🟢 LIVE From The Tower: Welcome To Spring. Hayes "No Trade Zone" & Strait Open, Jeff Morris & Da-Bing

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[music] [music] [music] [music] >> 70.

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

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[music] [music] >> JP Morgan, BlackRock, 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. I'm so bullish. Andy's bullish, I'm bullish, we're bullish.

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[music] >> The Rollup is headed to the top. If we're not already [music] at the top, we're going to the top.

>> The Rollup is my favorite. >> From all walks of life, all over the world, all over this industry, [music] come together for The Rollup. >> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> They're buying [music] them out.

Institutions aren't coming, they're simply here. They take control of major crypto, guys. Get right. Let's go. >> [music] >> Welcome to The Nest. See you on the show. Lights is off by me. Welcome back to the tokenization tower. It is April 17th, 2026. We are live. Happy Friday. Welcome to Tokenization Tower, The Nest, broadcasting live from the financial capital of the world. You're watching The Rollup. Today is April 17th, as mentioned. I am in The Nest, presented by our friends at Plume. Let's give them some love, man. These guys are bringing the heat in Bali right now on their offsite. Got the whole office to

ourselves. It's a beautiful day for new highs in crypto. Guys, what is going on out there? I mean, it looks It looks very very very bullish to me. I mean, I mean, how can we even argue against how bullish this is right now for this market? Um I mean, guys, hype over 45, Bitcoin pushing over 78, stocks, of course, at all-time highs. There's a lot of green on the bottom of this ticker right here. Let's give some love to all the bulls. All the bulls who made it this far, who stuck with us. They're here. They deserve the gains today. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a big show today. Uh

I'm looking forward to it. Uh we've got Jeff Morris of Chapter One, a large prominent uh investor into AI innovation technologies, and of course, digital assets. Talk to him about kind of what's going on there, and then Shuyal of Mega ETH um one of the one of the friends of the show. Mega ETH actually on Hyperliquid pre-markets is up like, I don't know, 40% today on their pre-token launch. Not exactly sure how that happened. Um guys, we're going to take a super quick standby, get right back to you with the markets, weather, and today's topics.

We'll be right back in just a second. All right, guys. On the show today, we

are live from the tokenization tower. We got markets and weather from New York City. It is a beautiful spring day again here, guys. The trench coat season is officially over. Let's give some love to the trench coaters, man. I I have a favorite trench coat. I love it. We got Chapter One GP joining the show. Um that is Jeff Morris, and Mega ETH's co-founder is also joining. Today's topics are presented by Trezor, our custody partner here at The Rollup. Let's give some love to them. Use code rollup10 at trezor.io to get your Trezor today. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a beautiful beautiful beautiful day. Robbie is getting his wisdom teeth out. If you guys have been uh watching the show this week, we were

talking about that yesterday. Uh I think his cheeks are as big as a chipmunk today. So, he'll be joining us back on Monday. Uh why don't we get into the markets and the weather? Before we do, I need to tell you about our premier stablecoin partner, Frax, building infrastructure for the future of digital money, open, stable, and borderless. For more information, start using the future of digital money today at frax.finance. Ladies and gentlemen, it is quite warm in the tokenization tower today. We're rocking a 78° day, partly cloudy, wind gusts of 5 mph.

This is, of course, powered by our friends at relay, relay.link. Some of the best cross-chain swaps in the entire on-chain universe, and the on-chain market is back. I've seen multiple runners go up to 10, 15 million. Obviously, Pump Cade had a huge run. Guys, I think on-chain is going to get reignited. I I um all it's going to take is a little bit more excitement from the market, from people who are watching, from people who are interested, and I think on chain's going to be back. Probably on Solana as per usual where that kind of activity happens. Already seeing runners. We're going to talk to a ton about some of the runners and about what's going on in the on chain world after our first guest today, but that's the weather. That's what's going on here. Let's get into the

markets. I think this is what you guys want to hear about. All right. [snorts] Equities all-time highs, absolutely flying. Oil dumped hard. Trump has announced that the straight is going to be open, and then apparently Iran is saying that they're never going to close it again. There is some still some macro tensions, but clearly the crypto market is is responding quite well. Ave's up 6%, Tao up 10%, pump up 3 and 1/2, Ethereum up about 4% as well, Bitcoin up about 4% Solana up a little bit more as well as Chainlink Near still hovering around that 1.42 mark.

Looking pretty pretty bullish though. Jupiter up 8%, Pengu up 4%, EthFi up 9%, Sei up 4, Celestia up another 5% as well. Man, some of these tokens have been beaten down so so hard. It's really not going to take much to get these things back to a little bit of a mean reversion. Um They'll get them back to prices from I don't know, 6 months ago could happen in a couple of weeks. Um Optimism up 4% on an interesting announcement from them about using their token as a uh staking it to get priority access in blocks, something that's quite interesting. They're they're running the EOS playbook back. Humanity protocol up

18%, EigenLayer up another about 1% after a 20% day yesterday. Plume comes in at over 10% today. Let's give some love to Plume, powering the nest, baby. Up 10% today. Those guys are cooking in Asia right now. Um yeah, I mean guys, the altcoin market is coming back to life. Obviously stocks driving this move, and yeah, I mean oil still elevated, but came down a lot today. I've been saying that the crypto winter is over. I'm going to keep standing by that. I think the crypto winter is over. Now, what does this mean? We're going to talk We're going to hear what Arthur has to say about this.

Um he's in a no trade zone apparently. Really just trying to allocate to hype and gold. We'll talk about that in a second. But if you felt the sentiment in the past, I don't know, just couple of days into the weeks, you could felt you could feel this vibe shift, right? This general kind of flow where we actually saw a change in the structure of the market. Bitcoin was kind of hovering around that range high at 75, 76, and yeah, really I mean it didn't take much to push us over that line, and I think that is what's now driving a lot of this bullish excitement.

>> [snorts] >> Obviously it's going to take a long time to repair the technicals on these things, right? Like the market is still very much in a downtrend. Commodities look amazing. I'm finally almost above water on my uranium position. That thing has been That thing has been a mental dead weight. Like Like you ever just had a weight on your shoulders? That's what holding a losing trade feels like. There's a lesson in there. Cut your losers fast. Otherwise, not only will they weigh down your portfolio, but they also weigh down your mental bandwidth and your ability to take more trades.

I was faced with the tax deadline, filed my extension on time, and yeah, I mean it's just sometimes sometimes the market gods just bail you out when you need them. So, let's give some love to the market gods. They're helping the boys out here. They're they are really doing something for the boys. All right, we're going to get into the news. We got quite a few things to go over before Jeff comes in. I'm going to tell you about Near first, our premier partner in the AI sector, the blockchain for AI, designed for AI native applications and autonomous agents. Near is absolutely cooking. Illia is one of the best founders in the crypto and AI intersection, and we continue to support them and back them. Stoke to have them

as a partner. Arthur. Arthur says this is a no trade zone. He sees AI driven deflation combined with the Iran-US tensions weighing in on risk appetite. He's citing a potential pullback to Bitcoin to to about 60,000 before the next leg up. Mixed reactions here on this one, guys. People are saying, "Look, just keep DCAing. Have patience." Versus the skepticism on his timing of this post, right? Like obviously the market's been performing very well, and Arthur comes out and says this is a no trade zone. He also said though in this post that not only was it just a no trade zone, but that hyperliquid and

gold were the two assets that he was accumulating in this no trade zone, the only two assets if I recall correctly. In fact, let me read you exactly what he said here. Think you'll find this to be interesting. Um portfolio construction. As an unlevered long-only investor, Malstrom can let time and compound interest do their thing. The slight outperformance of Bitcoin over IGV US over the past few days is very encouraging. It will inspire me to reevaluate my bearishness on the price of Bitcoin as the AI knowledge work create financial deflation accelerates. As the AI knowledge work created financial deflation accelerates. The only

asset I'm comfortable adding risk to at the current moment is gold and hype. Hype 4 will launch in a few weeks, and I predict this will take significant market share from Polymarket and Kalshi in the prediction markets vertical. That is a hot take. That is a hot take. Other than that, I shall pray daily to Lord Satoshi that they can infect the minds of our global class of political elites and convince them drop acid, not bombs. I can tell Arthur has dropped quite a bit of acid in his time. We have that in similar. We have that in common. Um look, I agree. It seems like the entire market of speculation is kind of ripe right now, but it does just kind of feel like this

I don't know, man. It doesn't feel real. Like the like the the futures in the stock market going to all new all-time highs with very little fundamental catalyst other than the war ending. Something doesn't feel right about it. And so I think Arthur is expressing some of his kind of macro views of having patience and just kind of wanting to, you know, roll with the roll with the punches rather than swim with the alligators immediately. I think he's got a massive hype position. I think he's calling for 150.

Um which would be absolutely nuts. And so I I don't really read into this. For me, it is kind of a no trade zone. If I'm, you know, we just went over the markets. Things are relatively strong. Look, I think if we get a pullback across stocks, we may get a pullback across crypto. I'm I'm still a little bit disappointed in the performance from crypto comparatively. Today has been a little bit different. Finally got the breakout. But um yeah, Arthur's no trade zone is fair. As a unlevered long-only investor, he's worried about AI driven deflation amidst political geopolitical turmoil.

So, all right, let's move on from Arthur. Yes. Circle sued over $230 million Drift hack, USDC freeze failure. The allegations are negligence in aiding to aiding conversion as funds moved via CCTP after hours. Man, Circle's saying that freezes only occur with law enforcements or court orders. Drift protocol has now shifted to USDT after a $125 million injection from Tether in investment into the protocol.

Strategic move to capture more dominance on Drift, but also in Solana at large. Man, this is a tough one, man. There's freeze policies and response speed that's influencing stablecoin choices. It's just hard. It's the free like I think the common sentiment right now on CT is that Circle's in the wrong. Is that they have they should have froze these funds. They should have done it quickly, and they should not have let They should not be contributing to North Korea's GDP via these DPRK hacks.

I I don't know. I don't know what the proper take is here. Honestly, it's hard to it's hard to react, and it's also really I I don't know that this lawsuit's going to work. Like I don't know that you can argue the ability for Circle to freeze funds as something that is going to be lawsuit worthy. But I imagine this is going to take years to settle, and it's going to be a bit of a spine in Circle's back for a while. So, that's all I have on Circle. Hope everything works out for all the investors at Drift.

All right, Luke Gromis says Blockstream CEO is pushing for optional quantum resistant upgrades for Bitcoin. He's opposing forced proposals that would freeze or phase out old addresses after a deadline. Back argues that since quantum threats remain theoretical, Bitcoin shouldn't break its rule against freezing funds. I mean, guys, I mean So, Charles Hoskinson comes on the show yesterday and says that basically the BIP 361 timeline is going to force Satoshi's wallets to to be um basically disbanded and completely gone.

And Adam Back is basically saying that he wants to preserve Bitcoin's no freeze user sovereignty ethos with optional quantum resistant upgrades meaning that if you're a Bitcoin holder, you can you can move to a quantum resistant version of the network um optionally. And I yeah. I think this is fine. I think this is something that is normal. And yeah, I expect that I I expect there to be a change in the way people are thinking about quantum as a result of

the impact of what would happen if you do an optional opt-in for quantum for Bitcoin holders. A lot of people are not going to move their coins. And I think it would cause further disruption and further splitting of the network's assets than if they did it a kind of like all-in-one upgrade. But I suppose there's no way to do that. Yeah, this is an interesting one. This is an interesting one. Bitcoin's biggest challenge maybe isn't necessarily quantum. It's deciding how to evolve through the situation without breaking the kind of principles or

unspoken rules that made it valuable in the first place, right? And so, that's an interesting spot to be in for the core protocol. All right, let's let's move on from quantum. We've done so much quantum conversation in the last couple of days. Okay, a former US secretary suggested US authorities prepare a backup plan in case of a collapse in demand for treasuries. This is the same guy who served during the great financial crisis. Nothing to see here. Let's hear this video and see what these guys have to say about this treasury demand. >> different, right? If when you hit the wall and you're trying to issue treasuries and the Fed is only buyer and the prices of the treasuries are going down, interest rates are up, that's a

dangerous thing. And so, I what the thing I am talking about now is we know people say, "When are you going to hit the wall?" I obviously don't know. It's impossible to know. But the law of economic gravity, you're you're not going to know that. So, and when we hit it, it will be vicious. So, we have to prepare for that eventuality. And I think we need an emergency break the glass plan which is targeted and short-term on the shelf. So, it it's ready to go when when we hit the wall.

This crisis is different, right? Yeah. So, basically what he's getting at here, Hank Paulson is arguing that um there's a break the glass moment coming potentially if buyers of US treasuries disappear, which would be Iran, China, Russia, all a lot of big nations. Um Tether is ironically buying a ton of these. So, Tether has become one of the primary demand drivers for US treasuries. That's why the government is so gung-ho on stablecoins because they see the they see the value and the demand for stablecoins globally.

Apparently, the Fed may become the buyer of last resort, which I think is actually it's already just recently happened. I think Trump um signed something recently with with Secretary Treasury Scott Scott Bessent about uh buying some amount of trillions of of US treasuries. If the treasury market cracks, it's not just a bond issue. This is the foundation of US as the leader in the global economy and as the leader in uh the ability to kind of keep its debt growing without really like destructing the rest of the global debt markets. So, everything will be affected by this. I

think I mean yeah, I mean you hear these types of not like fud, but like treasury FOMO conceptual ideas a lot. Uh to be frank, they kind of go above my head. Let's move on. Pete Rizzo is saying that cypherpunk legend Adam Back just said Wall Street is starting to adopt Bitcoin. Professional money managers are next. Pensions and insurers will follow. This is the passive bid that Robbie talks about a lot on the show that is coming where if MicroStrategy if I'm not exactly sure if it is yet. Uh but if they if they are added into the S&P 500 then there'll be this passive bid onto

Bitcoin and other ETFs. This is kind of where the space is going to reach its maximum maturity point where you have Bitcoin and ETH ETFs in major indices. And this leads to this consistent passive bid where you get much shallower bear markets because you have this somewhat infinite bid from passive investment vehicles. Let's go ahead and listen to Dan and Adam here from Paris Blockchain Week. forward you know, what are some of your predictions for institutional adoption for Bitcoin over the next year or two?

>> [snorts] >> Yeah, I mean it's quite interesting because, you know, the the Bitcoin market has gone sideways at this point and you know, it's starting to show some strength again, but the I think what happened potentially is that people heard institutional adoption and they saw the news flow and they expected the the you know, the buying behind it to hit immediately and institutions are more systematic and process oriented than that. So, I think it hasn't happened yet largely. So, you know, in effect you'll hear from you know, one big investment bank with a lot of wealth management clients or mutual funds and managed funds that you know, they are putting out model

portfolio or they're going to offer it to the wealth clients. But then they'll have a 6-month process to like write some guidelines for the set for the the sales teams. They'll do the training. They'll talk to compliance and legal. They'll select a custodian and all these things take time. So, you know, there are some early you know, indicators that they've been doing it. I think you could see from the BlackRock filings that about 30% of the coins were institutionally held. But I think, you know, the other 70% are just um individuals who manage their savings via a broker or a financial advisor who you know, called up their advisor and asked to get some Bitcoin exposure or

something like that. So, it gave access to people that wouldn't necessarily buy Bitcoin on a Bitcoin exchange, but I think the actual allocation to the managed funds and see the other context is most people in the world are not making manual investment decisions. They're not you know, have a self-directed stock portfolio. They don't have a stock portfolio at all. Their savings are in the form of like a life insurance policy or an employment, you know, managed fund. So, it's all managed by professional money managers and that that's probably most of the money in the world that's in that format, right? And so, those professional money managers have got to go through this process. And ultimately, I think that is good because you know, as Bitcoin as we always want

you know, benefits of Bitcoin to be available to everybody. And so, because a lot of people don't do their own management investment decisions, the only way they're going to get the exposure is via these institutional money managers that are managing pension funds and life insurance products and things like that. So, I think it's still to come and you know, it's it's a sort of later wave that will kick in you know, presumably over the next few years. Yeah. Yeah. Um somebody in the chat said on the previous point, big win for Tether, big L for Circle. Um Hayes also loses a lot of his trades, too. Yep, that's that that is true.

That legend trade event yesterday in New York was insane. It was insane. Uh I did not go. Was good, y'all. What's up, man? Eyeball 509, new type. What's going on? Um look, I agree. Adam Back is right. Uh trillions in potentially inflows as the allocation uh framework expands. Like there is going to be a massive shift in the way that allocation is happening in this industry. And scarcity ETF demands this passive flow for Bitcoin and for crypto assets is going to be the main driver of this industry going forward. It's 100% going to be the main driver. You're you will see RIAs, financial advisors, all

different types of people offering and selling to their clients on the phone to get access to Bitcoin, to get exposure to Bitcoin. And then once Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs are present in the actual uh S&P, Nasdaq, these larger indices, there'll be this infinite kind of passive flow. So, guys, we've got Jeff Morris coming up. He's going to join us. If you guys are in the chat on YouTube, I see a bunch of you guys. Uh Jeff is a large AI investor um and a general partner of Chapter One. We're going to move over to me and I'm going to get Jeff in. Before we do, I'm going to tell you about one of our amazing partners.

>> You up in the code. >> And I I want to see what questions you guys have in the chat. Uh we are going to have Jeff Morris of Chapter One join us. Guys, Jeff is a founder and general partner of chapter one, a seed stage venture firm focused on product obsessed founders in fintech, dev tools, AI, consumer crypto, and infrastructure. Guys, if you guys have questions in the chat today, I will be reading them as I'm live with Jeff. So, feel feel free to drop them in there. I'm looking forward to having Jeff. He is the former VP of product and revenue at Tinder, where he helped to scale into one of the top grossing mobile apps ever. Started investing as Index

Ventures Scout and Angel before launching chapter one, which is backed by Sequoia, A16Z, Kleiner Perkins, and yeah, he he's invited or he's invested in Mercury, Superbase, Etherfi, Ondo, Zodl, Aerobord, Lighter, a lot of these companies that you guys know of if you guys are watching the show right now. And he runs an informal founder experience program and recently launched a scout program as well. He writes on product philosophy on his Substack, The New Internet. So, looking forward to having Jeff on. Um we're going to get Jeff up in the show in just a moment and get him in on the Empire State Building. We're live in the tokenization tower. Let's bring Jeff up, get the show started, and here we

go, guys. Let's give him some love when when he comes up. The guy is ready. Big big big investor day today on the show. Jeff, wel- welcome to the show, man. Pumped to be here. Also happy we're having a a great day on the markets, so we we can be happy, you know. Yeah, man. When I when I shot you a message, it was still everyone was still in the doldrums. I've been beating the drum on the bullishness for the last week, and finally we're getting some action. Yeah, no, I think the past day has been much needed going into the weekend and uh yeah, I mean, I'm I still have a ton of things that I'm excited to talk about that we're excited about as a firm.

And so, I think we're Luckily, I don't spend as much time on crypto Twitter as I once once did, but I'm I'm really pumped up about what's going on at the early stages right now. Yeah, Jeff, I think your uh fund's kind of vision is quite broad and holistic across several different sectors, but I I actually had Cathie Wood on yesterday. It's yet to come out, but she really spoke about like this convergence of these innovative and disruptive technologies, right? AI, um blockchain, uh genomes, and kind of uh energy storage, and biotech, and kind of how all of these are coming together. I just love to hear chapter one's thesis and and your kind of

personal innovation and investor view of the world lay the groundwork for our conversation here today. Thanks for joining man. Yeah, I guess our firm background is all of us came from public companies, mostly consumer internet companies, where we led product teams, data science teams, engineering teams, and in 2017, when I really started investing crypto, the really obvious reason to be in the ecosystem was all the products at the time uh just had like terrible usability.

They weren't consumer grade. It was the like all the things that um in some ways we're still trying to solve, but the idea was, "Hey, what if you took the best people I could find who had built you know, mass market consumer products and brought that background and experience to crypto, could we help solve some of the um I guess product problems that we saw to bring more people into into the asset class?" And um yeah, in many ways we were early because it's it's taken a while, but our early investments at the time were like the seed rounds of Compound Finance, Dapper Labs, Ondo Finance, uh more recently we we co-led the seed rounds of Etherfi, Helios,

uh we're investors in Lighter, Layer Zero, pretty extensive crypto portfolio. So, I like to say we're uh like the amongst generalist firms, I think we're probably amongst the most crypto native. Like, I'd put us up there with USV and Founders Fund as being like the funds who can play in both worlds and feel like we can toggle in and out of crypto um and and love love the the space. Yeah, awesome. And and and I'm curious if your um like where your head's been at for the last 6 months. I I'm I imagine you've been deep in more AI decks than you have been in crypto decks. In fact, I saw one one of your tweets, which was kind of

timely after we had Tom um from um Variant Ventures on earlier this week, and he put out this viral tweet about kind of like the crypto VC reset. I saw you kind of, you know, put out a similar post. Have you been spending a lot more time on the AI side of things as of late? Kind of where's your where's your main focus been? Yeah, I think the reality is the number of pitches we see at the early stage within crypto just decreased a lot over the past 12 months. And so, the volume has slowed down, but we've still been very active. Like, the in fact, we're pacing in our crypto vehicle faster than our non-crypto fund.

Uh what we're doing though is just being way more concentrated in a fewer names that we think really matter. And so, the more recent investments have been Aerobord, um Zodl, the Zcash team spinning out. Yep. Uh uh I mentioned Lighter. We did a later stage check into Kraken, bulk trading, Hyperbeat. So, we're still really active. Yeah. >> you're in the trenches, man. You're definitely you're definitely deep, man. Uh-huh. >> I think we're I think we're pretty good at throughout every market cycle just staying heads down. Like, I I have zero emotions towards any market swings, and we just sort of like

keep doing the same thing every single day and and every single vintage, and um hope that we you know, hope that we are right, and then I think I think we we will be. Yeah, you know what, Jeff, I'm curious your perps thesis, right? You you you talk about bulk and lighter. I mean, it may just be as simple as, "Look, I think we're going to have tokenized 24/7 trading of any asset on chain." Like, but how big do you think, you know, this is going to get, right? And when it comes to lighter, bulk, and obviously Hyperliquid is is kind of the leader here. When when you think about the perps category at large, you know, how big are we talking, and kind of what is your what is your grander vision for what something like a lighter could

become? Yeah, I think if you look at perps, the market size relative to um traditional equity, it's still relatively small. The bet on Lighter was purely a team bet. And I think if you meet the Lighter team, you can see they're easily some of the best founders in the space. Um we don't have a we try not to have a thesis for what's coming in crypto that's like more than a week or 2 weeks ahead of where we are just because the space moves so quickly.

And so, we can like market map the space and and be really thesis driven. I think it's within crypto, we're way more founder driven is the is like the real truth. And so, like when I met Robert Leshner in 2017 or 2018, and he was building Compound, like DeFi as a category did not exist really. Like, it was a very small category. When we met Dapper Labs in 2017, NFTs weren't a thing. Um And so, I think that's how we like, we're really looking for category creating ideas and new companies that are like doing things that are net new.

And so, I don't I don't think we have like a uh market size view on what perps within crypto might become other than a lot of the best founders and most aggressive founders are spending time building there. And so, that's where we um that's kind of like where we we've we've done done our best investing. Yeah. You you've called Etherfi totally overlooked and underrated. We are on on our fund, we also invested in Etherfi. I think we bought your bags in the series A, so congrats to you, Jeff. Um and we so, I put out this tweet a year and a half ago saying, "Welcome to the revenue meta."

Yeah. >> I got a lot of pushback for that. People really made fun of me. Um year and a half later, we are firmly in the era of fundamentals-based investing from like a more institutional DCF, cash flow, token emission, net token value kind of flows thought process. Etherfi is one of the leaders here. However, as of late, they've made changes to their buybacks as well as Sky that have kind of perhaps shown the market that the programmability and consistency of the value flowing in the system isn't as robust as something like Lighter or Hyperliquid. I know this a very nuanced question here, but how do you reason

about the programmability as it pertains to a token economic system versus the ability to be flexible and change that from the founder's perspective? Those two were kind of diametrically opposed in a way. You know, sometimes you you want to be turning down your buybacks if you feel that the market is super hot. Sometimes you want to be, you know, ramping them up if you have a ton of cash flow, if you have a lot of of treasury um runway, and just kind of thinking more through these token designs going forward.

The whole space is going through a change here. How do you think about this programmability versus flexibility of economics when when, you know, if you're in a founder's shoes? Yeah, I think the buyback question and like zooming out how Etherfi has built the product and kind of the their roadmap going forward is very focused on building a revenue-generating company. And so if you look at the transaction volume of their cash product over the past four quarters, they now have over 50% market share of the entire crypto neo bank category and I think these numbers are public, but

will be north of a billion dollars in transaction volume in less than a year. I think they launched cash in Octo- October last year. And so again, in terms of like category-creating ideas Etherfi went from restaking to building this cash product, which is quickly become a market leader. Where where I'm not as like frankly like I don't spend as much time in the daily trading conversations around buybacks and that whole microscope under what teams are doing at any given moment. I think the Etherfi product and team are

about four years old and so to look at any kind of like week-over-week buyback volume and try to I guess project what the team's intent is is is I think like like treating a startup as a public company like a 15-year-old public company and um I do I do know Mike and team within like the near future are going to um come to market with a really interesting view on what their token should be and um we've had we had a board meeting this week. You know, obviously I can't talk about

everything that that we talked about, but the um the question of buybacks is something that the team is actively you know, like like the discussion is not lost on the team and so I I would just uh maybe wait a week and maybe have Mike on the show. >> [laughter] >> It'll be my or two weeks. It could be actually a pretty cool conversation. Um because I know they have strong feelings about about kind of how the markets um interpreting the buyback conversation. Yeah. So Jeff, I think we're both fully unlocked on that. I haven't sold a single token.

Um actually we did about 60-70 deals in 20 like late '23, we did a ton of '24 and then a little bit in early '25 and then completely pumped the brakes. I was with um a really uh well-known investor kind of like uh he's now a mentor and basically told me like look, man, in this bull market now, you get a lot of these bull market warriors, these guys raising five at 50 for whatever the hell idea that they have. So just kind of pump the brakes a bit. And the only deal we did in 2025 was was Plasma. Okay.

>> Um which which has actually turned out quite well even though it's been it's been taken down hard. The question here though is, you know, we've realized some of these gains um on some like like the more I don't know, either like shorter vesting schedules or uh projects that we're not as as bullish on. But a lot of them, man, we just held on and not really sold much of the vesting at all. And obviously the whole token market is decimated right now. Yeah. But I'm curious like so we when my partner and I set out to do this, we we were like, all right, we're going to take a full VC approach to this. This is a five-plus year time horizon. We're we're not going to be trying to sell the next big crypto company if we get lucky and invest into

it, you know, in the in the third year. And I'm just curious like how you think about the game theory between like other investors and the team dumping on every unlock versus like actually taking a real venture mindset to these things thinking like three, five, seven, 10 years out. Um yeah, and then just kind of like thinking through how to how to choose either with with which companies you want to take the longer term approach with, with which ones you're comfortable with trimming. Like I'm just curious on like some of your general strategies if you wouldn't mind sharing about how to maintain a profitable venture fund, but also giving yourself enough room to really kind of zoom out.

Yeah, I think the question's a good one and we actually took the same exact approach you did mainly because that's how we know how to support and build companies. Um so we maybe in the short term that's created um suboptimal outcomes for our fund, but the term like we always just think about the terminal value of a you know, 10-year-plus venture fund and uh maybe this is where we're slightly different from the rest of the crypto industry for better or worse.

But if you think of a company like Etherfi, which is, you know, rein- reinvented itself, created new categories multiple times within a four-year period and look at their roadmap and the ambition of the team. Like that's a pretty good example of of a token and a team that will continue to back, you know, for many years. And actually if you look at them at you know, the majority of the cap table, it's it's this it's a it's an identical view of the company where I think the reality is when you're building a venture firm, you have to put up DPI and return capital to LPs especially within

the context of crypto, the limited partners are used to seeing faster liquidity cycles than other asset classes and so there's a expectation that you'll trim and you know, return capital in a three to five-year period as opposed to if you're investing in AI out of a early-stage venture fund, maybe you're looking like a in years like seven or eight, your LPs are starting to to ask or or or kind of require some distributions.

Um and so that it's a different mindset. I think the question we ask ourselves every day of for every position we own, especially liquid, is just would you invest in this company again today? And so if you wake up and re-underwrite, say you have 10 positions in your liquid portfolio. I don't know how many how many you have, but you know, taking a real a real proactive view on the forward projections of the company, the roadmap. It helps if you're on boards or or board observer of these companies because you actually you know, I'm lucky that I get to to hang out with Mike and hear the vision. Um but you you can kind

of hear the pitch yourself in the story and it also you know, shows the company it There's a lot of companies in crypto [laughter] that don't have boards to be clear. Yeah, no, I know. And so I think there's a a seriousness to some companies that you encounter. We're also we're investors in Helium. Um everybody knows Mert and Austin. I don't have to explain >> Yeah, he was just on the show yesterday. Uh okay. See, um you know, so if you talk to Mert and hear his ambition, like he's trying to build a $10 billion company and um it's actually the opposite. They There have been so many points in their lifecycle where they could have launched a token and

um Mert a Mert token would obviously uh you know, perform very well, but Mert's serious about building a a real company and so I think I think it's been uh that like 2020-2021 vintage has a lot of founders who um were playing short-term games. They were mercenary founders who did not want to continue building and um and those are the positions that you obviously exit. I think for most of those projects, the value on those positions is probably like

you know, no longer even a consideration for your firm. Um but I think it's I think it's about finding like we want to work with very serious people and serious founders who are intense and want to build real companies. Um it's probably why we're actually excited about the current industry relative to maybe some other VCs cuz we're not um as deep in like consumer crypto as other maybe other firms. Like we're more excited about the financial primitives and tokenization, privacy, you know, this intersection between

TradFi and crypto. Like we That was always the goal. Uh frankly like I was we were always like since 2017 saying, "Hey, we want crypto to get to the point where the end user has no idea they're using blockchains or or crypto in any way." And um now we're here and we have like real institutional interest for different parts of the ecosystem and so many people in crypto are saying, "Hey, I'm out." Like this is not interesting to me anymore and I'm I guess I don't really fully understand that mindset other than if you like don't like finance [snorts] or the financial markets or that part of crypto then um

definitely like this probably isn't as interesting but if if that's exciting to you like this is this should be the best time to be in crypto. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a weird dynamic from the very early stages. Like I was just at ECC and I think you'll appreciate this kind of anecdote where a lot of the pre-seed and seed round type of companies they were a lot more kind of scared in the eye you could say a lot more concerned about like where their ability to raise a series A is going to come from. Yeah. >> Whereas a lot of like the series A and beyond companies pre-token service providers, managers, etc. Yeah. They're kind of like this bear market is not nearly as bad as the previous that we've been through. Sure,

we anticipated sales of our hardware devices to go down or sure we anticipated that our auditing firm was have to do a lot more cold outreach than we previously did in the last two years. Yeah. But like we also structured our company and structured our team in such a way that we're already for this. And so like through these trials and tribulations of these cycles like these teams are maturing. But yeah, I mean it is it is it is flushing out some of the kind of more overly speculative stuff. Yeah. I actually think it's like a really good time to be a a an a early stage investor again. Like Tom came on and said he thinks this 2026 like end of 25 26 cohort Mhm. is going to be one of the best. Yeah. Um he

thinks because of the uh proliferation of tokenized assets of stable coins of all these actual actual things happening that are driving real longer term substance that these are that that that there's going to be a lot of winners out of this vintage. One thing I have for you that's kind of correlated to Etherefi Yeah. tweet that I saw firmly agreed with came after Plasma One launched their uh neo bank announcement. Somebody was I think it was Mance from from Maven 11. He tweeted like there's way too many neo banks now. Like undifferentiated I'm going to be your front end for stable coins spend earn save pay all in my app and there's not a big distribution plan there's not a a unique founder edge. Do you agree with this? Is

there too many of the same like iterative stable coin neo bank plays? It like like what are you looking for if you're trying to invest in some of these more like web 2.5 technologies? Um what is is there something that you're looking for? Yeah, the answer is yes there are way too many. The thing we look for is generally a very strong point of view on a really specific part of the market that they're going after whether it's geography customer segment. So like said otherwise the go-to-market matters so much for neo banks and I think just layering on a uh

a wallet and some like swapping product or privacy product and expecting users to trust you as their primary bank account is really hard. Um if you go to you know, we've seen obviously a lot of specific geos so if you go to LatAm or different parts of Asia and launch a local product I think that can work. Um in Etherefi's case I think they like earned the right to expand because they had uh so much TVL and and and uh had earned the trust of so many customers that they would do right by them.

And so the there was a recent Coinbase or sorry Robinhood earnings report which I thought was really interesting where they showed Robinhood now has 11 different product lines that do over a hundred million dollars in revenue. Wow. >> And I guess why I thought this was interesting was because if you think of going multi-product like an Etherefi strategy or you know, the that path I think is a response to like once you have assets under management and you have users who really are loyal to your product then you can then you can really expand what you do and and I guess what I'm seeing a lot of though now is um

companies that don't have any product market fit who just roll out a a wallet or a neo bank and expect that to drive a bunch of new deposit volume. Um like you have to start with with deposit volume or distribution or a really unique angle in the market otherwise you're right it's it's it's pretty crowded. Yeah, and I think the same thing for trading. Like Lyra one of your portfolio companies um is integrated with in-wallet on Telegram like 500,000 users on there and then also Robinhood if I'm not mistaken. I'm curious like this we call it neo finance is like this like

>> [clears throat] >> defi mullet but it's really like this integration of of perps stable coins tokenized assets under kind of large scale fintech applications. Our thesis is that kind of a lot of these fintechy web 2.5 types of things like Cash App Robinhood Venmo etc. They're going to offer things like Morpho's Bitcoin back loans on Coinbase or Robinhood's Lyra perp strategy. A lot of them will offer a similar product but potentially choose a separate defi application. So Robinhood is with Lyra perhaps Coinbase is going to is going to you know, I think they've launched their own perps for instance but you know, perhaps they could do uh hyperliquid perps underneath with

with Builder codes or Phantom has hyperliquid. Um I think I think MetaMask does too so maybe a different wallet at a larger scale will do Lyra. And so it's kind of like to avoid a commoditized offering of the same exact product they'll just choose a different defi protocol underneath and you can see the Aaves and the Morphos start to thrive here. Uh I'm just curious like it is this kind of like a non-negotiable in your eyes now from the defi perspective? Like if if if I'm a protocol is getting into these partnerships and distribution venues is this like a very clear distribution advantage that is should be top of mind? Like how how how do you think about the distribution of defi protocols as it relates to the amount of users going on chain and like

pressing a ledger versus like opening their Robinhood or their you know, more familiar interface and then actually interacting with that protocol kind of like what Wagmi did with Plasma and Aave um more frequently? Like how do you think about the the focus point for these protocols as it as it relates to revenue uh new users TVL etc. Yeah, I think that integration war is real and it's happening across all categories. If you look at defi or prediction markets um or any other part of the stack like that's a uh the BD game is more important than ever.

Luckily I think there's less noise. Like the category winners of the 2022 to 25 cycle have been established in many ways and so when these defi protocols are working together there's an actual um like real BD relationship to establish. Where in the past you saw I think a lot of like sub um uh scale defi protocols trying to do integrations with each other and that just doesn't work. Um and so yeah, I think I think that is a a big part of the distribution game and in many cases the protocols have very different audiences and so you're kind of introducing

audiences to new primitives or new um uh financial markets that they don't have access to within their own ecosystems which I think is pretty cool. Um and so Etherefi's done a good job of this in you know, within their partnerships and integrations and I think this has played out across many different um companies. The question I just always ask myself is like does does the end user care about >> Yeah. um who's serving them this functionality and generally speaking um users tend to be less loyal to uh to the the protocol and just want a great experience. And so it obviously has to make sense at a product level

too. Yeah. Um kind of a similar point here but more on the token side. The CEO of Artemis John Ma put out a tweet after announcing their kind of equity data product that that they launched. Said it took us four years to admit the hard truth tokens don't make sense and value enabled by blockchains accrues to equities. And you go to the comment section and I mean it's kind of a war zone in here. Very sick. Congrats man excited. No no no huge mistake bookmarked.

Terrible. So so so wrong. Um final finally fundamentals get their time in the sun. Uh congrats Sean blah blah blah. And then you got people arguing about the positioning of this and how they're kind of enabling this. I don't know this feels like the bottom of tokens man. Like like what's your read on this tweet? Yeah, I think the token market and like what founders are responding to is so many of them have done the tour of like trying to onboard institutional capital to have interest in their tokens and the most common feedback they get is how do we know that the token will have

equity that's aligned or value that's aligned with the revenues and equity that you're creating elsewhere. Um so, right now the institutions view equity and tokens as being two very different parts of the company in terms of the the value that's being captured. And founders are trying to figure out how to create more alignment and guarantees that the token will um benefit from the you know, in the the revenue or the the cash flows that are being created by the protocol or or or platform. And so, I think what you're seeing is founders trying to actually solve problems that they see

based on the feedback they're getting from institutions. And everybody's trying to do this in a compliant way with again, I think like a limited legal frameworks to to solve the problem. But what what I'm hoping is that that and again, I hope projects like either five solve this is that relationship between the revenue and the cash flows and the token become very clear. And so, uh we can look at a a token and say, "Hey, this has real value that's tied to the revenue or or value that's being created by the protocol and um uh so, you we'll have to get closer to

tokens that that function like equity um in terms of the ownership and and and value that that is being assigned to those to to the tokens. But right now we're in this weird in between state. And again, I think that's like purely driven by we had this past like year or two where a lot of institutions were evaluating so many different tokens, whether it was you know, like the top 10s and and beyond. And that's the feedback that um that everyone's been getting. Yeah.

Yeah, they are. And they're looking at DCF kind of models. They're looking at token emissions. Really like I think where this is going to go is to the fullest extreme of like, all [snorts] right, let's fully analyze all the net outflows of your token to investing, um grants, um salaries, um foundations, any sort of inflation, all of like the emissions on one side and then like, all right, what value is coming back in to the to the asset? And like, is the net token flow a positive? Yeah.

>> Because that then that means that there's actual like longer-term wealth effect of holding the asset versus like the other way. And so, I think that's kind of like where the the whole spectrum's going. I agree. And again, I think this is a positive thing like where growing up and maturing as an asset class like we want institutions to have confidence in the value of tokens. And to to do that, we need more um more new playbooks to achieve that. And so, the I think anytime Crypto Twitter is upset about anything, it's like directionally um points to like a a conversation that

needs to be discussed um as a ecosystem. And frankly like I don't pay a ton of attention to Crypto Twitter at this point. It was actually at coming into this call, I I I had a topic that I thought was interesting, but I actually think another really good reason why you should start up becoming Crypto today is that Crypto Twitter is like a much smaller subset of people at this point. Yep. And obviously like like glad they're out there and care about Crypto.

But there was this moment in like 2021 to 23 where as a founder, you were like really letting that influence your road map because it was more of like a fear-based thing. And now I just think the the internet and what people are upset about, like the life cycle of any news story is like 5 minutes. Yeah, man. [laughter] So, as a founder, I think you can um make bold decisions and and not be as you know, worried about the public response, which I think is a really good thing. It also just matters less, you could argue, right? Like the flows that are driving a lot of the price action on especially the larger assets are primarily institutional.

>> Exactly. So, you know, they're not perusing CT for daily changes in sentiment or in, you know, what what what you know, which founder said what. Um Jeff, before I let you go, former VP of product and revenue at Tinder. Man, what an interesting um what an interesting company to work for. You know, Worldcoin is actually doing some like face ID or like proof of personhood stuff for Tinder. Um I'm just curious like what you think happens to a dating app like Tinder, like these matchmaking services in the era of AI, of like a lot of deepfakes and catfishing? Right? Like I I I don't

know. I'm I'm just curious like like where do you think this entire like subset of the digital world moves to? How how do you how do you think about AI as it pertains to dating in the common era? Yeah, I think the reality is that you're going to see way more bots, way more spam, fake accounts. Um you know, in the case of most these companies, like they're bots have gone up 10x over the past 2 years. And that problem will keep on getting worse. And so, all the dating apps are looking for identity solutions. Um the tradeoff as a dating app is that you

uh end up losing a large part of your user base. So, if you're a public company like a Tinder and you enforce um really strict identity um rules, then your growth ends up slowing down. And so, I think but then the long-term impact is you have healthier ecosystems. And so, I think the spam problem and the bot problem within dating is just going to keep on getting crazier. And so, the solution I would think would be to take a really strong stance as a uh product like you're seeing Tinder do potentially with Worldcoin. I'm not sure that's the final solution, but um to say like, "Hey, we want to solve this

problem and we're willing to take a short-term dip on our, you know, monthly actives or weekly actives to to to do that. Um Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. >> [laughter] >> What what a world, man. I know. >> a great weekend, Jeff. >> Yeah, appreciate it. Hope you get some grass touching. I It seems like it's a beautiful day wherever you are. Uh it's a beautiful day here in New York. So, uh I appreciate your time, man. Yeah, thank you. Cheers, Jeff. Bye. And bada bing, bada boom. All right, you guys, we're going to get to A Ton. Uh he's going to have some I don't know what he's got for us, man, honestly.

Let's kick it over to him and we're going to get fired up about what's going on in the on-chain world. I don't know if we're going to do macro world, on-chain world, but we're going to get into something, I'll tell you that much. Uh checking on the chat real quick. Uh awesome channel, thank you, Crux. Um Hayes sucks people into dump buying tokens and then he dumps on them. Um your friends are not your exit liquidity, Shine. Your friends are not your exit liquidity. Let's pin it over to A Ton. We're going to get fired up. Let's give him some love. Let's get fired up here.

Ton. All right, what's going on, man? What's going on? Good to be back on the show, live from the tokenization tower. How you doing? It It looks like the Unk airdrop 35% of supply for free. What does this mean, man? I have been so far removed from the trenches. Get us caught up here. Yeah, so this might be the best feel-good story that the trenches have needed for some time. So, you had the dev Fibs. And what he did was airdrop 35% of the supply to about 2,000 traders on chain. And so, what happened at the peak, the coin reached like 20 touched like 25 million. And at the peak, those airdrop tokens that he had given out were valued at like 6.4 million. And it just caught

like all of CT. Like you have this Unk shill, the Unk army. If you're over 30, you can't buy this token. It seems like there's like a movement going on. And like I'm here for it. Right now, it's currently the stats have it at around like 11 to 12 million market cap, around 11,000 holders. Um just seems like consolidating. Curious to see how it moves next. So, the meme is like the Unk meme, like the like the zoomer talks to the older guy like Unk. Like, "Yo, what up, Unk?" Exactly. It's like Unk like the Unk shill happening.

So, like they have that icon, that like IP. Like during the clip, like I'll have it on the screen. So, it's like I hope they don't get sued for any IP, but from like past experience with coins getting sued, whether it's like troll or like whoever it was, chill guy even, that just made it like mega bullish in terms of like market cap. So, the trenches have needed a runner, something to go past 10 million for time. And it seemed like a lot of people just making money. Like people making millions of dollars, 10k, whatever it was, just seemed to ignite it. So, we need more feel-good stories is what I'm seeing. I saw a token called Brent, like the Brent oil, ran all the way to like 15 million in like a day.

Uh I mean, I remember these things used to run to 100 million in a day. Yeah, and it's funny. There was a coin on ETH mainnet, Asteroid. This is like dormant coin for like months and months. Somebody had bought like nine ETH, which is what like 20k at the time, and for months it was basically worth next to nothing, but as soon as Elon had tweeted something about asteroid having to do something about like Shiba Inu, the coin just pumped. And after months of being worth nothing, this is on ETH mainnet. There was a Solana runner of like the same topic, but it didn't nearly go as high as this one did, and that trader from like months and months, sort of like your uranium trade where he was like underwater for like months and months, he just woke up and it was up

like six figures. So, um we're back. I think the winter's over. I think this is just the start. I saw your tweet this morning, this pump is for ants, and I think if you've been here around from like 2021, then the best is yet to come. Yeah, man. Um do you did did you follow what happened to Pump Cade? Yeah, so this is the equity I think you're referring to. I saw like a lot of tweets where it's like this is has to do with instant liquidity granting people instant um liquidity and no vesting. So, I think you got a little pushback in it, but I think people are starting to realize that like, "Hey, these are real companies. Hey, they're really building something for the trenches, for your

everyday DJ." So, I think and I like the team over there with they're building. Yeah. I wonder if Pump Fund's going to make a run back again. I think the the token looks pretty pretty bottoming out here. Yeah, I mean you're really bullish into the the buyback meta. I think they put out tweets like updating it, but I think they're like supply offset of circulating supplies is just like above a third. And like everyday, you know, they're they're like pumping like a million dollars back into the token. Supply offset around 33%, so if you're into the revenue meta, down around 50% from the ICO that like four 4 billion, so down 50%. If you're bullish on the trenches coming, then just like

hyperliquid, it's in my portfolio as well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Um man, it feels like the trenches are going to make a return. It feels like on-chain could have a comeback. Yeah, and who knows, maybe we'll end up with the Pump airdrop at some point. Yeah. Dude, any news on that? I mean I mean maybe that's why everyone's going to a loan's house. This is like a little bit of news where they like they figured out where he lived, so Really? Yeah, so hopefully maybe some people some journalists went to go over there and find out when our airdrops coming in, but if anything if it's anything like the Unk airdrop, I think people are bullish airdrops.

Wow. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a ton live from the trenches pumping hype nice from Crux of Crypto. Yeah, I mean those are the revenue generating companies in the space. Um they just keep buying back more tokens. I mean Pump has bought back a ton of tokens. They will continue to buy back more and more. I mean, people just don't value hype and Pump in the same way, and I'm going to tell you guys why, and then we're going to take a quick break. People don't value Pump in the same way that they do hype because they don't see the sustainability and long-lasting nature of the the revenue and the total expansion of potential market growth that they do with hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid, they look at the Nasdaq, the NYSE, the CME, they're like, "Okay, there's a possibility for this to get to absolutely trillions of dollars a day in volume comparatively to what the uh S&P does, the CME does, the the uh any trading exchange does." Whereas Pump, they're like, "Are we really going to get that on-chain demand back? Are we really going to get that back?" I would expect Pump to trade harder and stronger than hyperliquid in these more bullish on-chain environments because hyperliquid is more just going to be steady, I think, whereas Pump, I think it's going to absolutely churn and do and perform really, really well when the market kind of like turns on on-chain, but when it's not, people will question the long-term sustainability of the

revenue potential of Pump comparatively to hype. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to take a quick break. Be right back with Shuyau of Mega ETH. She's going to join us live here in the tower. Don't go anywhere. Stay here. See you in just a second. Audio

>> Alrighty guys. Um Ethereal eyes co-founders Vivek, Raman, and Danny Ryan on how the genius act unlocked Wall Street adoption. Some of the biggest Ethereum bulls in the entire Ethereum universe are obviously very bullish on Ethereum. Who would have thunk it? Um let's watch this video. I think there's a lot to unpack here from Ethereal eyes the co-founders themselves. There's a very long tweet here. Raoul Pal picked up on this and absolutely flew with it as well. Let's go ahead and watch this one.

Man, I'm vibing with this angle. Banks have been in Washington since 2015. They know this is coming. They know that blockchains are the future. They're just constrained by regulatory parameters. So, they couldn't use public chains. So, everyone had a Ethereum clone running in the background. I mean, J.P. Morgan had an Ethereum clone running. Um Hyperledger Besu. So, again, this isn't new. The real unlock and I saw this at the early stage of Ethereal eyes was no one could touch public chains. And then genius happened. And so, that's like uh that's the shout heard around the world for Ethereum. Once genius happened, public chains are now enshrined in law. Stablecoins are now enshrined in law. The biggest product market initial product market fits for blockchains are now in in law. When we got called in front of Congress to

testify about the Clarity Act, and we're like, "Wait, there's actually more legislation coming." That's when the tone started to shift and it went from banks and asset managers understanding this is a good tech, but not being able to adopt it to just complete FOMO. So, I think we are in that FOMO stage of we need to just like banks had to all adopt an AI strategy ASAP, they now have to adopt a blockchain strategy. And the the gaps that remain are can they do it fast enough? And can they build the right architecture and infrastructure? And that's how we stepped in. Like like Danny said, we identified there's a lot to build and there's a lot of infrastructural layers from tokenization to privacy to customization all on Ethereum. So, we said, "Okay, let's build it so we can help accelerate this." But, there's no pushback anymore. It's just how fast can

we go and how many apps Yeah, I mean, I'll I'll come into the areas that I know are sticking points for these guys. But, stablecoins is obviously the pointy end of the stick. It's the easy way in now, right? Cuz everyone realizes that they have to do it. But importantly, what the genius act did, so previously it was like public blockchains felt illegal. Or it felt like they might become illegal. What the genius act did is said, "You can do a legal thing we we made this legal thing with stablecoins. You can do it on on public chains." And And so, thus banks and and financial institutions they're like, "Well, we there's all sorts of legal things that we do. And we can do it on this infrastructure cuz that infrastructure implicitly is legal because of the genius act. So, let's do legal things on that." You know, it

doesn't that doesn't mean you can do wild ass DeFi with all of your classic assets. And we're going to need to see SEC regulation changes. We're going to need to see laws continue to evolve to like handle this infrastructure. But, I can do I can take the legal world of things that I can do and I can do it on a public chain now. And so, that was that was the big like opening for them. And yes, stablecoins are an obvious like place that some of them are playing in. But, largely I think what they're really interested in is like This is like the >> we upgrade our processes? How do we upgrade back office operations? How do we encode the rules of assets on chain and not have to do all sorts of manual work and stuff?

>> on thesis right here. This is like the Genius Act is unlocking public block space to be legal, to be available for all cancel on permission networks. We don't need bank chains. We don't need corporate chains. We don't need permission chains. We should do it all on Ethereum. Genius Act Genius Act Clarity Act is going to allow it. Tokenization, stablecoin, all all of this on chain. I mean, this it's just this is this is the uh strongest pitch for Look, the corporate centralized chains are done. And the future is certainly going to be Ethereum, going to be uh decentralized open public block space.

If you think about the kind of uh focus on privacy, compliance, and programmable asset rules though, you realize that Ethereum and public blockchains have a long way to go. I mean, they have they have to figure out how Ethereum specifically has to figure out how how it's going to navigate that trilemma of permissionlessness, RWAs, and smart contracts. It's going to have to figure out how how to implement privacy at scale. Um and what that actually looks like. So, the regulation didn't necessarily like slow this industry down. It really just changed the way that in investors, entrepreneurs, builders were building.

Things in it kind of they kind of did it in the wrong way. So, you could argue that slowed it down, but now it's legitimizing it. Now institutions are are not asking if they're going to come on chain. It's more of like when. And so, you got to love that. You got to love to hear that. Guys, we've got Shaurya here in the in the tokenization tower. We're going to take a quick break, get her set up, and we're going to be right back with you guys live from the tower. Last guest of of the day of the week. Thanks for being here. We'll be right back. >> [bell]

>> I am live here with Shaurya Khan of Mega ETH. Shaurya, welcome to the show. Welcome to the towers. Great to [laughter] see you again here in New York, your favorite city in the world right now. Absolutely, nothing competes with New York. Nice. Well, it's good to have you. >> as mentioned, yeah. Yes. Yes, uh with the AI doomers. >> [laughter] >> Exactly. Exactly. Well, good to have you. Uh it's been a while. It's been maybe 6 8 months since um since you've been on the show. And obviously, you guys have launched the mainnet. You guys have gotten products out there, apps out there. So, yeah, catch me up. What what's been the last 6 months like and then let's talk about what happened after mainnet. Yeah, absolutely. So, I think the biggest news is the mainnet went live after working on it for 3

years, believe it or not. Blockchains are actually indeed really difficult to build. And then standing up the infrastructure around the chain has also been very painful. But luckily, I think I'm just really relieved that the chain is live. It's really really freaking fast as we promised. Nothing has broken. And every promise we've given to the community and investor about technology has come to fruition. So, I'm just really happy about it.

There are things that concerns me as well. As most people know, we we launched the chain and we started the KPI-based TGE and most of our efforts are focusing on having a very healthy sustainable chain economics via the apps, via the stablecoin USM. So, the focus for the entire team is to make sure that the apps are going live. They're going live with good quality. They're going live with good adoption.

I think yesterday the Bricks team came on the show. Yeah. So, we have been working tirelessly and in secret of a lot of new primitive. I think Bricks represent one of them. Working with them to make sure that they are going live with us has been our focus. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. So, curious then like it's been about 2 months. What are I know you kind of touched on a bit, but maybe a bit more concretely, what are some of the things that you've been most positive about post-mainnet? And then as you said, some of the kind of things that that you guys are trying to work on improve. Is it just shipping apps? Talk to me about the pros and cons here and let's get into some of the nuances. Yeah.

The positive is, you know, we continue to welcome more new builders. Okay. It's amazing, guys. People say like, oh, you know, everybody pivoted to to AI. It's not true. Last night, so every time I'm in town, sometimes when I'm not in town, we have this Mega Mafia hangout. >> Yeah. We go to one of our builders rooftop and, you know, we grab industry pizza, grab a beer, and just chat and talk about life, talk about work. And yesterday we had a really good turnout. We have new builders coming in. The Dream Team, for example, they're building a option protocol, but it's extremely retail-friendly.

If you use the app, you don't really need to understand option in order to trade. So, I'm continuously impressed by the type of builders we're able to attract. I think partly it's because the chain is indeed really performant. I think partly because I think Mega has demonstrated that we walk the talk. Yeah. We said we're community-focused. We've done a bunch of, you know, investment rounds that targeting retail communities. You know, we said the chain is fast and chain turned out to be really fast. We did a stress test last year, which is, you know, 40K TPS continuous blasting the chain and it worked beautifully.

I think lastly is I believe that we're a chain with a bit of more aesthetics and attitude. Trying to stay out of the typical, you know, crypto UI UX. So, yeah, I've been very positive surprised. Had a great time hang out with the builders. I think they um They teach me more than I teach them. Yeah, because they are expert in their area. Right. And they come to you and they trust their entire product on your platform. They want you to understand their unique value proposition, their growth market. So, I'm now forced dive really deep into different sectors.

Really fun. Um And the things that I would say a bit challenging indeed it's, you know, I lose sleep over this is, you know, apps is our biggest focus, but every app has their own challenge. And there's very little that I can go and and fix it for them. So, the Bricks guy, give another example. They were supposed to launch with us a month ago. However, they have to go through a lot of paperwork in Turkey with the central banks, etc. And it requires humongous amount of interpersonal relationship and these type of things take time.

So, I think my job is to make sure that everything is settled for them and whenever they're ready, we're ready there for them. So, it's a bit of coordination that has been taking a lot of time. Yeah. You know, I feel like the the tides have shifted consistently throughout Mega ETH's kind of life cycle pre-chain, post-chain. Like it's just constantly shifting. Like you guys are operating in a in a a variety of different like market environments, also market demand on-chain being very active, being slower, sentiments, infrastructure. All these different components. I mean, I've lived through them with you.

I'm just curious like how your your perspective has changed on like what type of applications are going to power a lot of the future value on Mega ETH in general in the on-chain world, right? Like I think we have clear categories of perps, tokenized assets, or tokenized a sham vaults are kind of being a more institutionally led conversation, stablecoins. Right? They're kind of like these basic four, but you guys are very much like expanded outside of just purely like the basic four. But I'm curious like how have you thought about more like what just generally what's your viewpoint on the types of applications that on-chain enables and kind of just curious how that's evolved.

We are user experience maxi. Okay. Period. We believe that you want to use different primitives. It's probably not that hard to build a primitive in 2026, but it's really hard to build a good user experience for normies. That's what we believe in. We also believe in non-copy pasta. I am very vocal about it. >> [laughter and gasps] >> I think for the last 3 years, no matter what is bull market or bear market, if the product is very not so unique, I'm always very blunt and straightforward and sometimes I would tell builders is like, please go build somewhere else because you're not going to get much support from here.

So, from our perspective, I see on-chain finance, whether it's pure DeFi, you know, sometimes we call it arcade finance or gamified experiences, I see them as different a combination of different layers. Okay. I don't believe that you need one product that serves both institution, retail, whales, and dolphins. I don't think that's the case. What I think you an ecosystem needs is really good like DEX infrastructure. And then you want builders to build unique experiences on top of it. I'll give you an example.

So, I call it layered. >> Yeah. We have a DEX called World Market. It's the most freaking Cypherpunk DEX you could ever find. That it has no backend. Like I kid you not. Like there's no one can There's like no one control that DEX, right? Which I think is original ethos of crypto for those who kind of forgot. So, that is an infrastructure and the retail experience using that DEX really isn't the best. However, we have another team called hit.one. Founder was the first growth hire of Polymarket. He built hit.one on top of World, which translates a perp DEX into a unique experience. So, that is a layer we're looking for. Another example

would be Bricks. So, they're bringing Turkish lira to trade. But in order to short TRY, you can go to World to short it. And then you can go to Aevo, a lending protocol. So, what you're seeing is what I think is, you know, people promised in DeFi Lego in 2021. And I think it justifies the existence of general purpose blockchain. Yeah. If you don't have layered primitives, I think you should build app chain. You should not build on top of a You should not collocate and share block space. So, to answer your question, we want non-copy pasta. We want primitives that leverage each other. We believe in

extreme on-chain applications. Yeah. So, Legend Trade, they're a completely separate application. They just did this event in New York the other day. I think it was yesterday. And they had like this boxing ring and they had all these traders trading for like a couple hours on perps, maximizing They did like this whole competition around it. Are are you still a big bull on like this like gamified experiences on chain for like speculative perp trading or just like trading in general on chain? Like do you are you still firmly in the camp that like this type of enablement of taking something like trading, which is like very like quant heavy, it can be very nerdy, it can be very difficult, and making it like into like this gamified

experience, is that still part of the part of the thesis? Oh, 100%. I mean, Ryan and money there, they're all homies. >> Yeah, cool. >> They're all good friends and um I think the world is changing, Andy. >> It is. The world is changing. The gamification of everything is unstoppable. I think the competition to provide gamified experiences is also unstoppable. So, it's very much and we're seeing people coming on Mega for that experience because of the real-timeness of the blockchain. You legit don't have latency when you build this experiences on Mega. And you can never do that on another layer one blockchain. I'll emphasize it one more time. The It's the beautiful thing about Omega is is the technology actually works to deliver web

two user experiences. It just You can't do it anywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'm curious if you're if you regret launching the KPIs. Oh, no. Absolutely not. No. No. I am so happy I did. >> getting close here. Well, what it's six apps I I I I think are a six apps, 100 TVL of USDM, and there's one other. And it's I think the six apps is getting quite close now. Is Is that correct? Yeah. So, six apps and then a 100 million TVL, then there's apps revenue. Apps revenue is tied to the apps launching. So, if the apps is not launched, then there's no revenue. So, that is an awkward KPI, I would say. Um I am extremely um

how to say I I've never even thought about regretting that, to be honest. >> Okay, no. That's fair. But I want to explain my rationale, right? The rationale was very simple. Is you want to have In order to justify the existence of Omega, like why does Omega deserve to exist? Mhm. We deserve to exist because there's Omega GDP. There's economic activity and there unique things to do for people. If we can't meet certain bars, certain quality, we do not deserve to exist. Yeah. And I want to show that to the world because we have this culture of co-building. And I think it's kind of bold, honestly. It requires some guts to do that.

>> Yeah. And I'm all game for this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um So, stablecoin growth has been somewhat slow. Why? What's the What's What's going on there? Yeah. Um stablecoin growth is strictly tied to the DeFi apps. So, if the DeFi apps is not there, then there's no stablecoin. So, um everything comes down to application and user experience. >> Yeah. Nothing else matters. Forget about your you know, fancy blocks or infrastructure. If the apps are there, money will come. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, the entire chain ecosystem is changing. I think like this this whole institutional institutionalization of this industry is also changing. Kind of like zooming out more holistically here, how would you how would you describe the state of something like Omega E, something like an on-chain ecosystem comparatively to like the NYSE is like we want to launch our own block space or like these large institutions are like, "Oh, we want to you know, build on Canton." Like there's just like this really weird dynamic where it's like there's almost like these bifurcated worlds growing about. Um you guys being one of the leaders in kind of the more on-chain native world, curious like your perception on the splitting and then

perhaps your thoughts on is Omega E like ready to be an institutional chain? Like are you What What does that even mean? Exactly. What does it even mean to be an institutional chain? Um it's a very different game. And it's different muscles. It requires different your your views of the world. Um at the end of the day, we serve our builders and our builders tend to be those who want to provide retail user experiences. >> Yeah. Um whether that touch upon institution is their decision, not my decision.

>> Um if, you know, Omega become the quote-unquote, you know, selling ourselves as back end to NYSE, uh it's a very different world we're envisioning and that is not um historically the product market fit we're seeing. Um now, do I think that it's either or? I don't think it's either or. I don't think you have to choose. I think what Hyperliquid has demonstrated is if you have enough liquidity in retail order flow, you have enough traction, the institutions will come. Yeah. If you do the right thing, people will come and congregate around you. Yeah.

So, you don't think that the that the industry has lost its soul a bit with with all of this? You know, cuz I I I know you're a pretty strong believer in kind of some of the core ethos of what we're doing here. You guys have built Omega in a very opinionated way. Which actually, before we get to that, you guys took a lot of flak for building Omega E in like this like we're going to build this really beefy when we start we're going to optimize for throughput in an era of the industry where like people are talking more about decentralizing their sequencers than they were about their first thousand users.

And I And I mean that sincerely. Hyperliquid came out and clearly showed build a product, don't give a damn really about where your nodes are, get a lot of traction, figure it out. Right? You guys took a similar approach. In hindsight, like do you do you believe it was the right approach? Um we're very different from Hyperliquid. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um it's all first principle. What's the first principle? The first principle is as a a roll-up and Ethereum layer two, decentralization should not be your first priority.

There's something called escape hatch that your money on Omega will always be safe. There's nothing we can do because you can always bridge it back to layer one. Um I have said this on record before. I'll say it one more time that Omega E is way more secure, decentralized than most layer one, actually probably than most layer ones. Because the layer one foundation control the validator, they have a lot of soft power. We have no soft power over Ethereum mainnet. And anyone anyone can bridge their money back to Ether layer one. That's first principle thinking. I do not have to be decentralized because I have a freaking decentralized layer one. So, that's the first principle. I think that most people who talk about decentralization

was just laughing. As a core team, my ethos has always been how do we grow the industry without losing the cypherpunkness? Omega E is simply the best architecture you can get this done. And it's not Hyperliquid. Yeah. And to to kind of firm up the question, you think that the choice of opting for performance over the whatever other kind of options that you could have was the right option? There's no other option. Yeah. Omega E is the only option. Because, you know, Rob and I are kind of developing this thesis that again, Ethereum L1 is really like the home of like high quality assets, whether they're tokenized assets, large swath of capital, the home of stablecoins, the home of

longer duration assets as well. We'll see a lot of fixed income stuff come on chain. We'll see a lot of like tokenized um any sort of like actual TradFi product on on Ethereum. Solana, maybe more for DEX trading. Omega E for trading. Hyperliquid obviously PERPs. But like we're seeing this kind of like split in terms of purpose of chains, like in terms of why they exist. Ethereum is very clearly Like you you could argue that Ethereum doesn't even need to improve to speed up that much because because it's not it's not really for that.

Um I don't know. You're You're a huge Ethereum bull. Like I'm just curious how you're how you're evolving your thesis into L1, Omega E, like how these things come together. Are you thinking about it similarly like high quality assets, large amounts of capital, stablecoins, layer one, much less, you know, decentralized high throughput layer two, Omega E, kind of like bringing them together. Like Is that the right way to think about it? Are you still thinking about it that way? I do not think about it anymore. Okay, good. Um See, this this this is what I mean. We thought about these things for so long. Yeah. I mean, as a founder, my job is not so much about the semantic layer one, layer two, or what others are doing. Yeah.

Yeah. My job is think about the what I'm seeing, which is you're getting all this, for example, emerging market assets assets, which are very difficult to get on chain. And you can only get it on Omega. Yeah. You can get Sui. For example, today I think I saw that Sui spot just launched on transferred to Solana via Sunrise, I think. I'm not interested in it. No. I'm not interested because you can get you can get those asset on centralized exchanges on many different places. But the bricks yield, you can only get it on Omega. That's what I'm interested in. So, Seraphim from He just recently joined Solana. He He came on and he was like, "We're working on pre-IPO Chinese stocks only on Solana." Is this kind of like how

you're thinking? Like what type of more esoteric assets exist out there in the world that you can only get on Omega E? Yep. I think assets are expressivity instrument. Mhm. The world is going to have become more complicated. There are things happening. When things become asset, it gives you an opportunity to express where the world is heading. Mhm. Um many people know that I spent a lot of time in the Middle East. Mhm. And you know, the war happened. And you know, there are many different ways you can express the direction of the war other than oil.

Right. I think most people do not know. And that's something I'm very interested in seeing playing out. Um one more thing I would add is um you know, people don't believe in globalization anymore. I don't blame them. Mhm. But I believe in the globalization of assets. Okay. Okay. Explain what that means. >> that means people who don't live in other countries would still have a view on the asset in that country. Right. So, what you wanted to do is onboard the interesting one, allow them to create story and narrative around it. Right? So, I mean, you can always think about longing some sort of rock in America and probably hedge it with something else in Asia. And P- things will become so composable

uh and the LEGO will only deepen. Yeah. So, yeah, that that's how I think about the I would say the omega assets. And again, it goes down to user experience. Mhm. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I I don't mean to keep trying to put this into mental models, but we're shifting from like a chain-centric view of the world to a very much like an asset-centric view of the world. Like, I am an investor, I'm a speculator. I want to trade, speculate on X asset. Don't really care what chain it's on. I don't really care where it is. I want to get exposure, long or short, to a certain asset. And I think that's how like a lot I think that's where the space is progressing towards to, much less like oh like I want to be

on this chain because I want to exist on this chain. No, like oh oh like I want to trade this asset. This asset is here, so I'm going to go here to trade this asset. Mhm. I disagree. I think I mean, obviously I'm biased. Um I think most people don't think chain matters because chain doesn't know how to market themselves. Okay. Chain market themselves as a boring infrastructure and block producer. That is omega. Omega has a very interesting innate economic engine via the stable coin. Has a very close ties with the mafia applications. And with a lot more interesting things coming up. I

almost think I want omega to be a consumer-friendly developer product. Mhm. I want omega to be a you know, a a fashion product. I want to meme omega into existence. I want it to be relevant. I want people to say like, "Hey, I did I launched this asset on omega." Right? And then omega becomes more than a block producer. So, um >> So, you're a big bear on like chain abstraction and like this whole like where you operate doesn't matter. If you do a good enough job, they will always come to your chain. Yeah.

So, you want you want people to really know and love the mega ETH brand long-term. Yep. Yeah. And do you feel like you're succeeding in that already? Um I'll be lying if I say I succeeded, especially in this market. Right. >> What I think I'm on the right track is both from our creative design and the way we approach our builders, everything is going toward mainstream. Yeah. Um I was sitting with an investor the other day and they asked me the same question. They're like, "Aren't you don't you want to go approach the Wall Street and wear a suit?" Yeah. I was like, "You know, I've

I've worn suits in my life. I'm 35. But I think the the game has changed. The Wall Street people don't wear suits anymore. In fact, a lot of the finance bro wear Alo hat. Yeah. What I want to be is is a really cool fashion brand that a suit desire to use. I think there there is this it's like the streetwear, the the shoes that the bankers or the hedge fund bros or the AI bros love to they they adore. So, Sure. Okay. Um So, people are going to be curious about what comes next year. People are wondering about this kind of token dynamic as well as future product

launches. I think we're very firmly into an era of like um the the way that tokens are designed and launched and executed is changed drastically since you guys kind of first started building mega. You know, I'm just curious like how you're thinking about this holistically. People are saying that these things need to look more like equity. They need to have a like there's an equity of mega ETH and a token. They need to be one in the same. People are saying that, you know, they want to see revenues or product or traction. People want to look at the net token value flows in terms of the amount of emissions out, inflation, team, unlocks, uh grants, all that type of stuff. And then what's coming into

the asset. Like it's just like a more complicated world now. How do you think about this? How are you preparing for this? Yeah, I think yesterday the Optimus guys they >> just uh that was the bottom of to of of tokens. >> bottom signal. That was bad. That was bad. That was so bad. Yeah. Um I was like I mean, this is my fourth cycle. At this point, I mean, I'm used to it. I will struggle, but still it's like, "Okay, here we go again." Um If token becomes completely like equity, then there's no fun. Okay. What is the point, right? Just do equity then.

I think people lack imagination on what they can do with their token. Mhm. If you really think about what mega has been doing, we have the KPI for our TGE, but we also have KPI for our long-term token emission. For people who don't remember, majority of mega's token will be allocated to what we call KPI vesting. We're going to hold ourselves accountable to a certain metrics. That could be stablecoin volume, application quality. It can be you know, one of our metric is Ethereum decentralization.

Because if Ethereum is not decentralized, then mega becomes centralized. And we kind of want it to be censorship resistant. So, we have all these KPIs and people can, you know, put their token with different KPI and it allows us to see what community care about, hold us accountable. The for what it's worth, mega's core team only took 9.5% of the total token pie. If you know that, most team takes what 20 30%? >> Yeah. Mega team will only earn more token if we fulfill the KPI. That's what I think token should be for. It should be to hold people accountable. It should be able to like listen to community feedback. Obviously, it should generate revenue, right? It it should have some

sort of value accrual to users as well. We have something really beautiful called rotating sequencer. Mhm. You know, instead of decentralized sequencer, you can rotate the sequencer based on where the market activity is. So, I'm [snorts] very bullish on uh token. I'm very bullish on founders being more creative with token. Yeah. I'm more bullish on being very transparent with token. Um and these are I think how we take over TradFi and don't play the old game. But again, I'm only more like for probably extreme probably than most of your guests.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Um people are going to wonder like have you earned the right to not have to like pay Binance a ton of the supply for listings? Like people are tired of Binance. Uh we actually issued a statement last year that we don't pay anyone to list our token. But don't you think things have changed a little bit since then or no? Things have definitely changed. Um But it shouldn't affect that statement. It really does not. I think we are just as usual earlier than everyone.

Uh I see the exchanges are distribution channels. >> Right. A founder should know where their users are. If Binance is a very important area that serves your customers, yeah, do it. Find a fair price and do it. There's no moral judgment. If their users are people who are going to use your chain like ourselves, then yes, do everything to attract people onto your chain. >> Right. What I found to be very interesting and very much against in crypto is people slap morality onto everything. Right.

>> I found that to be such a just a zero-sum game. People can do whatever they want and the market will tell you what's right. People slam morality onto everything. Yeah. The decay of society, I guess. >> [laughter] >> Uh you know what? There the sentiment gap has never been bigger from what's happening inside of the industry and the natives compared to the suits. And it's appalling and it's it's growing. I I've never seen anything like it in it's my third cycle. It you know, we've never had this much adoption from like large firms and asset managers and allocators. But I've never seen such dismay within the ecosystem. I think mega ETH can be a shining light here.

Perhaps. Like what is what do you attribute this to? Why is it so bleak internally, but so sunshine and roses and like we're still early again to some of the largest allocators in the world? What's happening here? Uh the low-hanging fruits are gone. Ah, that's what it is. >> Low-hanging fruits like the grifters are gone. And I also believe that people who are the loudest on crypto Twitter or among crypto natives, they're they they can be very ignorant. And I don't I people have noticed that I don't spend a lot of time on CT anymore.

Also, I have a company to run. But I think the perception gap is not real. And people who are loud don't understand the truth. What I think the But however, what I think the real gap is the low-hanging fruits are gone. >> Yeah. What is your cheat code? Mhm. Explain. What is something that you have that no one has? >> Yeah, what's your edge? >> What's your edge? Like the Brix guys, right? Their edge is they just deeply, deeply understand the Turkish market. >> Yeah. In the meantime, they're deeply, deeply crypto native. Yeah. Um You know, the Hit One founder, he's been doing crypto his entire life and he did Polymarket growth. Yeah.

>> That's his secret code. Uh Dom, the founder of of Dream, who's building an option protocol on mega. Um you know, dude used to sell sneakers, just like understand consumer really well. Find your secret your cheat code that no one can do and then really double down on it. >> Yeah. Um I think the dismay or the disappointment among crypto native is um how to say? Um it's a it's a symptom that um the days of, you know, putting money in and getting a 10,000 X APY is gone. It's probably better for all of us. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Last thing from my side, more about this kind of potential um expansion of assets on Mega. What what's the plans and thoughts towards more enablement of tokenized assets, whether they're T-bills, equities trading? Is this something that you think your user base cares about or not really? Do you guys have plans to kind of onboard more of these non-speculative or more kind of traditional assets, whether it be tokenized equities, commodities, T-bills, treasuries? Is this part of the strategy?

It depends on our builders. I mean, we also have a team called Hello Trade. They're ex-BlackRock um execs. Yeah, so they're looking at all this very mature um I would say tried-and-true assets that people are used to, and that's their expertise, and you know, we let them do whatever they want. From my own perspective, um the cheat code of the founder matters. So, even if you're able to onboard those assets, how are you going to grow your audience? How do you make sure people buy it? Remains I think every founder's biggest headache.

>> Mhm. So, I always tell people um you know, get the asset onto whatever product you're building, but really think about who is your initial set of customers. Are we talking about, you know, the I just came from from West Village, which is quite a scene of itself, right? Is it a girl who wears Alo and drinking strawberry matcha in West Village, or is it going to be a, you know, Korean growing ganum, or, you know, a degenerative in Shenzhen? Really understand who your customers are, yeah.

>> Yeah. And by the way, it's really it's a very fun process. Yeah. Yeah. Wow okay. Um do you think Mega ETH can reasonably compete with Hyperliquid on perps? Solana's struggling on perps right now. Obviously, unfortunately, Drift got exploited, but even prior to that, they don't they just don't have the same level of scale that is that Hyperliquid has cracked in terms of trading experience and low latency. You guys claim almost like zero latency, and I know Brett is talking a lot about how latency is the new game, not TPS.

Do can Mega ETH enable a better trading experience than Hyperliquid? Yeah, uh last night Jordan and I hung out. There was one team on Monday. Yeah, they they were like, "Yeah, we tested all the chains, and uh yeah, Mega's just technically the best chain, and that's why we chose Mega." So, there's technical mode there. Um but I think you would agree that Hyperliquid wins not because of the technical um advantage. Um it's it's that you can just the depth of the liquidity is simply impressive. I, you know, I talked to a lot of whales, and they would tell me like, "Yeah, I'd love to trade on another exchange, and I can actually farm points." Yeah. I can't. I can't

I There's no depth required over there. So, >> [snorts] >> uh that's Hyperliquid. Uh Mega is a general purpose blockchain. We don't just compete on perp. Um that has been very clear to me day one. We compete based on novel assets, and also novel user experiences. That's it. I don't think about Hyperliquid at all. Really? >> think Jeff is a legendary founder. >> Yeah. Um so, how are you guys going to make money? Um I love that question, by the way. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer it. No, I love that question.

I I have been told that uh because we've been so quiet that most people are not aware of our uh our tokenomics. We we have our own native stablecoin, which is called USDM. In fact, Mega was the first protocol blockchain that actually has its own I would say native uh currency economic engine stablecoin, and um the the yield belongs to the protocol, which we're going to use to buy back Mega the token.

So, that's a very very obvious um revenue generating model that's going to go back to token holder, right? It's not like the founding team will take any of that. And then, um another one is um when we have enough trading activity, we we have something called proximity market, Mhm. where you can stake your Mega or buy more Mega and be closer to our sequencer and get, yeah. So, that's also very interesting. Uh I saw I saw Optimism had an announcement yesterday or the day before doing something similar. You know what's funny is EOS was the first blockchain to kind of do something similar to

proximity markets. Oh my god, that's uh brings back so much memory. And so, basically, how that works is like as a user, if I stake Mega, I get closer access to the sequencer. Yeah, so yes. >> Directly to my account? So, it depends so whether you're a retail user or whether you're a market maker, it's actually would make more sense to market maker. So, you can get much better entry, yeah. Okay, cool. Nice. Shiya, thanks for joining. What's on your agenda for the rest of the week in New York? Are you flying out soon?

I'm flying out tomorrow. I'm going to uh you know, um there's this ice cream shop that I really like. I used to live uh in Fort Greene. So, I'm dying to go back and uh get a scoop of ice cream. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Best of luck and as these KPIs come to a close into into token into more product launches into more applications. Ladies and gentlemen, that has been the roll-up this week. We are slammed. It's been a hell of a week. Shiya ended us off. Absolutely saved the best for last.

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back next week here in the tokenization tower. Let's give Shiya some love, man. She came in here firing, and that's been fun. So much, sir. Thanks, guys. See you next week. >> [music] [music]