher yields, no leverage. Visit infinifi.xyz to learn more. Um, so interesting, funny rebuttal on the hyperlquid thesis from multicoin. So yesterday, if you guys remember, we walked through the uh multicoin uh paper, right? And we talked about the price of Hypquliquid pushing up to $319 as a target based on an eight billion recurring revenue on an annual run rate

basis. The funny thing here is that multicoin was always and Kyle Simon is always preaching about reasoning by analogy often leads to the wrong conclusion. And in this report, this rebuttal from Billy is basically crediting Multicoin's research on Hyperlquid's open interest liquidation catalyst. But he argues the report ironically relies on analogy, particularly comparisons with Binancecoin, which is the antithesis to what Multicoin's entire investment and research strategy has been. And so he he argues that using Binance's exceptional

price performance as a template overlooks the many exchange tokens that failed to follow the same path. And there's a a lot of aggressive assumptions here from the paper from Multicoin and he's basically arguing that valuations based on Coinbase and CME don't make sense. My take on this is Billy Gal, I think you're going to be wrong. I think there's a technical fractal. I don't know if you guys are fractal boys, if you guys believe in that type of uh pattern matching, but I saw this insane technical fractal of hype and B&B token and it was pretty insane. I wish I could

find it. I really wish I could find it because it was insane. So basically what happened is bit uh Binance coin went to 40 back down to 30 back up to like 42 back down to like 32 and then went from 32 to like 150. Hyperlquid just went from 40 to 75 back down to 50 back up to 76 77 back down to 57 and the next step is 100. So I think there's a technical fractal that I don't know how much credence you would want to put into and there's the reasoning by analogy here and obviously there's the

fundamentals. So while I agree with Billy and I understand that it's ironic for multicoin to be reasoning by analogy after their entire spokesperson was always arguing that reasoning by analogy often leads to the wrong conclusion. I think there's a technical, a fundamental, and a reasoning by analogy thesis here for Hyperlquid. And um I think Billy might be sidelined. Billy might be sidelined. Billy might be sidelined. All right, guys. Let's keep it rolling into the next segment. BCG projects tokenized assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035. The future is bright for tokenization. Again guys, I was

telling you yesterday that I was on the panel at uh tokenize this in New York here and I was with dinari alpaca securityize um and galaxy and if we scroll down here I mean guys this market is about to explode. We are, this is the thesis that we've been harping on for lighter, hyperlid, aerodrome, unis swap, even a um morpho, um who else in the defi, you know, scape there's a ton of them and we've been harping on if this thesis is correct, if this plays out, right? They're looking

at the digital RWA projection USD, scoping it out to 2035. I mean, men, if this happens, the DeFi protocols we just named and the perexes and the onchain infrastructure and specific blockchains are going to absolutely expand in value like in a way we haven't seen since 2017. Like that's how big of an opportunity this is. If we get this right, if we get this right and we get the thesis right here, guys, because

like the beginning of the thesis here was like HF3, right? We saw that. That was like, holy we're trading anything on purp. But we're not just going to trade it on perp. We're going to trade it in spot. We're going to lend it. We're going to collateralize it. We're going to put it in vaults. We're going to earn yield on it. We're going to move it crosschain. we're going to hold it on blockchains. So, this is the long-term bull thesis for the return to fundamentals DeFi plays. And I think that it's the most obvious thesis, but it's also going to take a while to play out. It's going to take a little while to play out. All right,

let's keep it rolling. Before we do, let me tell you about LeFi. Building infrastructure for the future of crosschain swaps, bridging routing across the onchain economy for smoother crosschain execution. Visit lee.fi or use their jumper exchange product. Nick Carter here, famously a uh Bitcoin whale and bull, explains why Ethereum will be a beneficiary of quantum. Interesting. Let's listen to this. It's a couple months old, but I think it's a good post. This is going to get Robbie going. By the way, Robbie's our local in-house big ebull. Wag me Edward says, "Gnoc CSM, good to see you, man."

All right, let's play the video here. Uh, the fact that Justin is on this paper is also quite telling. I mean, it's in night and day. You know, Ethereum, it's basically, you know, in Bitcoin, it's just me worrying about this and like a half dozen other people. in Ethereum that's already been decided the transition is going to occur. So I mean it's just and the road map is it's like I was reading the blog on the PQ Ethereum side like I could have written this like I completely agree with every word written on here. Um and I I think you know Ethereum is also a beneficiary in the sense that it has not gone for this relentless optimization route. So like some of the like high bandwidth or high throughput blockchains have because they're going to suffer from this as I

said uh the fact that Justin is on this paper is also quite telling. I mean it's >> I think the Bitcoin story the Bitcoin narrative like the whole quantum story has been kind of uh put into collective amnesia as a result of everyone tweaking out about Sailor. Um but it's still a real narrative overhang for [snorts] Bitcoin. I don't think it's just going away anytime soon. You know what I mean? I don't think like I don't think we can just be like, "Oh, we're all worried about Michael Sailor now, so quantum solved."

Guys, hype's going to break above 65 on this on this show, and we're going to cover it after these first two guests. We've got the co-founder of Centur, a largecale institutional DeFi layer. So that last graph that we were just talking about um very much aligned with this conversation coming up and we also have the Nest exchange. So I don't know if you guys saw and I'll pull it up after but the Nest exchange is the main deck for Hyper EVM and the tokens flying absolutely flying over the last several months. The worst part about this Bitcoin bare market is not losing

money, but knowing Ben Cohen was right. Oh man. I mean, Ben Cohen is still um calling for October lows, so I still think he's probably right. But it's not even like Ben Cohen was right. It was more just like the four-year psycho believers were right. So, so we've got Anthony D. Martino in the back, the co-founder CEO of Santoro. Uh Santoro is an institutional DeFi platform. and they've got a lot of very interesting RWA tokenization offerings. This is the first time on the show, first time for us speaking with Centur team. Honestly, I don't really know that much about what they're doing. So, uh should be a good conversation uh with

with Anthony here, the CEO. Happy Friday, guys. Beautiful, beautiful day out here in New York. Beautiful day in the markets. We're holding the line and we're going to talk about that tokenization thesis that we keep harping on. Rob and I keep harping on here with Anthony. So, why don't we bring Anthony up um and we're going to get this show started. Anthony, welcome to the show. Uh great to have you. Happy Friday, man. >> Same to you. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, cheers, man. Uh first time on the show. Great to have you. Uh just kind of setting some context. We have just been developing this tokenization thesis alongside so many others around just kind of how we think about the second

and third order consequences of tokenization as it pertains to value capture with DeFi protocols, blockchains, etc. the kind of the bell curve of tokenization, the the types of assets that are uh you know the most beneficial to tokenize in terms of uh the core use case of tokenizing assets. Um, and we've just been diving deep here and learning a lot more about this and just honestly more about traditional finance in the last six months. And so that's kind of like the context for where we're at. I would just love to understand a bit about your background from uh HSBC Barclays. You've done 20 plus years in traditional finance. Uh so bringing that expertise into into the DeFi world, how did you you know found

Santor and what was the key kind of problem that you were looking to solve based off your extensive knowledge and experience? Man, welcome to the show. >> Thanks again. Yeah, I did 22 years of hard time on Wall Street. Um my >> just down there, man. >> I had the unique uh opportunity to run one of the larger Fanny Freddy books from 2007 through 2010. So got to see what the unfolding of a crisis looked like uh in real terms. Um and then I kind of moved on later in my career and traded emerging markets where I started to realize the benefits of Bitcoin and stable coins. Uh when you start to understand that in many countries in the world the currency is extremely volatile

which restricts investment which basically leads people to have very few places to store value or or generate wealth. Um, I mean, I think some of the starkkest examples are in Latin America where houses above a certain size trade in dollars and some of those comp countries like Argentina have had capital controls like excluding their population from dollars for the last seven years. So, the that's kind of where the use case really came to be for me. Um, moving on, I I started uh at Coinbase after I left my career at Wall Street, built a DeFi and derivative trading team. So, got um had an phenomenal experience there. It was like a graduate program because anybody Coinbase had the expert in almost every

field that you wanted to learn something about. Um so it was a really good kind of postgrad program there. And then um I started a company called Trident that um was focused on DeFi lending and then we merged with a company called Into the Block to form Centur last April. >> Yeah. >> So I think >> yeah remember into the block. >> Yeah. Yeah. So into the the so Centuro was much had become I mean Trident had become like an advisory firm for stable coin issuers and chains helped them grow their TVL. Um and then into the block was like a uh a non-custodial asset manager. So the high level theme for the merger was my clients have uh money to buy TVL and their clients have TVL

looking for a yield. So that was kind of the the non sophisticated way to say it but that was the citagy was very clear and then since then you know we built out we've become one of the top curators um which we hadn't done prior to that we launched multiple earn programs the the the key one being kraken earn so the bitcoin yield and the stablecoin yield is all run by centura um and we are uh about to premiere a new stable a new ra that we worked on uh with a tokenization agent and a top five uh asset manager.

>> Wow. So before we get into kind of like the deal and the earn product and what's happening there, I just want to kind of understand exactly how Centur works from a kind of like a product perspective. And so you guys are operating um riskmanage earn programs, morpho vault curation and effectively bringing kind of yield strategies on chain to fintexs, neo banks, etc. and enterprises uh at large. So you guys are almost like I mean I mean you guys are almost like a like a a yield provider at institutional scale with institutional grade risk management and understanding of onchain strategies and you guys are operating in

the lens of like B2B into neo banks exchanges like Kraken anyone who offers earn like programs and then thus kind of like B2B TOC by their consumers leveraging centator strategy and you your main business is getting uh deposits into your uh riskmanaged products and earning a spread or earning like a curation fee, a like a kind of like a manager fee almost. And your your goal here is just scale the amount of integrations on the B2B side to get deposits from their consumers uh directly into Centaur manage vaults or products. And that's kind of like the number one mo for you guys right now.

>> Yeah. And I would say that's perfectly described with our execution plan, but I would take a second to explain the vision. So we we think that and we're going to produce a paper in the next few days on this, but we think that there's there's the largest wealth transfer in history. And there's so many different articles written about well what is the younger generation going to buy? You see this activity of a lot more retail activity in the equity markets. People reaching out the risk curve for private investments, but they don't think about how people are going to physically handle their money in the future.

>> And being probably one of the oldest guys in the industry, I have teenage kids and their bank accounts are going to be Venmo with a debit card. >> Yeah. >> They're never going to walk into a bank. So our vision is that banking is going to change materially and this this kind of fintech payments remittance boom is all going to evolve into the next level of banking where the value that the banks extract is going to be redistributed to the providers to the the enterprise clients and the users themselves. So these earn programs are really to build a onchain wallet bank account substitute that instead of earning 40 bips in treasuries in a

checking account can earn four to 6% in a D5 yield strategy. Um that allows them access to their money 24/7 365. Right? So that's and then on the other side of that as that builds it it's going to grow into a credit engine that allows users like deal which is another program we won who are typically long cash the ability to lend to someone like a western union that has to borrow dollars to settle payments because a is really slow. So we're basically trying to build not a neo bankank but the new infrastructure for how banking will be in the future and earn is the first part of the execution.

>> Yep. Got it. And you know, when it comes to thinking about um the kind of generational shift here that you describe, um you know, I I like don't really hold any money in a savings account really, right? Like my savings account is on like a Robin Hoodesque or a uh even like a brokerage account or in USDC in an exchange or just onchain in general. and this kind of generational shift like I'm curious a bit more about like entrepreneurship and building businesses is quite path dependent right like there's events that happen externally

and there's events that happen internally and you know that kind of sets the stage for who the winners and and losers are how do [snorts] you think about the larger kind of like macro tailwinds behind this shift towards more yield onchain yield bringing that into users. The shift away from banks towards stable coins towards like kind of like this analog to digital shift like just kind of broadly before we get into the nuances of of the product like what is the kind of outsized macro thesis that you have that is like propelling CO's broader um product strategy. So, if you think about what a

bank account is to you, but really what do you use your bank account for? For me, it's I take in my paycheck and I pay my bills. And any money that doesn't cover that float is either invested through a brokerage account or invested through, you know, crypto exchanges like Kraken. Like, there is no idle funds that I leave in a checking account. Now, what I expect and what I've already been seeing is more and more of these kind of fintech neoank providers like a PayPal um are starting to engage in getting payroll into your Venmo PayPal wallet.

>> Yeah. >> And then as they expand merchant pay, you can pay your bills through the wallet. So then what do you really need to bank for? I mean at the end of the day I mean I don't my generation still uses some cash. I mean, I really only use cash to take out to go to a casino. There's really e even like people that do odd jobs around the house take Venmo. So, there really is the physical need of cash. And so, the two So, that's the base. And and what the what's the catalyst? There's $124 trillion of wealth transferring in the next 20 years to people of my parents' generation to parent to people in my kids' generation. and everything they consume, whether it's financial or

information is on this, right? So, if it doesn't fit on this, it's not going to get used. I'm actually, as a trader, I have a a strong bias to never trade on my phone, but the amount of people actually trade on their phones or make investment decisions on their phones >> to me sounds crazy, but like, you know, it's it's it's only crazy when two people do it. When half the population does it, then you're starting then it becomes a trend. So, it's really about wealth transfer to people who use and manage money differently, right? My parents still have envelopes for cash for certain bills, right? I I I think they still have some travelers checks if people on this phone don't even know what this is.

>> But my point is is that people are just going to use money differently and the services that are scaling. I mean, look at look at neo banks like Chime, how fast they scale. Look at debit card issues like Rain. There's pure demand. These aren't things that are raising a ton of money on speculation. They're running, they're raising money on numbers, on users, on engagement. Like this isn't a fad. This is just how people are going to use money in the future. >> Yeah. So in today's world then, you know, looking at Centur's products, you know, we can go on Kraken and you said like the Bitcoin strategies there are managed by Cento. There's other kind of like vaults on Morpho and you. So, for the listeners here, you know, they're

going to want to know, all right, like I hold Ether, I hold Bitcoin on Ethereum, I hold um Hyperlquid, I hold other tokens, I want to, you know, get yield on stable coins. Like, when you're looking at like the holistic offering, are you guys focused on depth of like a specific strategy, maximizing the efficiency and alpha generation in in a specific strategy? Is it kind of like breadth of here's as many kind of types of products for risk for assets for um you know global users like what is kind of the product strategy for you guys to optimize the amount of the most amount of deposits to get to generate the most amount of alpha. How do you kind of

think about that? So we think about dollars first and dollars is the biggest asset class and then we think we think about Bitcoin. Um and probably the next one is XRP. Um and there's a there's a the dollars are basically where the stable coins are basically what the global economy is going to run on in the future. If you listen to Scott Besson the Treasury Secretary I mean he's very clear that he's driving stable coin adoption because there's a lot of benefits to the US government. uh one diversifying buyers of their treasuries away from countries we might tariff from one day to the next and the other is you know most of global trade happens in dollars anyway so we need to have a dollar that that meets the times right so that's

where the stable coin so that's a pretty strong narrative that I think is pretty bipartisan so that's going to have constant tailwinds as far as we thinking about thinking about strategies I I think about where the banks step in and max extract from the user. So a checking account is the best definition of max extraction right now if you think of so that that's why we focus on dollars and I can get into I can go a long time about like how that has to change but so so yields are the so how do we look at this the strategies we have a very um we have a risk council that sets the parameters for each fault so when we went to Kraken they wanted yields above 5% but they didn't want to take on

deping risk they didn't want to take on um RWA ways that were too volatile in price. So, typically for every client, we create a perspectus as if you're buying an ETF. We we basically agree with the partner, here's the parameters, here's the assets, here's the protocols, here's the amount of leverage, here's the amount of duration we'll take, um how how quickly the money can move in and out of the vaults. And then we have a heavily um uh built out AI strategy. We so we have one AI agent that identifies opportunities across multiple chains and that runs at will but usually we get a batch run in the morning and the afternoon. Um and then we run another agent that tries to pick holes in the risk strategies like where can these strategies hurt what are the most biggest drawdowns and then finally when

all the data is prepared um we make a decision and then our uh smart contracts auto execute. So that's it's very similar to how a asset management firm would work but using smart contracts and AI agents to make it much more efficient because you have to make the risk decisions 24/7 365 right the crypto doesn't get a long weekend next weekend because it's US Independence Day >> so we need these tools that work faster than we do um and at the end of the day our goal whether we're a vault curator or a strategy manager is return client capital. It's return of capital before return on capital.

>> Yeah. >> Right. And that that's what we've lived by for the last five years and you know, knock on wood that's worked out for us. >> But I do want to address one thing. >> Yeah. >> Vaults like morpho style vaults are a fantastic piece of infrastructure. They are not earn programs. They are modular lending protocols that generate a yield, but the constraint they struggle to generate a high enough yield to be on their own be and earn program because the yield generally comes from and if you look at morpho I think 78% is simple Bitcoin ETH versus stable vaults even though there's thousands of assets on there the the vast majority is Bitcoin ETH stables and the vast majority of those are programs that are sponsored by

exchanges to run Bitcoin borrow programs. like Coinbase, right? So, you think about how much you're willing to borrow Bitcoin at what high a yield and then subtract 200 basis points and that's the supply side. So, if you're borrowing at five, the yield is three. I mean, 50 bips in either direction. So, those aren't 3% at least now when you could still buy a money market front for almost 4% is not good enough. So over time maybe that'll become good enough but for now you need to to do things that generate a higher yield and that's taking on leverage looping and arbitrageing rate differentials between protocols. That's the primary strategies. Everything's run inside of a day duration and most of it can be unwound block by block. But so

what we do is run the strategies that interact with a vault. So a vault could have Athena and Maple assets in it. We are the the the strategy manager actually loops those positions. >> So that's the difference. I think too many people misunderstand as a curator. Curator is like the simplest form of yield generation to actually run a strategy. That's where we really So we do vault curation because we identified some gaps in the risk processes of other curators at the time and we just wanted to have the vault set up in the way we wanted them configured. But that business doesn't make a lot of money.

That's not a, you know, I know that gets reported on D5 Lama who's a top one, two, three, but that is completely insignificant for us. It's really about we need to host those vaults so that we can run strategies on top of them. >> Yeah, Greg here in the in the comments says that's something that I'm interested in displacing Fidelity as my asset manager with AI agents or perhaps some sort of just like general onchain strategy. You know, obviously this is like still human oriented and human ran AI agents to to scrape for opportunities and then a se a separate one to scrape for risk. You know, we're we're definitely entering this like agentic finance world. People are excited about it. Um I think there's still like a lot

of trust gaps and a lot of guard rails and these things will need to kind of come to fruition, but we're still kind of working on that on the on the earn vault side. So, one thing that I've been kind of like pontificating on is like, all right, so we're going to have a lot of stable coin growth, a lot of NEO bank growth, a lot of RW RWA and tokenized asset growth, and then you're going to be using Morpho, you're going to be using Maple assets, Athena assets, aerrome, there's per here. There's a lot of these like kind of like underpinning protocols that are powering Centur strategies, the the entire business that you're running.

And so like I've been trying to just understand like if we are going to tokenize you know let's just call it there's you know a couple hundred trillion dollars of assets out there that I think are tokenizable over the next decade or two. Let's just call it like a mere 20 20 trillion over the next you know what 5 10 years that [snorts] is going to be a significant amount and that is currently you know five 10x the amount of the total existing crypto market cap. And so when you think about these DeFi protocols, businesses like Centura, we you stop thinking about these businesses as relatable for the $ 160 billion of TVL and DeFi and the three to four trillion dollars of total crypto market cap. You start to think

about these things as like asset managers for a you know taking bits of the total global asset population or size. And so when you think about this kind of like what's coming, I'm just curious from like a ma maybe more from an investor mindset or from a CEO mindset of like where you place your energy, resources, bets or from an investor perspective, where you allocate capital. How do you think about the biggest winners in this next five years based on this thesis being accurate? If this thesis is accurate, who wins the most? Where do investors allocate capital to, you know, is it the blockchain's underpinning? Is the is it

DeFi apps? Is it uh specific protocols? Is it is it a specific infrastructure? And then on a business side, how do you best kind of like uh position to, you know, gain a large amount of that ever growing pie? So maybe there's kind of two questions here from the business and entrepreneur perspective, from the investor perspective. If the tokenization thesis is correct, trillions of dollars of assets are coming on chain. Who wins? How to position to win here? >> So, I'll tell you who loses is banks that package banks and asset managers that package products because people aren't willing to do the work, right?

They either don't have the skill set or the knowledge or the time or the patience, right? Like older generations still pick up a phone to buy a stock, right? and they're they're happy to pay $27 when they can just go to their account, click a button, and get it for free, right? So, these enablers is what um blockchain and AI are going to change, right? We've had records amounts of retail users buying stock, doing the work. You know, it's a little easy when you're in a rally, but you know, we'll see if they stick around in the bare market. But in general, people are taking their finances into their own hands, and these tools are just going to enable that. So the big losers are the people who do it for you.

>> So I don't want to just become an onchain version of someone who does it for you. I want to contribute to the infrastructure that people are going to use. And what that's all going to end up doing is take a lot of rent takers out of the market which all the benefits the winners are going to be the users of these products. I mean think of I give you a simple and I wish hopefully my cloud updates fast enough. You think about the investable universe. So take individual stocks out because most people most of their money is in some type of managed ETF or strategy and then they play around with stocks as like their you know side drafting account when there's no sporting events on right so >> if you think about how many people are actively managing your money it's quite a small number

since ETFs and pass passive vehicles have been uh created so the amount of money that's actually being managed is only going in one direction right so having a parameter-based AI agent that you just what what does an asset manager do when you speak to them or a personal wealth manager? They ask you what your risk profile is. They ask your ability to sustain loss. They ask what your cash flow looks like. That's just a model driven. It's just a human asking you, but it's a model. So, what is it that hard to think that you type that into a AI interface, you know, stick within the regulations of the country and acquire the assets on your behalf?

>> I mean, it doesn't seem that farfetched now. Maybe it did a year ago, but what what are these professionals actually offering you and these institution actually offering you? >> Yeah. So then let me frame this a little bit differently. So in the current market, you could say that the market makers of these of these kind of like uh of tokenized securities specifically, you know, Citadel and Jump or whoever, right? The large ones, they make a ton of money off this current system, off this middleman, off this trading. They're like huge winners. And obviously like the big banks, right? Like JP Morgan, Chase, Fidel, all these banks make a ton of money off the existence of the current system. So like maybe a coralary here is like who is is it is it

is the winners of this then the market makers in in digital assets and on on chain who are going to be doing like is it is it the jump and the winter mute who are going to be you know you know settling these markets these rwas these tokenized equities on chain and then you know I don't know who the banks are on chain to think about it but like help me kind of wrap my head around this part. Yeah. So, think of the banks as an access point to market liquidity. So, the banks are the way you buy an ETF or or or an asset manager like a Schwab or mortgage stand is the way you get access to the market, right? Those guys are going to be are going to be minimized quite materially. Now, where where I think in the current st like

participants in the market who benefit is you're always going to need people to provide liquidity to keep Tices prices tight. So where the the the the jumps and the citadels make a lot of their money is not speculating on the direction. It's about constantly arbitrageing micro price movements so that people have liquidity at very tight prices. Right now what they get paid for it versus the value they add to the market is debatable and it's very you have a very strong view depending on which side you stand on. >> Yeah. >> But they provide a real service that doesn't just get automated away and and to be fair it's all automated anyway but it's under their wrapper.

>> Right. So the question ends up becoming is as the rappers disappear and the underlying tech gets accessible by the individual users. That's how I see the market unfolding. So you may not interact with a name again 10 years from now. It's it's just a it's just a portal where you describe what you want and it shows up and how it would show you custody which >> now will be wallets instead of 25page documents you have to sign and mail back to the brokerage house. >> Yeah. I've, you know, the the the system from buying a stock to actually where that stock settles, there's just a slew of middlemen in between.

>> Anything from a clearing house to the broker dealers to DTCC to the brokerage itself to the custody provider to the stock certificate owner. It's just this entire slew of middlemen in between specifically on tokenized securities here. And I yeah I mean whatever value that is where that value gets ported when those middlemen are removed is it's just kind of like what I'm trying to mold and figure out here. So um >> I mean the that friction is typically created by two things. So one is technology and the second is regulation.

Now technology at a big bank or a big asset manager is extremely expensive to upgrade and the banking system and the asset management system are systems are very integrated. So there's certain advant certain benefits you get if you indiv if you individually upgrade but is if the system upgrades everyone gets the benefits but that doesn't necessarily always acrue to the person spending the money to upgrade. So this is why you kind of get this deadlock where like I need a monumental uh move forward to want to spend that kind of money and I'll just keep using old system and patch them together, >> right?

>> The regulation, you know, you could be a skeptic, but I've seen it in action. The regulation is really just a backwards way of the banks putting a tax so they can they can and I'm talking very broadly. there like I think a lot of parts of DoddFrank were really good for investor protections and taking a lot of leverage out of the banks and pushing him into private credit and by definition of people who can take losses than socializing with a guy who puts 50 bucks in their deposit in a bank account, right? So I think that that's helpful but I mean I talk to fintexs all day long who you know most fintexs when they move money from one place to another and it's like woo magic it moved in two seconds. What you're what you're not seeing is when XYZ remittance company you deposit in New York and it

shows up in Mexico 12 seconds later. That's not technology. That's the bank that's the remittance guy going out to a bank taking a loan and then wiring the money to the other location, right? So you see it instantaneously, but then the bank is then the the remittance company is still waiting three days for HCA to settle. And that's why you pay 7% on a remittance. So >> yeah, >> but we have stable coins >> and there's we've had stable coins for eight or nine or 10 years and we've had blockchain. So why why aren't we doing this already? So that's one. The other thing the the regulation a lot of it is built because the old system what who owns the stock where is it is because the ledgers are hidden >> once you put that all on chain you you can track everything right where you

can't track like some of the largest uh fraud or moving illicit funds has happened in banks right HSBC took what a $7 billion fine 15 years ago for funding Iranian terrorists or you know in Mexico for drug dealers because the way that the traditional money system and why it takes so long is basically they they put all these hops in between so they can just verify at each hop that it's the same user's money but as you go through enough hops you start to lose where the original hop came from but on chain you could see it anybody can see it so these innovations I'm a bit frustrated haven't been implemented already but I understand why >> yeah interesting man last thing for me

Anthony on centator specifically is what material changes to your business will clarity act passing create? >> Um, for our business, I think it'll just unleash a lot of pent-up demand where I mean, we've worked with a ton of clients. So, there's two big blockers to this kind of like the the levy breaking and just having a flood of these. One is Clarity Act coming through. Um, and we speak to a lot of fintexs. Their two biggest hang-ups is clarity app and then the other one is DeFi is scary. I don't really understand it. Um while the yields are attractive, I'm afraid if I promote a product that gets exploited, I

lose my clients money, I lose trust and my it's game over. And that's why we incubated a company called Firelight, uh which is going to be the first scalable onchain insurance. It launches next month and we just closed our first close of our uh seed round uh this week. So Firelight's going to start insuring vaults um potentially on Kraken. We're looking to ensure staking risk, reststaking risks. So things where you and it's a very simple structure. Anyone who purchases this cover um has collateral sitting in a box next to their their capital. So if anything ever happens, the collateral sold the uh and the claim is remediated in less than 10 days. So I think insurance is probably

the biggest thing I'm excited about along the things that um because I think that's going to be the piece that lets gives the fintech uh you know web 2 users peace of mind to really start moving at scale. >> Love it. Love it. Regulation and insurance, two things that a lot of these industries have had for a long time that DeFi has kind of just struggled on. Son, have a great weekend, man. Thanks for spending some time with us. Uh, great to have you on for the first time. Would love to have you back. I'm sure I'll see you at some of the conferences in New York or at any of these kind of like tokenization RW RWA ones. Um, great weekend. Go I don't know who your who your World Cup team is.

Maybe it's the US. >> It's the US and [laughter] yeah, good luck. Have a great weekend. >> Cheers, Anthony. Peace, man. >> Bye. >> All righty, guys. Uh, that is Ctora. That is the earn economy. That is Anthony playing with poker chips that I knew you guys heard. What's going on, Eyeball? Good to hear you. Hey, freedom guy. We know, bro. If you can't beat them, join them. See what they're doing. Position yourself accordingly. You're too emotional. This is finance, not civics. We got a fight in the rollup army. Freedom guy versus Greg. The boys are fighting. We got Edward fighting on another person who was short stretch. I wonder if they uh close that short. Um,

Greg the fiat banker, I appreciate you your concern, but I know what I'm doing. Good work, Anthony. The rollup army, there's no need to fight, guys. Hype's at 64.75. Bitcoin needs to close this daily above 60. I don't know who the 60K seller is. Whoever the 60K seller is, I'm coming for you. I'm coming for you, buddy. Um, all right, guys. We've got Talaga, the founder of Nest, a pretty prominent DEX on Hyperlquid EVM, Hyper EVM. This guy's a major hype bull, so very aligned with the show, with the channel, as you guys may may assume by now. [snorts] And we're going to be talking about what

they're building with Nest, the product. Like I said, the token was flying. Like if I could pull the token up on Dex screener, it's been cooking. Absolutely cooking. Me Let me just check it out right now. Nest exchange. I'll have to find it, guys. But we're going to get Anthony up and we're going to talk to him. Here we go. Nest W Hype Gecko terminal. Oh, I haven't seen Coin Gecko's terminal before. This is pretty cool. All right, so they got hit down a little bit following the uh Hyperlid pullback that kind of like kind of like

mimics Hyperlid on like a super high beta vibe. It's uh $3 million market cap trading at a penny and a half right now. Alltime high at 4.5 cents. It was trading at less than a tenth of a penny in April. So, this thing's up like 15x in I don't even know, like two months. Obviously, very small cap. So, the whales in the chat not going to be able to ape in size, but passion. It's passion. NSM says, "I'm going to buy some more lighter today at

some point." Yeah, I mean, h I feel like yesterday was the play. It's up 12% today, but I mean if it closes here on the daily anywhere above 1.8, it's one of the strongest daily closes we've ever had on lighter. It would be a new all-time high and daily closes and the the previous alltime high is basically $2. So, we're very close to blue skies there. We're not talking lighter. We're talking Hyperlid. Let's get let's get Talaga up, the founder of Nest. Talaga, welcome to the show. Congrats on the success of Nest as of late. How how you doing?

>> Very good. Very good. Thank you for having me on and appreciate you dedicating the show to us. It's uh really nice to see. >> Great, man. Of course, man. Always, man. I was just talking to the talking to the audience here about what you guys are building. You have a crazy background. A former United Kingdom PhD cancer researcher who transitioned into crypto during a pandemic. Uh you're the co-founder behind Nest Exchange, a metaex uh offering very interesting liquidity opportunities for trading on Hyper EVM. Man, you got to tell us your story about Hyperlid. What's your Hyperlquid story? Yeah, you know, um my Hyperlquid story started perhaps a little bit later, you know, than everyone else. Um you've been in crypto,

I guess, since uh towards the end of 21. So like you said, you know, I was a cancer researcher working here in the UK and uh discovered uh you know the bull run during co we all got sent home and uh we were getting paid our salaries. We had this thing called furow and we're like you know I was with my girlfriend I was like what can we do you know with this money coming in and uh discovered the blockchain and um you know was looking around things like ADA and ETH were up massively you know over time and I thought ah you know if if I just put money in 3 months ago I would have been able to uh pay for our our traveling plans. Um so then you know we were playing around with with it a bit you know looking at crypto YouTubers making

absolutely no money getting dumped on for about a year. Um, and then sort of really dug into to crypto when Andre Cronia released the V33 primitive and I thought, you know, I'm just going to get on the technical side here, really understand what's going on. And uh, absolutely, you know, was taken away by the model. Obviously, it wasn't successful, but I could really see the benefit of, you know, systems that are distributing 100% of of revenue that they generate into token holders and and into the economy. You know, that's what really attracted me into crypto was building these financial systems that can make the world sort of better. I was thinking, you know, even just for savings in in the UK, you get like 1 or 2% even if that, right? What if everyone

was getting 5 to 6%. Uh how much better off would everyone be? You know, people would have a lot better time sort of going on. Um, long story short, I kind of messaged my now co-founder, Satsi, uh, who was working on a protocol at the time and and I I then went traveling and I was, look, I I know a lot about V33. I can write some tweets and I just did that for a bit. [snorts] Um, then sort of his his sort of project came to a close and we thought, you know, let's let's launch our own. um started out on Blast uh with a a V33 called uh Phoenix >> and um you know Blast was really fun at the start but unfortunately you know the the whole thing got closed off and and I think pivoted to sort of a mobile app.

But what we really nailed down on as a team was really thinking about incentives and what users want and you know looking at what an the economic activity of a chain is and sort of directing that in into a a positive sum system and that really brings us to to Nest and and Hyperliquid. I think you know looking at at Hyperlid it's kind of like the holy grail that DeFi has been you know looking for this whole time. you saw GMX, DYDX, and then kind of maybe good timing after sort of FTX. Uh people were looking for the next alternative, something that, you know, they're not going to take all your funds and that kind of stuff. And uh I think two things came to fruition really for

Hyperlquid. was, you know, building a great UX, working hard on the product, make sure it works really well, but also that incentives mechanism where I think now it's 99% of of protocol fees go towards, you know, buying hype. And it's this direct, you know, feedback loop that has allowed hype to grow, you know, to to significant proportions. But, you know, you got to start with building something that users actually want, right? You know, you give 100% of value, but if no one wants to use your product, then you're you're going to go nowhere in in the first place. And that was kind of the challenge that we had um on Nest.

Um I think what to to your question what attracted us to the chain was you know our experience uh sort of on blast was that there's very much um you know chosen protocols that come along to the chain and you know it's hard to compete against that if you're not part of the the sort of initial cohort. But Hyperlid and the team and and the values that they have, it's it's kind of a a meritocratic system, right? You can come in, build your project, >> acquire your users. Um, you know, we might retweet you, we might not, but there's no sort of preferential treatment. And I thought that sort of really aligned with our values of of of wanting to work on on something and, you know, if if we do well, things may pay off. Um, and so, you know, that that brought us to the chain in the first

place. we could see really the EVM layer doing really well considering that um you know Hyperloop is bringing a lot of users um you know taking users away from centralized exchanges. I think there is always a subset of people that uh will want to come onto an EVM layer to do sort of EVM finance, right? Trade tokens, provide liquidity, borrow and lend. And you know, I think that layer is going to really um sort of benefit as hyperlquid grows over time. Um but I know I've been going on for a bit here and uh I can perhaps dig into, you know, how we built Nest and why we built it.

But I think that the sort of meritocratic playground and the fact that you know Hyperlquid is this exchange that um you know is transforming the sort of perpetual futures and spot trading experience is really what attracted us to the ecosystem in the first place. >> Yeah man. And so the Nest token has been on an absolute run uh for the last three four months. Maybe you could just explain to us uh kind of like what the what the Nest bull thesis is here. uh why why should the people listening in the community consider this? Is it like a hype beta play? How does the mechanism work and kind of the liquidity uh mechanism on Hyper EVM and just kind of give us an understanding of like what

just happened? >> Yeah. Yeah. So um perhaps I I'll go to the start and you know go through the the sort of thought process that we went through you know when we were trying to launch Nest and I think what what we call it you know it's a decentralized exchange that is structurally aligned with hype uh sort of deep into the protocol core and you know what we were seeing and and we were asking ourselves the question right we launch a token on hypervm what would we do what would everyone else do and the answer is you're probably going to sell that token to buy hype because it, you know, hype has so much demand. It has the assistance fund, you know, I think it's bought a billion dollars of hype every year. It's a significant economic value chain that is roaring. You know, it's

been talked about in in CNBC. Data buying it, right? Who are you to launch a token and and expect people to buy it over that? So um that's kind of a blessing and curse of being on high prevm is that you know you have this amazing ecosystem with you know thousands of users who have been kingmade by the airdrop right and they're loyal and they they love the chain but at the same time you're you're competing against what everyone loves the most. So the answer was we have to find a way to bring that together into the system and to give users what they want which is you know more hyper exposure and uh in our case as a decentralized exchange access to the economic activity you know the fees that can be generated on the hyperVM which are separate to hyper core

and you know we landed on on on the V33 model which uh importantly gives 100% of of fees to token holders um and what happens in these sort of V33 systems is, you know, people lock a token and then they vote to earn the fees from the protocol. >> Y >> what a lot of protocols do is they allocate a lot of VE tokens, lock tokens at the start to specific uh things, whether it's the team, you know, different kind of uh incentive structures. It's roughly around 50 to 70% of the initial supply. [snorts] Instead of airdropping all of that to everyone else, we decided to do something very different, which is to build specific incentive mechanisms for the decks.

>> Um, that captures fees on the decks, but gives that back to users in a way that we think users want, but also is positive sum for the entire exchange. >> So that's called the hype engine on NES. >> Yeah. And what that basically enables is if you, you know, engage with the protocol, you LP for example, you lock the Nest rewards that you receive. Not only then can you earn the fees from the platform, but that sort of bucket of that initial supply which on other exchanges uh you're competing against here, that bucket is working for you. So you get the voting APR that you can get on any other exchange, but then every week you get this hype bonus if you deposit your lock in the in the sort of

hype engine system. And um that's I think was uh the key thing that that we really nailed down was was the incentive structure because you know if you're LP on HyperVM, >> you have hype. You love hype, right? You're going to LP hype. Wow, I can LP lock those rewards and earn more hype on top of that. Um, and the same goes for for any other users. And I think our lock bonuses have been around, you know, a thousand% annualized at the moment because we're on this growth trajectory. Um, that also means, you know, there's a lot of uh uh sort of arbitrage, LTV on the chain, impermanent loss, everything that goes with LPing. And that I think is helping to offset. And uh, you know, we've really built this for for the hype DJs, the hype bulls like us. We're

bullish hype. And um in effect to sort of close out what that enables us to do is if Nest is the dominant exchange on HyperVM, we're capturing all the fees that are generated by the trading volume on the network. Uh and your lock will capture that. But then we're also able to transform some of that into hype. Um giving you a bigger share of rewards than you can get anywhere else in, you know, what is the the the sort of fastest growing uh and most exciting token in crypto at the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. And so I mean I think you kind of outlined a really good uh you know like it was really nice to hear that you have like like like the awareness and like product understanding to think like okay people are already buying hype over most other tokens in

the market. Why is ours different? Well we have to kind of tie this deeply into it to make it kind of like that investable. And then if you look at the not to like you know fixate on the chart it's obviously very small market cap token but like it it mimics a lot of the price action of hype just kind of far more volatile and so you know when these dats are buying hype for example their whole concept is like maximizing hype per share sailor trying to maximize his Bitcoin per share David Shamus and Bob Diamond are trying to maximize their hype per share it's all about maximizing hype per share I is there a way to think about Nest in a similar fashion as you've just described in like a maximizing hype per pool per token. How do we think about the value of like

getting kind of indirect hype exposure by using Nest by locking or by holding the token >> place but Hyperlid strategies have I think and Hyperion as well have been doing you know a great job of um stewarding you know the ecosystem in in the capital markets and Hyperion really engaging with DeFi which I think is really exciting and I really do love seeing that and we've had conversations with them as well and uh yeah really nice team um hype per share um yeah I suppose you know we're we we have different token supply you know dynamics that's not really what you know we're

optimizing for per se >> what we we do have is you know the bucket of fees that are generated you know on the decks uh and also the trajectory that we believe the exchange is on and also where the ecosystem is is going to be going over time and like you were saying a little bit earlier you know Nest is is perhaps you can consider it B to you know not financial advice do your own research you know don't believe anything that people say really think for yourself but you know uh we we paired the token with hype because we're bullish on on hyperlquid and and you know I think if hype goes up over time naturally nest should follow the same trajectory um I think what we're looking at really is is that the bucket of fees

on high prevm are going to continue to And what that will enable our users to do is to convert that economic, you know, volume, that trading activity into more hype and the DEX is able to to do that for you in an automatic basis. So, it's really easy, right? You lock you deposit into an automated voter. It collects fees and and then you collect your hype every week. It's been uh interesting to see people posting their sort of P&L charts on uh on Twitter. You know, it's nice to have a community engaged and really believing in in what you're doing. um you know to to sort of fluff us up a little bit you know I think Nest is now the the fourth uh largest DEX across DeFi in terms of token holder revenue over the last 30 days maybe 50 days um I think DeFi Llama

really did us a solid by uh putting out the tweet I think earlier today showing that uh sort of quarteron quarter above certain sort of thresholds and ess's you know generated the most revenue um sort of over time over the last quarter >> but that's really you know what we're able to do here is to capture the activity on the chain and as a proportion of the pie compared to all other dexes, Nest will deliver you more and more hype. So to your sort of hype per share point, you know, uh uh if you're an LP and you're you're sort of continuously locking the token and the exchange is growing, you know, your lock will capture more and more hype over time, which for you, fantastic. You know, you're you're sort of growing uh you know, your underlying.

>> Okay. And so this hype engine I is this held in the treasury of Nest. >> Uh correct. Correct. It's a it's a V NFT. So a VE Nest position. >> Okay. >> Um so that was you know 40% of the initial supply and it it sort of votes optimally uh sort of automatically you know through an algorithm collects the fees um converts them into hype and distributes that to users who who lock Nest on the exchange. Okay. So you can lock vest for is it is it similar to like is it one month, six month, one year, two year, four year or is it longer term?

>> Yeah, you up to 6 months is how we we set it. Um typically you know like arrows four years uh we wanted a little bit of a of a shorter lock period for for some particular reasons. We think that has some advantages, but that's that's the the sort of number. >> Got it. Yeah. because I'm going to pull this up on the screen here and I just see people tweeting like okay so for example you guys just you guys just tweeted um another quarter million nest available for liquidity providers this week epoch recap from satsi here um but I'm just trying to find 44 single epoch bonus paid in hype um lock nest deposit in the hype engine

vault Okay, so you buy Nest, you lock it in the Hype Engine vault, and then you earn yield in hype tokens every epoch. >> Correct. Correct. Every week you get a drop. >> And the yields right now look ridiculous like um how is this sustainable? >> Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a good question. I mean, >> well, like where does that come from as well? >> Yeah. So, you know, the yield comes from the the overall sort of um fees that the the exchange, you know, is generating.

Um, so, you know, I think the first phase we're in right now is a bootstrap phase for the exchange. I think, you know, we've been growing massively. You know, the emissions value is is at a good level. It's been encouraging a lot of growth, which has been great to see, and that's sort of achieving um what we've we've wanted to have, which is TVL coming in and and TVL continuing to grow. Um, but that locking API is simply a function of the fees generated on on the exchange. Um, you can lock and put it into the the Hype Engine vault or you can lock and and vote by yourself. So, right now roughly 50% of people are are voting manually just collecting fees.

You know, whether you want to vote on the kinetic pool to get kinetic fees, you know, you can do that. the other 50% are in the um hype engine vault which votes automatically for you. Um compounds that back into Nest and then delivers you a hype bonus every week. >> So, >> okay, >> you know, in terms of whether the APRs will remain that hype, that depends on whether more people jump into the Hype Engine vault, right, it's going to bring it down because it's going to be shared across more people. But um there's just so much trading activity on HyperVM and and the TVL I think we have is is very productive. So it's just generating a lot of fees and and to sort of my point

earlier in terms of how the the exchange is is structured from its tokconomics. Um the vast majority of the initial supply was dedicated towards this Hype Engine reward system. So I think what users are seeing is they're just capturing much more value from the exchange than they would anywhere else. And that's why also the the APIs are high. >> Wow. Llama AI found 12 that meet all four criteria. Grew TVL grew revenue over 5 mil over 500k in revenue. And your revenue just comes from trading fees.

>> Correct. >> Got it. >> Yeah. Trading fees and protocols who you know come onto the platform can also deposit incentives but right now it's it's a majority of trading fees. >> And so how much hype have you guys accumulated in the hype engine? So when we first launched, you know, it wasn't all sort of roses and and lovely, you know, we we had a really hard start. Um it was just after 1010. Um >> okay. >> And for about 20 epochs, we accumulated hype and that was uh towards the epoch 20 that was $200,000 of hype. >> And so what we decided to do is to switch this into sort of a weekly distribution.

>> Yeah. Um, and you know, in the last 10 epochs, uh, we've, uh, sort of generated around $400,000 of hype. So, roughly annualized, it would be as it currently stands, um, I don't know, between one and $2 million of hype, but, you know, that that's just been accelerating as we've been going along. >> So, it's the we call it the biggest airdrop in in HyperVM history. So, um, hopefully that, you know, that keeps on going. And uh it also mirrors right hyperl liquid and using fees to buy back hype to bring more structural buy pressure to the token itself. And I think that gives hype balls a reason to to come on to nest because if we grows you know so so do the hype buybacks but

um obviously the assistance fund is it's a different beast entirely. >> Yeah. Okay. Um, Greg says in the chat says, "Aerero maxi relay is very attractive for guys like me. Like to lock for forever for a long time. Let compounding do its thing. Don't want to stare at charts. I have a life." Thanks, Greg. Thanks, buddy. Uh, does Nest have a similar relay strategy like Arrow? >> Yes, absolutely. And that is the Hype Engine vault. So, okay, >> that is it. Yeah, you get your lock, you deposit it in there, uh or yeah, votes for you automatically, algorithmically, collects the fees, compounds them into Nest, and you just sit there and you let the hype bonuses come in every week.

Worth noting as well, you know, people sometimes want to exit. We do have a secondary marketplace done by a third party um where you can, you know, sell your locks and um that is a trade people, you know, have been doing as well. >> Interesting. Very interesting. Very interesting. So the hype engine concept shifted from like this idea to like now just paying out the yield to the lockers basically. >> Yeah. Essentially that that's how it stands for the moment. You know we we spent a lot of time looking at DATs. Um and this was yeah just before 1010 uh looking into the protocol that it was DAT summer right everything was hardened. Everyone was pouring >> a lot of money into DATs at the time. um

it's still a possibility but given where uh the market is right now around DATs but also the the added complexity that that comes with it you know the mechanics are sound where you're compounding hype per share um and you can bring that programmatically on chain I think that's a really exciting opportunity for people to participate in that >> but uh you know we decided to take things step by step and that is get Nest to a level right where perhaps where it's supporting a it makes a lot of sense because if we're doing 50k fees a year, what's the point in having a DAT linked to an exchange? So, we wanted to prove that that key idea that we had that creating an incentives mechanism that is predicated through hype and and

capturing economic activity and giving 100% of that to users makes sense. If then you know Nest is is able to continue growing and would dedicate a portion of its fees into a DAT then suddenly that becomes an interesting proposition because >> if you look at Hyperion DeFi for example the amount of you know uh hype they have if they're getting5 to$10 million a year in in fees suddenly that becomes an exciting prospect for them in terms of revenue and that's kind of how we were thinking right if you have an onchain DAT that's generating 1020 million a year of hype in revenue then all of a sudden you can create that sort of excitement and energy around a treasury token. So, we're taking things step by step. You know, it is perhaps a slight

pivot to what we had initially imagined, but it's very much there. And >> I think so far in terms of um how we've been going, it could be a possibility, but um we're we're sort of seeing how how Nest does first and and then we'll move on to adding more complexity and sort of growing out the ecosystem as we go along. >> It looks like the highest revenue day you had was about 136,000. uh on nest for one week or >> for a day? >> For a day. It could be. Yeah. I think one epoch we hit 460 or something like that.

>> Yeah. >> For a week. Yeah. >> Interesting. So, what's next for you guys? Uh we had a question here in the chat about what what you guys are focused on next. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I think, you know, we've we've been really humbled so far to have seen this, you know, sort of great growth. really glad that hype bulls like us are sort of taking an interest in Nest and getting hype drops. You know, that's that's what we wanted to see for the ecosystem and seeing it grow. I think >> what hype EVM has missed so far is a a trading hub liquidity infrastructure.

You know, previously there was sort of more unis swap type pools which are great for spot assets, but if you're a protocol or someone who wants to build a protocol on Hyper EVM, you know, building liquidity on a on a sort of unis swap spot LP is entirely at your own cost and nest as an exchange as a V33 sort of like Aeradrome is able to incentivize that initial phase of growth where protocols need it most and you know give you distribution through the exchange and build liquidity. So now we're working really hard um as as we have been before you know on bringing users to the chain. We have some protocols lined up to launch on Nest that have come from outside the ecosystem. I think that's what we want to see on the EVM side is to keep

growing it um and keep the you know the ecosystem alive. I think now Nest is has the infrastructure to enable that as a as a you know liquidity hub. Then, you know, we're working on what we're calling NAST v2, which is a complete revamp of of the UI. We're working with Wondstruct Studio who have built, you know really >> very nice uh uh designs for some of the leading teams in DeFi and it's been fantastic working with them on refining the user experience. You know, we're exploring different things like treating LPing as a sort of trading experience, which I think will really resonate with users. Um, you know, if you're putting in an LP, right? Hype is at $60 today. I want to I think it's going to go up,

right? You set your LP from 60 to, you know, $4 and, you know, 39. Uh, and you you DCA out on on the way up. We're we're sort of taking that idea because that's what we can see most users are doing on the platform, right? They're either there to earn yield when, you know, the market's sort of a bit more stable or they're dcing in or out of hype. And we're really bringing that UX. um yeah >> trying to change things up because you know DEXUIs they're really complicated and you know you look at like 50 different liquidity pools >> no one wants to look at that and especially you know DeFi natives will will bite the bullet because they're kind of interested in that so we're revamping the UX uh uh completely um we're also bringing in a a really

interesting plug-in that is centered around sort of uh LVR and MEV you know there's a lot of arbitrage on the chain um because we're so close to hyper core Um and ultimately LPs are sort of eating that. Um we have a dynamic fee system in place that spikes with volatility but it's not very responsive. But what we've been doing is is looking at where the arbitrage and the sources uh you know where are they happening? Are people uh is price discovery happening specifically on the hype spot pair? We we think so. And then it's rooting through onto the EBM side. Um, so we have a specific new dynamic fee that comes up that is able to spike a fee based on the dislocation of the price of hyper on our DAX versus what the uh

price is on hyperlquid and that's through the the pre-ompiles and you can only do that on HyperVM which is a really exciting thing to do um that we can be much much more tighter on the dislocation and therefore charge a higher fee while steering showing that the ARB is profitable but our sort of back testing shows that that should generate roughly 20 to 50% more fees on the exchange. Of course, you have to see it live and how it actually works. But sort of in our modeling, that would be a significant boost. And you know, if you're an LP today on HyperVM, you know, hopefully that means your life is about to get a lot better.

>> Yeah. >> You know, um and you know, we have some initiatives like the uh sort of Nest Hatch, which is a um sort of a style launch. uh protocols can come on and distribute their token onto the exchange and really benefit from a fair launch type system. And uh lastly, what are what are we doing? I've forgotten. There's quite a few bits on um it was Hatch the dynamic fees. Oh, and we're also looking at um a a very specific uh change to our sort of emission structure. Um you know we we had the sort of traditional V33 um you know emissions at the start and

then sort of decaying over time which is is great for a bootstrap you know we looked really carefully at that you know Aerodrome I think over one year inflated 120%. >> Um other sort of V33s over one year were more like 250 like extreme you know inflation nest over one year is is sort of uh 100%. So, you know what that means? If you lock on day one, you know, you're you're sort of roughly you 50% diluted by by the end of the year. So, it's it's much more tighter. But now that we're growing and and we're really expanding, I think this gives us an opportunity to tailor the emissions to the amount of fees that we're generating. And this is going to happen on the fly. So, it basically allows you to to save on some emissions on the way

up uh but also constrain things on the way down. overall, you know, saving supply, but there are some specific sort of really novel boost structures that are tied to fees and momentum that haven't been shown in DeFi before. So, um, that should ensure that LPS and, uh, people on the platform are rewarded when there's high volatility like they would be on a unis swap style decks. >> Y, >> um, >> uh, instead of having, you know, this sort of rigid structure. So, um, that's to come. Uh, so plenty happening and, uh, yeah. Yeah, excited for for Nest V2 and we'll be sharing sort of more on that in in the coming weeks.

>> Beautiful. Well, Tago, man, I think the guys in the chat are pretty excited. Um, Nest my has Nest has my attention, especially 3 million market cap. Let's effing go. Uh, people are excited. Thanks for joining us, Taga. Uh, excited for what you guys are building and uh, looking forward to getting more involved, getting my dusting off the ledgers and getting back on chain here a little bit. So, thanks for your time, man. Look forward to seeing you there. Really appreciate it. Thank you, man. >> All right, Saga. Have a great weekend, man. And uh England tomorrow versus Panama here in New York.

>> Easy game. Easy game. >> Easy game. 3-0. [laughter] 3-0. 4-0. >> All right. Peace. >> Appreciate it. Take care, dude. Bye-bye. >> Uh Christian says, "What about spot equities on Hyperlid?" Uh right now, Dinari has a spot SpaceX pair that is doing pretty well. I think that's interesting. But yeah, we need more spot on Hyperlquid. Right now, they're kind of like they're kind of losing the spot trading market to Salana um and Backpack and so we definitely want to see more of that. Thanks to Laga. Yeah, man. I mean, that was pretty good. I think I think Nest could be a buy and a lock for six months. I mean, it just mirrors

the price of hype. Let's let's pull up the screen here. Uh, I'll show you guys what what what I'm looking at. So, it basically just m is mirroring the price of hype. And like, you know, it's a $3 million market cap, so you can't really do TA or anything, but it is down um it is down 71% from the highs.

If you guys can see that there, it's down 71% from the highs. So I mean I mean look at the run. I mean, it's at $3 million market cap. It's tiny. There's not a lot of liquidity. There's not a lot of trading. It's interesting. And you just get paid in hype. You hold Nest, they just pay you hype every epoch. I like it. I think I'm going to buy it and stake it and lock it and just see what happens. Small amount I guess in the chat like 1 to 5k or something. Probably like 5k

cuz if you think hype's going to go up and do well, this thing probably triples the performance of hype. I would say probably triples the performance of hype. I mean, it drastically outperformed here. The suck I mean, the thing that sucks that we missed that initial initial big pop, but I don't think it's over. Hype's breaking above. It's pushing past the resistance here at 65. Yeah, we're doing three minute charts in the rollup now. What happened to us, guys? Um, but we're going to break this level here.

I don't know, man. It went from like we're cooked to like three massive wicks to the downside. We need this thing to get back up to like six. We need a daily close on hype above 66 today. 66 67 daily close on hype would really do us well. I think it would really set the trend back to where right now we're still just kind of like fighting fighting for our life a little bit. But, you know, at a 60 something dollar hype, you know, I don't know, some some chop, some push, some chop, some push, and then a big pop would be epic over

the summer while everyone like this would line up with Bitcoin not dumping, not going to zero. Clarity Act hearing on the 17th. I don't know. Obviously, this just a squiggle on a hungover Friday, so don't take that. These are all rounding errors. These are all rounding errors. We're so early. Just back up the truck, dude. I love that, man. Let's go, man. All right, guys. We're gonna get into our daily equity segment today as per usual on the show. Um, powered by our friends at dinar. And then we've got our our we've got our AI super cycle episode next here live in the tower with Evan Fischer, a pretty prominent VC from

Portal Ventures. Um he does a lot of work in investing that they they've done a ton of investments and the theme for that episode's going to be investing in the era of AI, what that means. what kind of sectors are the most profitable, most investable, most interesting, how to think about um what happens in that world and more. So, we'll be interesting for sure. Um and yeah, guys, I mean, hype's at 65. Bitcoin's holding 60 again. We need a daily close above 60.

So, I'm feeling pretty good about it. Feeling pretty good. I think we're looking pretty good. We just need to get this thing above 66. I think today I think we need to get this above 66. Um, so let's get into the daily equity segment here and uh keep the show rolling, guys. So, let's hold 60. Let's hold hype at 65 and um yeah, let's get into daily equity. JP Morgan lifts it S&P 500 target. JP

Morgan turns more bullish on stocks to year-end target of 7,800, citing an unprecedented surge in earnings upgrades driven by AI investment in easing geopolitical tensions. This comes after Micron's beat on earnings. The bank says 2026 and 2027's earnings forecasts have risen about 10% this year. JP Morgan believes improving AI adoption and progress towards a US Iran peace deal significantly outpace the downside risks here and suggest a more optimistic market outlook still warns a potential flash crashes. While critics see the late upgrade as a possible lagging signal, the bullcase for the for the stock market now depends on AI spending

translating into growth in exceptional earnings for compute, memory, and other companies. But increasingly optimistic forecasts often leave us with room for disappointment. Guys, JP Morgan's bullish on the S&P 500, and this would bode extremely well for our positions. Extremely well. And so that's what we want to see. I think that this is a fair assumption just given to the price action. I don't think that they're accounting for Ben Cohen's year end stock pullback philosophy, midterm year, four year cycle stock pullback. We'll see if we can defy gravity there. JP Morgan lifts the S&P 500 target to 7,800. Guys, that's our

daily equity powered by our friends at dinari, the tokenized equity platform with onetoone real ownership of tokenized equities. Guys, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to get Evan up in the studio soon and get the show on the road. Happy Friday. Don't go anywhere. We just had a great conversation with the Nest folks. More to come. See you in just a second. [music] >> [music] [music] [music]

[music] [music] >> We get deep. [music] We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we [music] get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. [music] You know we get deep. We get deep know we get deep know [music] we get deep we get deep know we get deep [music] we get we get deep money powerak

[music] [music] weak weak w We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep.

[music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

>> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get [music] deep. We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You [music] know we get deep. We get deep know we get deep know we get deep [music] we get deep know we get deep know we get [music] deep we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we get [music] we get deep know we get >> [music]

[music] >> We get deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. [music] [music] Heat. Heat. N.

[music] [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know we [music] get deep.

We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. [music] You know we get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep know we [music] get deep we get deep know we get deep know we get deep [music] we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we get [music] we get deep know we get >> [music] [music]

>> We get deeper. We get deep, you [music] know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. [music] [music] >> [music] [music]

[music] [music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. [music] You know, we get deep. You know, we get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep.

We know we get deep. [music] We get deep know we get deep know we get deep [music] we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep [music] powerak [music] [music] We get we get deep, you know. We [music] get deep.

We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] >> [music] [music]

[music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. You know we get deeper. [music] We get deep know we get deep know we get deep we get deep know we get deep [music] know we get deep we get deep know we get deep [music] we get we get deep we get deep we get [music]

we get deep know we get >> [music] [music] >> We get deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep.

[music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]

[music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. >> [music] >> know we get deeper. We get deep know we get deep know we get deep we get deep know [music] we get deep know we get deep we get deep [music] know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we [music] get we get deep [music] know we get

>> [music] [music] >> We get deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. We get [music] deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. [music] [music] Heat. Heat. N. [music]

[music] [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep.

[music] You know we get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. >> [music] >> know we get deep we get deep know we get deep know we get deep [music] we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep money power [music] big >> [music] >> hour.

We get deep. We get deep, [music] you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

[music] [music] >> We get deep. [music] We get deep. You know, we get deep. We get deep. We get deep know we get deep [music] know we get deep we get deep know we get deep [music] know we get deep we get deep know we get deep know we get [music] deep we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we get

[music] we get You know we get [music] [music] we get deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] [music]

[music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep.

>> [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep know we get [music] deep. We get deep know we get deep know we [music] get deep. We get deep know we get deep [music] know we get deep. We get deep know we get deep. We get [music] we get deep. We get deep. We get we get deep, [music] you know. We get [music]

[music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] [music] >> [music] [music]

[music] >> Hey. [music] >> [music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. You know, [music] we get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep.

You [music] know, we get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. Know we get deep. [music] We get deep. You know we get deep. We get we get deep money power [music] [music] big [music] money. >> [music] >> We get deep. We get deep, [music] you know. We get deep.

We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

[music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. We get deep. [music] We get deep. You know, we get deep. You know we get [music] deep we get deep know we get deep know we get deep we get deep [music] know we get deep know we get deep we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we get we get deep

[music] know we get >> [music] [music] >> Welcome back to AI Supercycle, [music] 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 [music] massive technology. Near is the blockchain for AI and the execution of AI native apps.

You can check out Near's latest AI product at near.ai. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Going 70.

All righty, guys. Welcome back to the tokenization tower. Episode number 39 of our AI super cycle show. Our premiere weekly AI show powered by our friends at Near. Visit near.com to learn more about what they're doing in the AI sphere. I'm here with Evan Fisher in the Tokenization Tower. Evan, great to have you, man. Welcome to the Tower, New York City Empire State Building. Happy Friday. >> Good to be here. >> This is this is great. I mean, so I I was at Goldman out of undergrad and so I can I can see the office all the way downtown. Um, which is is wonderful. And like I mean we'll get into it, but so many people have talked about how excited the suits are. Yeah.

>> About crypto this this week. I mean I I got lunch with the Goldman digital assets team on on Tuesday and and the suits are exciting. So >> yeah, they are. It's an institutional bull run. >> It's a token bear run almost. It's like a token bull uh institutional bull token bear. You are an investor at Portal, the co-founder of Portal Ventures. You guys have done you guys have a massive portfolio across uh kind of crypto fintech adjacent industries. Today I kind of wanted to have this conversation about what it means to be a venture investor, an investor in general in this world of AI. Just thinking about how it affects your thesises, how it affects the way you're uh assessing founders, assessing industries, sectors, and more.

Before we get into it, just want to give you a chance, you know, what is Portal? What's your long-term thesis here? Um, and just kind of give us the quick and dirty there. >> Yeah. Yeah. The the quick and dirty. Um well so all we do is preede first check-in blockchain investing. Um it's awesome to be in this office. We were the first investors in Flume. >> Beautiful. >> Uh back in it's two and a half years ago at this point. >> Um I started portal uh four and a half years ago. I was at Insight Partners before that. Spent three and a half years there. Helped invest 600 million across global fintech internet um and software. And I was looking in 2021 at protocols. I said, "Wow, everyone thinks these are just random tokens, complete

speculation." And and they were at the time, but I said, I think you can build interesting income statements on these things. So in I wrote an article for Banklist in 2021 >> that was titled how makerdow makes money and we built an income statement for it. So I built the fund on that thesis. We said how do we invest in protocols that are just going to be profitable and be interesting businesses? You know, fast forward four and a half years, we've built a reputation as one of the best preede investors in crypto. We manage 120 million across the two funds. Um, great mix of investors, institutionals, and large single family offices. Uh, and you know, we're we're we're doing more of it. We're still excited about the category.

>> Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, man. I mean 2021 was, you know, preAI, it was pre- chat GBTE, was also pre pre a lot of like this like revenue fundamentals outlook that the space currently has in terms of like where we're at in that kind of view and in that sector. Um when you're looking now into the investing landscape preede verse check in again kind of like the thematic here being investing in the era of AI we've seen different iterations of uh crypto companies kind of come and go and now there's this kind of like big narrative overhang and investing overhang in the AI category over crypto but these two are kind of coming together and so you know talk us

through just like very broad and then we'll get into some of the of the nuance nuances of like what does it mean to be a venture investor in the post AI world? What changes do you investors have to make to their thesises to their understanding of their of the world to their world views to adapt to this kind of AI first world? >> Yeah, a lot changes. I think a lot of people talk about what changes I mean for instance you can build code faster. A code base isn't as defensible. You can ask hard questions. You can be an expert on anything. Um I'm my job is to figure out what doesn't change frankly. And so for us what what doesn't change? Well, we think there are huge problems to solve specifically across finance and

other categories with blockchain. One of my takes is I don't think crypto is a financial technology. I think that's wrong. Um so huge problems to solve. Um and the founders that go really deep with an unfair advantage on understanding that problem. It's unique insight. They're using an inflection point technology. That doesn't change. that's that's still the same. And so >> part of being a crypto investor and being in this AI bubble that we're in right now is we're familiar with it. >> We've seen it before. And what it is is everyone gets excited. Eventually we'll enter a trough of disillusionment. And you know, a lot doesn't change. And so even in the software world, I don't think that much changes. You know, is it easier to build companies? Yeah. But

that just means it's easier to build new companies that you want to invest in. So from my perspective, it's a great time to be a venture investor. There's never been more opportunity. So we what keeps us up at night honestly is where should we focus because there are so many interesting thesis to run out today. >> Yeah. Yeah. So in the crypto market specifically then uh when you're looking at the different sectors, the the different categories, we're very much looking at revenues and monetiz uh monetizable modes uh differentiators. Now, we've kind of ran all the iterations of the different perexes or the different exchange or lending or whatever it is. Um, what is what is the what does the moat look like in blockchain in a in in maybe

[clears throat] in specific sectors or categories in this post AI world? And then what becomes far more commoditized now that intelligence becomes very very kind of abundant. what becomes far more commoditized and what becomes more rare and differentiating that you would look for in a founder, in an idea or in a company? >> There's a ton in there. So, I'll I'll try to address all of it, but let me know what I missed. >> Um, >> I think uh you think where to start on this there honestly so so many. >> Um, >> so what is interesting to look at today? Well, I think network effects are still interesting. I think liquidity is still an interesting moat at certain scales of course. Um I think trust is an

interesting moat. AI doesn't touch any of those. So you know when I think about categories that are actually safe and protected from AI >> blockchain and fintech are one of them because >> building code faster isn't what ships a fintech or a blockchain product. It's the trust. It's the incentives. Um, so most of what we do we actually think is quite protected and just gets a tailwind because our founders are building faster. I was at lunch with the founder in our portfolio yesterday and he said his CTO over the post using uh, you know, claude code to build things is doing 20 PRs a weekend. That's insane to think about before. And so it's just a

tailwind to him. But how's he going to win? It's not going to be based off the codebase. It's going to be based off the insights and the markets. Um we can go a ton of different places from here. So I'll pause before I I give you a monologue on on all those questions. >> Yeah. And so liquidity um distribution network effects these become these are very powerful non-replicatable by AI like like >> dollars are not commoditizable because you can't just print more dollars. You can create more intelligence but you can't create more money. >> I could build a Bitcoin codebase really quickly now but that doesn't make [clears throat] it valuable like Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

So distribution liquidity network effects, taste, even branding, even maybe. Yeah. Um it, you know, we think about this acceleration of intelligence as like, all right, we're going to see the rapid growth of and the rapiding cheapening of the cost of intelligence, meaning that we can we can build systems and products that took much much much longer, much quicker. Um, which also creates more rapid competition. Like I can spin up competitive products and protocols to things that previously took a long time or a lot of money to build much faster. We saw this with token launches and with blockchains already, right? We had back in 2020, 2019, you

know, you had to raise 10, 20, 30, $40 million to launch a blockchain. And then we just had L2s and rollups as a service which a lot of that didn't work out in the same way that that people thought but we drastically commoditized the cost to launch chains tokens pump fund came along same kind of concept you had to raise all this money all these exchange listings no no just do it on chain same and so is there's I'm just kind of like thinking what's coming here what is the where could we see that play out again in this market where where there was this big cost or big effort required Now we have you know far better engineering, far less cost, far more pace. Where do you see that that like material tipping

point or 0ero to one possibility? >> Yeah, it it it happens across the board. That's what happens with some software businesses that you know friends of mine invest in where oh a company goes from founding to revenue to 5 million in a year's time and and like you don't flinch at that anymore because the barrier to entry has decreased so much >> in blockchain and crypto. We see so many you know new trading apps and trading platforms that just get built quickly and they give out quick incentives. They bootstrap a a trader base, but it's mercenary sometimes. And so, you know, you end up having these really fast revenue spikes, but what's it good for?

So, as an investor, what do we have to do when a business, you know, goes from one to five just like that? We sit there and we say, well, why isn't your competitor going to do that? Like, what's the unique insight? Right? again. Um, so I I think what what it actually creates an issue for is ZERP created so many momentum investors >> where they just they looked at the outputs and they said that's enough to understand the inputs. They said oh business is doing these metrics that's enough for me to think it's a good business and it's going to have terminal value and that's not the case anymore.

So you just have to think like a traditional venture investor now. So the boom and bust is gonna be with the momentum investors. >> Interesting. So then who loses in that scenario right because sometimes when you think about who wins or how to kind of allocate for like you know in any scenario any kind of path dependent scenario it's sometimes it's easier just to look at who's going to lose right like in this kind of tokenization boom that's happening right now the losers are going to be the the analogesque environments that call the the call the broker to buy the stock the middlemen in between the the owner of the stock and where the stock certificate lives when you know when a lot of this comes on chain stable coin coins replacing remittances Western Union etc. Um so kind of thinking then in the lens of

network effects liquidity distribution taste branding who who loses then if we're if if this is the winning characteristics of investments whether public or private who loses >> um it is the generalized horizontal platforms are probably most at risk. >> Explain that. Um, I was at dinner with a friend who was explaining this and we were talking about it and so I know how to apply it to software. We're still trying to figure out how to apply it to to blockchain. >> Yeah. >> But let's say that you use Salesforce right now or you use some ERP system and it's good enough but you know he used the example you run a liquor store. Well

there are lots of nuances to running a liquor store. You have to check IDs. You have certain licensing that you have to manage certain inventory rules. And so it's it's not perfect. you say it's it's good enough. And so entrepreneurs are going to come along and they're going to say "Oh >> I could over the course of a few months build something that's actually like an ERP system or a supply chain management system for a liquor store." Yeah. >> And in the past, you'd say the development cost of that was too great. >> But technology is deflationary. And so cost to produce reduced. Therefore, we can have more specific products. Um you can have more consumer surplus is one good thing. Uh but I think you're just going to have a lot of smaller outcomes.

If you're a generalized platform, you need to figure out how do I build customized solutions all of a sudden and is it worth it? >> Yeah. So then applying that framework to blockchain, there was this kind of like every app is going to have its own chain idea for a while, right? But that didn't really end up happening. >> Yeah. I think that's ridiculous. >> Yeah. >> Well, and to be clear on that, like people depending on people's bags, they change their mind on that every six to 12 months, you know? >> Yeah. But then how do you apply that framework then to so so so like the generalizable horizontal platforms or what you know whatever that is in crypto will not be as favorable as the more specific use case specific ideas. Well, well, so what's interesting is for crypto, I think it's different again

because it has the benefit of network effects and liquidity, >> right? >> Um, so you know, where the liquor store example applies, it actually doesn't, this is back to my point of I think crypto is quite protected from all things AI. Like I I think it is a tailwind, not a headwind. It's helping teams build faster. As an investor, you have to be cautious because you see quick momentum. you say, is this durable? But I don't see it really risking market disruption. Another thing people talk about is like, oh, are the founders, you know, are all the founders going to to AI?

>> It's like, well, >> you know, you have fintech founders entering, you have people from marketmaking firms, HFT firms entering, >> and you just have some people that come from financial institutions. And so they were never in the candidate list of of building AI. People that are momentum have left. Um but it's it's like I I wish I could give you more. I I really just think it's a tailwind. >> Yeah, it's interesting kind of then more specifically on the convergence, right? We we we've seen a lot of traction around like decentralized training, decentralized inference. Um obviously like you know products like Venice have done extremely well with with their privacy aspect. nearest as private inference. We've seen this convergence

start to happen. I know you guys are kind of more focused on the financial services but also have done some kind of like convergence investments if we're thinking about so kind of like this conversation has has been like investing broadly in that world but then like what about more nuanced in the convergence of the two worlds it do do you do do does portal have a thesis on uh the value of blockchain in AI world? Yeah, we Katrina on our team wrote an article on this um three and a half years ago. Yeah, I think which was beyond hype here are the four use cases we think matter in AI times crypto.

>> Cool. >> And if you go back on that article, it's pretty much played out that way. Um one of the first is can you use incentives to uh you know create compute to acquire compute and so we were an early investor in Exhibits as an example. they started off as a decentralized GPU marketplace have scaled massively on that thesis. Uh, another one is sovereignty, you know, like that I think is still underexplored actually. Um, or excuse me, not sovereignty, providence. Um, and so Worldcoin's a great example of that. How do you decide what's real? I think there's tons of opportunity there. Um, we're investors in a business called Interval, which is using blockchain um, for private enterprise AI. And one of the value props is you know when you

throw the data on chain you just know what's real what's not real compliance so on so forth. >> Um the the other two you know you have some governance dynamics which I think are turning into harnesses >> and the last one is how do you incentivize data collection which is absolutely playing up. So that's everything that we believed three and a half years ago and we we've been investing along those lines. Um you know the first check into plume but we do a lot. We're always saying what's the market missing that they're gonna be on to in two to three years, right?

>> And so two to three years ago, FTX world, people were like, "Oh, >> yeah." >> You know, they're never DeFi is never going to come back. It's it's it's dead. And you know, one of our best DeFi investments ever. I I I wrote the check the week after FDX. I was like, "This is of course it's coming back. It's the best use case so far." >> Yeah. Yeah, man. It definitely I mean it pays to be like country in that regard when it comes to kind of thinking about um you know bringing these worlds together as you're saying um obviously there's this kind of growth of AI having like like this kind of tailwind as you're saying to uh all the use cases that blockchain and digital assets can serve you know but one thing that that I think is is clear is that people are pe

people are looking at this and wondering kind of like when will the the growth of this kind of open- source decentralized you know insert whatever part of the stack here really ever like compete with that the kind of like frontier labs and the actual like model companies that are uh you know have raised billions and billions and billions of dollars and so my question to you is and again as part of this kind of like investing in the post AI world I think we're going to get to a spot where we're we're going to realize that we've gone too far we've given too much data we've allocated too much resources. This this thing is getting too fat, too good too fast, you know, and I'm just curious if you think that a tipping point is required for people to kind of like turn over to the

more open- source open source decentralized iterations of kind, you know, some of the more closed source centralized iterations of LLMs and AI that exists. just like broadly like we kind of reached that tipping point when the Bitcoin block was the Bitcoin Genesis block was created when it was like banks on the bank of brink of bailout 2008 it was like holy we need something different >> do you think we might get to a point like that in the AI world >> you know I think the consensus answer would be oh the US government's going to nationalize the AI labs it's a national security threat and that privacy is going to be an issue or oh Gavin Newsome's going to make it so you have to sign into your computer with

um an ID and you're you know you're going to get KYC to use your computer. Honestly, I don't think that would do it. Like I I think it's either going to be a better product and people are going to use it or it's not and the you know privacy use case like it doesn't people there's not much track record of people making decisions for the sake of privacy. >> Yeah. Um, even within crypto with people who, you know, are very investing heavily in everything privacy related, whenever there's something easier, cheaper, faster, better, they use the product. Yeah.

>> Like we're humans are lazy at at our core. So, >> it needs to be better. Now, what could make it better? If regulation actually starts making these products harder to access for certain questions >> or makes it harder to access the best models such that the best models publicly are from the labs are actually weaker than some of the open-source models all of a sudden then you start to see adoption. So >> it still needs to be a better product. >> So it's not like an ethos game or like a privacy game or a data game. It's uh it's just humans are, you know, privacy has has this kind of stated belief issue where there's like this stated belief of of the desire of it, but then the actions don't always kind of show. And

yeah, you're you're kind of saying it's just going to be a product thing. >> It's you could run a fun game with your crypto friends and play stated versus revealed preferences on privacy and just go through their tech stack. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. kind of zooming out to the more like fintech financial services investing era that you guys have really really done a lot of deals in and then thinking about the acceleration of these kind of more macro events. Obviously AI kind of been the topic of conversation today. a lot of these investments that you do and I'm sure that you found this I found this through you know through the investments that we've done plume being one of them as well which is there's all these like path dependencies externally and internally that affect the likelihood of success of an investment and like one of

the externalities right now is we're just in this mega acceleration spending capex on AI and so as it pertains to some of the financial services and fintech investments that you've done you know in 2020 20 2019 maybe you know you couldn't have predicted that we could write into an LLM to send stable coins globally and you know it would be done in fractions of a second for fractions of cost agentically but like these tailwinds have played in our favor such that AI is just very good at reading zeros and ones blockchain hashes transaction addresses IDs are zeros and ones and letters and numbers and the rise of stable coins obviously kind of like probably more more predictable so

when when it when you're looking at your portfolio of fintech companies you feel free to talk about some uh financial services companies. The proliferation of both AI and stable coins simultaneously from like a regulatory perspective and just a capex perspective are like very interesting headwinds for or sorry tailwinds for like this kind of path dependency in a positive way. Um talk to us about kind of what that that more macro broad view is that you have for fintech and financial services and then how that kind of dribbles down into your investing framework for some of your portfolio companies.

>> Yeah. I I view um I'm sure Kyle will get mad at me because I'm about to do an analogy. Yeah. Um but I I view [laughter] uh blockchains as kind of the app store moment for finance. So what does that mean? Like the app store really created a ton of new software applications because it created global distribution. It managed a lot of your backend for you and the result was you could have stories like WhatsApp. You know that was a huge story back in the day. sub 20 person team building a you know a platform and an application that scaled to millions potentially even billions of of users I forget when they were acquired. Um so what does blockchain do?

It it opensources some of the hardest parts of financial services innovation. You have the custody, the distribution, the liquidity, it's all open source software now. And so you're lowering the barrier to entry for creating these new products. And that's where I think you're seeing this proliferation of, you know, teams building unique financial products. So one way that we've expressed this is we have this thesis we call latent capital markets. >> There are so many financial markets across the world where there is demand for products but the demand's not met because the cost of serving it has been too high >> or there's been a you know PR issue or a regulatory there's so many different reasons but it's it's just underserved demand. And so we specifically were looking into some of the AI spend and

the energy spend. We said wow uranium's interesting. So, we went super deep on all of these energy categories. Landed on uranium, realized uranium doesn't have a spot market. >> Yeah, >> it's it's a it's obviously a huge asset for the next coming decades, but there's no spot market. And if there's no spot market, there's no derivatives market. >> So, there's a huge prize to be done. So, we were the first check into a business called Uranium Digital. Um, they are tokenizing uranium to create the world's first spot market for uranium. >> Yeah. >> Physically settled, sells through brokers. You can access it through your traditional prime brokerage platforms if you're an institution. That's possible because of blockchains, right? Because a tiny team, team sub 10 can all of a sudden create a product that like it

would have taken a financial institution to actually get off the ground. >> Yeah. And so again, kind of coming back to where we started on the top here, this is like a second and third order effect of this AI capex boom. You got this high demand for commodities. copper, uranium have been absolutely on a tear the last 12- 18 months. And so you're, you know, then then we start thinking about like uh the financialization of these assets. Uranium not having a spot market. There's like a couple ETFs you can buy right now, but they're mostly miners. Um there's like a Tezos spot market right now on chain, but it doesn't really exist globally. And then you have like the financialization of compute happening as well. There there was a company that just raised from A16Z I believe yesterday it was announced and

they're basically just all in on how do we create a basically commodities like market for compute doesn't really exist right now. Yeah. And so that's happening too. And so like we're like there's all these little ripple effects but one of them is the financialization of these of the commodity sector that is powering this kind of AI capex boom. >> Yeah. And if we zoom out too, like some mental models I have for the space are um the world is getting faster, more complex and more AIdriven and finance and financialization is actually really valuable for that. I think financialization has gotten a horrible rep because it's just been associated with like [clears throat] >> markets, gambling, whatever it is, nationalism. Yeah. Yeah.

>> And it's like well financial markets are are like queryable. It's maybe it's like a Nick land idea like it's like this queryable intelligence all of a sudden. I mean if you want to understand a belief about the world study financial markets understand the revealed preferences you can ask such interesting questions. So I think financializing things is actually great and I think as the world becomes more complex it becomes more valuable. So that's where things like financializing compute, financializing commodity markets, financializing new credit instruments, financializing intangible assets, financializing trust, reputation, all of this. I I actually think it's good because it helps us query a very complex world and understand where value sits.

>> Well, it's, you know, it's just about creating the best price discovery as well for things that people are interested in. Yeah. >> And that and I mean, I think the thesis here is that whether it's [clears throat] finan uh financializing compute, uranium, etc. 247 global market access via blockchain rails is the best way to create price discovery for global investors. >> Yeah. Yeah. Correct. And so we spend a lot of time asking what are other nonobvious things to financialize. We're investors in the company that's creating intervals. This company I mentioned earlier creating a data marketplace. >> So how do you do secure compliant trades of enterprise data?

>> Really interesting. I think in the world of AI well if your data is public it's obviously commoditized. everyone's trained on it and so what are all the foundational models trying to do? Get private data. That's where the alpha is. Y so you need infrastructure for that. Um >> so the world's going to be more financialized. >> Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And so when you're thinking about like like the parts of this kind of like uh AI and finance stack, you've got kind of parts that are financialized as a result of the growth of the sector and then you've got kind of like the actual stable coin sending the actual trading or whatever it is. Where do you see like from the investors perspective, right? Where do you see the

I I suppose like the value capture that will happen for fintex for financial service companies for these kind of like like as they collide with the agentic kind of finance flows and and workflows where are you placing your chips for here's where I think the these types of companies or these types of parts of this kind of broader picture are going to be the most valuable versus like the most commoditizable or kind of like basic. >> Yeah. Um what's really interesting about financial services innovation is the innovator's dilemma is stronger than what we explain to us. Yeah.

>> Um you know the innovator's dilemma is the the concept of uh the person who built the big technology in the past has so many assumptions about how they view the world. They're locked into certain worldviews because the products they've created. The incentives make it so they're not as incentivized to innovate. That's where people often said, "Oh, you know, the big companies aren't going to compete with the small companies." Um, people like Google came along and have somewhat disproved that. Google, Amazon, like it's it's incredible the their ability to fight the innovative innovators dilemma. But and a lot of a lot of crypto investors go wrong when they view crypto as software >> because it's not. If it's if you're

serving financial services, point to financial services examples that have handled platform shifts well, you know, like Stripe is a new company. Robin Hood is a relative like both these are relatively new companies. So I I look at that and I say, >> well, I don't think the incumbents are going to capture this. >> Yeah. Um, so we're for the most part there are rare exceptions where I think that there's actually an innovator's dilemma like um where there's actually an incumbency risk, but for the most part we think it goes to new players.

>> Interesting. And so that is that like is that like the banks that the incumbents, the brokerages, the traditional rails? Yeah, it it depends on the category you're you're looking into, you know, like for a lot of these credit products, the banks are are the incumbents for obviously for agentic payments and that's one where like I'm I'm curious to see how it plays out because there there is a benefit to adding the rails and owning the distribution. Um, but there it's like the Visa and the Mastercards are >> right. But like in that specific example, Visa, Mastercard, there's kind of conflicting views here of they know that their card networks are not meant to support aic microp payments at scale, but they're also going to kind of build out stable coin rails. But then you have people arguing like, oh, like the credit cards are going to be better or, you

know, these card programs are better than stable coins. That one's been a kind of a big point of conflict. But I think both I think both will work. >> That that's usually the answer. Is it >> um like financial services is the second largest TAM in the world, >> right? >> There are huge huge outcomes. When people were looking at payments companies over the last decade in the traditional venture world, >> the biggest mistake people made every round was undersizing what they thought the TAM was >> because they they would look at numbers and they'd say that's insane. There's no world in which you could have that much payments volume. There's sticker shock to it. And that's the case when you look at tokenization, you're like, "How big

could tokenization get?" You see numbers that start with a T. >> Yeah. >> You're like, "No, that that that could that could never be true." >> Yeah. >> Um but it's just such a big category. So the answer is like it's going to be all of it. Which is why we say sometimes people are like, "Oh, is is crypto just finance? If so, has it compressed? Is it not interesting enough?" I'm like, >> "If that's our bare case, >> yeah, >> that's that's interesting." [clears throat] And I don't think that's true. Like I think crypto is um is like a coordination technology. It's its competitor is the legal system in my mind not >> it's it's not a financial technology. So, >> yeah.

>> All right. So, just kind of zooming out here as as we kind of come to a wrap in a bit. Just thinking from the investors perspective, we've seen iterations of the ramifications of this AI boom. We saw a we've seen a massive runup in memory stocks. We've seen a massive runup in commodities. We've seen a massive run up in uh storage and in compute and in chip and semiconductor stocks. >> Yeah. >> Looking out now with where we're currently at, what is what is Evan Fischer's Portal Ventures view of the world of investing, you know, either tangentially or in this kind of broad

category, crypto, AI, global macro going forward. Obviously, if if if you didn't, you know, get into the early rounds of the big frontier labs or if you weren't buying semiconductors or commodities over the last 18 months, you kind of feel like you've missed out. You feel like there's been a huge boom and I missed it. And honestly, I missed a lot of it. I I had a good bit of gold and silver and somehow they were kind of bucketed into that somehow. So, that's nice. But I didn't, you know, I didn't get any seed checks into uh any Frontier Labs and uh passed on all the SPVS because I just was like, I'm never going to get my money out of this and uh looking at like semiconductor storage, etc. It's just been a crazy mania.

[snorts] Um where do we go from here from the investor who's looking at this market now global macro wise and wanting to allocate you know bitcoin and crypto AI based kind of investments uh commodities give us like your portfolio man put your portfolio manager hat on how do we allocate in today's world >> well well I'll start with if you it's it's not too late to trade the memory stocks and if you believe that you should go on vest markets and trade the memory stocks the only place you can do that right now if you want me to plug more more portfolio >> companies >> also a portfolio company of our of our fund.

>> Wonderful. Yeah. >> Um [laughter] uh so where do we go from here? >> Again, you have to kind of zoom out and ask the question like what do you believe in? I I'll focus on on early stage investing because like I'm a venture investor by training. So >> you're you're thinking 10 plus years out. Yeah. What's the world going to look like in 10 years? >> Yeah. Uh the world is getting faster, more complex, and more AI driven. And if you think about like the coordination technologies that we have for that, it's legal technology is is one of them. So it's like our legal system is starting to be outdated in terms of the mechanisms it uses to enforce things.

>> Think about law. What does it do? It creates trust because there's a verifiable commitment. I see I'm going to do something. It's in a contract. And then there's enforcement. So you can trust me as a counterparty. Well, if you start to think about AI and the pace at which everything is going to run, it's like are are we going to are we going to do lawsuits from AI to AI for a transaction that happened, you know, that happens every minute? Like there's so many things that are going to play out that are just too fast and too complex for our existing legal infrastructure. Yeah.

>> So, I think the most interesting blockchain applications into AI are coordination technology. M >> and I think people keep pointing to the payments and the finance of it because if you compare it uh to a legal technology again what do you use legal technology for in the first place was like accounting ledgers. It was financial use cases were the first use case of legal technology. So that's where everyone's getting mistaken and they're saying oh blockchain's a financial technology. No, it's it's like a legal technology >> where the first use case is finance and the rest of them are going to become so obvious to the general public >> given AI over the next 5 to 10 years.

And so that's what we're most focused on right now as an investor. I don't think other people are playing here. I think people are too focused everything finance. >> Um so we're we're we're doing some deals there. The founders building there. We we I took a pitch just before this in Williamsburg. Nice. Um, that's what we're most excited about. >> So, focusing not on finance, not on kind of like the more financialized pruners, that's still a part of the vision, the fintech and financial service and the stable coin proliferation and just the kind of the growth of the total global crypto total market cap, etc. But it's really just this coordination focus, this next stage, you know, it kind of reminds me of the of the blockchain, not Bitcoin era, right?

>> Exactly. And um don't get me wrong, we're still doing financial investing. >> Yeah. >> We're just we're in the business of saying what are people not paying attention to? >> Of course. >> And so, you know, when FTX crashed, >> it was DeFi. It was like when we invested in Plume, people were saying, "Oh, crypto is never going to be regulated in the US. Everyone's going to have to move offshore. It's going to be this like, you know, renegade technology." And I was like, >> "Yeah, sure. >> That's dumb. It's obviously going to be regulated." And whoever does that first wins, >> right?

>> Um and so for us right now, the coordination stuff is just completely missed and and we think potentially a bigger opportunity than some of these finance applications. >> Love it. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been Evan Fischer live from the tokenization tower on AI super episode number 39 powered by our friends at Near covering the investment framework and mental models for investing in a post AI future. thinking about commodities, equities, crypto, the second and third order consequences of what is happening across financial services, fintech, and aentic finance. Evan, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming to the tower. It's been a pleasure. I'm sure you're busy. We're going to let Evan go. We're going to finish up here with markets, charts, news, and cover

the rest of what is happening in this crazy, crazy week of a market that we've had. Guys, don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]

>> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You know [music] we get deep we get deep know we get deep [music] know we get deep we get deep know we get deep know we get deep we get deep [music] know we get deep we get we get deep money power [music] >> [music] [music]

>> We get deep. We get deep, [music] you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. >> [music] [music] [music] [music]

[music] >> We get deep. We get deep, [music] you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we get deep. [music] We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we get [music] deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep.

[music] We get we get deep. We get deep. We get we get we get deep, [music] you know. We get [music] We get [music] deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. We get deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep.

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

[music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. We get deep. [music] We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You know [music] we get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep know [music] we get deep we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we get [music] we get deep know we get

>> [music] [music] >> We get deep. [music] We get deep, you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep. You know, we get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know we can beat [music] [music]

[music] Hey, >> [music] [music] [music] >> hey, [music] hey.

>> [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we get deep. [music] We get deep. You know we get deep. You know we [music] get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. Know we get deep. [music] We get deep. You know we get deep. We get we get money power. [music] [music] We get deep, [music]

you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] [music] >> [music]

[music] [music] >> We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. [music] We get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You know [music] we get deep. We get deep. You know we get deep. You [music] know we get deep. We get deep know we get deep [music] know we get deep we get deep know we get deep we get we get deep we get deep we get

[music] we get deep know we get >> [music] [music] [music] >> We get deeper. We get deep, you know. We get deep. We get deep. [music] We get deep, you know. We get deep. We get deep. We get deep. [music] You know, we get deep.

[music] >> All right, Nero, >> welcome to the tower, brother. >> Thank you, >> Nero. You have to uh introduce yourself. One of the the longest standing rollup team members in New York now visiting for the World Cup, >> you know. >> Yeah. >> Where are you from? What do you do at the rollup? What's your experience been like? It's been an amazing experience, life-changing. Um, I started actually with the rollup. Before it was called the rollup. >> Yeah, >> it was Defi Slate. This guy had met my brother uh first and then I started working uh part-time with him while I was doing uh civil engineering work and then it started to catch on and um went

through the bear with them >> and now we're here. >> Now we're here. Now we're here. It's the World Cup in New York. Yeah, >> incredible games. Columbia doing incredibly well. >> Yeah, I started two against games in Mexico. Now we're here. >> How How was that? How is Mexico? >> Amazing. Best football experience of my life. >> Really? >> Yeah. >> Really? >> Definitely. >> First World Cup. >> Yeah. First one. >> Wow. >> Hopefully not the last. >> Full of Colombian fans just everywhere. >> We took over Mexico, man. >> Took over Mexico. [laughter] >> All right, guys. We're uh to you guys in the chat, Freedom Guy, Rugrat, what's going on? We're going to look at the markets. We're going to look at the World Cup. We're going to start with the World Cup. We're in New York. Norway is playing France right now. Leo's going to

pull up on the screen. Nero. Nero is Leo's brother, guys. So, the producer here working the screen is is >> Leo. >> Nero's younger brother. Um, we're going to pull the screen up. So, Norway France is right now France is up two to one. >> Um, let's talk about the World Cup winner. All right. So, right now, France is the highest projected to win at 21%. Okay. Argentina 15, Spain 13, England, Portugal, Netherlands around the nine, Brazil, Colombia is down here at 1.7%.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean >> I mean that's >> that's reasonable. >> So, what do you think? Who's our who's who's our top two or three? Nero's our in-house FIFA expert. So, I'm going to be I'm going to be placing live bets based on who he tells us to. I mean that's like the general consensus right there. Yeah. I mean I I cannot disagree with that but I have like this uh feeling that Brazil might shock everyone. I mean it's been 24 years since the last time they won it.

>> Yeah. >> And it's the longest streak since the first since the first time they won it. >> Yeah. >> They went from 1970 to 1944 also in the US. Really? 32 years ago. >> So I got the feeling that they gonna redo the same thing. >> Wow. Okay, so Brazil at 6%, guys. Uh, that pays big. Uh, let's see. Let's see. World Cup winner. $100 on Brazil. $100 on Brazil pays you $1,500. That's enough for a couple nights in New York for the boys. [laughter] All right, we're going to take Brazil, guys. I agree. I spent a lot of time in Brazil. Really enjoyed it. Vinnie's on a hot streak right now. And they got Neymar back.

>> Yeah, I kind of, right? Yeah. Is he back? He played. He played, >> but he's not like back. >> He's not in at his full >> collection. >> All right, we're going to do a little $25 on Brazil to win it all to win 400. All right, let's get into the games coming up uh this weekend. So, we've got um England, Panama. That one's hard to predict because it's just going to be >> like three England England wins. Yeah, you you can bet on the spread or something like that, but >> Yeah. Yeah. uh tonight or Sagal Iraq just started. Sagal is probably gonna take that one.

>> Uruguay Spain. >> You think they could take it? >> Ah, bro. I mean, I just saw recently that they have like internal issues, the coach and the players. >> So, uh it's a spot for them%. >> Yeah, >> that would be a crazy win if they won. >> I think they go for a tie. I >> You think a tie? >> Yeah. I mean, they they always But >> we're going for the tie. We're going for the tie here, guys. Urguay and Spain. That would be crazy. Spain would be >> Spain would be in >> in a bit of a rough spot.

>> Yeah, but Spain is I think it's already qualified. So >> So tell me in this iteration of the World Cup in the US, in Canada, Mexico, only only eight teams from what I understand or sorry, eight third place teams in the groups make it to the knockout stage. Yeah, it's because of expansion. >> So, what are we even playing for? It's like a bunch of international friendlies. Like, what [laughter] are we kind of >> You know what I'm saying? >> I mean I mean the the only reason to do that is to have more games and make more money. So, >> yeah. I mean, that's kind of >> is plenty happy with that.

>> I mean, I'm going to go for the uh to be fair with the lesserk known teams. I mean, they have gotten like some pretty um shocking results. >> Yeah. I mean I live >> Spain Spain couldn't beat uh Cabo >> both and Euro White didn't too. >> I mean I watched Ecuador beat Germany at >> Ecuador couldn't beat Kurasau. So there you have it. >> Doesn't make any sense. >> That's how unpredictable it is. >> Cape Verde South Africa New Zealand Belgium actually Kith Verde Saudi Arabia is pretty close. It's a it's a tossup. >> Yeah, it's a tossup. I would say one zero cap verde.

>> One zero cappo verde. >> Yeah, because I mean they held up against Spain and Euro way. You will expect them to. >> Guys, we're gonna come back on Monday and we're gonna just go over all these picks and see what our local in-house expert here took us. We're gonna go one zero. Cappo Verde. >> I'm I'm doing good in my fantasy. Uh >> oh, there's a World Cup fantasy. >> Yeah, there's a fantasy. But I mean, let's hope that the continues, right? Wat. >> Um, all right. Let's look at >> the big game. >> What's that? >> Go to a big game on the weekend. >> Yeah. Who's that?

>> Colombia and Portugal. Colombia and Portugal of course. >> So tell us about what what's at stake here for this game. >> I mean the stake is to uh who's who tops the group. >> Yeah. I mean uh Colombia has got six points. Portugal has got four. >> Yeah. >> Uh Portugal needs to win in order to get the first spot. >> The main thing here is to avoid England. Uh which is one of the possible rivals >> in the in the first round of the knockout stage. >> Exactly. So if Colombia wins, they will So the loser of this game likely plays England.

>> Exactly. >> And the winner, who they play? >> They might play Ghana or Croatia. >> Okay. Yeah, it's different. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Okay. Okay. So right now, Portugal at 53%, Colombia at 24%, Thai at 24, sorry 25%. So the the the odds are in Portugal's favor here. >> Yeah. I mean, definitely Portugal is one of the favorites uh of the tournament. Uh, so and if I go by the uh by the heart, I I'll I'll go Colombia always, but I think it'll be like a tie. Yeah.

Like a 1-1 or something. >> And um Ronaldo. >> Ronaldo. >> He scored one goal, I think. >> Two, I think. Yeah, two goals. >> But people were saying that Mbappe Messi >> Yeah, it's like they were having a party and Ronaldo wasn't invited, but he he got to a party later scoring against. Yeah [laughter] >> he got two goals. >> He got two goals. Yeah. >> Yeah, there was Beanie scoring and >> Messi and Mbappe. >> Everybody like, "Where's Ronaldo?" And >> I went to the Norway game and Holland scored two goals, man. Watching Holland in person. Never seen anything like it, bro.

>> Bro, he's a freak, right? >> Dude was just like, you know, the like the goalie gets the ball and I've never seen a guy It's like a cheetah. It's like a cheetah that's like watching like a wilderbeast run and it's just like bang. Yeah, it's amazing the speed that he has for his size, right? >> Yeah, he's like 6'3, big shoulders, like >> so >> that that must have been something. Definitely. Yeah. He's like one of those guys that is supposed to take to the the throne of Ronaldo Messi like >> And what is he 20 21? >> No, he's 23 24 I think. >> 23 24 now. But he started when he was like 19.

>> Yeah. Yeah. He started breaking records from as a teenager. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. All right, guys. Coming into the markets here. hype holding up 65 looks pretty good. >> Bitcoin just trying its best to hold 60k. I mean >> it's doing everything it can. >> Yeah. >> I mean I mean for us it's like we want to we want to buy cheap Bitcoin, you know, like in the 30s 40s would be insane, but man it would it would be not great for the roll up here. >> Another bare market for the boys. >> No, not like the not like the one from 2022. No, [laughter] >> we don't want to go back there. go back there. Yeah, this one's been better.

This has been better. >> So, Bitcoin's holding up, guys. Again, I think, you know, we're looking to to hold the line here. We want to see hype close the daily above 66. So, we really want to see a breakout here. We want to see Bitcoin close this daily above 60. And then, I mean, that's it, man. I mean, you got stocks, you know, holding up. Um, bunch of other coins kind of just barely holding up. Salana up a little bit today. >> What's Salena? 73 >> 73.

>> It's actually good compared to >> I know, right? It's uh it's it's holding up good today. So, >> yeah. >> Yeah, man. So, so New York for for for the weekend. >> Yeah. Uh I mean I'm I'm looking forward to what you're going to show me. [laughter] >> I don't think he wants to know, guys. Guys, as always, it's been an amazing show. W's in the chat. W's in the chat. Guys, thank you for being a part of it. Uh, happy Friday. Uh, Nero, one of the longest standing uh, players, team members, hardest working folks, does incredible work, been absolutely crushing. Uh, Freedom Guy says, "I like teams with good young goalies that can catch fire in the tournament. Ask, what

teams fit that description other than Holland?" >> Okay, >> teams with good young goalies that can catch fire. >> Catch fire. I mean, h >> like young goalies that are kind of under under represented. >> Uh I would say I mean like Spain, but I I don't think the goalie that that's that's been like on the ascent lately. I don't think he's starting. >> Yeah. >> I haven't been able to catch like all the games. Um so I really wouldn't know. Uh >> Oh, good. We're going to go with Holland then.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Guys, thanks for being on the show. You know where to find us. Bear Bull. We're going to be here. We're going to be here tomorrow. Well, not tomorrow, but Monday, 12:30 p.m. Eastern, live from the Financial Capital of the World, tokenization tower, the nest. I mean, we're here. [music] The markets are down and up. We still think that was the sweep and then we go from here. So, >> close this out. Nero. >> Um, it is great to be here on the tokenization tower. Yeah. Uh, and yeah, I mean, just enjoy the workup and look at the markets afterwards. Don't worry about that. Now, >> there you go, [laughter] guys. Happy weekend. Have a great weekend. W's in the chat. Have a great weekend. Rugrat,

Freedom Guy, uh, NOOCC, Cross Central, >> Edward, all you guys. We'll check on the positions on Monday. Greg, everyone else, Christian, guys, thanks for being part of the show. See you guys later. Don't [music] [music] heat.

>> [music]