🚨LIVE: Tom Lee Buys More ETH! Is Revenue Durability What Matters? HYPE, PUMP, LIT, ZEC Ripping.

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[music] [music] [music] 17 lord. >> [music] >> We'll see you around the timeline.

Feels good to be back. [music] >> I think The Rollup is one of the most premier media brands in crypto and Andy and Robbie are great experts [music] at everything they talk about and it's my favorite podcast. >> Adding it to my library every week. potentially multi-chain deployments. >> We are at [music] connect day one here. I'm testing from space. [music] [music] [music] [music]

>> [music] [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. [music] JP Morgan, Black Rockck, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions.

It's just it's next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I I don't know what else to say. >> I'm bullish. >> He said it. HE FINALLY SAID IT. So bullish. >> It is bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. [music] [music] >> [music] [music]

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

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

>> Zoom out. The institutions aren't coming. They're simply [music] here. It's the golden age of crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. [music] Welcome to the next. See you on the show. Yo yo yo yo yo yo yo Robbie Drunken Miller bought my bags over the weekend. >> Andy Drunken Miller >> Andy Drunken Miller Robert Tudor Jones accumulating DCA strategy buying more Bitcoin. I saw that tweet on Friday night so house after with the guys hanging out. We had a couple clients roll through some other friends. had a crazy night with uh these three guys who

are selling preIPO blocks of different companies. Like not like a big like party night or anything. It was more just like >> it felt like an episode of a big short in real life. I'll tell you more about it. Um but uh but yeah, man, what a what a good weekend for the coins. How was your weekend, man? >> Well, uh weekend was fantastic. Felt like it was non-stop just moving moving around, getting things uh situated and settled. >> Yeah. Um, but overall, man, I mean, plenty of things are happening. It's wild how market conditions, I mean, were apathetic going into the weekend. Felt like we were getting news. Now things are looking a little bit better. We'll get into markets in a little bit, but pretty green across the board.

>> Definitely. >> I mean, man, thesis is uh is unchanged, but it feels like every day we draw closer and closer to uh to the start of a new cycle. >> Agreed. Guys, as as always, you're watching the rollup live from tokenization tower, the nest, powered by our friends at Plume. Let's give them some love here at the Empire State Building, 77th floor. Absolutely epic day. Uh started off a little cloudy, a little rainy, but it's beautiful. Today's August 17th. We have a great show today. We've got the co-founder of Rain, uh one of the largest stable coin card companies. They're powering all of the favorite stable coin cards companies that you guys know and love. Markets and weather as always. Tons of news coverage to go over. Um and yeah guys I mean I I sat down this weekend with three guys selling large block shares of OpenAI

Anthropic Khi uh Adams and it is insane what is happening in the secondary market for these preIPO equity uh companies. They're going out they're uh the GPS of these large venture capital firms are selling or are authorizing the sale of a certain amount of their equity shares. Then you've got like these middleman sharks like these guys and they're going out there and they're pitching these things to anyone from a New York Jewish billionaire who literally owns half the block to an NBA star. I mean it is like it is insane what's happening. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars of size into Cali at like $30 billion into OpenAI, into Anthropic, into a lot of these companies SPVS multi-layered agreements, you know, it's just like it

it felt like an episode of um of of in Big Short when when they're like, "Wait, why are they bragging?" And they're like, "No, they're not bragging." Or whatever that scene was. And and like not in a bad way, like these guys are great. Like they're doing good work. they have, you know, they're doing things right and they're making good cash. But it's just like the amount of craziness that is happening from the demand perspective of like anybody in anybody with any amount of capital who missed investing in any of these early AI companies is going on a limb to get exposure to to the extent of tens and hundreds of millions. So, if you're wondering why crypto is not doing so well, Rob, or why, you know, things have kind of slowed down, I mean, I think a lot of that speculative energy is

happening in behind the-scenes meetings with literal whales and then young guys like ourselves aged 20 to 30 who are effectively operating as like middlemen for these GPS of these large, you know, Silicon Valley VCs trying to go out and buy, get a bunch of buyers for these blocks is what they call them of shares. Um, so yeah, I mean like they got, you know, Joel Embiid's uh agent calling them that night. He's trying to get into the Kouchy deal, but they're blocking him out because they've got the like like the deal's almost done with the son of, you know, insert billionaire here.

And it's just like these guys are on the phone like these guys got like six WhatsApp calls in a matter of like two hours at So House. And it was all just it's just nuts. So, >> and it's their shares or they're brokering the shares for another client. >> They're like drop shipping the shares. >> So, they're they don't own the shares. So, so there's some early Open AI or early call sheet employee >> that has a bunch of activity and they're looking to block trade OTC in the private markets. >> GP of the like the VCs that invested in them earlier on. Yeah. >> Yeah. Early employees or early VCs.

Yeah. >> And uh I mean look, that's exit liquidity, man. They all around us. >> It's crazy. And I was just telling him I was like like I got enthropic like $300 billion on my desk and it wasn't that interesting because I was like what is my 25k check going to do at your $300 billion valuation. Well I mean >> I was going to three or 4x they're going to lose trillion. Yeah I know right. Um >> I mean for a $25,000 check maybe you're looking for for a bigger multiple but you know these guys that are at you know hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of size >> 3 to 4x is phenomenal.

>> Yeah. So that happened and that was interesting and that kind of like blew my mind. I was like damn like so the business model is just finding whales, pitching them on buying this stuff and then taking a little spread and just rinsing repeating on all the bigname companies that are launching all the humanoids, the space companies and it's all about the network, right? It's all about who you know. It's all about what you know who you can sell to. So yeah, it's just it was crazy. And then I spent the next two days absolutely on the couch because I ate too much dairy. Had this stomach bug. So I'm back now. I ate nothing but bagels and crackers and soup yesterday. This morning I also had a bagel with butter. Uh but I thought I was over this stomach thing. And then I literally was on the couch and and I

will not even explain what else was going on because of my stomach. >> And I ate dairy and fried chicken. >> You're certainly back in New York, aren't you? With all these bagels. >> It was terrible. Welcome back. Welcome back. >> So, that was uh that was what you miss at So House Fridays, man. Anton was there. Had a great time. Um and uh yeah. >> Well, uh we've got a lot to cover today, so why don't we get into it? Uh plenty of news. Uh today's topics, we've got uh as you mentioned, the RAIN co-founder headed into the tokenization tower. Had a great chat with Hib while you were gone. Talked a lot about RAIN and uh Rob from Dragonfly has also been talking quite a bit about RAIN. So, I think we have plenty of material to go through with uh the co-founder of Rain. Uh

before we get into all of that, why don't we uh why don't we get into our uh our our pre-show uh role here. >> Yeah. Yeah. Marcus, weather and more, guys. Let's get into it. Um starting off with Dinari. A quick shout out for them. Building infrastructure for tokenized US equities, bringing real world stocks on chain. Visit dinari.com to learn more about onchain access to public markets. Uh it's a nice pretty beautiful 79°ree day. It says heavy rain out there, but it's not. I I walked about halfway to the office this morning. It was perfect. U nice cloudy breeze out there. Feels like 83. Office isn't too hot. It's great vibes. Um I'm sure it's kind of warm down there in Florida, but you know, we're doing our best here. So, >> keep >> Yeah, looking good. Let's uh let's get into the markets. Uh that's what I think

uh everyone wants to hear about. That's what we want to talk about. >> Yep. Before we do, let me tell you about Fracks, our leading stable coin partner of the show. Open stable border list future digital money. visit fra.com to learn more about their FRANET product and more. Uh, as we kind of get into what's happening in the market. I see a lot of green in the market today, guys. For all you guys watching, good morning. Good morning. Uh, YouTube RX, show us some love. Let us know what you guys are buying, what you guys are selling, if you guys are holding anything, if you're trying FOMO, if you're trying Pump Fun app, if you're long, short, memory, stocks, crypto. Rob, what are you reading today off this green day? I mean, look, I uh I love to see it. Um we've been talking about this for a

while. Uh it feels like at this point it's still chop, but look, disbelief rallies. This rally will fail like all the others. It just takes one, >> right? It just takes one of these little pops to catch a bid, to get sustained. And you know how much I'm I'm sure you saw this cuz I saw this all over uh the timeline over the weekend, which was that uh open interest is going up. That means that people are betting on volatility. They're expecting this market to move one way or the other. And we knew that volatility was at all-time lows. Ballinger B. I mean, take your indicator, take just by, you know, looking at what was happening, the volatility was at all-time lows. So, we knew that this was an unsustainable

market uh uh situation. We knew that volatility couldn't stay this low forever. We knew that this thing was going to have to move one way or the other at some point aggressively. It's moving up now. We don't know if this is going to be a sustained rally, but it only takes one for this to ultimately move and catch some momentum. So, it's good to see. Obviously, you know, we want to see, you know, this just apathy turn into a sustained rally upwards rather than, you know, the one last leg down. Also, it just seems like we're not going to just stay in this low volatility environment for the next month and a half. Everyone's calling October as the, you know, time frame for when we're actually going to see a move.

I think it's going to happen sooner. Maybe this turns into a sustained rally. That would be incredible for the vibes. Um, but as of right now, we're still in chop. I mean, I don't really feel comfortable in calling this a sustained rally until we see, you know, >> something more than, you know, one to five% moves across the board. >> Yeah, I mean, we we need an expansion from Bitcoin for sure. Um, equities are strong as per usual. The the the the um memory basket, I think, is bottomed out. If you look at DRAM, the memory ETF, it's up 7% today. Let's see. Yeah, it's at 62 almost. um bottomed out at at 44 only 10 trading days ago.

>> There are things just kind of diamonds in the rough like I shared my portfolio last week. Um I mentioned that I still had >> fun ripping >> pump funds ripping uh you know we had G money on talking about fake world assets last week. >> That thing's ripping >> 30% plus >> blasted that on FOMO guys. If you guys follow me on FOMO, I am just top blasting into uh into fake world assets. >> Mr. Dooka top blaster. Uh, I bought um when it was down 15%. But now it's up. I still want to buy more. Um, I want to get to a point where I have a million FWA in case this thing runs to a dollar.

>> In case we get a a dollar, >> a dollar per FWA, which would be uh which would be a billion dollar market fully diluted. >> So, you want like a 30 You want to get like a $30,000 bag at this current price. >> Exactly. >> Bullish. >> Um, >> wow. If that's if you do that on FOMO, if you run your if you run 30K to a to a mill on FOMO, bro, you will have 50,000 FOMO followers. Like, easily, your Twitter account will go will 10x. >> I run it on FOMO, >> dude. I've run the whole trade on FOMO. >> I'll tell you right now, I'm about a quarter of the way there.

>> About 25% of the the bag that I'm looking for on fake world assets. I I mentioned last week portfolio update. Obviously, you and I are both bullish on the monetary premium assets, Bitcoin and Zcash. >> Yeah, doing well. Zcash looks great. It broke out of that little triangle thing that I was stuck in >> the revenue meta. Uh we we pulled up that net token values dashboard. Uh chain link was towards the top. No surprise that it's ripping today. Ripping. I mean, it's up 2%, but it cleared that $9 mark pretty handedly. >> And um there's a couple other ones that are just starting to turn on value acrruel to their token. Uh, syrup. I got like three updates over the weekend from Coinbase that said uh maple is up 5%.

And I got that update like >> ways to go >> three different times. So definitely got a ways to go, but these things are starting to move. Um, >> how about Ether, guys? Uh, I put out that tweet that was like, you know, this is one of our portfolio companies. I think our entry, uh, if you guys look at the price-wise as like 20 cents, 22 cents. Uh, so back in the day, you know, that was $200 million market cap. I mean, that's what it still would have been FTV wise, which isn't that great. I mean, I think the seed round was 40 or 50 or 60. So, we got in at like a multiple of the seed round, right? We were kind of late on it. Thing I think launched at like 8 billion and then completely just got nuked all the way down. I mean, we had our vesting start,

let's see, launched March of 24. So, we had our vesting start pretty much at that exact bottom uh at 55 cents. Then it ran up to like a $2 and we didn't sell anything and now it's back to 50 cents. That one's looks really good still. And then how could we not say uh you know Dr. Miller has literally bought her the hyped at that I've been underwater on for a long time. Um almost I love following Andy on FOMO. Yeah. New type. You should man. It's fun. I'm telling you if Ravi does this fake world assets trade from 30 bands to a mill over next cycle on FOMO guy will be goated in like the like the trenchers will respect him. Can I uh can I can I deposit the uh position that I already have?

>> For sure. For sure. >> Okay. >> For sure. >> Well, let's run it up. >> Yeah, dude. For sure. >> Might have to do that. >> I mean, my FOMO I just deposited more um on there. I think I have a thousand followers now in FOMO. >> Okay. >> 9.95. >> All right. >> I'm down 20% on my fake world's assets back. I'm up 25% on on Black Bull. >> Um I actually lowkey think that uh pe people are going to regret not buying Anom. Like I think Anom is actually like I'm actually so down just to be like you know what pack up like couple bands 10 bands on on Anom whatever it is and just let the man grow to like 4 million followers.

>> You saw the Z500 thing this morning. >> Yeah he just launched it. >> So obviously we had the N7 index for a while but the issue with the N7 is it it wasn't investable like you know you could go and buy all these tokens separately but Z500 sounds like >> what's that? you know, we could have made it investable by like putting it on like a index app or whatever. >> Right. Right. And so Z500 sounds like it is, you know, this onchain index product. Uh, and Anom is going to curate that index, right? Which is very >> people launch tokens and they airdrop the tokens to Anthem holders, >> right? And so, >> and so he's kind of trying to like make a he's trying to kind of like validate what he thinks is worth Ansom holders

holding and rallying behind versus other stuff. >> Yeah. So, there's definitely a curation aspect, right, where it's not just curating content, but you're creating an index of investable assets. And I think that's incredible. And I think that is kind of the, you know, the first layer of this. And then you're right, the second layer of this is that there's tokconomic alignment between the index itself, all of the assets in it and anom holders. Anom the black bull becomes this meta asset of the index where you have value acrruel. You know, if the index does well, you have value acrruel to the black bull token.

>> Yes. And I just want to give a shout out to Rasmer because I saw Anom quote tweet him and and I know he's been the butt of a lot of jokes, but he's up like 200 bands on in public on Black Bull on Anom token and I just think the guy's hilarious and I think he's like just got a funny stream and I just think that he's going to hit for like multi6 figs on on Anthem in public. Um, and it's going to be hilarious. And I just think that I think Anthem to a bill is almost like written stars. It sounds silly. Sounds silly, but it's like >> I mean, dude, when you think about previous cycles, Dogecoin, Sheba, Enu, Pepe, Ma, like you get you get meta mega runners.

>> Yeah, let's see. You buy ore on FOMO, they're still making good revenue. Yeah, I think they are a new type. I think they are. I mean, I couldn't be more happy to have woken up this morning to see Dr. Millers aping on my per bags contributing to a lot of growth uh and more. Zcash looks good. Pump looks really strong. Chain link. So yeah, I mean we'll see, man. Uh it's it's nice to see some some strength, but nothing to really get too too excited about. Uh I do think there is something to be said about uh making that uh FWA trade in public on FOMO, though. I think uh there's a lot more upside than there. I mean, there is some downside to doing things in public. Um, but I just made my FOMO completely separate and I've only funded it through um through like Apple

Pay and no like no like sending over from other private wallets and stuff. So, >> right. >> Well, FOMO and this Z500 and some curated index and the thesis that Thread Guy has been putting out there for a long time. They all feel very very aligned and comprehensive like very similar in the sense that this is all social trading. This is all like investment curation like you know thread guy says the new influencers are going to be you know these people that you know basically make trades in public. Antom is saying like hey this is an investable asset. is curating this asset, this ind index asset and then FOMO is saying hey like

you the assets that you buy in public on this app basically are this curated index of like your performance and your thesis. So the all these thesis I mean generally when you see convergence and confluence amongst like multiple parties I typically think that means that there's more truth. It's also just crazy though, like like I said, I if this trade goes well and FWA like quadruples from here, you're sitting on like a 100 bands in public of that. Like dude, for an average 27y old to just be sitting on a 100k of like a crypto token is just like unfathomable to the world, right?

Like the majority of the world to have $100,000 is like a massive um uh accomplishment. I mean, let's just be real, right? $10,000. And so there's also an element to this of just like how >> yeah I mean it's just it's kind of like building this that's almost like this like onchain flex as well. But I worry about the whole like putting a target on your head and invasion of privacy and a lot of the OGs would never want to do anything like this. But I think there is something to be said about like the whole I mean like the whole thesis is like the soft influence is declining and the the hard results is what matter. So I'll leave you with that as I set up Charles here. Um, I I know I know you have news and more to cover. As always, our digital assets market is powered by

our friends at Zama. Let's give them some love. Great great Monday opening for the boys uh and the girls out there. Let me quickly tell you about Near and then we'll pass you over to Rob while I get Charles set up here in the tower. Uh, Near is our partner for discovering and using apps on chain. Near.com, one account, no borders, your financial life all on chain. Been using them to trade perm long is cooking. My lighter long is in the green. We are doing well. er.com. Uh per are great. Try it out and be back soon. >> All right, guys. We're going to get into the news for today. First up, this was uh some news that dropped over the weekend big big in the payments and AI world, which is that Stripe, the big payments giant uh still private is going

to be uh entering into an agreement to acquire Open Router. Uh funny because the same founder of open router was founder of open C which was obviously the NFT aggregator and marketplace. Open router is a similar aggregator marketplace but for AI. it will route your LLM queries into uh into a you know basically this machine that is going to uh route your queries into the best model for that uh different open source intelligence or open weight intelligence models as well as some of the more uh frontier models and so yeah startup that helps companies switch between artificial intelligence

models. Uh the thing is that they're acquiring these guys for more than $7 billion which is a massive increase on their last valuation. Uh and so uh we are monitoring this mostly from the AI world. Uh but we do think that you know Stripe uh doing this puts them in a very interesting point because this isn't really their game. you know, uh maybe it would have made more sense for, you know, Anthropic or an OpenAI or Frontier Lab to acquire Open Router, but uh it's interesting that Stripe, typically a payments company, has gone ahead and, you know, seemingly made some moves on making this acquisition. So, we're going

to we're going to keep an eye on this because uh it is going to fit uh a little bit differently into their into their tech stack. So, we're going to we're going to continue to monitor that situation. Uh, nevertheless, very, very interesting to keep an eye on. Let's go ahead uh and move forward here. Our friend of the show, Frank Chaparo. Uh, Harvard is leaving their Bitcoin ETF stake untouched in Q2 after cutting it 43% in the prior quarter. So, they cut some of their losses. Harvard is staying in the Bitcoin ETF position. Uh look, I mean, we know that this is something that uh is the next new unit of liquidity for Bitcoin. Uh we've already gone into the

individuals. All a lot of those guys has got have gotten shaken out. You know, El Salvador, some sovereigns, right? Different different ETF providers, all of that has now rolled out. This product has been out for a long time. Uh and we saw that it was actually um I think it was Eric Balenunas, the ETF uh reporter from Bloomberg who who made this point and I agree with it which is that JP Morgan getting into you know the Bitcoin ETF having some on their balance sheet not particularly interesting having Harvard right these different pension funds these things are particularly interesting because that is what uh those are sticky sticky units of liquidity

uh and that's what we're continuing to monitor. So, you know, we're going to we're going to keep an eye on this, but at the moment, it seems like Harvard is just keeping their stake where they where they are. Uh, and we're going to see how these uh positions uh evolve over the coming weeks to months. Big shout out to 1 in as well, launched their shared liquidity protocol. Uh they are crushing it. Uh very innovative when it comes to this technology. Uh and we are going to continue to keep an eye on this as well because the deck space is heating up. AMM space is heating up.

We're going to continue to take a look at this space 1 in uh let you keep your money in your wallet but also provide it as liquidity to these pools. Very fascinating mechanism to take a part of. Um let's keep going. Uh Paul Tudtor Jones is adding to his Bitcoin position and Drunken Miller is buying Hyperlid. Have a great weekend. Uh this was incredible news. Obviously these guys tend to be right in the market. People like to follow their uh their thesis and so to have some of the smartest minds in the space tracking uh what you know we've been tracking for a long time uh is very cool to see. So, Paul Tudtor Jones investment uh increased its Black

Rockck uh Bitcoin ETF position by almost 20% in Q2. And you know, typically we find out about these changes at the quarterly filings. Uh Tutor now holds almost uh 700,000 IBIT, uh almost $20 million. Honestly, kind of pennies uh if you're looking at the grand scheme of things, but still material. Uh and then Drunken Miller going into purr I think was actually more interesting because this seemed to be a new position. Uh so 23 million position in purr. Uh and obviously purr is bringing uh drunken miller uh exposure and hype. And so these are guys that have typically uh you know they've gotten involved into the digital asset space in the past uh and now they are making larger positions

and bets in the space. So very very cool to see uh losers average losers winners average winners. Uh so that's what we're seeing Tutor Jones and Drunken Miller do. Just some absolute legends in the space. Let's kick it over to another front of the show but a little bit more of a controversial one. Mark Zeller commenting on VVV Venice uh says he is passing on VVV despite viewing Venice AI as a strong privacy focused and uncensored AI product. I think we've seen this in the in the past. Uh protocol and structure are different from product. Uh he compares Venice favorably to competitors like Open Router, but argues the investment

structure matters more than product quality. And so the the equity token split is something to take note of. Venice recently raised 65 million series A at a billion dollar equity valuation. Key word there is equity because equity investors are going to receive exposure to strategic assets like GPU infrastructure whereas the token the VVV token now offer uh staking versus AI inference revenue buy and burns and yield but no governance or ownership claim on the company. This is the equity labs to token split. Zeller sees this as an example of tokens being structurally subordinate to equity and this is what a lot of companies that have launched

tokens are going to continue to need to figure out. Uh lesson is that token value capture matters more than narrative especially in these apathetic market conditions. Token fundamentals are what drives some of these tokens upwards. You see this with pump fund with lighter with hyperlquid and now increasingly more of these tokens are starting to acrue value via the revenue that they're generating. But in this case uh Zeer points out that there is still a divergence between the equity labs corp uh the equity ownership over some of this GPU uh infrastructure and the revenue that is going into buying and burning VVV. So look, this is what almost every company that has both an

equity uh uh corporate structure as well as a token. They're continuing to face. This is an unsolved problem. We know this is a result of Gendler era regul regulation. Uh and unfortunately, he has left a stain on the industry that the industry is still figuring out. Um, let me tell you guys about a partner of ours that we think is doing things the right way, keeping the crypto ethos in mind, launched their token a little bit more recently than the Gendler era, and that is going to be Zama. Uh, Zama is doing incredibly well with everything on the privacy front. We believe that AI is just continuing to take over more and more of the world, more of the attention market share. Uh companies like Zama and

Zcash are doing incredibly well because they are positioned for privacy to shield assets and maintain confidentiality. Uh we think, you know, a dollar onchain tends to stay on chain and a dollar shielded tends to stay shielded. You guys can encrypt your money at app.zama.org right now. Product is live. Token is live. Next thing we want to talk about here today, Iran begins laying mines to the street of Hormuse. This is reported by CNN. Look, we don't know how accurate this is, but there has been slower traffic uh in the street of Hormuse.

Guys, this is the last tweet from DB. It's been five months since we heard from him. He's been active since 2014. RIP. Don't have a lot to cover here. Look, I mean DB does good news, but uh you know, obviously this was a while [snorts] ago, so we don't know exactly what is happening on the DB front. Uh we hope he comes back uh because uh he's been a trustworthy figure in the space, but uh yeah, best of luck to our friend DB. Let's continue to move. Got lots more to cover here. Uh there's an L1 value capture thesis that we're going to get into. And so if you're curious uh let's go ahead and cut to it. Uh if you're curious what uh Tuli is talking

about in this tweet and you run the numbers here, billion transactions per day at uh 310 of a cent per transaction. Uh that's going to equate to about a billion dollars in value capture for an L1 that is providing block space for these transactions to the tune of a billion dollars per or a billion transactions per day. uh you're looking at about a billion dollars in revenue a year. Um and we know this is uh you know a pretty valuable company. Look, if you look at uh some of these frontier model companies, they have unprecedented growth, right? And these are kind of apples to oranges at this point. I think Anthrop is going to do a hundred billion dollars of revenue this year, putting

them uh in the camp of probably trillion dollar market cap. Um whereas some of these L1's are on track to do a billion dollars in revenue uh putting them somewhere in the $10 to hundred billion market cap range. But we still have um we still have open questions about how we get there. You also have L1s that are scaling beyond this 310en of a transaction cost per transaction. So ultimately, look, if we have blockchains that are continuing to scale, they can provide supply at, you know, orders of magnitude more affordably than what you're seeing here, there's going to be

companies that take that block space, especially on L2s and whatnot. Uh, but if you do have this supply demand dynamic work out, uh, you're looking at about a billion dollars per day. Totally seems to think that's a reasonable projection. So guys, we're going to go live from the tokenization tower with the co-founder of RAIN. Uh he is ready behind the scenes as well as Andy. We're going to bring him up in just a moment and then we're going to get back to finish out the news, talk about our daily equity segment powered by Dinari and everything else that is happening that you guys want to make sure you're keeping track of this week. Stay tuned right now. co-founder of Rain Charles younot in the tokenization tower right

after this. [music] >> Welcome back to another episode of Stabled Up, our premier weekly show covering the ins and outs of digital dollars, stable coins, and the future of decentralized finance. Show is made possible by FRA and FRA is powering the financial engine of the internet powering FRXUSD and genius compliant stable coins. This is the stablecoin super cycle made possible by FRA. Now enjoy stabled up our weekly stable coin show.

70. >> All righty, guys. Welcome back to Stable Up episode number 46 with The Rain co-founder Charles Younut. Charles, great to have you in the tower, man. >> Thank you for having me. Yes sir. As always, Stabled Up is powered by our friends at Frack. Visit their fra.com to learn more about FRXUSD and more. Charles uh the leading stablecoin infrastructure cryptocard provider some would say. Obviously there's been an ex you know explosive growth. I'm a big fan of uh payment scan.xyz a great uh provider of data where you

can you can see all the growth of these individual NEO banks. So, a lot to cover on this kind of that explosive growth, but maybe just uh quick into why Rain, why start this now? What you know, kind of give us a bit of the founding story of the company. >> Yeah. Uh me and my co-founder Furuk, we met in 2021 kind of in the depths of COVID. We met on a slack channel for other founders and started working on a side project together not related to stable coins or crypto. But through that experience we got really frustrated with the rails that are available to us as builders in the US. We were trying to build on top of a and wire and they were difficult to access. They were slow.

They were expensive. Felt like 2021 that there had to be better options out there. Um and then that was kind of our our first foray into stable coins was adding stable coin support to that fundraising platform. we were working on and then through that is when we got really excited and bullish about stable coins. We we realized that the actual experience of investing in a startup and and getting an investment was way better on stable coins. Like our first angel investment happened on Christmas. >> Yeah. >> Uh when banks traditionally would have been closed and then the weekend would have followed or banks still would have been closed. So it probably would have been five plus days until we actually got the money and the investor was actually in Singapore. So it could have even been longer. But extend USC we got it instantly. So that was one of our

first like aha moments of like okay this is better way of moving money globally. Uh and we started to actually decide to work on rain around that time. So that was November 2021. Really early on we realized that the actual bottleneck to growth and adoption of stable coins was that spendability the interoperability with existing rails. I we got the USDC that Christmas day, but what we could actually do with it was really limited unless we went and offramped through an exchange and followed all of these different steps. So, we realized if we can make stable coins spendable on a Visa card, we unlock adoption and acceptance at millions of merchants globally and that instantly makes stable coins more valuable. So, that was the

first thing that we started Rain to tackle. And in 2021, there weren't really we couldn't really have started as an infrastructure provider. If we started as, hey, we're gonna allow you to launch a stablecoin back to card, we would have had zero customers that day, right? >> So, we were actually our own customer and that we we solved for the people that had this hair on fire problem early on. And and one of those people, those early adopters were cryptonative teams. >> Yeah. So we we built for Dows, we built for cryptonnative funds, we built for protocols uh and were this B2B neo bank for the what was essentially an underbanked population at the time because of regulation. A lot of them were offshore where there wasn't really this vibrant fintech ecosystem. Um so we were that the neo bank for those people

and then through those like first two years of building rain is when we were able to develop all of our onchain infrastructure, our smart contracts, our licensing, our our visa membership and then in 2024 is really when we started opening up and becoming a platform. Yeah. And enabling other people to issue on top of the infrastructure we had developed. And from 2024 to now is has been a lot of growth and and excitement. We we now currently power over 200 programs. Uh we just announced like a Western Union partnership recently which we're really excited about and having such a a storied institution work with us.

>> It's really like a full circle moment for us. >> Yeah, definitely. And and I mean we were talking prior to the show just that it feels like uh Rain has gone through like its first kind of exponential hockey stick growth and you know that the you know as an investor would say like the easy 10X has passed. Now it's like the how do you 100x this over like the next decade and I think we'll get more into that and kind of what you see there. But I think to to kind of set the foundation further here based on how you guys saw the opportunity right in the earlier days there you know this kind of Neoank craze or mania if you will that has kind of started to really catch fire the last 18 months as you said wasn't really a thing in 2021. I mean there was the

crypto.com card. I was an avid user of that back in the day and you know no longer am but there was you know the Gemini card and then but it was really just about yeah I mean we do a lot of our payments to our uh uh from our clients to our employees to uh kind of any kind of third party in stable coins for the last six years. We've been doing we we've basically been running this business for six years on chain and over the last couple years it's gotten to be obviously you know as things grow and scale you know you know okay that then you go and you know do banks and all these things but in the beginning it was fully on chain and it was like wow we're running a business fully on chain this is awesome >> yeah like this is epic

>> um and then all of a sudden this neo bankank thing came like oh you can spend it's like earn spend save yield like this kind of like this big four then boom you know read pay explodes etherfy explodes cast explodes. Um, plasma starting to grow, Tria. There's there's all these names here. Maybe you can just like unpack like what the neoank bull concept is here. Like if I'm a neo bank bull, what am I really like investing in? And like what am I expressing bullishness on by being bullish rain bullish kind of like on the neo banks that it's powering? What is that like?

What is that thesis actually? >> Well, what's really been exciting to see is that stable coin infrastructure has brought down the cost of launching a neo bank. Traditionally, you have to sign a partnership with a bank and it would it would be, you know, large monthly minimums. It would be very difficult to do and then you would be locked to whatever country that bank is in. So, you you'd be committed to this large upfront cost, but then also not be able to expand very easily internationally. Now, with stablecoin infrastructure, we're seeing a lot of neo banks choose to go stable coin first, build on top of stable coin rails, and then day one be able to launch in in multiple countries, expand globally, uh, which we think is great for innovation. we now have this this Cabrian explosion of neo banks all with different value propositions

different areas that they're targeting uh different consumers that maybe weren't profitable to target before but now they're going after that. So for us it's like this is opportunity to explore areas that just weren't really able to be explored before because of the limitations in the underlying infrastructure uh the inability to scale globally efficiently. So there's now like new neo banks that just weren't possible before. So that's that's really exciting. >> And then from the concept of the existence of the neo bank itself, why why does the world need this product?

Like why does the world need this uh kind of non-custodial uh blockchain based system for banking? Like like what is the what is the broader kind of adoption thesis here? >> I wouldn't say there's really one answer to that. Okay. I think when we first launched there was one answer was hey you have onchain assets you need to spend them >> now that is the base case like table stakes it's really up to our customers to ask answer that question because it is like you have to find your niche you have to find why is someone going to choose your product and that comes it's like answering that question it's like hey why do I need this neo bankank >> um so if you're just answering a very

blanket question then I think you're going to end up building a very generic problem that is is maybe not going to resonate with anyone strongly enough. >> Right? >> So what's exciting is that you can actually answer this for a very specific set of customers. So whether it's freelancers in Latin America or it's high net worth individuals in Southeast Asia or it's you know remittances uh into Africa like there's just a plethora of different use cases that you can solve and build very specific applications for. >> And that's the beautiful thing about rain is that it can power all of that. It doesn't. It's completely technology agnostic. And so, you know how generalized SAS went through this whole kind of, oh, like, oh crap, we're in trouble. A vibe coder can code like very

specific specialized technology for plumbers in rural Indiana who whose customers are single moms at home, right? It's like, bang, I built you this in in two weeks. It's perfect for you. Rather than like, let's say, Salesforce CRM or something, right? Would you say that the neo bank space is going through a similar transition where okay, you know, with only so much um success can you have in a generalized fashion where it's like I built this thing, it's for anybody. Uh there's not a geographical kind of opinionated thesis. There's not a net worth opinionated thesis. There's not a spender thesis, a traveler. like there's like there's kind of like little subsets that I'm sure each of your customers uh are you know competing on but also have realized that there's like

uh more of like a moat in a blue ocean if they kind of focus on on one is this neoang space going through a kind of a similar generalizable SAS to specific SAS kind of thing that AI has has has brought or kind of how would you explain the >> yeah I think that's part of it every every technological trend goes to this unbundling and and rebundling phase and I think right now in the stable coin space we're seeing this unbundling in parts of it and then bundling at other parts of it. I think in the infrastructure side you're seeing a bundling okay >> of infrastructure providers now offering more of this like full solution and then on the neo bank side you're seeing an unbundling where you're maybe taking uh >> what would have been like a super app that's catering to everyone and then

just focusing on actually I'm just going to take this one piece that this company does okay and then I'm going to do it really well and I'm going to be known for like this one thing. >> Yeah. Um, so yeah, we're we're kind of seeing like that unbundling of the stablecoin neo bankank space where people are going more laser thin, going deeper into it. And that was really when when we were starting rain and and kind of deciding to become more of a platform. That was one of our core thesis was that we couldn't we had the opportunity of just going direct, going BTOC and becoming a neo bank for consumers.

>> But when we looked at the landscape, we realized that there is really no way that we could be best at all these things. There's no way. We're not on the ground in Mexico. We're not on the ground in Nigeria. We don't know the remittance market well enough. We don't know the freelancer market well enough. There there's all these spaces that we're not the best to build the product for that. We felt like we were the best at building the infrastructure and then allowing our customers to do what they're best at. Yeah. >> Which is solving for the the problems that they're closest to. >> Yeah. And I think to understand a bit as to why RAIN even needs to exist or why neo banks needs to exist, it would be helpful to understand the way that uh transactions even work.

>> And you guys put out a really good article. Uh I think it was uh it was a team member, I forget his name. >> Yeah, Conor Conor Dempsey wrote a great post. >> Great post. And it basically is like the anatomy of a stable coin swap or swipe. >> Swipe. Yeah. >> Um and so maybe you can just like explain to us how card payments work. I know it's not the sexiest topic. and then how stable coin card swipes work. Uh I think that would be helpful. >> Yeah, I think there's a few different ways like you mentioned the the Gemini card and the um some of the other exchange cards which I think were are important um pieces of this whole space.

But when we started building Rain in 2021, it was really important to us to not just solved the maybe superficial problem of making crypto spendable, but also there were so many advantages that we felt that we would be able to have if we could actually build everything from the ground up on chain. >> So, not just being able to make a tokenized asset spendable, but actually the benefits of settlement on chain uh balances being onchain like all the time. Like that's really what we try to build is on the ground from the ground up stable coin native infrastructure. So for us the way Rain does it which is not necessarily the way every stable coin infrastructure provider every cryptocart does it but the balance when you

authorize a transaction we're actually checking like onchain balances to make sure there's enough spending power that the user has. Usually in a traditional um fiat card that would be like bank account or there would be some sort of underwriting happening right >> um in our case like the underwriting is happening against like assets that are mostly onchain and then we would do the authorization decision clearing is essentially the same that's like more of a merchant to network side and right now Visa does enable merchant settlement but that's not something that rain touches or that a lot of consumers would know or care about. Um and then settlement. So traditional settlement is always net settlement. So like let's say you swipe your card for a coffee. There isn't one single transaction that goes from you to

the coffee shop. What happens is that your issuer so like Rain for example, we would be settling with the network Visa uh net of all of our customers. So that's includes refunds that our customers have that that includes all of the authorizations that were made and are clearing. That's all like one transaction that we'll be doing daily. for Visa and then on the other side the merchant has like one transaction where they're getting settled net with the card network against all the transactions. >> So it's like this batch settlement process that happens traditionally that happens using the traditional rails that are available to you in whatever market you're in. So as a if you're in the US you you have like Fed Wire, you have AC um you might have access to some other

rails as well. Those traditionally only run during banking hours so Monday through Friday. Uh, and then you would have to post collateral with the networks to cover weekend settlement or long holiday risk. Yeah. Because you're not settling on a Saturday, you're not settling on Sunday, you're not settling on Christmas. >> Um, and the but Visa cards are being authorized 24/7. So come Monday morning, Visa doesn't want to take the risk that the issuer on their network isn't able to actually meet the settlement obligations that happen. So they will have most issuers post collateral to cover those days when they're not settling. Uh in 2021, Visa introduced stable coin settlement. So you could actually settle with the network in USDC. And then we were one of the first

to do 365 settlement. So being able to settle in USDC every day of the week. So whether it's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, whether it's Christmas Day, Martin Luther King Day, we're settling every day. So that actually allows us to collapse some of the collateral requirements. Yep. >> That an issuer typically would have to pose. So lower cost of capital. Um our borrowing needs are a lot lower. So that means we can run programs more efficiently. Hopefully those savings can be passed down in to the end customers because the actual cost of running a program are now a lot less. >> Yeah. Yeah. A and so very specific uh kind of uh point on the refund side.

That was a big push back to using crypto for payments was once you send it, it's gone. >> Yeah. Um, and I assume you guys are working, you know, very diligently on this. And then if it's not out already, it will be, you know, very soon a feature because when these guys go and say like, "Oh, I'm a I'm [snorts] XYZ powered by Rain credit card." Like, it's my stable coin credit card. >> But when I think credit card, I'm like, I can go take my MX to the club and spend five grand. And if I don't have it in my bank, I I can still spend the five grand.

>> But it's not a credit card in the same sense. um you know in the same sense that I can you know get a refund or spend that money if it's not there cuz you're saying you guys are running the onchain validation or verification instantaneously what am I missing there and what's the status of kind of like >> so there's different we support a variety of different types of of credit miles some of it is collateralized so you'll have uh crypto in like a smart contract or somewhere where it's collateralizing your your your credit card or securitizing your your card so that exists in the fiat world where there's like a securized credit card usually that's for subprime borrowers where they can actually maybe their credit limit is too their credit score is too low and the bank isn't willing to underwrite them without securitizing

some sort of collateral. So there's like onchain equivalent of that in smart contracts. We do have some programs that are not collateralized. So they're actually are doing some sort of underwriting and they're authorizing a transaction uh without some sort of collateralization happening. Yeah. So we support both models. Like really what we're focused on is the infrastructure and you can develop different types of programs based on that infrastructure >> and refunds are available cards. >> Yeah, refunds are available. It's >> we think that a lot of people like to talk about just stable coin to stable coin account to account wallet to wallet payments.

>> But there's a lot of value that a network like Visa provides in a transaction having this like trusted intermediary in between the transaction. If you're if you're uh transacting with an unknown party, like you're just walking into a store, you have no idea who this business is, you haven't underwritten this business, you haven't done any KYB on this business, you can take a Visa card, swipe it, have a a transaction authorized, and you trust that you're going to be able to get the good that you just paid for, and if not, you can file dispute for that. >> Yeah.

>> If you're sending this random merchant online or in store, >> uh USC, like you said, it's gone, right? And if you didn't get the good that you were promised, you have very little recourse on getting that USDC back. >> So we think that even in a world where stable coin settlement on both sides, from issuer to the network and from the network to the merchant is happening >> instantly in in stable coin rails, there's value for a network like Visa to provide in that transaction, >> right? 100% there is. Yeah. And I mean, we had Josh Moss, their stable coin strategy lead here, uh, spoke a lot about the work that they're doing, and they're just really, really pushing into it hard. obviously that open USD announcement that they were a part of.

>> Um, so just kind of getting to RAIN the company, not to be confused with the RAIN token that is on the coin market cap right now. >> Oh yeah, I don't even know what that token is. >> You guys get asked that a ton. It's it's confusing. Um, you know, you guys are having this explosive growth. Uh, the transaction quantity on rain cards is exploding. The amount of neo banks launching is also it's it's almost like those people are have realized that this is a good business model if they have a unique value proposition to a unique set of customers as that grows rain is just the kind of a benefactor of that growth.

You guys have had this massive explosion of of transactions. I mean, I think I [snorts] think the like the leading card providers are doing $100 million a month of of volume and then like 80 80 60 40. So, cumulatively, you're looking at like a quarter billion or more a month right now through rain. Um, which is which is in which is pretty intense, right? I mean, if you look at that chart from 20 in early 2025, it was less than maybe 20 million. Yeah. I think in 2024 we were if we did a million in a month, we were like very excited, >> right?

>> Yeah. Exactly. And so we talked so that's that first 10x congrats to all the investors who you know entered that saw this early. Great. >> But the next like 10x for 100x from here is like now you're talking a quarter a billion a month to like you know you know you know tens of billions a month and then you start to get to like the big the big T, right? And so >> like what does that look like? Is it agents? Is it more neo banks? Is it regulation? Like what does Reign's decadel long like trajectory look like? Give us like like the bull case and and maybe the conservative case as well if you can.

>> Yeah, the growth so far has been exciting. You know, looking at payment scan, it's awesome to see the the inflection, but really I don't like to pay too much attention to that because if you zoom out, stable coin cards are still such a small like spec of the actual volume. Visa is doing trillions of dollars a day and we're doing like a tiny tiny fraction of that. So growth is exciting, but when we talk about the TAM of what we're building, we really think about like all of money movement. We feel like there's very few use cases where stable coins wouldn't improve. Um whether because it's faster, because it's cheaper, because it's global, because it's more transparent. There's so many benefits to moving money through stable coin rails. We think that the TAM of this space is actually like all of

money. um which is a ginormous TAM and uh right now we're focused on this this space and also we like to talk about just where we are in the technological adoption curve right we're we're still in this crossing the chasm moment where there's early adopters that have really found success with using stable coins and now we're trying to get into the mainstream and that's really where the next 10 100x of adoption is going to come from it's going to come from the western unions of the world launching stable coin products it's going to come from more and more of these traditional businesses is moving over to stable coin rails and I think in the US a lot of our fintech apps probably feel pretty great like we don't really see the need to use stable coins or adopt stable coins

>> but I think it's the underlying plumbing that is really what needs an upgrade in the US it's how do we actually upgrade the way that settlement happens that doesn't rely on preunding accounts all over to make it seem like it's instant and magic but actually doing that uh lowering the cost >> like the end user should actually not even know that experience has changed. It should be like your app just upgraded from this cloud provider to this other cloud provider and you didn't notice a difference, but maybe it's a little bit faster. Maybe it's they can uh offer you the service for a little bit cheaper.

That is I think the dream is that the actual experiences don't really change. They're just maybe available to more people. They're available in more countries. They're available for a cheaper price. Uh the experience is faster. like all of these benefits, but the actual experiences don't necessarily have to look very different. >> Yeah. And so that's the big swing for RAIN is this reinvigoration of the settlement process of spending at large to get to that kind of bigger >> and the bigger space is just, you know, we're we're trying to increase stable coin adoption globally. >> Yeah.

>> Um and if we can just take a small piece of that, like that's that's great. Uh I think that that's going to be right now we have experiences that we're mostly powering our card base. We're going to be experimenting with a lot of different experiences that are not necessarily card- based. Yeah. >> We're also really excited about aentic payments. We have >> both stable coins and AI like two very disruptive technologies at the same time which is very rare that you're in this like platform shift of money movement and also um artificial intelligence. And I'm, you know, we don't really know what agentic experiences are going to look like in the future, but I am really certain that agents are going to spend more and more on our behalf. Uh, and then those agents are probably going to prefer stable coin rails. Yeah.

>> If it's an option, I think a lot of times it's not going to be an option because of merchant acceptance, but you're seeing things like X42. Yeah. >> Where agents now can pay for APIs like using stable coin rails, and that's like a no-brainer to me. So what are those new experiences that can be unlocked using with with AI agents that's like completely green field which is very exciting. >> Yeah. Is this your first time? Is this your f are you a first time founder? >> No, this is I guess technically like a third third startup. I did my first startup in high school. >> Okay. >> I was building this uh college admission statistic website. So we were like crowdsourcing all this data from our friends in high school and then posting it on this like online site that we built where younger classmen can look

and figure out what they needed to do. That was the first startup. Uh then uh after college I graduated from Stanford. Um did a startup uh on like the contractor management space. >> Okay. >> So we were it was in this like gig economy time. So we were selling to ride share services like food delivery startups anyone that had to manage thousands of contractors and onboarding them every week globally. We built software to help automate that at scale and then we got acquired by into it. Um and I was part of the self-employed team at in it for over four and a half years.

Got it. >> Before leaving and then starting rain. And is the vision for Rain to potentially be acquired in the future? Uh is there a like like what is your kind of longer term thought here? Obviously folks are going to be uh you know and I'm also curious like how you guys make money and etc. But kind of how are you thinking about the more longer term trajectory? >> We want to build a generational business um aspirationally and we want to IPO become a public company. >> Hell yeah. uh don't want to get acquired. Like that's that's not something that we're we're actively looking for or interested in. Like we really want to build a sustainable business that could continue growing and compounding for decades ahead.

>> And what are some of the if you can share like what are the like what what has been the growth of the of the revenue side and you know how h like what's the margins of the business like what are the business lines? >> Yeah, main sources of revenue are interchange is a big source of revenue for us. So that's the the fee essentially that merchants pay for accepting cars to the card networks. Uh as the issuer we get a large percentage of that that fee. Uh we also charge SAS fees to our our customers for running the the infrastructure. Uh and then there's usage fees that we charge as well. So that could be for issuing cards for KYC. A lot of these are costs that we bear for operating like a compliance program or or dealing with like shipping, dealing with disputes. So fees

at scale as a program goes. So those are our three main lines of revenue. Um growth I think in the last we've gone from low singledigit millions to hundreds of millions in the last uh like 18 months. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> So I mean another year or two or something and this IPO is going to be ready to go. I mean if not >> uh yeah we'll see. I mean there's a lot of work to do ahead. Uh we're just trying to build the best business possible and and then hopefully everything else falls into place. >> And what's the relationship like with your other founder? How did you guys I mean you you guys met in the Slack and kind of saw this problem. What's the what's the kind of dynamic between you two?

>> Yeah, it's it's been interesting because we didn't know each other before just meeting on Slack. >> Yeah. >> We had this organic like founder dating experience while working on this way. >> Well, like we worked on this side project together which like low commitment uh just for fun for like eight months. But that was really great because we got to learn about each other's strengths and weaknesses. got to see if we enjoyed working together uh without a lot of the pressure that comes with putting like a a co-founder label on it or >> raising money uh and then having to like make things work. Um and then when we found an idea that we had really strong conviction on that we wanted to actually go all in at we had this experience of okay this is actually a partner that I

think would fit for this because I think people talk a lot about product market fit but founder market fit or founder product fit are just as important. >> So making sure that you and your co-founder are the right people to be building this startup. It might be a good idea. It might be something worth doing but are you the right people to do it? Is this the right co-founder to do it with? >> Yeah, >> I think that's just as important of a question to ask. Uh, and then we felt we asked ourselves that question, we felt like even though we had no experience launching cards and we felt that we were the right people to do this based on other experiences we had and I think we compliment each other really well. Like I'm I'm the CTO. I mostly drive product engineering design. He does like all the

other parts of the business which for a financial services business is a lot, right? It's dealing with compliance. It's dealing with legal. It's dealing with implementation, marketing, >> um, finance. There's so many aspects of the business that are >> really important to to handle. And if you get wrong, then the business is >> just not going to work. And if you get it right, then the business can actually like really start humming. >> Yeah. What are some of the qualities of your co-founder that you uh appreciate the most and what are some of the things that are are are the hardest to kind of work through?

>> He's, I would say, very creative individual. like he just can any problem I think he will just find like a creative solution to it. Yeah. Uh so it's it's great working with him >> because I I can just like think okay there's like this is so difficult like I don't know how we're going to like you know get this like when we were first trying to figure out how to launch rain and we didn't know anything about cards like we didn't even know who we should talk to. we just talked to anyone that would that would give us a meeting and then it was really his like creativity that came up with a plan of like how we were going to do what we wanted to do at the time.

>> Um which felt like a very large task. So I think just his creativity >> um his like he's kind of fearless, right? He's you kind of need that that fearless person in the co home. Uh, I think I'm a good counter to him in that I'm like the >> the sanity check sometimes. So like some of his he has a lot of crazy ideas and I veto like a lot of them or like maybe we shouldn't do that. But this one is actually like really good and let's like I think when we both agree on an idea, it's usually like a very good idea. Um, >> so he's able to like come up with like a lot of crazy stuff and then I'm able to like filter to like okay here's like the things that I feel like >> we should actually do and then

>> that has been a good combination partnership. You know, I'm curious, you know, how your workflows and your productivity and your the way you've thought about building the company, especially on the product side, has changed post AI, post cloud code, post co-work, codeex, etc. You know, just give us kind of a sense into how your, you know, entire viewpoint on building a company has changed. uh whether it be the standards you set for your team with using these tools or your own workflows just like from the viewpoint of you know getting acquired by in it back in the day for a company that sounded like it'd be a lot easier had you had some coding tools versus now building you know the go-to infra for crypto cards what has

changed in your outlook and your and your personal uh you know flows >> a lot I always think that we're lucky to be building the business at the time we're building it and to scale it at the time we're scaling and the beginning of last year we were just 17 people on the team. >> Sure. >> So most of our growth has come with the assumption that there are these agents uh and these artificial intelligence that would be able to do a lot of work that traditionally as a as a fintech you'd have to hire a lot of people to do. So we can think of compliance, we can think of support, we can think of implementation from an AI first perspective like how do we actually redesign these traditional workflows from this uh assumption that you have an agent that can do a lot. Uh

so that's been great to be able to to build into that assumption. also thinking about what are our competitive advantages as a business like my last startup think if I would not start that business today because I think everyone would have just built that internally >> uh because it would be a lot easier to to do it uh and have it fully customized to the way that your flow works for us. We're building an a startup that I think is very difficult to vibe code like you can't really vibe code rain over a weekend. >> Yeah. just because of all of the compliance, the licensing, legal, the relationships that you'd have to build, all those stuff just takes time and experience. Um, so it's it's it's also like redefined where we think we should be investing in the business, investing

in things that are unique to what we're doing um and that can't be replicated and then being okay outsourcing everything else. So buying off the shelf things that are not really uh advantages to the business um and then trying to still maintain the team as like relatively lean. >> Yeah. >> Right. Not trying to overhire and then having to do a round of layoffs because we realized a lot of these roles can be automated. >> Yeah. >> Um so every person we hire is like very intentional hire. >> Yeah. >> With the assumption that we can provide them tools that will give them a lot more leverage.

>> Yeah. Well, Charles, man, congratulations on the success. I know this is uh from your perspective still the beginning from the outside perspective clearly uh one of the breakout kind of consumer applications of the space throughout this bear. I mean it's been amazing just to see the pure growth uh give you something to be excited about and it's you know there's a there's a really unique position for you guys where the world's waking up to kind of this concept of neo bankanks and you guys are in a great spot of just being able to be the the provider. Um, and you know, like the beautiful thing is as these different types of leaders and founders come on with various skill sets and various ideas of what they want to do. It's just this continuous product feedback to you from your own customers.

you know, one person may need like a license in the Bahamas and need a special FX, you know, you know, rate there and a specific bank and, you know, another person uh may need a specific cash back and like there's just consistent feedback across the whole spectrum kind of builds out a more uh, you know, sturdy product for you guys that you can eventually kind of say to anyone, hey, like we can definitely do whatever it is that you need because I mean, look at all of you know, what we've done and so I know that you guys are are getting there and steadfast pass on the way to the IPO. So, look forward to seeing that as well. And thanks for thanks for uh joining us here, man.

>> Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah, pleasure, man. Guys, we'll be right back with the rest of the show. We're going to talk markets, charts. We're going to look at at some of the latest happenings and more. Drunken Miller and PTJ are buying our bags. We have nothing to be upset about. We'll see you guys in just a moment. [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Heat.

Heat. We get deep. We get deep. We get [music] deep. We get deep. We get we get deep. We get [music] deep. We get we get deep, you know. We get deep. Know [music]

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

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[music] You know we get deep. We get we get deep. We get deep. >> Yo yo yo. What's going on, guys? This is Itan with the rollup. We're going to be patrolling the streets of New York City getting answers to the questions that you guys have most. What are people trading? What are people investing in? How much do people actually budget? We're going to have people from all over, all different investment classes, people who are dead broke, people who are dead whales, people who are just loaded. There won't be a mayor or politician to stop us on the streets.

We're going to go everywhere. All five burrows. We're taking over the 212. [music] [music] Heat. Heat. [music] [music] [music] [music]

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

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[music] We get deep. We get deep, you know. We get deep. [music] Bar chart tells us that the total value of US corporate equity is now more than 400% of GDP. This is double the peak of the.com bubble and more than 5x before the 1987 stock market crash warns JP Morgan as memory stock ETF Drram is up a whopping 40 to 50% from the lows.

SanDisk flying. The memory trade is looking for another leg up. Yet the total value of the US corporate equity is now more than 400% of GDP. The United States of America is quite literally dependent. The economy of this country is dependent on the stock market. it this this comparison suggests that US equities have grown far faster than the underlying economy. We are in the middle of the AI buildout. Of course, that is what uh the the economists will tell us is the reasoning for this. Um some investors argue that high valuations can persist especially with AI earnings growth and more. However, other investors warned that this is getting too out of hand. Whether you think it's out of hand or not, what I think is a certain objective reality is that due to the excess amount of capital in the

market, uh the indexes and the large caps and the hyperscalers are likely to be more volatile and reactive and responsive to external catalysts than they would not be or than they would be otherwise. meaning Fed rate changes, meaning war, meaning other kind of catalysts have the ability to really turn the market quickly. Investors see their portfolios at all-time highs. They see these swings. There tends to just be a lot more reflexivity when there's this much capital in the system. I think that's the objective reality. More volatility for sure. Whether or not you think it's upside capped or downside capped or they are overextended or not, I think is is a subjective conversation.

But as you can see here, we are at a point of very very very outsized total capital by means of equities versus GDP in the US. I I I'd agree with the volatility take. I think if you look at uh the stock market capitalization as a function of the productive economy of the US or any other you know geographical jurisdiction you know typically the way that this has been is like okay well there's a market and it's correlated or connected or based on the productive output of the companies that make up that market. Now what we're saying is that you know we've

increased the capital supply to such an extent that it's no longer a onetoone relationship maybe it's a 4:1 relationship at least 400% of GDP >> that is now saying that there is more intrinsic capital in the market than it is based on the actual productivity of those of those companies which means that you know there's going to be 300% more uh you know self-fulfilling prophecy intrinsic aspects of the market more based on momentum more based on technical analysis than previously before because well these things are all intrinsic to the market and now the capital is the thing that is leading the

market no longer tied to the fundamental output of these companies so I think that is absolutely going to lead to more volatility it's also going to mean that you know the things that these prices and these markets are reacting to is going to be different than what it was before and it's going to be outsized. So I think uh Andy I think you draw uh the correct conclusion. Um I think you know the one reason for it is just purely that there's more capital and liquidity in the market but I also think that since co we've been in this K-shaped economy paradigm and I think that's also accelerating what we're seeing play out in the market and why we're seeing it decouple so much from GDP. And the reason is the Kshaped economy is

basically this bifurcation where the assets are increasing but the the the prices of uh certain economies, certain services, certain sectors are uh falling behind and so you can see this in you know things like you know the co is a perfect example because everyone went online and so you saw the acceleration of things like zoom, shopify, online shopping, Amazon all of these things uh And then on the other hand you have the the deceleration and the backwards movement of you know malls and movie theaters and cruises and these sorts of things. So you had not like one economy moving one way in unison but you had

this bifurcation in the market and some sectors did well and some sectors didn't do so well. I see the same thing playing out in digital assets and it feels like the K-shaped economy is playing out all over the world just for different reasons. In digital assets, it's the K-shaped because you have the revenue producers and the monetary premium assets doing extremely well and at the same time those are taking market share and taking market capitalization from the companies that aren't doing well, aren't keeping up, aren't generating revenue. And so you no longer have this, you know, everything, you know, uh, rising tide lifts all boats paradigm.

It's very much a more mature market and it's very much a a a market that's just been just had so much liquidity poured into it, at least in the equities market, that we are still starting to see those wealth effects, meaning that compounding is still happening. Liquidity is poured into certain sectors of the market. that liquidity is able to compound in those sectors but it drains liquidity from other sectors. So you see the liquidity compounding in things like the hyperscalers in memory these this is the AI bottleneck trade and it's a compounding wealth and liquidity effect but you also see the lack of liquidity and you see that compounding effect also take place in the sectors that are starved of liquidity.

>> Love it. Love it. Ladies and gentlemen, that is your daily equity today. Stocks are out growing GDP at a rapid ratio powered by our friends at dinari trade spacex on hyperlquid spot with dinari spxd. They also just launched their USA available product up to $5,000 per day for US investors. Trade the entirety of the S&P 500 onchain using dinari. Check out dinari.com for more. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get into the revenue durability conversation. Tom Lee also bought more ETH uh this week. He just keeps buying ETH. I mean, he just keeps buying ETH. I mean, it is hard to un It's hard to even look otherwise as to

what he's doing. I mean, he just won't stop buying ETH. Another 9,000 ETH added uh this week. They I believe that they announced 9,000. Sailor stops buying ETH or sorry, Sailor stops buying Bitcoin. Stop selling Bitcoin this week. Michael Sailor is getting pawned by Tom Lee. Whether that's leading to this ETH Bitcoin ratio changing, I think is up for grabs. Uh but it is clear that uh Tom Lee will continue to buy more ETH week over week. He's now accumulated 13 or 14 times the amount of ETH than he previously had. Um I think in the first, you know, month or two. So he's just been rapidly rapidly accumulating. We know Bit is doing that. And then we know Sharplink is going and deploying their

Ethereum in the market as well. guys in the chat, how are we doing? Uh, little miss gun, good to see you. Good to see you, FOMO. New type. Uh, market looking pretty good, Rob. Revenue durability is the question. So, guys, let me take a super quick standby and we'll be right back with the revenue durability conversation. [music] >> [music] [music]

>> Heat up here. >> [music] >> deep.

[music] >> All righty, guys. Is durability of revenue what matters? So, if you guys remember our conversation from Friday, we talked about uh whether or not protocols should do buybacks or not, right? We talked about whether or not that matters, why that matters, is it important? And we kind of came to, you know, several different consensuses, but I would say like the like the crux of it was if the return on equity is higher uh than the return on your capital essentially, then you invest the money into the company. If the return on equity is lower than the return on the capital, then you do buybacks. I mean, that is a very very simplified version.

The full episode will be on our YouTube tonight. it will be it's already on X. There's tons of clips. It's it'll be on Spotify, too. Today is about the durability of revenue. And so, there was a a common rhetoric in the market prior to Pump Fund's recent rerating that the reason why Hyperlid was valued so much higher than Pump Fund was because investors did not think that the durability of Pump Fun, i.e. memecoins in trading on chain was nearly as durable as hyperlquids. Hyperlquid expanded into RWA per they got a lot of traction now have a lot of their daily and weekly volumes as well as open interest coming from RWA trading stocks, commodities, equities, you name it. Pump

Fund went through a bit of a hard a bit of a dry spell if you will with uh onchain trading having a big slump in 2026. However, if you look at the pump fund revenue numbers, you'll see that they're actually much more they're much steadier than you may think. And so, while this is a specific small example, I think there's different ways to approach this buying onchain businesses conversation. And so today's conversation is about how to think about the different types of durability of revenue and the different types of businesses on chain and how investors are essentially valuing these different types of businesses. Another good example is Sky versus Hyperlid. Sky uh

does a let's call it fifth if you will of the Hyperlid revenue. You you need to fact check me on that. I think it might might be a little bit smaller. >> Um >> but SK Sky Sky is above Hyperlid in 24-hour revenue. >> There we go. So, Sky is currently valued at a minuscule valuation compared to Hyperlquid. Um why and why and what is why is Pump Fund trading at its valuation due to its business model? And then you got other businesses on chain.

You look at Tether and Circle. You look at Circle's valuation in the public markets based on its revenues. And so there are kind of these categories of revenue. And the question is how much does durability matter? And so Rob, curious your thoughts, [sighs] >> huh? Um, >> like why is Hyperlid trading so much more expensive to pump fund? Why is Sky at such a lower valuation? Is it programmatic buybacks? Is it token economics? Is it unlocks? Is the are investors questioning the durability of revenue? And then basically not investing or not placing the same

valuation premiums as a typical like PTE ratio, right? 12, 15, 18x is what most investors kind of typically expect to see. But why are some protocols getting that or higher and why are some getting lower when they have consistent revenue? >> Yeah. Well, it's going to be a lot of uh value acrruel to the token. So if we segment this first by protocol and token uh you know you brought up Hyperlid and Sky. Let's just take that as the example for now. Hyperlid's at a $ 59 billion fully diluted valuation.

And uh Sky is at a $1.2 billion valuation. Uh Sky also has a $1.2 billion uh current market cap. So they are fully diluted. um although I think there is there might be an inflation schedule and so you can look at the protocol you can look at how much revenue is coming in and you can also look at the durability of the revenue that the protocol is generating and you could say look you know maybe it's the case that memecoin gambling or you know let's well let's stick with hyperlquid and sky you can make the case that you know uh rate environment is you [snorts] know high it's going to stay high and so the durability of you know a a stable coin protocol that is, you know, making money on the spread between what they

can loan out and the cost of capital. That is going to be uh fragile and they aren't going to be able to keep up this level of revenue. Um, and maybe Per is the opposite and Per is going to continue to grow and the dur durability of that revenue is increasing. And so it makes sense that Hyperlid the protocol is going to generate more protocol revenue because well, it has more durable revenue than some of these alternatives. But then you got to look at the token and that's a different conversation. And I think the reason why Hyperlid is valued where it is which is almost 50 times the valuation of something like a Sky despite having less revenue today in 24 hours than Sky. The reason being because we know how durable

that value acral is to the hype token. So you could argue that you know whether Sky or Hype has a more durable revenue profile doesn't really matter. The question really to ask here is how much value how much of that revenue is moving into that token and then how how durable is that? How durable let like let's say you know uh Hyperlid and and Sky continue to generate similar revenue profiles. I mean today they're within $20,000 of one another. Sky is at $442,000 of 24-hour revenue and Hyperliquid's at $422,000 of revenue.

Let's say for the next 6 months these guys continue to generate the same amount of 24hour revenue every day for the next 6 months. But Hype has made it clear to their community and their token holders that 99% of the revenue of the $422,000 that they generate every single day is going to flow into the token. That's an extremely durable value proposition and value acrual proposition to the token. Whereas Sky, you know, they've talked about buybacks. They've said, "We're going to do buybacks," and they've done buybacks in the past, but it's kind of it turns on and turns off at their turn it off as of now.

>> You got to trust that the Sky team is going to do the buybacks. And so maybe they do generate very similar amounts of revenue. Maybe they even generate more revenue and they decide to acrue some of that revenue back to the token at some points, right? But how programmatic, how durable can token holders expect their value acrruel to be? It's not necessarily the question isn't necessarily the durability of revenue. Okay. >> But more so the durability of value acrruel. >> Interesting. Okay. So, so this piece and I like that take this peak this piece from that 1816 guy deli um researcher type of guy. Great piece. When the market doesn't buy the revenue story, there's a question I keep coming back to

when screening protocols. If a business earns your entire investment back in under two years revenue, what's stopping you from buying it? The the answer is almost never the revenue itself. It's whether you believe the revenue survives. That's what the XRE rev multiple market cap divided by annually annualized revenue actually measures. Not cheapness, durability. And so two live examples make the point. Pump and arrow both screen at low singledigit trailing multiples 2.3x and 3.5x respectively. Over the last 30 days, pump is up 87% [snorts] while Arrow is down 14.5%.

Same screen but opposite outcomes. In June, the market priced pump at 1.3x, meaning it doubted the protocol could sustain even 16 months of current revenue. That disbelief broke in July and the rerate has done all the work since. arrow is the mirror image. Its multiple has tripled since the December 2024 price peak. Not because anyone believes more, but because revenue is decaying faster than the market can repric it. If this framing holds, the trade isn't by the lowest multiple. It's by the multiple that's about to stop being doubted. When a doubted revenue stream preves durable, the rerate does the heavy lifting even if revenues outpaced. And I think that I think this

is exactly what happened to pump. And that's what I was trying to explain. I think it was like sometime last week where I was like it's like this trade has been completely ousted by anybody who's an institutional fundamental investor because they don't believe in memes. They don't believe in uh the ability for this protocol to generate this revenue longer term. But that is what led to this violent price move, this violent move is that there was this belief switch in the durability of the revenue. And Rob, what you're saying is that okay, maybe it's not just about that, but it's also about the uh belief in the market that the token is going to acrue that value, which we spoke about last week in that pump turned on the programmable daily buybacks and um for

the last three to six months. And so that whole like what does the protocol get? What do token holders get? That whole question has been effectively taken out of discussion, right? Uh right. And so they solved they had they solved the question that if you pull up the screen again that the framing is by the multip they solve the doubting question and then the the the the rerate did the heavy lifting. And so this this this fella is proposing the XREV stat which is market cap over annualized revenue at 1x the protocol's revenue the protocol's revenue pays back its entire market cap in a year below it's faster than that right and so obviously it's like whoa okay that's a lot of revenue

to make like hype would have to make what 50 billion in a year is if we're counting that topline number um but effectively the the read is like is there protocols out there guys that we think the market is applying a massive durability discount to and we can get positioned in these before the rerating and that's just what happened to hype or sorry just what happened to pump and I think there's more to come and so basically the alpha is in figuring out whether that disbelief is right or not >> so let's uh can let's use an example here.

>> Yeah. >> Fake World Assets, FWA. >> Sure. >> Generates 38 million in annualized revenue. >> Okay. >> Fully diluted valuation 31 million. >> Okay. So, that is going to be in bucket A. Prints $400 million a year. I don't know. Feels like a fluke. Price tag 1x. Mhm. >> So the argument here is the market is once again saying to FWA >> like, "Hey, we don't think your NFT gotcha onchain casino is durable."

>> That's what we're saying. That's what the market's telling you right now based on those numbers. Obviously, the protocol is so new, so you get like this like kind of like novelty discount as well because, you know, who knows where this thing's going to be in three months. It hasn't even been around for three months. Um, and then bucket B, no revenue yet, but the ICO says 4 billion. Take my money. There's a lot of protocols in bucket B. >> Our job right now is to find protocols in bucket A, right? >> And you just said that Fake World Assets is is literally the exemplary of a 1x price tag, which is it's literally making the amount of revenue per year >> that its market cap is at.

>> Right. This is I I like this metric because what it says is that it's a measurement of doubt in the market. Correct. And it is where alpha is >> right. And it gives you an opportunity to uh [snorts] you know appease that doubt and it gives you an opportunity the market an opportunity to remove doubt from a project. And if the doubt is removed in your mind faster than the doubt is removed in the market's consensus, you you get to be along for the ride during the rerate. And so as absolutely I mean it's a fantastic example here. FWA fits into bucket A.

The market is currently doubting that FWA has durable revenue. That's why it's pricing it at below 1x this XREV multiple. Yeah. And so what this does is if you are a you know basically in the camp that says >> a believer if you will. Sure. The market is still a disbeliever. And so now if the market does suspend that disbelief, the the asset teleports and you can be along with the ride if the mark if if you suspend your disbelief before the market does. Correct. And that is exactly what just happened to Pump and it's still in the process of that rerating because the revenue is insane.

I mean look, they're not printing two or what's the market cap now? Three billion. They're not printing three billion a year. So it's it's you know it is now in the camp of you know it's closer to like a uh you know I don't know it's a the price tag is maybe like a 5x or something. >> You say three billion. >> That's the FDV of pump. So annualized revenue according to DeFi Lama is 325 million, >> right? So you're sitting on like you're closer to that 10x price tag now. Yeah. >> But where did this rally start? It started at a bill.

>> So you were sitting at like a 3x price tag and now we just got rerated to a 10x. >> And and look, I mean guys, a 10x multiple on revenue is still nothing crazy. That is still very very reasonable for for any I mean this thing could trade 50x revenue. >> Exactly. And I think that's an important thing to point out like memory equities traded 30 40 times there in bull markets you have 25 to 50x multiples. >> I mean if you're I mean yeah if you make a billion dollars I mean look at hype you make a couple billion dollars a billion dollars a year they're at a 50x multiple and they that thing might trade to $100 before the revenue really changes. So, if you got anything in that 1 to 3x bucket and you're a believer in that asset, oh my god, you got to slam

that thing because I mean that's just what happened to to pump. And so, um, okay, so bucket A tokens are born cheap. A new protocol friend, I love the FWA example here. A new protocol finds product market fit in a high fee sector and revenue explodes before anyone believes it lasts. So, XREv starts near below 1x. This was pump in the bare market. >> FWA now, >> correct? High revenue, small market cap, maximum doubt. The market cap is low for exactly one reason. The market isn't buying the revenue story yet and makes these makes these the belief rerate candidates. Bucket B are born expensive.

The market prices them from day one as future revenue giants. So, XR starts with a belief that they already paid for. There's no doubt to buy their only expectations ahead. Arrow launched in bucket A. Pump launched squarely in bucket B. Watch what happens to each in the following sections below. Pump puck uh bucket B pays back its premium. Yeah, it launched at a four bill val. More than 9 years of the revenue of protocol was uh already already printing and opened up at 4.5x on circulating supply. The belief was prepaid. The market spent a year taking it back. Reasonable at the time.

Memecoin volume cyclical. Competitors were vamping it. and its durability discount. It it it started at like a 6x. >> Mhm. >> Right. But it they say it peaked in June, right? In terms of it got all the way down to 1.29x >> in June. This thing was the screaming buy in June. And I I can't believe we didn't like add more into it. I mean, I got into it on pers, which is great, but I I just for the same reason that like the whole buybacks, you own you own more of the network at the lows. Like, you just want to own spot in these things.

[snorts] Um, because your share of the network increases as the burn happens and as they generate revenue and take supply off the market. This thing was trading at a 1.29x, Rob. >> Yeah. And if we're saying that hype is at a 50x right now, again, depends on how you navigate the hype market cap and tokens and yada yada. Anything in this one, it's currently only at a 2.3x right now, which means that some of somewhere our math is wrong because you're telling me that it's at a it's at a three bill FTV.

And um >> yeah, I'm telling you that uh the annualized fees or excuse me, the annualized revenue on DeFi Llama is 325 million. >> Right. Well, then maybe I got the FTV wrong because they did a massive supply burn. >> They did a massive supply burn. >> I see Pump Fund at a $2.3 billion valuation. >> That's what I mean. >> FDV. >> Yeah. So, so it it originally started one to one, but they burned 30 36% of uh supply. Yeah. >> Yeah. So I Yeah. Yeah. So it's trading at a 2.3x right now.

>> Okay. >> Yeah. Which is still relatively low. >> So when they burn the supply, the the step down in this ratio took a massive elevator down because they just they just, you know, >> they didn't burn any revenue. They're still generating the same amount of revenue. Right. >> Exactly. And and so the the denominator stayed large because the revenue is the denominator but the market cap fully diluted market cap is the numerator and that got it massive step down. >> Then this is what they did. This is huge for FWA. If FWA does this, this thing flies to multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. So my only concern with FWA right now is roughly $370 million worth of of circulating supply burned.

Bullish. This is pump >> that >> then they lock 50% of net revenue into an irreversible buyback and contract running for a year. This is what changed my mind on pump and completely changed the trajectory of their chart. >> And I I want to jump in here because this is exactly durability of value acrruel. Everything we've talked about up until this point is durability of revenue. You could have had a problem or the market did have a problem with pump fund at 10x. The memecoin gambling casino wasn't going to last, right? this was the institutional cycle and pump fund in this positioning didn't really make a lot of sense. Their revenue was going to decline. It was also cyclical at the time. Turns out that was wrong.

But the difference between that conversation and this one is value acrruel versus revenue. Value acrruel is the amount of that revenue that is going into the token and that is just as important if not more important than the revenue itself. And so let's let's keep the screen on the screen. >> Yeah. Because this is exactly what you're talking about. earnings now convert directly into a bid. And this is what we need to see for FWA. And this is why Hype was valued way higher than PMP was. And this is why Sky is also not valued nearly at where these guys are valued at because their earnings do not convert directly to a bid. That is exactly what you're saying is the main uh topical nuance. It's not about the durability of the revenue. But the

durability of the returning of that revenue to the token holders is what the market is pricing right now. And that is exactly what the data is showing. >> Yep. Exactly. And and and look, we have the ability because these are onchain companies. These are onchain protocols. Their revenue is generated onchain. All of this can be automated. It can all be programmable and program programmed directly into the company economics themselves. There's no reason if you're a company with a token and with revenue to not make your buybacks programmatic. Totally agree. Totally agree. And this is what the market wants. And and I and I love and I do not mean to keep shilling a low market cap fake world assets, but if fake world just comes out and is like, "Hey, we're going to turn buybacks on 50% or whatever it is. I

don't even know what it is. Can can can we ask like what the >> let's find out token situation going over there. [snorts] >> Um this is a great conversation. Thank you, Bowen. Cool. Uh glad you're enjoying." And so yeah, so the rerate only started when the revenue story turned, right? So, April 2026 and then they had this 50% of revenue locked. I didn't even realize this, guys, until like a month and a half ago. I was late on the ball on this. I should have been all over this. Um, and we should have been buying pump much lower. Um, >> and I think look, the the the one important thing here to mention is that the XREV metric on its own would have still been that 1.2, but it wouldn't have been a screaming buy until they changed their programmable

>> buybacks. Yeah. Exactly. >> That happened to co just around the same time as the revenue multiple being there. And that takes this thing from a 1.2 multiple with no real guaranteed token value acrruel to a 1.2 m multiple with guaranteed buyback dry powder programmed directly into the smart contract. >> 100%. >> Durable revenue and well durable revenue somewhat of a question mark but extremely durable value acrruel. >> 100%. And that's what you see here. And so, you know, this the author goes on to write about how the how the re-rade started when the revenue story turned big, you know, big uh August 3rd and 9th was big fee uh 5 million of buybacks,

yada yada. And then XREV has expanded now from 1.29 to 2.3x carrying pump up 87% in 30 days to $1 billion market cap. Not even FTV. We're just looking at market cap here, bro. We're not even looking at FTV. Um and so >> that also might have been the reason that uh our numbers were a little bit different. >> He's saying that he's using circulated market cap on FTV. The multiple is about 5x and August unlocks are actively converting one number into another. Memecoin launchpad is still cyclical. Um but uh is but you know whatever the blah blah blah and so then we get to a drum which is on paper arrow looks like a better deal for $400 million mark cap against 116 million in trailing

annualized revenue. 3.5x and unlike most protocol 100% of that revenue feels flows to V or lockers real yield zero leak the X rev chart tells you something different though it's rising for the wrong reasons so the multiple has tripled since December 2024 with price peak as revenue falls faster than price so basically what's happening is early 2024 is arrow it started quite low there's a lot of disbelief in it u and [snorts] the bull case for a new protocol found product market fit riding base breakout revenue exploding ahead of belief and the market briefly pricing it under 1x all under one-year revenue. So it was under this 1x when it launched

and then it's kind of stayed in between this this mark but now it's trading all the way at 8.8x and so revenue scaled belief followed and the multiple expanded to 3.4x 4x in December and you know buying early on was the trade but now the token has fallen significantly bare market of course and the multiple has nearly tripled to 8.8x 8x which means the revenue is collapsing faster than the price. Annualized run rate revenue has gone from 443 million at the peak to about $46 million today.

Quarterly gross revenue peaked at 106 million and printed 29.3 million in Q226. So the the revenue as a as a as a construct of from the peak has gone down significantly. Obviously bare market for onchain trading you can expect this to turn around. You know, Aerodrome is a great protocol. They've got their Aero launch coming up. I'm also seeing Aerodrome annualized revenue at 113 million. So, I don't know where this author gets 46 in annualized revenue.

>> There's multiple llama here. >> Defi Llama. Well, I mean, maybe this is just extremely volatile like >> annualized. Yes. Um, it has gone from 443 at the peak to about 46 million today. um quarterly grossed. But yeah, it doesn't make any sense. If their quarterly revenue was 30 mil in Q2, then how is their annualized 46? It should be closer to 100 mil. >> That's what I'm seeing online. It's about 115. >> Yeah, I mean that doesn't make any sense. So yeah, this is wrong. Okay, unless we're missing something. >> Um but either way, like the point remains here, guys, and we don't need to go too deep into the exact exact, you know, protocols and teams and things. The

point here is that uh a you know a protocol like pump or art or FWA or they have this really large disbelief of the revenue and then there's other protocols that have a lot of belief in the durability of their revenue. You add in kind of like the belief in the distribution of that revenue to the token holders and you get a picture that's telling you quite clearly, you know, where there's opportunities to invest at the disbelief of the market, >> right? Um, X Gold in the chat says, "We need more protocols that benefit the token holder like the ones you're discussing. I think speculation is dead and once clarity is passed, only a few will survive that generate real revenue." Uh, Xcold, I think you're absolutely correct, and I think that's

exactly what we're talking about here. You you nailed it. And I am going to call this the K-shaped token economy, which is the bifurcation in tokens, those with revenue in their protocols. And and it's very important that there's an and there you can't just have revenue in your protocol. You also need to acrue that revenue and value into your token. Those are going to continue to do well. Those are on the up and up. The asset holders, the token holders, the investors into those protocols are going to be extremely happy with their performance over the coming weeks, months, and years. The flip side is that there are companies and tokens out there. One, there are companies out there without revenue and

they're going to need to shape up and find product market fit fast. Two, there are companies out there that have revenue but are not acrewing that revenue to their token. Maybe they don't have a token, but maybe they have a token and an equities corporate structure and they're choosing to acrue that revenue into the corporate structure rather than into the token. The investors into those tokens are also going to be very unhappy. they're going to be very unhappy with the way because they have the bottom part of the K. And so obviously if you picture a K, you got the vertical line and then you've got, you know, one line going up and one line going down. The line going up is the revenue generating protocols with value acrruel to their tokens. The line going down is the bifurcation and the

companies that don't have revenue or are not passing that revenue back to their tokens. There's a very very very few select coins that have a monetary premium. We've talked about them, Bitcoin and Zcash that belong in, you know, those are sort of a separate conversation. But if we're looking at the altcoin complex or the token economy, there is clearly a trend and you can, you know, you can get on board now or, you know, you can realize this later. And I I think you know we speak to not only the in individual investors but also the founders and builders that are in charge of their tokconomics and I think we're continuously seeing companies protocols that are seemingly finding themselves in the bottom bucket

right maybe they have revenue but maybe there isn't a buyback mechanism or value acrruel mechanism and they are making changes they're turning on you know re you know programmable buybacks in the case of pump fund we Lido come on and say that there's you know going to be a buyback mechanism. We had you know we've heard from chain link they have these buybacks as well right there is increasingly a story of revenue turning into value acrruel for the token companies are realizing this more tokens are realizing this now is the time because literally if you picture a K be you can now switch sides now is the time to switch sides before these two things get so far bifurcated that you can no longer go to

the place where you want to be >> look over here guys Um, first of all, only caveat is like things like Bitcoin and Zcash don't have to play this game. You just got to have a long-term mimetic belief that, you know, Bitcoin, one Bitcoin and one Zcash will be higher in the future. No revenue needed. Those are my favorite. This is like my favorite barbell. It is SOVs, >> just BTC, Zcash, unlimited ceiling, uh, uh, lower floor in the bear, volatile as hell, going to shake you out. Got to be a max believer. vault those things. You know, Zcash is going to 10 to 20x in in this next cycle. I think Bitcoin is going to go to 250.

Beautiful run, right? Um, awesome. [snorts] Everything else is it it had better be a uh app that is making money and that is doing well because it is not going to uh your average L1, L2, infra, whatever it is, I don't really care because if it's not an S sov or if it's not an app printing cash to me, it's not that investable. And so I don't mean to be so cruel and just like, you know, blunt on the nose, but that's the reality. Now, back to the screen. The tokens worth hunting are the ones sitting in bucket A profile today. High verified revenue, compressed market cap, and more importantly, a market that hasn't bought the story yet. The market that hasn't bought the story yet, that's a starting position where the re rerate does the

work for you. For for for what it's worth, a lot of the newer revenue plays are sitting in bucket A right now, printing six figures a day with XR rev stuck under 1x. The market is calling it all a fluke. Same as it called arrows at 7 and pumps at 1.29. Those are our big plays, guys. So, as you know, hype, you know Bitcoin Zcash lighter um near um, you know, a lot of the client and sponsor tokens, Zama, FRA, etc. These are our long-term plays. We we've got our fund investments, the Ether FIS and ton of these other ones that are, you know, hopefully going to play out well in the long term. But, you know, I added pump lower and I think that's going to keep I'm still long on it. I think that's going to do well. Etherfi I think is maybe one that I I would love to get

a look at at the X-Rev. Fake World Assets is one that I think we should probably get in with size. I think Rob needs to get his 30K filled because this thing could have a rerating similar to pump. It is these bucket a dur market is not believing in the durability of the revenue under 50 under 50 mil mark cap under 100 mil market cap market doesn't believe that are going to absolutely rip faces off because they're fundamentally aligned with the entire trend of this cycle which is this kind of you know honestly the entire trend of the cycle is revenue meta I mean we we were 18 months too early um and this is it we will find these on the show guys and I I think it would be doing us a disservice to not just even just go into FWA here

and just look at it a bit a bit more closely. Um since you mentioned EtherFi obviously good idea ventures portfolio company here uh hold. So DeFi Llama you know has different levels of granularity but uh annualized revenue is 50 million. Uh fully diluted is 500 million. So you got a 10x uh xrev if you're using fully diluted. Uh the market cap of [snorts] etherf is this this thing no way this thing's fully diluted. >> Yeah it is. It's fully unlocked. Wow.

>> Yeah. Okay. >> Yep. Fully unlocked. So it's market is right around 500 as well. >> So it's about a it's about a 10x. So >> about a 10x. Now I want to mention one more thing though before we start drawing conclusions because on Ether in particular, DeFi Lama doesn't have this for all the coins out there, but they do notate holders revenue here. It's a separate line item. So now we're starting to get into, you know, the top of this is obviously the revenue durability and the revenue multiple. But then the next level in here is, you know, the value acrruel durability and the value acrruel multiple. And that is where DeFi Llama delineates this between revenue and holders revenue, which what we're saying is revenue and value

acrruel. These are essentially one and the same. As long as you demarcate the difference between revenue and value acrruel. Y >> you know, Ether has about a fourth of its revenue actually flowing into token holders. >> Yep. >> So, >> this is something that obviously we want to see this get, you know, a little bit more, you know, closer to onetoone, but if I know Mike and the team, uh, we know that they're still spending on growth as they should be. And so this is again part of the conversation that we had >> and I think we had this conversation on Friday last week which is that look this this entire industry is still so early like we're shaping up for a whole new cycle these payment companies onchain

tokenization tokenized equities payments like these things are just you know they're years in the making and so you know we know that this is a company that is going to go out they have a low cost of customer acquisition they're extremely focused on the fundamentals and they're going to use some of revenue to go acquire more customers as they should be doing. And I think Ether is actually a really great case study to consider how much of that 50 million should they be putting into buybacks or should they be putting into growth? I mean, the conclusion from the last conversation was that a lot of these companies have launched tokens too early. Maybe that's true, but now that the token is out there in the wild, how much should that split be? I think

that's still an open question. All righty, guys. Uh, kind of closing out here. Um, great segment. Enjoyed quick check-in market. Bitcoin 644. Great candle. Needed it to be honest. Uh, to keep this to keep the hopes and dream alive of not getting the one last harrah, but still still is potentially on the cards as always. Uh, you got hype here with Dr. Miller entering. Looks [snorts] decent. I mean, it's just chop chop chop city. Link had a nice breakout here uh from the lows, right? Really nice move. You know, you would want to see this continue to find some find some support here on this previous level.

Hold the line there. Continue to move lighter. Same thing. Just kind of chopping around that level that it was at. Um more consolidation. Would love to see that continue. [snorts] Near as well, just kind of slowly slowly just kind of finding its next level. should have some really good support here uh at this level. I mean this is the original breakout point. It's almost retraced to full kind of like you could call those inefficient candles. Uh pump as we know it. I mean we were looking in the earlier days to flip basically flip this level here. That's what it did. Now it's gone up significantly. You mean this is probably a logical place for a pullback um at least of some sort, right? I mean, we'll

see what happens in the shorter term, but probably a logical pullback spot or at least a take a break and take a breather and normalize a new a new kind of range of price in this high uh you know, tenth of a two ten of a penny range. Ze, I mean, my chart is disgusting on this. Sorry for all the nonsense, but had this little triangle kind of trying to break out. Still super volatile. Kind of hard to do TA on this thing. You just accumulate this thing and keep hanging out. Purr. Ducken Miller's buying purr. I mean, we had these two levels listed. Bottom one got hit. Bounce. Long ways to go to get back up anywhere close to where it's been.

Good start at the very least. Still underwater on that one. Frack. Start tracking this. It's got a ways to go um on pricewise. Uh needs to flip. I mean, really, it needs to flip this level. um needs to flip this 40 C level to be interesting technically and to really be able to get a nice bounce. Waiting to see that. Zama, if you guys missed this, as you guys know, friend of the show, we're getting a really nice retrace here of the breakout level. I mean, >> oh wow. >> I mean, pretty much as good. I've been dinging in on FOMO. Uh you guys can see that there on my FOMO. Um about as good as an entry you can get if you believe in privacy. If you believe this wasn't just a fluke and that we've started a new trend here. It almost looks like the

perur chart like slow rise, big breakout, full pullback, slow rise, big breakout, pullback. You, you know, you would hope that that would be a nice point. Aerogone we just spoke about just consolidating, still had that nice breakout, got that, you got that news coming next month for for their launch. We'll see what happens there. Um, that's the main ones that we're tracking. So, let me let me tell you about FWA >> ETHI real quick. Looks great.

>> Um, >> oh, nice. >> Flip this level. Really important level to flip here. It did. You can even pull that up a little higher and say, you know, you wanted to see this whole thing get flipped. It did. Any retest to that 46 level should be a good buy. And then, I mean, if we're tracking this thing, we're looking to come tackle some of these highs up here. Close to a dollar. I think it's got I I I think it could tackle Yeah. come up and touch this little level here. So, that would be the next target for Etherfy. Um, yeah. I mean, all in all, it all depends on the king. And I mean, if this is a if this is a flip of a level, then we can push.

>> All right, guys. That that's enough uh technical analysis. >> We need a full flip. >> Uh, let me tell you a little bit more about FWA and the way that their value acrruel has worked further up here. Let's let's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's um So, there was a controversy in FWA. Value acrruel was not going to the token. They generated about Got to get the glasses on for this one. They generated about 2,000 ETH and uh 0% of that went into the FWA token. Uh it was also a nasty timing issue. The controversy hit exactly as

the 15-day FWA emissions were ending. So 30% of the supply had just been emitted. Those recipients could now sell and the extraordinary incentives that had driven protocol usage were disappearing. Meaning that a lot of that revenue didn't actually make it into the token at the same time that you had all these token unlocks hitting. Uh that has now changed. And so FWA launched with a 15-day incentive mining period. 30% of the entire supply was distributed to users during those days. And during that time, it was about 2,000 ETH that the protocol generated. Then those emissions ended, but during that time, that 2,000 ETH, almost 0% of that actually went into the token. Um, and so

it went into different, you know, service providers and things. Uh, one of which being Token Works, and they reportedly held zero FWA. Then on August 3rd, immediately before FWA became freely purchasable, Token Works announced the new long-term tokconomics. 50% of its share of future protocol fees would go toward FWA buybacks. The critical word was future. None of the roughly 3.2 million already generated during the incredibly profitable launch period was going to FWA buybacks. And so that meant that of the three million uh dollars or 2,000 ETH or so that the protocol generated, that's not going to buybacks, but going forward, we're going to see more of the

revenue go into buybacks. Um FWA dropped incredibly after that uh happened. And so now the response from token works which is the entity behind FWA they increased the allocation from 50% to 80% of future protocol fees going to FWA buybacks. This means it goes into a reserve. That reserve is used exclusively for buying back and burning the token. Uh so since they've gone further as we just discussed the current configured protocol fee allocation is 100% towards buybacks rather than 80% compromise announced during the controversy. So instead of just distributing that ETH to FWA holders, they're going to be using

it to buy the token and and burn it. Uh protocol prints money and it is going into value acrruel for the token. So there's really no reason not to go into this. Um, I had uh chat GBT actually go into Ether Scan, look at the contracts on a pretty high-powered model here to verify what we're talking about. Um, and that's what we're seeing. So, the the first two weeks the protocol printed ETH about 2,000 ETH that didn't go into the protocol or excuse me, it didn't go into the token. However, now going forward, if the protocol continues to print, the token will be the main benefactor of

that revenue. So, not only did you have and I think this is the clearest example because you had at least in the fir you actually have both sides of the thesis this entire you know revenue value acrruel bifurcation that we've been talking about. You had this play out in the same asset both ways in a matter of a month. Meaning that the first two weeks the protocol printed revenue to the tune of 2,000 ETH, but none of that made it into the token. Then two weeks later, the emissions ended. The protocol still printing, but they turned on 80% or 100% buybacks, meaning that there was actually a value acrruel thesis. This is represented onchain. Now my clanker here

says that the uh contract isn't immutable and that is something to note. Obviously, you would want this value acrruel to be in an immutable contract, but it is a an onchain programmed programmable programmatic value acrruel thesis where you know first two weeks of the protocol 2000 ETH none of that actually ended up acrewing. But now going forward, you know, the protocol is actually printing revenue and that revenue is making its way into the token. That's an extremely important delineation. And now I think FWA actually, you know, has the correct mechanics for token holders.

>> 30-day fees, $10 million, 7-day fees, half a million dollars. >> I mean, it's it's printing. >> It's printing. And market cap's around 30 mil. >> Go from 30 mil. >> Go to 30K from 1 mil on FOMO next next year. Let's run it, dude. I mean, I want um Yeah, I want a million units. I want a million units of >> guys thinking in units. So bullish. Um guys, one last thing I I I want to show you and then we'll close it out here. Uh [snorts] third assistance fund has been activated on uh hype that is uh Black.

>> Um BlackRock has filed a massive uh purchase of Purr. Um they are now the biggest shareholder of PER itself. Uh so [snorts] 8 million shares were bought during the quarter ending on June 30th. Um so uh they did buy per um and Ken Griffin Citadel Advisors are all Mr. Kenny G. >> He he liquidated Leopold and then went all in purr. He also added to purr in Q2 and dr.

So I when I sat down with Mr. G's daughter at East Village Cafe must have gotten to her head. She must have told >> you were you were height pilling her. >> She must have told old boy Kenny G to start allocating to the gamma squeeze. All right guys uh that is it for today. As always love you uh thanks for being a part of the group. Thanks for being a part of the uh journey here. What are your thoughts on Celestia? They got a long way to go. Uh still cooking one one time before you guys go. Yeah, I mean I think I think we we still hold our uh our position that we invested in in the fund. Uh it's like it was like at a much higher entry. So, uh for what it's worth, we haven't sold um and we hope to

see them do well. uh the the era the space has changed a lot and I think they recognize that and so I think they're trying to um basically build and dog food their own amazing underlying tech to build basically like revenue generating applications. I think they're doing some cool agentic stuff as of late but I haven't kept too much tabs on them but would love to I haven't talked to Nick in a while but I was supposed to get out to Hawaii and hang out but it's been it's kind of been a busy busy summer more responsibilities than I expected. Um, but guys, as always, thanks for being a part of the show. W's in the chat. Amazing, amazing show. As always, you know where to find us. Today is a green day. It's not always a a green day. Sometimes we get red days.

It's all right. We're We're going to be here. We're We're going to find the most durable revenue assets that are trading at underappreciated valuations. And we're going to continue to show them to you guys. We're going to keep buying them on our own. Robbie's trying to turn 30 G's into $1 million on FWA. I think I'm going to join him on it. Why not? >> What? What if the boys turned 30 to 1 mil in public on FOMO? >> Shout out G Money. >> And we're not even early on the damn thing. The thing has been the thing was trading at less than 10 mil for a while. >> It's been out a month, but uh like uh like we just talked about um the first two weeks the protocol printed, but none of that made it into value cruel for the token.

>> Do you think? Then on [clears throat] August 4th, they switched the protocol mechanics or excuse me, the token mechanics and uh started to direct uh about 100% of revenue into the token. >> So this thing has only been investable for about two weeks. >> Yeah. >> Um yeah, it's been out a little longer. >> W Lucaflex, thank you Black Crypto Soprano. Thank you, Miss Gun. Thank you everybody. If you're still watching on YouTube, drop us a like. Drop us drop us a subscribe. We're we are live every day from the financial cap of the world showing you the way, explaining what's going to happen this next bull cycle, participating in the upside with us u and the downside sometimes. Um yeah, guys, I mean you guys make this possible. We really appreciate you guys tuning in and being a part of the show.

Much love. See you tomorrow, 12:30 p.m. Eastern. You know where we'll be. Bullish or bearish, red or green, we'll be here with a smile on our face cooking. See you guys. >> [music] [music]