Rollup TV: FraxFinance, BitDigital, ZKsync, Monad

Transcript

Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat.

Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Heat. Heat.

Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, hey, hey.

[Music] Bang bang. We've arrived. Let's go. Rollup TV. Thursday, October 16th. It's 12:04 in the great state of Florida on the Eastern Standard Time Zone. We've been flying all over the world. conferences left and right. We wrapped up the Asia conference tour. KBW in Soul, Token 2049 in Singapore.

Markets are ab just absolutely whiplashing left and right. Ethereum's under 3,900. We're going to see what this means. What is happening? Are you getting caught up in short-term gyrations of price or are you a long-term convicted believer in one of the greatest technologies since the birth of the internet? We're going to find out today on Rollup TV who you are and who we are. Uh thanks everyone for listening, for watching and tuning in. got a great show, great

lineup today. Uh Sam from Frack just one of the guys that is absolutely tuned in when it comes to stable coins. Uh obviously last weekend and and you know we're still seeing some aftermath of the last weekend had quite the implications for stable coins. We saw USDE uh Athena's stable coin get whiplashed itself got turned around. Uh I think it fell. I don't know, to the extent of like 20 cents over on Binance. All kinds of shenanigans happening on Binance.

There's never a dull day. We're going to be talking to Sam about all of the uh Binance shenanigans, the listing processes, the volatility, uh all of the things that you guys have seen playing out on the timeline over the last few days. Uh Sam from Frax is a great guy. High density and high signal, very tuned into the ecosystem. So we're gonna we're going to get that Intel from Sam. And then we've got another Sam who's going to join the show. Uh Sam Trabar of Bit Digital, one of the leading Ethereum digital asset treasury companies, will join us. This guy is uh he's with the

likes of Michael Sailor. He's with Tom Lee. He's with Joe Luben. Uh this guy, not only did he uh build a company on Ethereum, tokenizing some Manhattan real estate, which if anyone knows, New York real estate is some of the most primed real estate in the world. He was able to tokenize it and put it in Ethereum. He was also then able to sell that company to Joe Luben, the co-founder of Ethereum. I'm also seeing messages from Vitalic in a Telegram chat. All kinds of things.

Ethereum is so back. We're going to get all of this intel to you guys very shortly. Also in Ethereum land, apparently we're just Ethereum maxis today. We've got ZK Sync RWA season unfolding right before our eyes. I believe Alex had a prominent announcement that he unveiled at Digital Asset Summit in London this week. We're going to hear directly from the horse's mouth. I also had a just great conversation with Alex in Korea. Uh it was a pleasure. Him and I tend to get philosophical. He's got a very libertarian focus uh to his work. So, we're going to be talking about this.

And last, but certainly not least, G Monad. Let's get the chat fired up. Let's get some G Monad in the chat. Come on, guys. Monad season. Did you claim your airdrop? Where you guys at? Where you guys at? Gonad. Uh, we're gonna get ready. We're going to get fired up. So, let's make sure that everything is cooking and then uh yeah, I'm pretty stoked.

Again, certainly last but not least, um is uh tunes gonad. We're gonna get everything that's happening. Monad launched their claim. We connected. You guys may have had some trouble, but we're gonna clarify all of the happenings uh with the Monad AirDrop claim. I saw some things like people were uh keeping track of their interactions with Monad Testnet on paper.

What? You guys are maniacal. That is that is insane behavior keeping track. You're gonna just you're gonna just take take a notebook and turn it into a block explorer. What? We're going to talk to tunes about it because uh to think that these pe that that people are out there just taking notes on the block explorer is uh is is quite a scene and it it is c it is in need of an explanation. Um so let's circle back Sam from Fracks. We're going to get up in just a moment. He's going to come on and we're going to rehash all of the

things that happened over the weekend. Just absolutely uh fascinating. Uh let's check in on the markets. I see I see some things sliding just a bit. But you know what? Really, it doesn't even compare to uh to what we saw last weekend. Uh if you look back and we do some time horizon analysis, three months ago, we're up 10. We're up 10% from three months ago. We're down 10% from one month ago. So, we're just

getting whiplash, guys. Don't get chopped up out there. Don't get chopped up. Uh, DATs are still active. Apparently, apparently these Dashes have cash on hand. Um, we're going to talk to uh Mr. Sam Trabar about the happenings last weekend and he's going to tell us about uh what they're doing in that land. Are they buying Um I think some of these uh treasury companies are under MNAV and so we have to think to ourselves are they going to be selling the underlying ETH to buy their shares and close the gap.

We shall see. We shall see. Um All right. All right. All right. All right. Let's see. We've got the founder of Google shilling Zcash on the timeline. That's pretty insane. Sergey on Zcash. Fascinating. Um, the gold rally is continuing. Let's see. You know, I saw something that said, uh, every time after a gold rally, you see what happens to Bitcoin. and it is it is just something that you don't want to

miss. So these things are happening. Um we also have a mega e uh sonar round. So I think this is going to be quite interesting. Let's see. Kobe wrote um Kobe wrote a little message about uh the Monad uh round on Echko. Hey, what's up? It's Kobe Monat recently launched the qualification period for the airdrop.

Wanted to let you know that every Echo user that invested in one deal is now eligible. Very, very cool. Um in your Echo App wallet, we've generated you a brand new address, eligible Monad address. This address is brand new and has no ties to your Echo Investments or any deposits you make. You can use this address as one of your eight EVM options in the Monad AirDrop by importing the private key into your wallet of choice. Uh please do not uh please do not do this with your regular Echo wallet. Mismanagement of your private key compet your investments at risk. Uh and then it goes on to talk about the private key a little bit more.

So, we're going to be talking to tunes from Monad in a little bit, but first, but first, we've got a bit of cleanup to do from over the weekend. We're going to get Sam from Fracks in here and we're going to get him set up so that he can educate us about the stable coin shenanigans that occurred over the last week. Guys, it's already Thursday. It feels like we're I mean we're still talking about the absolutely incredible happenings that occurred over the past weekend. We're gonna get Sam on stage so he can he can just help us unpack what happened. Um Sam, it's good to have you on. Welcome back. How you

doing? >> Always good to be on, Robbie. How's it going? >> It's going well, man. It's going well. I'm glad to see that you have survived, in fact. And uh man, maybe you could just help us like pick up some of the pieces here on just you know the stable coin situation that occurred. Uh we saw some shenanigans happen on Binance. Per auto deleveraging. There was a lot that happened. Could you just describe like what were some of the pieces that you stuck like right away? What were some things that stuck out to you? Can you just kind of take us through your mental what was your mindset, your mentality as you were weathering the storm over the weekend?

>> Yeah, for sure. I I'll actually just give some like background, too, because it was a really crazy Friday cuz it was so normal and then it happened out of nowhere, which is what made it the most insane thing I've I've ever seen. Um, honestly like I know like we were there through terra um everything, right? Uh but this was the honestly the more surprising thing because it came out of nowhere. People kept talking every day about their oh oh they're they're like is it is it going to implode? Is it going to implode? Is it going to implode? Right? And then okay fine it did. Right. But um like it it was a funny story because we were actually talking to like a very big hedge fund uh earlier in in the day on Friday to uh they wanted to move over a lot of their uh cash in into FRAUSD,

right? And and so um we we were on a really good call with them and then as soon as we and it's funny because they asked some really like Trafy questions. They've never like went into like crypto and so they wanted to actually move kind of their banking and investments and stuff into like PRAUSD and make investments there. So they kind of gave us uh funny uh risk questions like what if the Ethereum blockchain goes down? Will you be able to like uh redeem? Um, and it was like, "Dude, I I don't think you understand kind of what you're asking." No, we won't, but neither will you. Be able to redeem if if the Ethereum blockchain goes down. But then they they were really excited. Uh, we answered all their questions because they needed to, you know, have these

disclosures because they they work in Trafy. And then as soon as we got off the call, I was like, "Holy shit." Like like it was insane what what was going on. And so we're just like looking at everything. Um, and after all that stuff, like FRAD is totally fine. It's genius compliant. It the collateral is all redeemable, right? T+1 uh at at at slowest, right? And so I didn't even need to think about making like a post about, hey guys, like I actually decided against it because I was like if if like if I'm like guys like everything is okay, everything is okay. you kind of get like the Baghdad Bob like meme, you know, like like that people think like uh it's like you can just go on the the

the thing like the price and ours is fine, right? Like Tethers is fine. It's like you know everything is uh but um so I I didn't want to make th those kind of uh you know posts and and stuff but it was insane, right? It was absolutely wild. The epicenter was clearly Binance. um like I I don't know like in terms of like like conspiracy theories of like what actually the exact thing uh was because I think people are still talking about it. So I don't want to come and like give give my own um you know thing like that. But in terms of stable coins, I think like the most important thing is it reminded everyone um stable coins are supposed to work uh when nothing else does. And it's

been a long time since people have been reminded of that fact. The reason the original frack stable coin was a decentralized hybrid model and now FRXUSD is a totally like compliant fully backed you know base dollar of our ecosystem of a of a bunch of other and and and people like when we got on that call you know they they can be sure like uh okay this thing is is just it's just a digital dollar like you could take additional risk on top of it but Friday reminded everyone that if you call something a stable coin it the point is that it works when nothing else works right the terra

worked 90 what 78% of the of the time right so like like technically right >> we likened it you know to the life of a turkey right you've seen that chart where it's like oh yeah the life of a turkey it's great it's great it's great and then just no >> one yeah the Nicholas Talib one right like the the uh it's just like exactly that right it's like if you're going to take like risk and stuff that's great. There's there's different there's different uh like things that you can do it with, but the stable coin uh in our view, right, the stable coin should be working when nothing uh else works. And and then I I think like you know um that's why I I actually um like came out and said,

well, if that if everyone's saying, oh, this didn't work or that, you need a definition of what it means for it to work or not, right? And so everyone throws around the word DPEG. Um, and uh, I think it's it's important to have like a very clear definition of what uh, DPEG means and then what like price means so that people aren't really talking over each other when they're discussing these events. Essentially, >> it's insane. I think um illuminating what those definitions are is ultimately going to help people come to a better standard of what is what is a stable coin, what constitutes a DPEG.

You know, there are there's prediction markets for these things. There's insurance markets for these things. Like, you know, we we need to have some common standards. I I I also want to talk about um like really the the fundamentals here and and a lot of it happened on Binance and we don't want to get into conspiracy theories but what I'm what I'm hearing and and what makes sense to me is that you know this was not uh it it was the difference between a fundamental uh issue and a technical issue. What I mean by that is, you know, back in back in the Luna Terra Ter Luna days, uh, and FTX got, you know, tangled up and all that, too. Like Sam Bankman Freed, which surprisingly is a

controversial thing to say now, I guess, but like he stole funds. He misappropriated funds at the very least. Um, and that created this liquidity contagion that, you know, spanned into everywhere that they had their technicals, their their tentacles. Um, this felt more like an engineering problem. It was it was the mechanism that some something broke somewhere. Do you do you agree with this this analysis that this was like the the reason that we we had this sort of flash crash was fundamentally different from why we had one back in 2021 or two whenever FTX crashed and and if we can pinpoint that this was an engineering a technical issue. What exactly was it that broke that led to just, you know,

market makers pulling bids and ultimately seeing things that are supposed to be stable go down to, you know, 20 30 cents and and, you know, 60 cents on on some exchanges? The just the massive price dislocation that happened. Can we pinpoint a particular thing that broke and caused the price dislocation? uh if if Binance wants to give more information uh then then the answer is yes. The reason I I didn't want to uh go into the exact like kind of conspiracy theories or like this was 100% exactly as you're saying some for sure some kind of technical like like price

architectural thing. It was not macro one. You're like oh my god everything is dumping by 80% because of the tariffs. Yeah. The the tariffs of like no no no please please don't. there's like tariff news every single day. If if the dumping was a macro related thing, then like the the tariffs the price of everything in like your life would probably be really really screwed if it was that that impactful. Uh it it had nothing to do with that. I mean like the common sense clearly uh shows that I mean Binance is is a great actor in the space overall. I know there's a lot of like you know like things going on between some rivalry and stuff but overall like I'm I'm talking about since their inception. Uh uh so like they're they're great, but I think it would be great if they actually this

time uh kind of showed what is the exact um architectural issue. I I didn't even um really go down the you know down the rabbit hole of all of the conspiracy theories. Um it it could honestly have been like genuinely like a architectural like hack like of their of their oracle system of their thing. But again I I don't know. But one of the things that was really interesting was the auto deleveraging thing that everyone is talking about now. Um I kind of see it like uh the the tariff phenomena where a group of people like a society learns about a particular topic like really really quickly from like 0 to 100 like like really quick like no one in in the

US or honestly probably the world uh knew the t-word right before before Trump's second term. very very few it was like a economic term and like you you no one knew what a tariff uh what on average right like like if you if you ask random people and stuff now I think everyone if you ask random people they have heard the word maybe they can't give you a dissertation on what a tariff is but they literally uh heard about it from like 0 to 100 as like a society basically right and I think ADL like from as a crypto like society industry uh people were wait I can I can get like auto deleveraged. What the what the hell is that? Even though even though they should know what what it is, but if

they're if they're trading, right? Um and then they see kind of the structural different deals, right? Like some some entities like Athena uh can't get auto delever at least in in specific uh situations based on some some deals >> the average person can. Um I think that's pretty important to like kind of like talk about for for traders and things like that. Um, but overall like I think the most important thing I was was was thinking of is uh the stablecoin stuff and I made a post and I said look I don't I don't think Athena depected because like my definition and I tried to kind of define uh what everyone should hopefully think of as the term

for like a stable coin peg which is from the perspective of the issuer. the the issuer perspective, right? It should should be how you call something uh depected. And so I I clearly said with with like no, you know, I didn't want to make it complicated and stuff. And I I want to say look, everyone should basically look at the issuer. Are they allowing redemptions in a timely, orderly manner? Um and they didn't change it from before, right? It's weird if they if an issuer is like, "Oh, every day we have, you know, this policy and then we just change it like like today, right?" But if nothing has changed, right? If nothing has changed, this this stable coin is not depected because if if I create a secondary

venue, right, like like a a centralized platform and I'm the one that allows people in and out and on this platform USDC is trading at like 90 cents uh or like I make a trade at 90 cents, whether intentionally or unintentionally for uh a few hours, would it make sense for everyone to say, "Oh, USDC is DEG USDC is like is DPEG. I I don't think so. I don't think that makes coherent sense to be like USDC is DPEG because this this this secondary platform right that that's a centralized platform and it it is trading at 90 cents. circle has no control over that, right? Like if you for example are are like a bank and you

say, "Hey, I have this piece of paper and you can always come uh and and put the piece of paper and give it back to me and I I'll give you, you know, some gold or whatever, right? Just as a like hypothetical example. And for some reason, uh, it's not your business, but for some reason, there are people trading this slip of paper between each other at like half the price of the gold that you're willing to redeem right outside your bank. Okay? I I I don't know what the, you know, the reason is for those people, right? Clearly, there's something it's not the average reason, right? Clearly, like like Friday, >> I don't think it's fair to to be like I don't think it's coherent. I I guess fair implies some kind of value judgement. I don't think it's coherent for people to be like this thing is

depegged. Uh now granted obviously Binance is a one of if not the biggest secondary venue, right? So it's not like it's just something uh but clearly we're talking about something that went wrong at Binance like like that that's what we're talking about until this point, right? So it it's clearly uh not the right definition of a stable coin peg to extrapolate it to secondary venues. And so a lot of people tell me like, "Oh, Sam, you're just talking about solvency or something." Uh that's what you're you're saying. And I and I would say not exactly, but but that's also at least better. Solveny means like you you look at the reserves of of a stable coin and then you see,

>> okay, is it is it mark tom market at this point? Exactly. hit one or or a dollar like one uh 100% CR or like basically higher if it is then you know it's not DPEG >> that's also um at least closer but it's not exactly what I mean because you can actually uh be solvent but then you you could not be redeeming in an orderly manner or changing your your like uh you know redemption policies and stuff like that. I think it would be fair to say it's deped if if like even if it's solvent if they're like we we for whatever reason they're like you know we're not redeeming or like uh kind of like circle because they didn't know they were solvent until the FDI uh bailed out um you know uh SVB and it

turns out they were solvent the whole time >> you' say that back in back in SVB when they uh when that bank collapsed >> you're saying that they were solvent but they deped because USDC went down to 90 that was sort of the consensus this. But it turns out FDI and they had do they stop redemptions? Is that kind of the key factor in your mind? >> Well, I think what happened with SVB2 was on a Friday and I >> always on a Friday. >> Personally don't think Yeah, it's always those Fridays, right? I I personally don't think Circle ever does redemptions on on like a Friday. Um and I think like that's been the same throughout all all of it, right? Um, and so I I think that the right way to communicate about these

things, which like you said very well, is important to unify because of of prediction markets of all of these different things that are getting bigger and bigger, right? Is to say the stable coin did not deps on either one or multiple or like many venue, which which is bad, right? Which should be investigated like how why why did this happen or how do we improve it? But but like it it didn't dep I I my my view on this is like uh well to for for Athena I I think we could talk about Circle a little bit differently. It's it's been a long time.

Um but for for Circle they didn't actually know if they were solvent. It turns out in retrospect they were uh because they didn't know. uh they um they obviously internally were like we should we should not do uh redemptions until we know we're solving. Turns out that, you know, lucky for them and everyone like they used the banking system, uh on Monday when they would have opened redemptions, uh FDIC swooped in and said, "Hey, everything's okay. No one freak out." Um and and everything was fine. But if you look at it like truly and and and like they didn't know, right? So So I they didn't know. And also they I think they would have

stopped the the ad par redemptions until they knew. So I think they basically uh got lucky. >> Yeah. On the Athena thing, it's contradictory in my mind. It's counterintuitive because on one hand we have Athena making these special arrangements with Binance to protect themselves from auto deleveraging. But on the other hand, they were that was the one venue where USDE crashed. So like what like how do you how do you how do you do both at the same time? How do you have this special arrangement? Did Binance not honor? We don't have to get into it.

I don't unless you have, you know, anything you you'd like to share, but to me these are two fundamentally contradictory things that both occurred. USD did crash on Binance in particular, and we're not going to, you know, extrapolate that to a broad DPEG, but they have that, but then they also have the ADL protection. And so if it wasn't the ADL, if Athena didn't get ADL and that's not what led to their USDE depreciation, what did >> Yeah, that that that is a great question and I think actually the it gives it gives a bigger uh there's there's a bigger kind of issue at play in in my opinion which is the if if a lot of people use a uh stable coin or synthetic

dollar, whatever you want call it uh and not knowing what the risks of it are. And I'm I'm not saying it's like because of Athena or Binance or something. I'm just mean making a general statement about usage. You will eventually not this time thankfully, but you will eventually have uh a terra style uh collapse of different things not to zero. And and so let let me explain what I mean because I actually saw this debate with Jordi and Hib uh the the video they they put up that that they did. Um I think the the crux of it was like was there going to be another terrace style like like crash and and

stuff in like a stable coin? Um, I think the the salient issue is if you have people using a dollar that they think works in many different situations where it doesn't necessarily or like some aspect of it uh is is not going to work like is not similar to to Terra at all. Like Athena is not going to zero like like it's it's a great product. It it's not comparable. But this is not uh the point that I'm making. The point is more subtle. It's that people on Binance, they they have USD earn uh they have a bunch of these products. They they don't know like they they're it's not like those people read S1 filings. They

they're not going to go and read like Athena's disclosure and and stuff like that for good or for bad, right? Like you know, whatever. >> It's they think it's a dollar like they think it's like, you know, Tether, you know, like like FRAUSD. that's like genius compatible like like USDC that's redeemable and it's it's not it's a different product and great and Athena is very very transparent about that but if you go and use the these things and integrate them in different places uh it's going to eventually um get a lot of people uh like surprised and then maybe maybe if if there is a situation where like like Friday happens where people

like holy I need get get the heck out of this thing. Uh I just learned what it is. I was just I was just getting this really great APY on on the earn product. Now everyone's saying, "Oh, like uh this might be, you know, uh insolvent and stuff." I think that's the crux of it. The crux of it isn't whether this mechanism like like works or not. It clearly works. It's it's an amazing innovation that that literally uh got Athena from zero to what is it 12 billion or something like that. And it deserves massive massive props. Uh it's obviously and and they they very clear it's a synthetic dollar. It's not a redeemable fiat coin, but it's obviously not a fiat coin, right? It's not like USDT. It's not like um USD fra USD. It's not like these things,

right? And uh they actually have something that is like that. It's USDTB, right? They they released that recently. But if you use their synthetic dollar in a way that it acts as if it is, which isn't their fault by the way, like like you know that it's a it's a decentral it's a token, right? It's like uh so if you use it that way, there will eventually be like a systemic uh issue when the these things are not entirely solvent for a brief period of time or like they they have to remove redemption for something and I'm not saying athe um

>> and so I think that's very important is like is this thing being used as money uh where it's not necessarily really supposed to on that level like the the the Athena mechanism is totally fine. It it works. However, it could be implemented poorly in like another thing, right? Maybe they have her on uh like like like longtail assets and and and and it gets uh really poorly implemented, right? Or maybe they don't have auto deleveraging uh deals and they do get wrecked in some some venues and things like that. It's not a redeemable dollar, right? Uh and and even if you impeccably manage this like so-called hedge fund balance sheet, uh you meaning

any any issuer, right? It's not the same thing. And so if you if people are using it as if it's the same thing as a dollar, eventually there will be like a a a widespread shock of like, holy crap, this thing was not a dollar. The good thing is I don't think it'll they'll go to zero, right? I don't think that'll ever ever ever happen really because the the mechanism works. But that doesn't mean people won't be uh massively shocked that their thing is not a dollar and they might receive haircuts or like things like that later in the in the future. And this is just a general statement by the way. It's not at all about Athena specifically. It's about things that aren't extremely extremely boring uh fiat coins essentially, >> right? and you're describing the difference between a a genius compliant

fiat stable coin and for lack of a better term an algorithmic stable coin which is dependent on some some market forces in crypto and DeFi. Um >> yeah and and I would go and I would go as far as to say not even necessarily like like genius compliant uh even just a fiat coin right like the best example is USDT right tether actually increased its supply during the actual like if you go and look at its market cap by by day uh it actually increased in supply during those few hours um I actually went and looked at it I like like USDC's went down um some people were redeeming fraction electricity of course it's not

as as lindy so um totally fine right but but the fact that tether uh went up uh I think that is a data point that speaks for itself right like the the moneyiness and and the literally the flight to safety definition of of tether for every every single like essentially uh both user on Binance but like even even globally that that is a reason why they're 170 billion plus supply right it is literally the the flight to safety and and it works. Um, and so I think I I would go as far as to say like the it's not necessarily just like the the regulation stamp. It is it needs to be redeemable. It needs to be properly uh

known as it is it is fully solvented. they're they're good for um in in terms of the entire supply, but every single person uh essentially can go to this thing when everything else uh is is wrecked. That's that's the real um real thing that that makes a difference between is this thing real money on chain um on venues on centralized exchanges or not. >> Yeah. And and with Tether, there was never a doubt. Um, I there's one more stable coin that I want to talk to you about, and it didn't really have much to do with the Friday uh crash and the weekend shenanigans.

PYUSD mints 300 trillion. What What is that? Like, where did that come from? They're I mean, it seems like a fat finger, but they're still supposedly fully reserved. So, there was jokes flying about how, you know, PayPal USD is fully reserved. They must have 300 trillion in reserves, right? >> I I I think everyone was joking. Trillions like like PayPal got there first. Uh but yeah, I I would be surprised if whoever did that was uh still um employed, but I I mean obviously it was it was an accident. Um but but still um like it's it's interesting because like for for us at at Frack we have multiple checks uh

obviously both offchain and even onchain like we we literally have um extra code like like minting caps and things like that. Exactly. to prevent something really silly like this, but also more uh as well of like if if we have crosschain messaging and some some esoteric thing happens that uh there's like an accident of precision or something between the the different messaging on on chain. Um I think that whatever happened they clearly didn't have that uh in in uh PYUSD's situation. I think it's an unfortunate thing but um it's a good laugh. I wonder if there will be um you know downstream effects of like either

either regulation or or like things of like if you're a stable coin issuer you have to have checks in place to not do that. What I thought was interesting was Chaos Labs I think actually paused the PYUSD market on a for like a brief period of time which I I think is is very uh say like very very responsible um because you don't know maybe North Korea has minted 300 trillion and uh things are about to get really bad right um but I think that was a great idea um I think thank thank uh thankfully there's just nothing um nothing bad it was just most likely like a a fat finger But it's also really good from now on in my opinion to when people are analyzing stable coins to know what the actual

trust assumption is for like an infinite or near near infinite mint. uh if like their systems are compromised and stuff like at at Fracks we have like onchain level contract like like blockers but also just our our processes offchain someone else has to look at actually two people have to have to look at uh what the first person is proposing um and all all this stuff I would be surprised if that was the case with uh at at at uh PYUSD and then two people also didn't catch it but um it'll be interesting if they if they do release a post more >> yeah it I mean it does signal the lapse in tokenization right ultimately these things are they're treasuries they're

paper contracts but and but it's not native issuance right I think that's that's kind of what's what's missing here is that we we still have this disconnect between the real you know paper contract world where all of these things are housed and where they're originated and then the digital onchain world where they you know after they've been tokenized And and when we when at least when I think about, you know, Secretary Besson talking about three trillion in stable coins and really, you know, embracing this industry, it feels like we need to move the origination process more onchain like we have to natively have fungeibility or some some semblance

of issuance or origination natively on chain. So that that is the first pass at at the asset. If we want to go and take it into a paper contract for some reason, you know, maybe we can do that as a secondary rather than the other way around. We issue it offchain and then and then the secondary is onchain. >> Yeah, I I actually I think that that's really well said. And I have like a theory about this that I I call like the the the net worth theory, which is depending on how much of someone's net worth is literally onchain versus like in a you know classical like 401k or like a bank account or whatever. They will prefer to hold uh their their US

dollar supply like their their actual USD um >> where that the rest of their net worth is. Um, so so like if if you're a traditional uh financial like like I don't know like a boomer or something you have most of your like retirement account stuff in in like Schwab or whatever uh it is it is a pain to move this way uh like into the onchain world because everything you're interacting with like the dividends you're getting or if you want to make a new investment or like your your like financial advisor whatever uh they they are they these days right they they call you and and they they don't even understand this thing right over here And if most of your net worth is onchain, whether whatever tokens it is, it doesn't

matter, right? It's is it Bitcoin or or something else or DeFi or whatever Solana memecoins, you will want to hold the dollars that that makes up the rest of your net worth on chain. You you would prefer it's actually worse the for you other than spending for like consumer items and and merchants and stuff to hold anything >> offchain. And so my my view is over the next five years as you said with uh Secretary Bessence's like I guess estimates of three trillion uh stable coins is the more people's net worth in everything else comes on chain with like RWA issuance and and all of this stuff the more people will actually want to hold prefer to hold digital dollars stable coins as the remaining amount of

dollars uh of of their net worth and the other side will be uh more um inconvenient, >> right? Like right now everyone asks, "Oh, why should I use stable coins when you have bank accounts or Venmo and stuff?" It'll actually become the other way. And the critical causal factor is where is your net worth? That that's my theory. My my view on this stuff is like if your net worth is onchain, you'll prefer to hold your dollars onchain and then just spend them through these new innovations like these spending cards like uh etherf pay, all of these things.

Um and and if uh if it's offchain, it's it is inconvenient to bring it onchain. And so what we're doing at like FRA is we're looking at where are the the new places where like people's net worths are going to come online like like tokenized equities, these kind of things. And then making sure that uh the preferred uh stable coin kind of and and and DeFi ecosystem around these places is FRAUSD and and FRA and stuff. So that's why we've actually started working with so many uh institutions and like RWA issuers, not just as like infrastructure for like uh FRAUSD, but because I think the next frontier in the next like couple years is that these people's net worths will come on chain. They're going to want to

actually hold genuinely uh most of their dollars on chain as a as a um other uh part of their net worth. And so we want to make sure that we're the best um functional for for those people. I I think that's extremely well said. Um we're we're seeing this generational transfer of wealth from the boomers all the way down to the zoomers. People are learning about finance more uh in their adolescence because uh we all have access to the internet. We have access to these financially these internet native financial applications. Um Sam, thank you so much for coming on man. I I I always appreciate your insights. I think you know you you are really particular about when it comes to the market structure especially with stable

coins but then also have a capability of zooming out and looking at the bigger picture. So I I really do appreciate it and uh yeah thanks for thanks for the wise words. I think everyone in the stable coin world and industry these days can can learn uh from you and your takes. >> Thanks Robbie. Always a pleasure to be on. Catch you next time. >> See you soon. Thanks Sam. All right. Amazing Sam. Great great guy. Super nice guy. Uh super smart guy. Um we uh are going to talk to another Sam here coming up very soon. Um very very soon. We're just going to make

sure that we got everything correct and we're going to get our next Sam. the CEO of Bit Digital up on the show. Um, so let's do that. Let's get him up on the show. I think uh Sam from Fracks had a bunch of good takes. Obviously, such a hectic weekend. Uh, we're going to get Sam from Bit Digital up to talk everything about Ethereum, Ethereum, Ethereum, Ethereum. Uh, the DAT trade is happening. Uh, and we're gonna have Sam, the CEO of Bit Digital, one of the leading Ethereum treasury companies up.

He is up there with the likes of Tom Lee and Bit Miner. Uh, Joe Luben and Esbet. This is Sam of Bit Digital. Welcome back to the rollup. We are here with Sam Tabar. Uh, very excited for this conversation. There's been a ton of turbulence in the markets uh, over the last week. Trump said the T-word. We heard the word tariff and all of a sudden everyone went into a tizzy. Um, but really Bitcoin and ETH kind of held up quite nicely. So, we're going to be talking about ETH today and we're going to be talking about Bit Digital, which is a digital asset treasury company. Uh, publicly traded and ETH powered. Uh, Sam Tabar, you are the CEO of Bit Digital.

Welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. And yes, uh there's been a lot of price action in the markets lately. Last Friday was uh considered a very difficult day in the markets and now it seems like a distant memory. Having said that, you know, our our stock performed remarkably well. I think one of the best debt performances on that very terrible day and there are reasons for that. We can get into that later today. >> Yeah, happy to. Um before before we get into that particular day's occurrences, I I'd love a little bit of a broader thesis as to why um you chose to to use ETH as the primary asset in this vehicle. Um first, maybe we could get

into your background uh and then we'll ultimately work our way into how you found Ethereum and then ended up leading Bit Digital. >> Yeah, very some brief words about my background. I I started my career as an attorney, as a lawyer for a law firm called Scatteren Arps in New York City. I moved on to uh help create um a Japanese hedge fund in Japan. Uh I did that for a number of years. That was a lot of fun. Uh worked out really well. Uh then Bank of America, Maril Lynch asked me to run their capitalist strategy. Uh which I did. Um and um after that I uh during that time I I read about uh bit Bitcoin. At that time

Bitcoin was primarily used for um nefarious purposes. Silk Road was a thing and um and uh but it was a very interesting uh situation where people could use money that's not printed by the government and that was a very novel concept. But what moved me mostly was Ethereum because that had some technology that we can get into. But suffice to say, Ethereum had the ability to rewrite the ent entire financial system and it's and it's doing that now.

And when I read about Ethereum, I I was very excited and I I co-founded an Ethereum company uh called Fluidity. We created something called Air Swap. It was a decentralized exchange. Uh, we also tokenized Manhattan real estate that became a a study, a landmark study in the Harvard Business Review. And um, I I had some pretty good backers like Michael Novagrats, who's the CEO of Galaxy. He backed my my my Ethereum company. So did Joe Luben, the co-founder of of Ethereum. He was also uh a massive shareholder of my company.

Uh, we did end up selling Fluidity to Consensus. Consensus is the largest Ethereum software developer in the world. Uh and uh and Joe Luben heads that and he uh was very happy with that acquisition and all my shareholders made money which is saying a lot because in crypto u not everybody makes money. There are lots of winners and there are lots of losers and um there are not so many winners but there are a lot of losers. So uh I was really fortunate to make sure that all my shareholders made a handsome return.

Um, and then I ended up joining um, Bit Digital as an executive. It was a Bitcoin mining company when I joined it. It's a it's listed on uh, NASDAQ. The ticker is BTBT. And we were at the time about five years ago when we were Bitcoin miner, we noticed that all our our entire fleet was in in um in China. Uh, and we thought, you know what, that is a jurisdictional risk. as great as and as profitable as this business is at the time, this was five years ago, >> we should really move the entire fleet out of China and bring it to North America.

>> And we did that and that was quite a feat because we did that during COVID and there were some um if you recall some very challenging u supply logistics going on globally in in uh in the world. And so when we, you know, we took tens and tens of thousands of machines and we airlifted them and put them on boats from China, uh, and they traveled around the world, uh, and, um, and we, we had them powered up in North America and Canada and the United States. And, uh, we did that for a while.

And then I realized, you know, Bitcoin's great, but I realized that the business of Bitcoin mining is not a good business. It's a hamster wheel in many ways. You just have to constantly buy new machines. You have to dilute shareholders in order to raise capital to buy those machines. Taking on debt to buy new machines is a bad idea because you cannot predict the future cash flow of the business. So you can't really service the debt responsibly. Bitcoin's all over the place and so you don't know how much money you're going to be making in the next month when it comes to Bitcoin mining. So if you take on debt, that's a very risky proposition. Those who take on debt when it comes to

Bitcoin mining, that really ends in tears. So you know, you in order to raise capital responsibly, you could only dilute existing shareholders, which also sucks. and you're just buying these machines that end up becoming very expensive paper weights after a few months. >> And then there's something called a having in in Bitcoin and um and that that happens every four years. And essentially what ends up happening in the having in Bitcoin is that it it divides the profits of Bitcoin miners in half. So basically, it's a business where you're in the hamster wheel of just buying new machines, diluting shareholders, and the business profits just cut in half every four years.

And politically, people don't like the fact that it takes so much energy. So, it just became uh a business that I didn't I was I was really disenchanted with. And I was the first one in the entire sector to say, "This business actually sucks. We're going to start putting Ethereum on the balance sheet and we're going to start positioning uh to become the MSTR of um of of Ethereum. And when I did that, I I was throwing a lot of tomatoes um metaphorically speaking. Um a lot of people were Bitcoin maxis at the time. And if you mentioned the word Ethereum, it was um it was like a bad odor. You know, people

just did not like that. they would just say, "Oh, that's a shitcoin. What are you doing?" And then I had dinner with uh Michael Sailor um and he said, "You know, Bitcoin mining is actually a really bad business." And I I said, "You know what? I totally agree and we're trying to get out of it." He goes, "Why don't you just do what we're doing, which is just buy Bitcoin, put it on your balance sheet, just be like a mini MSTR." And I said, "That's a great idea, except I want to do it with Ethereum." I mean that um that was um that was not a good uh that was not a good uh conversation at that point.

>> How did Michael Sailor react when you told him, "Oh, we want to be a mini MSTR, but we want to do it with Ethereum." >> He said he said, "U that's a bad idea. Ethereum is going to end up going to zero." Uh and the vibe just died in the room. and um and the conversation sort of uh went south and we um I I left the boardroom. Uh so he you know he he was but you know he ended up being wrong. You know Ethereum did not go to zero. It actually ended up doing extremely well >> over the past couple of years and it's begun to outpace Bitcoin for good reason. And there are lots of reasons why bit um Ethereum is outpacing Bitcoin and there's a lot of reason why there's a lot of positive price action around

Ethereum. We can get into that today. Mhm. >> So now we become this um Ethereum DAT as they call it. But wait, there's more. We had a very successful AI business, one of our subsidiaries at Bitcoin uh at uh Bit Digital, >> and we called that subsidiary White Fiber. >> It was such a successful business that we decided to IPO it. And we did that just about two months ago. And that was a very successful IPO. up well over 100 p% over the past couple of months. >> Congratulations.

>> Thank you. And Bit Bit Digital owns 71% of White Fiber and that's an AI business. So, Bit Digital is now the only public company in the world that I'm aware of that has exposure to the two largest and most impactful story arcs of our time, which is digital assets, which is Ethereum, and artificial intelligence, which is white fiber for us. So now today, if you go on the Bit Digital website, you'll see on the homepage that Bit Digital is just two line items.

It's Ethereum on the balance sheet and the amount of white fiber that we own which is 71.5% and it's very easy to value. The market values Ethereum minute by minute, second by by second and the market values White Fiber. It's a listed company on NASDAQ. So we're an extremely easy company to value. >> It's just two line items. And so um and so that I'm I'm very happy to be a part of um a company that had the foresight to um to have this double-pronged approach on on digital assets, namely Ethereum and artificial intelligence.

And by that I mean data centers that are built uh to power uh artificial intelligence, which is what White Fiber does. So that's that's what Bit Digital is. And there's a reason why we've been outpacing um a lot of the digital asset treasuries uh recently from a market valuation perspective. It's because uh we have um a very creative approach when it comes to the capital structure. I can get into that in a moment. But also we own 71% of white fiber which is doing extraordinarily well. And so that has a cascade effect on the valuation of uh of Bit Digital. And we're the only ones

that actually own a real business. Uh if you look at the Ethereum DAT space, they're all shells. They were shells. Uh they were basically kind of frankly failed businesses and they were repurposed into buying a bunch of Ethereum and putting on on the balance sheet. That's very different for us. We have a very successful business. We own that business. we IPOed it and we have a whole bunch of Ethereum on the balance sheet. So that's that. >> It It's really funny to see some of the uh the as you call them failed businesses uh that essentially got a way out of of a a business that was dropping as a means of of exiting to some crypto founders that were looking to just use the shell and the ticker that was on

>> on you know publicly traded exchange. >> Not the case for you guys. very different case >> um given the history in Bitcoin mining and and allowing the infrastructure to then segue into AI and white fiber which as you said is doing quite well. You guys have over 27 million shares trading at about $34. Um and like you said 71% of that company is owned by Bit Digital. I I'm curious and I'd love to get into some of the things that you mentioned in there. There were some Easter eggs about why Ethereum is doing so well. what the capital structure is for Bit Digital with respect to Ethereum. But maybe I want to start just a little bit higher

level. You you've got this AI company and then you've got Ethereum. These are the two line items. Ethereum is so broad. It's so diverse. There's so many builders and different applications that are all being built with Ethereum. AI is one of them. And I'm I'm just curious, even if you're projecting out six months, a year, five years, do you foresee any interplay between White Fiber and Ethereum? Do you do you see White Fiber selling compute on Ethereum? Maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about White Fiber. And it'd be it'd be fun just to to think about what kind of interactions it could have with Ethereum.

Yeah, I mean there are a lot of there's a lot of speculation on how AI and Ethereum will intersect. I imagine they will. There are lots of theories on how they can. The way they intersect currently is that they're both expressed in a public vehicle called Bit Digital. There's no public vehicle that has that kind of expression. Um with respect to white fiber uh the AI company that we own on the balance sheet that is primarily a company that is finding is basically it builds data centers and it builds data centers in a very unique way data centers for and and it's basically bringing a bunch of HPC

servicing cloud clients that are focused on um AI and what we do very differently is that we find these abandoned facilities facilities that were left for dead like manufacturing facilities, mattress factories and so on and we repurposed them into tier three data centers. Tier three is a one of the top levels um uh when it comes to um building a data center. So for example uh we bought a mattress factory last February and uh we souped it up. Now it's a top tier data center. We just finished it uh very recently and we did

that in record time in six months. Normally when you build a data center for AI it takes about two years but the way we do it it takes about six months. >> Um and the reason for that is we have this retrofit model approach. We we have this skill set where we're able to retrofit a facility that's been left basically abandoned. We take the existing power in that facility. We use the we use that power. We leverage that power and we uh have this retrofit model where we build a a box within a box of that facility and we're able to uh have a top level data center to uh service AI

clients. And so that's been really a a fun uh that's one of the reasons why White Fiber is doing very well. The market is realizing um that there's a real need to build data centers quickly and we've been able to crack that formula and so that is our play in artificial intelligence. Um and uh and and that's one of the reasons why the stock is just doing extremely well and that again has a cascade effect on on Bit Digital. So that that's a little bit about white fiber and but your question about how Ethereum and artificial intelligence will intersect I mean I don't know where to begin.

It's um the world is going to be very different uh in five years. Uh we will not really recognize it and I truly do believe that Ethereum will rewrite the financial system and I really do believe that artificial intelligence will rewrite society. it's already happening >> and and um and and to to think that's not happening is really um I I bid you uh I good luck to you. Uh so it it it's it's basically a world that we need to prepare for. Um it's a world that's arriving really quickly. I think it's already here and um and it's very difficult frankly to answer your

question on how Ethereum and smart contracts could play a role in AI. One theory that's come up that Tom Lee actually I have to give him credit. It wasn't for me. He mentioned that perhaps I don't want to mess it up, but he that he said that perhaps there could be a way for um AI agents to be um their identity to be validated on the Ethereum blockchain so that we know exactly who you're dealing with uh when it comes to AI agents and that be validated um on on a blockchain such as Ethereum. That makes sense. That's just one example of a I'm sure a ton of examples. I just want to mention it's such a difficult

question to answer because if somebody asked me hey what do you think the internet is going to be looking like and they you asked me that question back in 1998 and I remember that year unfortunately I am I am a little bit um I'm 52 now so I remember uh the internet when it was invented and and the whole process no one would have ever imagined Uber no one would have ever imagined you know dating apps like Tinder. No one would no one would have ever imagined the internet giving out these apps that you find today. Um so it's just really difficult to know how Ethereum and AI is going to intersect. They're going to

intersect and they're going to do it in ways that we can't even imagine today. very similar to how the internet in the 90s we couldn't imagine what it would produce such as again apps like Uber and so on. >> Yeah. And you you mentioned the the capabilities here and and how these are both some of the most prominent emerging technologies and digital assets with respect to Ethereum white white fibers pioneering AI and and data centers and and powering this movement. And you're right, there there's some some key tenants with Ethereum that could make AI a lot better and these could really start to work together. The censorship

resistance is something that we think a lot about, we hear a lot about with Ethereum. Um, and ultimately it could really strengthen AI and make sure that the open source movement and the AI movement work together and these really work together for the benefit of human humans and society and and it doesn't get closed off or or blackboxed or or just monopolized by, you know, a few a few big winners that ultimately take advantage of all the rest. Any >> Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, there's really a fight between light and dark right now when it comes to that particular issue. I'm very much against censorship of all kinds.

>> Uh I'm in many ways a free speech absolutist and um and um if if if there is technologies where we can resist um the government's um posture to squash um freedoms uh particularly in relation to freedom of expression. I'm all for it. >> Yeah. >> I'm against rather I'm I'm against that and all right >> understood. Yeah. and and Ethereum's got this co code is law philosophy to it which is just is really really impressive.

>> Um I I'd love to think and talk a little bit more about the capital structure that that you have. Um and maybe we can start from the beginning because you you mentioned a piece of your your lore, your background that I wasn't too familiar with. It was Morgan Stanley Bank of America coming to you and and asking you to run their capital strategy. And so I'm just curious >> Lynch. Yeah. >> Or excuse me, Maril Lynch. Um and and so I'm curious uh what what was it like running capital strategy there and then maybe the segue here is you know you heard about Ethereum what when you're when you're working in what we call traditional finance and and you're you know running one of the largest institutions in that world and then you hear about this alternative system this alternative money that feels so far away

and and it was it was very very early and it was being used for nefarious purposes. Did you write it off completely or was there kind of a kernel in your mind? What generally how did you balance these two worlds when you when you were there? >> There was certainly a kernel. So look, I was I was a lawyer and then I became a banker and I realized that the system is rigged. Um the the financial system thrives on friction, unnecessary friction. uh when whenever you try to whenever a person wants to transfer value to the other person, a lawyer and a banker gets involved. Uh you know, contracts, uh bank accounts, the fees to transfer it, uh and so on, escrow agents, just a

whole bunch of middlemen. And what Ethereum does is gets rid of all the middlemen. It solves for escrow. Like you said, code is law. You don't need lawyers. you have smart contracts, you don't need bank accounts that goes from one wallet to the other. You don't need escro agents because you have uh something called an atomic swap which makes an automatic transfer uh when certain conditions are met which is one of the you know beautiful things about Ethereum. So these that kind of technology when I read about it I realized that my profession as a lawyer a lawyer and a banker is just going to be made redundant and you know I would strongly encourage people not to go into law school young people they should not

be lawyers they should not be bankers because all of that is going to be code and Ethereum is leading the pack on that. >> Wow. I I think that's also true of AI and and you mentioned that, you know, the people that are getting caught flatfooted, good luck to you. If you don't think AI is going to come in and innovate your industry, >> yeah, >> best of luck. Same thing with digital assets coming in, like you said, lawyers, bankers, ultimately software is eating eating this world. And so you you realized this even early on and and therefore you were able to prepare and uh ultimately excel. Not only did I realize this, I co-founded an Ethereum company uh back in um 2017 16 or 17 um which were early days. A lot

of people are getting on the bandwagon of Ethereum now, but I I I I co-founded an Ethereum company and and uh we hired engineers and we and we built on the Ethereum blockchain. Um, and that was a a successful company and I sold that company to the co-founder of Ethereum, Joe Luben. So, um, so yeah, I I >> it was difficult to do back then in 2017. A lot of the infrastructure that we have today was not available. >> Oh, absolutely. It was very difficult to do back then. But, you know, it was, you know, where when it was a very difficult time for Ethereum when Gary Ginsler was the SEC chairman during that era. Um, as you may know, um, Mr. Gendler had this, um, uh, bee in his bonnet about

Ethereum, and he couldn't even decide, or he made it unclear, I I I think it was on purpose, whether Ethereum was a security or commodity. He would not give any clarity on that. He would go after so many developers on the Ethereum ecosystem. He would investigate a whole bunch of projects. I I had de developer friends who were afraid to write code on Ethereum because they didn't want to go to jail because Gary Gensler was just going after everybody. >> Yeah. >> On the Ethereum blockchain. That era is now over. Uh Gary Gensler has been put out to pasture. And now you see a very friendly SEC uh chairman, a very friendly political administration. Of course, there's nothing perfect about

that political administration or any other political administration, but when it comes to crypto and Ethereum, this is a pretty friendly political administration. And so, we live in a very different era. But there was there was a reason why Ethereum was not doing very well uh back then is because, you know, it was not classified as a commodity like Bitcoin was. And so when you when when it comes to a commodity, you're allowed legally to champion the commodity, talk about the price of the commodity, make predictions about the price of the commodity. There's a very different set of rules when it comes to commodity and Bitcoin was a commodity. Ethereum was not clear and Gary Gensler did not make

it clear on purpose. So there couldn't be anybody like there were no Michael Sailor types in the Ethereum ecosystem because we were not sure if Ethereum was going to be classified as a security. If you champion a security, if you make price predictions on a security, you can go to jail. And so that is why there was no positive price action on Ethereum. There are two reasons. There are no champions of Ethereum because you cannot really talk about a security. And secondly, developers were afraid of writing code on Ethereum because Gary Gensler was investigating everybody on on the Ethereum blockchain for silly reasons. Those reasons are now gone. You see people like myself and Tom Lee and Joe Luben. Um we were just in Singapore

just a couple of weeks ago on a panel. Thousands of people showed up and we're all talking about, you know, Ethereum and and and why and why that is the blockchain of choice. We were not really able to do that during the days of Gary Gensler. And now you have a whole bunch of developers who are building on Ethereum with absolute freedom and not being worried that, you know, they'll be investigated by uh for for silly reasons uh by the SEC. >> Yeah. So, even though you uh Joe Luben and Tom Lee all have uh your own uh Ethereum digital asset treasury companies, I think you guys are all friends. You're you're up there. You're on panels together. Uh Joe Luben bought

your co your your company in the early days of Ethereum. Can can you just speak to the relationship that you have with these guys? Maybe, you know, do you have any funny stories that uh of your your interactions or your run-ins with with Tom or Joe? I do tip my hat to to Joe for helping start this movement. Um, when it comes to the public markets uh, and how to express the Ethereum aspiration, we all Tom has a different approach, Joe has a different approach, I have a different approach. Uh, my approach is to use the capital structure creatively. So for an example of that is that just a couple of weeks couple of weeks ago we did a

convert. Uh we raised money using a convert. Uh we had um some really great players like Kraken and so on that came and participated in our convert. And the reason why that's important is that it was an unsec it's unsecured debt. And no one else has done this in the Ethereum uh digital asset treasury ecosystem. Um SB hasn't done it. Um, uh, Tom Lee hasn't done it. We did it. Uh, and it's and the reason why that's important is because when there's a crypto winter and will be, there always is. Um, the if you don't have if you have secure debt, you

are securing your Ethereum that debt that you've raised money out of unsecured. So when Ethereum if and when Ethereum is what happens that the people who participated in the convert it just it just converts into equity it they don't Ethereum and so that is the beauty of unsecured convert unsecured debt money that way it's really responsible especially downturn if you're excuse me if you're raising money um using debt get secured when the bank

turn uh they go bankrupt because the creditors go after your Ethereum and so that is that's important that's one of the things we've done on the capital structure to raise money without diluting shareholders and to raise it in a way where they can't come after our Ethereum should there be a crypto winter or a sudden crash like there was on Friday. >> Yeah. So that's >> so so getting into that I'd love just to unpack that further and this gets into the capital structure that you have with Bit Digital, you know, maybe you could just walk us through from from your perspective. Um what happened on Friday and and how do we pick up the pieces and and move on?

>> Well, I think a lot of people are leveraged and um and there are some people who think that um Ethereum will just never go down. I believe that uh Ethereum has structural upside, but they're there's going to be a lot of cyclical girrations up and down. And if you're leveraged, you're not going to be positioned well when the cyclical generation goes down. And so, um I think it's, you know, unfortunately probably good for Ethereum that some of the leveraged has been washed out. Um and um I'm really hopeful that uh people have learned their lesson on not leveraging themselves too much. Having said that, Friday does feel like a distant uh time.

I mean people are already I feel a lot of people have have um are already starting to to move on from that. Um Ethereum will go up uh but it takes a while. Uh and it could happen quickly of course but you just don't know when. And uh there's good reason for Ethereum to go up. We can get into that. But there's going to be cyclical generations and if you're levered, you're going to be in trouble. Um, so yeah, it's what uh Warren Buffett um said, you know, stay away from uh what was it? Uh ladies, liquor and leverage.

>> So, you know, >> still holds true today. >> Still holds true. Before we get into um the the thesis for Ethereum going up, I I'm curious just to wrap up the you know what happened over the weekend, did you guys buy more? Is that was that sort of the outcome of >> I can't I can't say I can't say unfortunately that's not public information yet. So >> Okay. Okay. But because you guys are public then I guess it will be released at some time and quarterly filings and such. >> That's right. So, we will we will find out soon enough. Uh who who had the cash on hand and who is buying more. Um and actually I I do want to ask just one question and I don't want to catch you off guard, but I I and then we'll get into the the Ethereum bull case here,

but because you mentioned Gendler, there's this thing that's been circulating over just over the last couple days and it's this article about how SPF didn't do anything wrong. Gendler used him as a scapegoat and and the Biden administration used him as a scapegoat and uh and now the the sentiment on Twitter is just to quote Anom, one of the the Twitter personalities here uh is that Trump is going to pardon SBF. I already see the propaganda starting. From your perspective, is there anything else to be said about the Gendler SPF story? Or do you think, look, he stole money, he's in jail, let him stay in jail?

>> I I I do I I I'm not really a fan of of S Sambf, but um um so I don't want to like defend him or say that he didn't do anything wrong or right, but I do know one thing for sure. Mr. Garrett Gensler uh had an axe to grind uh with crypto and he did everything possible to um to split that movement and uh and and tear that movement apart. Um you know there I just just just as an example during of of how awful that time was even Bit Digital was occasionally debanked. There are banks that called us during the Gary

Gensler days and um they said you know the you know we're getting we're getting heat from the certain political officials and the administration to bank Bitcoin mining companies and um you know they weren't very clear about it but they they they made us like read between the lines and so you know we were told to bank elsewhere and they had to close down our our banks. I mean we don't have that issue anymore. It's quite the opposite. Uh but it was a it was a pretty bad time. We also received letters from Senator uh Elizabeth Warren telling us that we were destroying the environment which is not true. We were using I think it was like 98% renewables. We're using hydro and all these renewable energies to to uh power

Bitcoin. This is back a few years ago when we were a Bitcoin miner. >> This is incredible. I I just I think it's worth mentioning that a a company that is fueling all this investment into an energy source such as you know whether it's wind or solar or some kind of renewable energy is ultimately pushing that forward. You guys were actually and it may seem counterintuitive to someone that thinks, you know, you're using all of this energy, but you're the ones that are actively seeking out and and we're sorting after this energy source and pouring money into renewable energy resources that forward.

>> I'm glad you see the absurdity of it. It was a very absurd time. Um, it really it really it felt I don't the political administration back then with Biden and Gary Gensler was just very anti-crypto and it's they probably lost the election because of it. You know, there are 50 million uh crypto holders in the United States and and and the Democrats in many ways alienated that entire voting block which is very motivated a very motivated voting block and um and the Republicans took advantage of that. it was a really bad idea for the Democrats to politicize technology. Um, and um, that kind of blew up in their faces. I heard that

Elizabeth Warren still continues uh, to um, uh, to be against crypto for the silliest reasons, but I don't think uh, people listen to her anymore. >> Yeah, I don't think so either. I think she's she's about due for retirement. Um, >> okay, let's get >> speaking of retirement. Speaking of retirement, just just >> Sure. We we we do have too many old people in the government. Frankly, we we need we need younger people. I mean, the average age in the Senate is like I think in the 70s or something crazy like that. These people belong most of these people belong in nursing homes, not in Congress.

>> Yeah. And and the issue here is that young people see the absurdity of the job itself and don't wish to get into a career like this >> and and Okay. Okay. Well, if you know the the the thought experience goes >> and and and and that's why young people are very disenchanted with the existing system and that's why they are gravitated towards Ethereum and crypto and trading uh and trading you know crypto because they feel the existing system is entrenched and rigged for this older uh class and um and it it they they and that's why you see young people just trying to figure out an alternative

system that's for them and that's why crypto is a big deal because for younger people they see that as a chance to sort of even out the playing field. >> I think you're absolutely right and I think the Democrats were subservient to this uh this ideology and the the older people that were there and they said they said to themselves, "Oh, crypto is for rich people. This is money. This is for rich people and this is going to get monopolized." So therefore, us as Democrats, we don't like this thing. But they fundamentally misunderstood the fact that crypto is the alternative to the current monetary system that has been monopolized by the elitists that they're trying to to prevent from getting in and monopolizing power.

>> That's correct. You're totally right. >> I I think they they lost the election because of ignorance. Um >> it's true. >> Well, we'll see how this plays out in the midterms. Obviously there, you know, there's not a political show, but sometimes, you know, we delve. >> Um, okay, let's get into the Ethereum bullc case. I think you already set the scene. You know, we have this generational wealth transfer. Money's flowing down and people and and frankly, you know, by and large in part as a result of the internet and the democratization and the and the open access to information, people learning about finance a lot younger. saw a chart the other day. You know, most people that are are now in retirement age, they didn't learn about money until, you know, their 30s or their 40s and they

they had a true career. Now people are learning about finance in adolescence. Um how with with this being said and we we already framed the political environment, Ethereum as one of the emerging technologies, AI is an emerging technology. you know, Tom Lee's been famous for his, you know, price predictions of of Ethereum to to 20,000 and and more. I'm I'm curious from your perspective. Um, feel free, you know, call out a number if you'd like, but you don't have to. What is the bullcase for Ethereum going up over the long term, irrespective of of the shortterm gyrations? You know, there there's a fundamental thesis here.

I'm I'm curious, you know, how how do you see the bullcase for Ethereum? Well, look, if Ethereum and Bitcoin were was invented on the same day, people would never have heard of Bitcoin. Um, and you know, Bitcoin just had some a great first mover advantage. And then when Ethereum came up, it had these this technology called smart contracts. Uh, you could build DeFi applications on it. These are things you can't do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just basically a store of value. So what I'm trying to say here is now that the coast is clear on Ethereum and you're seeing you know very friendly congressional acts like the Genius Act and the Clarity Act

that's you know providing some clear rules around stable coins and you know the majority if not half or more than half of stable coins are built on Ethereum. Um, so you're going to see a lot of uh development activity on Ethereum, especially with these congressional acts coming out that are providing clarity particularly on stable coins that are built mostly on Ethereum. So you're seeing now Ethereum being unleashed uh because of the regulatory environment, the political environment and and Bitcoin is now taking sort of a back seat because it's just an inferior technology. Um, I'm very grateful for Bitcoin being the mother coin, but it it is it is it is um the the the it's not

the it's not the technology that's going to change the world. >> Um, it's Ethereum. Ethereum with its ability to rewrite um what already exists in the financial system. That is a technology that only Ethereum has um with no downtime as opposed to other blockchains including Bitcoin. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um and you guys have not only you know staked this claim but you've also put your money where your mouth is. you transformed your your business, which at the time was profitable with Bitcoin mining, but that's right. Um, it >> we had we had we had a profitable Bitcoin mining business.

>> We had a profitable business. We transformed it and made it into an Ethereum treasury company and we IPOed our AI business and so we own a large part of that. So that's the position we're in now. But yeah, we we we knew what we knew the puck was going towards AI and Ethereum and we made moves to position for that. And I would encourage everybody who's listening and your audience to make the similar to make similar moves. >> Ethereum and AI is going to eat up the world and it's just best to position for that.

>> Do you anticipate more Bitcoin mining companies following suit and doing the same thing you did? Um I thought I think I don't think any Bitcoin mining company's going to survive the next having which I think is in a couple of years I believe. >> Yeah. There's just there's almost like a 1% chance that there's going to be uh that many Bitcoin mining companies as there is today. Um you know Bitcoin mining companies were once really hot because they were Bitcoin proxies.

um they were Bitcoin proxies in the capital market. So instead of buying Bitcoin, you would buy a ticker of a Bitcoin mining company, but after a while you had like a whole like 20, 30, 40 Bitcoin mining companies. It made no sense. There was just too many proxies in the capital markets for Bitcoin. On top of that, it became a very difficult business. So um so I don't think Bitcoin mining is going to be a business in in the future. I forgot your question. And I apologize >> just it you answered it essentially if Bitcoin mining companies are going to uh start to turn off their machines um and quit mining because it is no longer profitable.

>> I I certainly think so. They're either going to go into the uh data center play like what White Fiber did or uh they'll be a treasury company. That's already happening by the way. That's happening in a very large way. Most Bitcoin companies have already announced their intention to pivot into AI or become a treasury company. >> Kudos to you. >> When I did when I when I was the first we were the first ones to do that a couple years ago and that was not received well by the markets. >> But now you guys are the ones with the first mover advantage >> in some ways.

>> I I got another headline here just kind of fresh off the wire. Uh it's your friend Tom just said today that the DAT bubble has burst. I'm just curious if you know that if you agree with that first off and then and then if you do, you know what what does the future of of capital formation at an institutional scale for Ethereum? What does it look like if the DAT bubble has in fact burst? >> Well, you know, that's why I'm very comforted that we own a very real and thriving business. That's fairly important. And so we have a way of hedging ourselves to any uh any um bubble bursts. And that's why last Friday when uh the markets uh crashed, feel free to look at our stock price did

very well. Uh and so that is a a unique position that uh Bit Digital is in. I am not an ETH maxi. I'm a shareholder maxi. I look at the sharehold the the price more closely and what we can do to provide value to the share price as opposed to gathering uh Ethereum. Uh but you know I do think that Ethereum is going to be worth much more in the future than it is today and that's one of the reasons why we're buying Ethereum but we're doing it in a way that's responsible and maximizes shareholder value. And if you look at the share price performance, um you'll find if you look at it past week, month, the past

three months, I think, uh we've done pretty well, >> I'd say. So, um and I've got the dashboard up. This is this is a great dashboard. It's updating in real time as we're having this conversation. Um we started off today. Uh right now, NAV per share is 430. And I did check before our conversation started. It was at uh about an 11% discount. We're already closing that back up to eight. We're at an 8% discount now. So, I'm just I'm just curious about the capital structure here and kind of the mechanism. Um, when you do find that you're trading at a at a discount to NAV, are are you using cash to buy the shares or maybe you can just talk about what what dominoes do you put into place to ultimately close that gap

and and you know, let the market resurface? Well, one of the things we did was we did this convert where it converts to I think $416, which is a big premium >> to uh MNAV uh to where our share price was when we did the convert. So that is a that is one of the creative things that we've done with the capital structure to keep buying um to to position well the company when it comes to raising money uh and not um necessarily just using the one lever which many people use which is just diluting existing shareholders.

>> Got it. And uh I think I've only got maybe one or two more questions. This has been a really really insightful pod. um when when you're you know sitting on on the ETH that you've got and it's 150,000 Ethereum uh that I see on the dashboard here. It's uh upwards of $600 million. How are you deploying this capital to to compound some of this Ethereum? Are you putting it into DeFi? Are you lending it? You know, are are you staking it? you know, h how are you how are you, you know, already compounding uh the Ethereum stack that you do have to again just maximize uh Ethereum per share further?

Yeah, we're just simply doing plain vanilla staking about more than 80% of the Ethereum on our balance sheet is being stitting off is enough to cover the GNA of the company running an Ethereum that is remarkably not expensive. It's very uh expensive business to run. One of the reasons why it's very attractive unlike Bitcoin mining that is a very very expensive business to run. Bitcoin mining has you got to get a data center. You got to buy

machines. You have to have power contracts. Your machines are outdated in months. You've got to buy new machines. You have to deal with Bitcoin going up and down and you making sure that everything is all connected. It's a very expensive and complicated business. the Ethereum DAT business. Very simple. Buy Ethereum in the open market, stake it. You can't even stake Bitcoin, so you're not getting a yield, right? So, you could stake Ethereum, and you could use that stake to cover your very um you know, feather light expenses when it comes to buying uh when it comes to running an Ethereum DAT versus a Bitcoin mining company.

>> Incredible. Sam, we've only got a few minutes left here. Uh I'm just curious, you know, some takeaways from the Asia conference tour. um you were up there, you know, with with the other big uh digital asset treasury companies um having the important conversations on on the main stage. What what were some of the takeaways? What what was the, you know, the sense in the room? Uh any anything that you pulled out that that stuck with you while you were out there? >> Well, first of all, there were 25,000 people at that conference. I was really surprised by the scale and volume of people. And um when Tom and Joe and I spoke uh at the main stage, there were thousands of people that showed up and um there are people like camping out on

the aisles. I was very surprised by the reception, the excitement um of of what we do. And you know, I think that crypto has a very bright future. uh that Singapore conference I think it's one of the largest if not the largest crypto conference in the world and um and it I was just um I was just very encouraged that and it just confirmed that I was on the right path. Uh and it it was just so great to see all this excitement uh from the media, from people, from uh just c people who are just getting into it, who are curious and are just disenchanted with the existing financial system and wanting uh a a shot at a fairer system

or a system that's being developed right now. Um that's that's that's found in in in um in in this movement. It's a counter uh it's a counterestablishment movement and I'm glad that I'm in it and I'm glad you guys are in it too. >> Yeah, we certainly are. Uh Sam, thank you so much for joining. It was an absolute pleasure and I think we we share a lot of the same philosophies especially when it comes to this movement. Um would would love to have you on again sometime soon. >> Thanks for having me. That last segment was presented by

Wrecked. Don't get wrecked. Uh, shout out our friends over at Wrecked. OSF doing a great job. I love seeing a a nice hardware if you if you want to call drinks hardware. Um, just like the idea that there's creative opportunities here in crypto. We don't just have to be launching the next uh fork of an L1 and dumping on retail with a low float high FDV. Uh, I will shamelessly plug React because look, they sent us some drinks and I like the drinks just like NFTs. It's like a physical NFT. Got nothing against

the guys. We're gonna get our next guest up in here having a party. Uh we're bouncing a little bit in the markets today, which is good to see. Uh so we're going to get our next guest, Mr. Alex G from ZK Sync. Uh coming up in just a little bit, let's make sure that we get the correct titles going. We've already had Sam from Fracks coming on. We're gonna get Alex G, the OG from ZK Sync coming on.

Hey, hey, let's get Alex up on the stage uh as he should be and we're gonna we're going to talk about all the exciting things that are happening on ZKYNC. I believe Alex is out at Digital Asset Summit in London. Let's bring him up on stage so that he can tell us all about the announcements that he has shared with us and the community over the last few days. Uh, Alex is not up yet, guys. Let's get him up here. He's got so much to share. There's Alpha waiting. There he is. Alex, welcome to the show.

Good to have you, man. Uh, it's been a little while. Uh but I feel like man every time we every time we chat it's always a good time. Uh we did see each other in Korea. Thank you for uh helping to throw an amazing event. Uh it was it was great. Had a good conversation as well about some of the the core ethos behind ZKYNC and uh our industry as a whole. And now you're just continuing the conference circuit. I'm I'm back. I'm cozy. I'm in Florida. But you are uh did is it Digital Asset Summit London? Is that where you shared your most recent announcement? >> That's correct. We're here in London. Uh it was a fantastic conference and uh we have a lot to share. So happy to talk.

>> Beautiful. Well, let's get into it man. Uh you guys have been the home of RWAS. Would love to understand what the latest announcement is and how it helps push that initiative forward. >> Uh sure. So the uh uh what we unveiled this week is the previdium industry initiative which is a uh culmination of a series of workshops we've held with over 30 global institutions uh from finance to banking to uh you know with with some of the largest names uh Deutsche Banks Bank of France couple of central banks Mastercard uh um um Fidelity International like lots of big names

um observing um how previdiums can change the uh world of traditional finance of banking how they can help accelerate the adoption of blockchains and um it it comeed with a white paper which is available on our website on our Twitter accounts I highly encourage everyone to read it it's very high quality it's made in cooperation with deoid uh and what's really uh interesting about it is uh it's uh for the first time the banking industry actually gets the technological architecture that uh solves a very big dilemma. So maybe I I'll start zooming out to to get to a bigger picture. The

financial institutions today are facing a mounting pressure from their user base from their customers to upgrade to new rates. So the pressure is so high that I would characterize it essentially as the adopt or die moment for institutions. Uh the customers want faster settlement. Uh they want uh uh a lot more flexibility. They don't want to wait two days anymore. They want to be able to send funds anytime on Saturday on holidays uh between the different countries, different subsidiaries, different um companies. And the traditional rails cannot fulfill uh these requirements and the competition from blockchain is

growing. Blockchain systems are offering this and the banks financial institutions understand that if they don't change now and embrace these technologies it might be too late. They will be left behind and uh won't be in in this high demand anymore. And uh they have been realizing this for the last couple of years. There have been numerous attempt to embrace blockchain technologies in banking and financial institutions and they failed for a big fundamental reason. The blockchain space has essentially bifurcated into two completely separate design um uh environments. We have public blockchains that have verifiability which enables

true credible neutrality which is enforced not by trust in some uh middleman by but by the properties of the protocols themselves. Uh and the these public blockchains have composibility and interoperability. So they those are open spaces where everyone can talk to each other. It's really easy to build new stuff to connect to um to to uh build on top of existing protocols. They they are really the forefront of the innovation in the public u uh in in this new digital economy. The problem is they come with a series of disadvantages that make the institutions uh they like that conflict with the

requirements that the institutions have on the business side and more importantly on the regulatory side. The key properties that public blockchains are missing are uh the privacy which is a non-negotiable requirement for from the regulation to the the basic uh common sense like the real world businesses cannot afford to publish all of their transactions all of their customer data completely you know broadcasting this to to the entire world. Um and uh this the second uh really big problem there is lack of control. So we love open blockchain space, permissionless systems, uh the ability to for anyone to uh to start

using them. The institutions cannot really like jump on this as of today immediately. They have their uh legal requirements on KYC. They need control over their systems. They sometimes they need to keep the data on in certain jurisdictions. So they let this control privacy and uh the ability to meet the compliance requirements and they have experimented with private blockchains for the last couple of years. Those failed because they were lacking connectivity and openness of the of the public systems. And what this previdium initiative uh is about it's demonstration of previdium as the new type of architecture enabled uniquely by zero knowledge proofs that bridges for

the first time the the gap between the these two realms. You can have now private blockchains that are connected to each other and connected to public systems and yet they preserve the privacy and they give full enterprise grade control to the institutions and companies and organizations that are are using them. Uh and this is really what the announcement was about. Building on top of the previous announcement which we shared a week uh earlier, the uh Atlas upgrade of the ZK stack which brought uh institutional grade performance uh by integrating air bender our uh proof system which is today the the best of my knowledge the fastest

proof system fastest open source risk five prover and ZKVM in the world uh which gives you very low transaction costs fraction of a cent like I think 0.01 01 cent uh per simple stable coin transfer up to 15,000 TPS which is double the annualized average Visa load and very very importantly 1 second ZK finality which enables this connectivity between the previdiums uh in a private way preserving privacy not just by individual chains but also the privacy of these interactions >> and this is huge because we've gone through these ads and flows and you've been around long enough to to

remember these these transitions throughout history when it comes to the adoption curves of crypto and blockchain. You know, we had Bitcoin and then Bitcoin crashed and and we said, "Okay, well, blockchain is good, but not Bitcoin." And that kind of kicked off this 2018 2019 era of all L1s, EOS and Stellar Lumens and all of these things as a means of creating these permission chains. It also kind of led to the experimentation phase from JP Morgan uh some of the internal incubated uh consortium chains, you know, Hyperledger and and uh DTCC. These guys have started to experiment. And it wasn't until 2020 and 2021 that we really started to see

public activity on public blockchains take off and almost hit this inflection point where and and you you pointed to this in in kind of your opening remarks where it is more of a risk to these institutions to not come on chain. It it's the adapt or die moment. I think you put it really really well. And and for so long it was like okay well we want them on chain but it's important that they're on a public ledger so that everything is composable and we have open access to these financial systems those things were fundamentally at odds. We didn't have the ability to give regulatory clarity and privacy and all the things that institutions expect but also tap into liquidity and composability on public ledgers that is

now solved. Providiums and I take it providium is kind of like a take on like an optimum. It's almost like this new flavor of blockchain where it and and the prefix is is clear. It's privacy, but you also get the capabilities and the functionality of of what we've come to expect in an open Ethereum landscape. The these are some of the characteristics that you've now taken to an account. And I I I want to understand a little bit about how you took this from an idea into reality. Was was this something that you know when you're having the the conversations with central banks and Fidelity and and you know Deutsche Bank and all of these institutions is this something that they're telling you that they need? Are

they voicing, oh look, we want to we want to do this but we we can't give up on privacy. We can't compromise on on scale. It it won't ever work. What were you hearing? And then ultimately you put this into practice. Is this something that they told you that they need or is this something that now is out of the box and you're going to go and you're gonna you're going to sell it to these institutions? >> Yes, we are we're talking to uh to large number of enterprise customers and what we hear is what I said the it's not that they want to change themselves. There is a mounting pressure from their customer base.

>> Mhm. their customers come to them and say we want the systems we want you to offer service on a whole different level like we have our business does not stop we need 247 we need not t plus 2 days but t plus 2 seconds and um they are um uh you know the these institutions I would put them on a spectrum for from the fastest moving to the slower moving uh adop adopters like the the early majority the the late leggers uh but they are all interested so some of them will be faster than than the others because they are more agile they they can afford to move faster some of them

will take uh probably several years because they are um a large you know or large organizations with a lot of committees a lot of politics also going on internally but eventually everyone will have to embrace this technologies because the pressure is coming from their customers not from their uh you know own curiosity. >> Makes sense. Um I remember during our conversation in in Korea, this all sounded well and good and especially having some of these enterprise partners will help with distribution of this technology but ultimately they have their business. you know, maybe there's composability benefits and network effects as a result of uh multiple

institutional businesses and enterprises all tapping into a shared uh layer of infrastructure which is ZK sync. But my question to you then and it's the same question to you now how are you guys going to make money like what is the you know if you guys are giving away infrastructure and technology and and even if it gets widely adopted what is the value acrruel mechanism back to zka sync >> uh look the uh uh if every bank adopts previdium architecture they do it not just for one bank they do it for multiple subsidiaries of the bank and sometimes it's uh doz thousands or even hundreds of subsidiaries in different countries. Even within the

same country, they have different uh spaces. Uh all of that is going to generate a huge load of transactions talking from one system to another. uh going from the um individual providions to public chains uh to clearing houses to uh all the kind of uh or to the defi infrastructure >> uh and all of that is going to generate uh interrupt fees and those fees are going to be order of magnitude lower than the interrupt fees that they're paying to the traditional financial connectors uh and way lower than what what they would have to pay to trusted third party bridges. to liquidity providers if they were you were to tap into into those systems. Uh the sheer

volume of this transactions >> and so we're talking about thousands hundreds of thousands of entities that will eventually embrace it. Uh down to individual enterprises, individual companies and startups. You know, Stripe is serving over 1 million individual startups and and companies that have accounts there. In our view, what blockchain will lead to is that each company will have their own private space in some way, shape or form. If you think about this, public blockchains are a little like um open spaces co-working.

So imagine you have a town and and then uh we work comes in and opens the first open space co-working and now everyone can go there uh get a desk and start working like with with very very low uh barrier of entry. Uh and this is nice and great for individuals. This is nice for startups. Uh but as an enterprise, you probably will like, you know, especially as a bank or some serious more advanced uh scale up uh you would not want to be in a in a completely open space, right? You might want to at least reserve rooms or even get a dedicated uh office space for for yourself. And this is what we're going to see like eventually everyone will need some private

uh space. We might not even be calling them chains anymore like we could call them I don't know containers like similarly how you have websites today like every company has their own website every company has their own private cloud the data of the companies is not completely available to everyone they rent their private databases on AWS Google cloud Azure BU whatever the services are but they retain the privacy aspect of uh of those systems they they have full control with granular access rights on who may see the data, who may transact in what with what permissions and so on. We will see the same things replicated in the blockchain world. So

we will have millions of of this uh like previdiums um as an architectural structure. Mhm. >> Uh and therefore the the the just the interrop alone is going to be massive and on top of that there will be other ways to monetize it you you know like from uh cooperating with the u enterprises directly from some kind of service fees >> various different u uh ways how uh the value can be flowing back. Uh I don't know yet exactly what what all of those ways will be. But what I know is the ZK ecosystem is governed by the ZK token.

It's the token that controls the the governance and the uh the upgradability of the infrastructure and community has uh the deciding power on what this token will be. Like today it's a governance token but it can be upgraded to anything else. It can be upgraded to have any other type of functionality. uh it can be expanded with burning function with uh uh any kind of fees that that are flowing through the the uh this ecosystem and eventually if it becomes big there will be a way to monetize like Facebook was not profitable for for uh uh you know several dozens years I think and then eventually if it's big then somehow the way will be found so I this is the least of the concern

>> yeah understood I I think it is just an interesting thought experiment to understand or or try to think about where the space is going uh and then back into what a monetization strategy could be from that. But you're absolutely right. I've heard Sam Alman from from OpenAI and Chatevt say, you know, you guys aren't generating revenue. This is before they launched their subscriptions. How are you going to make money? And they and he would say, well, we're just going to build AGI and then we're going to ask the AGI how we should make money, which I thought was a great great answer. Um, and it it it makes sense, especially if you're, you know, you're connected, you're tapping into, and you're you're providing all of this value. I I have this philosophy of economic karma, the the value will find you back when when

you're providing it. Ultimately, it does it does return. Um, >> I I'd love just to, you know, in the last few minutes, I'd love to just kind of hear um because what what you're describing this this uh this vision that you have for uh this architecture on ZK sync, but it speaks to the the vision that you have for the industry more broadly is millions of priv and and any company, any business, enterprise, large or small, having some control over their uh financial domain and and businesses by nature are all conducting business with money and therefore you know they all have some element of finance to them and each of those have their own domain and and this

calls for a vastly a very diverse multi-chain experience. Um and as a result of that interop is extremely important because even within you know some large enterprise they might have subsidiaries that all need to interop with one another. I I'd love just a little bit of a refresher on the elastic uh chain, the elastic network, you know, how the and and because of ZK, this is fundamentally different from how Ethereum scales. Ethereum has re-execution. You know, it gets slower every time you add a new L2, you need, you know, it kind of clogs up the block space. This is fundamentally different with elastic network and ZK. as you add more providiums, it should in theory

make the system more efficient because uh ZK it has, you know, more proving capacity, more more uh verification capacity. Could you just kind of give us a refresher on the elasticity of the network and how adding new providiums will benefit the the entire landscape all of the providiums as a whole? I would say that adding more previdiums will just increase the power of the network effects of the system. So we have the metaf flow that says that the uh value of the of a network is proportionate to the square of the number of nodes on the network. So if you increase the number of participant thousandx uh the value will increase 1 million x or something along these

lines. uh uh but with regard to efficiency adding new nodes to the elastic network adding new previdiums new chains public chains private chains doesn't matter simply does not increase the load on any individual participant unlike shared monolithic uh mega chains where everyone has to re-execute every single transaction. So this is the the beauty of ZK proofs. You get two properties. You get the scalability because you can recursively verify uh you basically you recursively produce the proofs for each chain individually and then you aggregate them together uh one by one the verify and the proofs of several chains then the proof of proofs

then the proof of proofs until you get a single proof which you can put on Ethereum. >> Ultimately you will be able to generate the proof of Ethereum itself. We're very close to uh we we already have real time proving if you measure if you call real time like under 12 seconds like an under the block proof time. To me real time really means anything less than 1 second. >> Mhm. That should feel instant to a human. Like you do a transaction and within a second the entire network converges over correctness of execution of all the transactions in the network which can be millions or billions of transactions and then you get a single proof which you verify on a mobile device. This is the ultimate end game for all of the of all of Ethereum and

all of blockchains. This is what will get us to this real internet of value while preserving privacy. So what's what's really interesting is the um it's paradoxically the privacy and interoperability is is the the two sides of the same coin. Uh because you can only get privacy with ZK proofs. >> If you don't have ZK proofs, imagine consider a system that uh you can only see a subset of transactions that concern you. Fine. You see that someone sends you $100 or $1 million, they get correctly acrewed to your account. You can verify that. But how do you know that they had the right to own this $1 million in the first place? That they did not mint it out of thin air, forge, you know, inflating supply for the

tokens, making them uh uh valueless. You like the only way for you to guarantee this is if someone or something guarantees the correctness of the entire system, the computational integrity, the the correct execution, the correct following of all the rules that comprise the system. So either you have to trust that someone does this for you which brings you back in the in the world of the old institutions that are fulfilling this function in the traditional world today. This is why we have so much regulation and compliance and oversight because trust is expensive. It's very very expensive to produce this trust to to create it to oversee. A lot of players even even in

traditional finance are wrong and they are uh pulling the rocks. >> Mhm. But if you have if you replace all of that with cryptography with zk proofs with cryptographic verification that does not depend on humans don't trust humans anymore you don't trust validators you trust math which guarantees the entire system is correct then you can do selective disclosure and only show each participant their part of the system but that also expands to all the other systems and now accepting a transaction from a remote chain is as safe as performing coming in transaction on your own chain that that is under your control because they are running this remote chain is running the exact

same code base and exact same cryptographic proofs circuits so you can trust them as you would trust your own system. >> Mhm. >> And this is what's so beautiful that you can expand this network indefinitely making it perfectly elastic. Elastic meaning like this the the capacity of the system just always follows the the demand. >> Beautiful. Alex, la last question here is uh ZK Sync is closing in on $2 and half billion dollars in RWAs. You guys are number two according to RWA.xyz just behind Ethereum uh mainet. So two and a half billion dollars now. How how do we how do we get this to 100 billion?

What's the 50x? How how do we how do we scale? >> We're going into the uh real world economy and we're going to be tokenizing more and more assets. Different classes of assets are having different levels of complexity when it comes to tokenization. So private credit is the easiest to tokenize. Then uh comes something like uh uh stable or maybe even even stable coins uh and and uh uh money market funds is is the easiest. Then private credit which is the next wave and then tokenized equities and then private like private equities is probably next and then u public equities uh is most complex because it it has to to adhere to most regulations. Uh but

this is happening we we we you can listen to the u executives of NASDAQ talking about this executive of of the largest uh uh US banks, European banks, Swiss banks, Singapore. Um we just uh uh announced the launch of the ADI chain which is a joint venture of the IHC the one of the largest sovereign funds in the world from Abu Dhabi and the uh first Abu Dhabi bank the largest bank in in uh United Arab Emirates who are launching a the first digital dearham on their Zik chain uh powered by by Ziki Sync. Uh so this is all happening. it will just take time. But now we are

really like you you you mentioned uh that we are at an inflection point and I fully agree all of this has a massive catalyst in the US administration and all the uh pro crypto stance that that we enjoy that we have enjoyed throughout this year and I think it's going to accelerate from here and all the other regulators in the world will follow suit. >> I think so too. >> It's just a matter of time now. >> Yeah. Well, keep up the great work Alex. It's always a pleasure having you on. I always I always learn something and and have a new appreciation for ZK as well as ZK Sync. So, uh looking forward to to talking again soon and uh you know continuing to to steward the IND industry forward. Thank you for all the all the good work.

>> Thank you. Really enjoyed this. >> Cheers. See you next time. All right. Always always a pleasure with Alex. um you know he is uh one of the one of the few founders that is as technical uh as he is uh hardworking which is incredible because there's all kinds of things that require um someone to go out and make these connections and push the industry forward like you know here on the on the rollup I feel our mission is to educate right and all all the founders coming on uh they're teaching me things they're teaching us things therefore they're teaching you things as listeners uh these guys that are going they're educating ating Wall Street. They're

educating traditional finance. Uh they are just as much educating uh those on the fringe and those on the periphery as we are. Uh and they are helping uh clear the way for projects and builders as a whole. So, always a pleasure to speak with Alex and uh smart founders such as himself. We're going to keep moving along. Uh let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Our next guest is Tounes who leads growth over at Monad. G Monad. Everyone loves Monad. Uh we're gonna get him up in just a little bit. Very exciting times over at Monad. think, you know, sometimes I think that teams do this on purpose where they um

sometimes I think teams do this on purpose where, you know, they they have such a rush to their airdrop claim that it breaks and then they can claim, oh, we had so much demand. There was so much excitement around our airdrop, they broke our claim page. What a shame. Wow. It's just we're we're that popular. No, I don't think these guys did it on purpose, but that is what happened. Privy uh was overwhelmed by the amount of demand that Monet had for um for its airdrop claim. I believe your boys and myself over at the rollup, we are poised for an airdrop, I believe. So, we're gonna we're going to be talking about this. Uh

we are going to get Tunes up in just a moment. You know, Tounes is one of those pseudo anonymous guys. We have met at conferences in the past, but you know, we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna chop it up. So, uh so to the team in the back, do whatever you guys got to do. We might have to take a short break in order to uh in order to get tunes up, make sure we get all of his uh his uh anonymous protections in place. Um but let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Let's see.

We're getting fired up behind the scenes. Yeah. Let's send him in. Are we ready? Leo, do you need a a moment before we get him? Let's get him in here. Okay, we're gonna get him up in just a moment. We're gonna have some fun. We just had a pretty technical conversation with Alex G from ZK Sync, which is always great. But this one uh this one with Tunes is going to be a good time. A little less technical than the previous one. Just give us a moment to get his uh profile picture loaded up. Leo, let me know if we need to go to standby and then we're gonna we're gonna ride it home. Big finale here with Tunes, head of growth over at Monad.

Let's go. Let's go. He's in the back. We're gonna get him up on stage. I can see him now. All right, I think we're good. Tunes, welcome brother. Doing well, man. I have never called you a and I never will, dude. Congrats, man. Monad is is real. It's alive. Okay. Uh, we're going to work on Tunes's audio to make sure that he can uh he can spread the gospel of Monad to all of you

plebs. Yeah, just just give us a moment here, tunes. We're going to get that fixed up. Um, in the meantime, I've just been convincing myself that Monad is real. I think uh there's almost like this collective hallucination that's happening and uh I'm certainly part of it. I enjoyed my Monide card. Uh that was pretty cool. Um I like the uh the anime AI generated uh profile picture. I think it is it is my profile picture on one of these one of these social apps. I think it might be the base app actually that I use the Moad Card. It's pretty cool. Um, as soon as we get the go live and the

green light from uh my team behind the scenes here, we're gonna we'll chop it up about the airdrop. Uh, when token is uh is what we're hearing from the community. I'm sure you guys have heard that plenty as well. Um, and we're going to have some fun. Also, I mean, there was so much demand, so much popularity around uh the Monad Airrop that Privy was overwhelmed. We had Henry from Privy on the other, I think just last week.

Yeah, Tunes, give us a little one, two test. >> Hello, Gad. >> Gmonad, we're good. Beautiful. Ghana indeed. Tunes, I've been rambling here for a little while. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks. Thanks for having me, Robbie. Nice to nice to chat. >> Yeah, man. What's uh what's the last few days been like since you guys released this on Tuesday. >> Yeah, definitely feeling microwaved right now. Um very very hectic, a lot of chaos. Things are breaking, things are working, people are happy, people are upset. Uh really just in the thick of things. And uh yeah, hopefully we could just do what we always do and provide some good entertainment.

>> Yeah. Was there any like uh hesitations over the weekend? Obviously flash crash Friday, there was big market turbulations. Was there any any anyone internally say like, "All right, guys, maybe we shouldn't launch this checker on Tuesday." Definitely not. That's a funny it's there's a misconception and that I often see where there's a joke of oh man had waited 700 days to launch just to like launch at the absolute worst time or whatever. Um yeah just to be clear there's never been any sort of attempt to time anything. We've just been very patient with our wonderful dev

team you know solving very hard problems. So yeah, never ne never thought twice about launching this. We launched this as soon as we can and yeah, very happy with how things have gone so far. >> I I'd love to just kind of sound off on on on how it went. Um, again, significant demand, overwhelmed Privy, uh, the third third party wallet provider, uh, through no fault of your own, except building a ravenous community. So kudos, uh, on doing that. My question to you, I got a I got a Monad card. Uh I connected my Twitter to uh to the airdrop checker. It seems that I'm eligible. I don't know. I didn't get a specific quantity. I don't think I

don't think that's available yet. But what I did get was that my airdrop strength level is that I'm cooked. Could you just Could you just expand upon that a little bit? What What am I microwaved? What does this mean? >> I mean, it can't be good if you're cooked, right? like this. >> Oh no, >> it's not a good thing. >> But I got a Monad card. >> Um, yeah, I mean, we're just having fun, you know. I think it's obviously good if you are eligible. And yeah, another another component of this. I almost tweeted this, but I didn't. Um, I was going to tweet, I can't believe we got away with launching the the checker, not giving anyone tokens, and everyone's so

happy. like it's kind of just a quick little uh bait and switch. Um but yeah, you know, there's reveal coming up. >> Yeah, there's a reveal coming up. Um >> Okay. >> And yeah, I mean, we'll see. You know, it's like the job's not done yet. People have expectations, but you know, only time will tell. >> Um Okay, so give us a sense of the timeline coming up here. Uh and just to make sure that we have our expectations, right? It's the October 28th, right, that we have the airdrop. uh the the checker essentially. We we won't get the tokens on the 28th, but this will kind of be the next unveiling.

>> Yeah. So, it's a little nuanced. I'll I'll try to explain it very clearly. So, the claim opened Tuesday. Um the claim October 14th, the claim closes on November 3rd. So, you have until November 3rd at 1300 UTC, which is also 9:00 am New York time, to basically just connect all your stuff and, you know, kind of like lock in your entitlement to your tokens. Um, basically, when Monad Mainet goes live, your tokens will just kind of they'll be there. You know what I mean? You're not going to have to like sign a transaction to get your tokens or anything like that. Um, and then yeah, on October 28th there's an optional kind of pre-reveal,

right? So, you don't have to do it, but yeah, on October 28th, you know, if you choose to, you know, you can kind of participate and um reveal your yeah, your airdrop early. >> Okay. And as far as these airdrop strength levels from what we're seeing when we connect our uh our handles and our our wallets and things, can you give us any sense of All right, like you already said that I'm cooked. I get it, right? But then these other ones are like community last. Like what does that mean? It's so ambiguous. Can you give us any sort of hierarchy or tier list as far as like is is community last better than I'm cooked? Like where do these things stack up?

Yeah, I think, you know, it's it's probably more fun if people try to figure these things out themselves and speculate. >> I'm trying. I'm trying, dude. >> I think it would be boring if we like released some official here's exactly what everything means and how it works. I think it's supposed to be a little more vague, a little more fun. Um, yeah. It's it's also I mean, you know, when we did Monad cards, if you read the the names and descriptions we gave out, they were all, you know, little jabs, kind of like joking insults just for kind of shock value and make the experience more fun. So, uh, yeah, whenever anyone asks me, they go, "Oh, I got permanent underclass." Someone asked me this in person yesterday. They go, "I got

permanent underclass. Is that good? Is it bad?" And and my answer is, I mean, obviously it's not good to be in the permanent underclass, you know, >> but you just said all everyone that you've said so far has been, "Oh, that's not good. Oh, I'm that's not good. Permanent underclass." No, can't be good. >> Uh that's just all part of the fun, you know. >> That's one thing that you guys are doing well over there. You guys are having fun. What's been the What's been the vibe like? I mean, when it's heads down, it's grinding, it's building, and it's like really just doing like hand-to-hand combat and building a community. That's one thing. But now you guys, I I take you see the light at the end of the tunnel. You're you're having fun you guys with with uh with intern we had on a couple weeks ago. What's kind of what

what's the what's the vibe like internally at Monet? >> Yeah, for sure. Um I mean vibes are high. I think when you've been a part of a team for such a long time with like you know you have mission one of launch and then mission two like actually be successful you know it's nice to just get to the milestones right so being close very close to launch is very exciting um I think we're all I think we're all just excited probably you know nerves are high you're you're naturally just nervous nervous, stressed out, feel feel a lot of pressure,

um you're in the thick of things. So like on the on the day we launched the claim, you know, it's very tough to, you know, get a pulse on what the consensus reaction is to how the launch went because you're kind of just in the middle of it and you're stressed out and you're just there's so much information flowing at you all at once where you can't really get a read on it and and you can't really process what just happened until maybe you get a night of sleep and wake up the next day. Additionally, yeah, we broke privy. So, funny enough, you know, there was just a lot of traffic. Um, I'm sure a lot of it was real people. I'm

sure a lot of it was maybe, you know, DOSS attempts or whatever, DDoS, I'm sure. >> Um, but like our website, you know, worked fine. The website never actually went down. Our our systems were all clear, I think. I think part part of this, you know, I you can't really like blame Privy or or say that, you know, Privy's not good because this happened. I think any provider we would have chosen, the same exact thing would have happened. Um maybe they could have done a stress test, but the thing is is that if they did the stress test in the in this exact capacity, the same thing would have happened. And obviously, you would why why would anyone want to kind of take

down their systems? So, um, yeah, it was very chaotic cuz we all get in the war room 9:00 a.m. launch and within 30 seconds, okay, it's down and we're like, "All right, great. Well, on standby." >> I picture like, you've seen that that picture. It's Obama sitting in the chair and it's Bush and it's Hillary Clinton in the back looking all official. Like you got Ke sitting down like that is the image that I have of the war room 9:00 a.m. in New York launching the airrop checker for my dad.

>> Very very fun. And then yeah, so probably first two hours it was down. It got it got it went back up maybe at 10:45 >> and then it was a big wave of emotion of people finding out if they're eligible or not. Um, you know, you have a lot of people who weren't eligible who were upset. You had people who were eligible that were happy. You had people who were eligible and were happy that other people weren't eligible. And so there's a lot of dynamics, a lot of emotions. Um, and then as intended, as this was designed, people started really sharing their, you know, these cards that you're talking about, kind of flexing them, shock value, comparing, trying to figure out what does this all mean? And then the timeline just started to be infected

with everyone sharing their claim strengths. That's what I thought was going to happen at 9:02, but it was just a delayed gradual roll out and then by the end of the day it was all just, you know, felt felt a lot better. >> You guys have this intel lock down there. I have there's like a internal department at Monad like the Monad Intelligence Agency, the the MIA, and it's like I I just there's no leaks. There's no there's no no one that has uh no whistleblowers internally that have leaked the uh the strength of these levels. You guys really have tight lips uh and have built this in such a such a way that uh has really been it's been locked down and it's cool to see because

it just hypes up something and it and it it ultimately leads to this really this explosion of emotion and excitement like like you were talking about and Pete like the community is so ravenous too. I just want to get I want to get your reaction to something because I think it was yesterday I saw someone keeping track of their Monad interactions on note paper. >> They were writing down all the interactions that they had with TestNet on paper like it was like they were creating their own blocks block explorer by hand and it turns out they were ineligible.

>> Right. Right. >> Insane. Um, in in other news, uh, you guys are also airdropping to everyone who has participated in an echo round. Um, this is a pretty novel way of doing things. You guys are, uh, also one of the one of the teams that is is accustomed to going out and trying new things in the spirit of crypto experimentation. What was the motivation to choose Echko and why include everyone who has participated in an Echo round?

Right. So, you know, just to start, I I would say that I'm I'm not the one that was in charge of, you know, selecting who isn't isn't part of the criteria. Um, so I don't want to necessarily speak for, you know, the org as a whole as to like exactly why. Um what I would say you know we have a good article that we released that talks a lot about eligibility criteria you know anti-IL efforts monad community onchain users crypto community uh crypto builders crypto curious monad builders generally speaking I think that there's just this like distribution is really difficult

and fortunately you know a platform like echko is a great almost I guess whitelist of people who you know are both real and are the type of people you would you would want to kind of be part of your community. So you know any sort of list power users that you know rep represent real onchain users you know real crypto community. I think we tried to target and include we als we also included Legion which is another sort of uh onchain fundraising platform. Um so yeah >> got it. Yeah this was uh so this was an

effort of anti- sibling which makes a ton of sense. All of the users that are participating in deals on Echo and Legion are all KYC. Um, and so by doing this, you can be assured that you're getting real humans to participate in the ecosystem. Um, you mentioned that the claim ends. Was it November 3rd? >> Correct. November 3rd. >> November 3rd ends. And does that mean Mon will go live November 3rd. Once the claim ends, we will all get our tokens. Um, so just to I guess go from the FAQ, it doesn't explicitly say that. So I don't want to uh be the source of truth

here. Um, but I I mean there's nowhere that's been said that the moment that the claim ends is the beginning of mainet, right? So >> okay. Okay. the the Monad Intelligence Agency is going to fact check that one. Um, okay. And and when it happens, putting that aside, regardless of when exactly it does happen, um, you guys are going to go live and you've got not only a ravenous community of users, but also builders that have decided, uh, they're they're using Modad for their applications. Is there anything that you can give us a taste of whether it's yields or points or games or apps or

DeFi? Like what are some of the projects that stick out that have already committed to building on Monad and will be live day one? Is there any is there any apps or anything that you can shout out as far as you know when it whenever it happens November 3rd, maybe maybe not, but you guys are going to go live and everyone's going to get their tokens. What should we do on the chain? what's going to be live and and and how should we get involved, >> right? Yeah, Monet has Monet has in my opinion a very strong ecosystem for a pre-launch chain. Uh it is it is kind of interesting how how high expectations have gotten for chains on day one. Now, you know, if you look at something like Salana, uh I don't think I don't think there was any concept of Salana trying

to build an ecosystem of apps before they launched. you know it was it's a technology project or then you know the thesis if you is if you create really good infrastructure then you can create a good experience for both users and developers um so I would say monad similarly is a real technology project where you know the entire chain is built from scratch the logic of of what it's designed to be comes from first principles it's fully EVM compatible it's a novel consensus mechanism where when it when it launches, you know, it it'll be the the state that it launches in and the way that the system is designed is where it can actually

scale up to thousands of validators. You get very very fast finality um under a second. you know, block times are 400 milliseconds can maybe, you know, very comparable to Salana. >> Um, and the chain has massive massive throughput. So, you know, we're talking 500 million gas per second. You know, just to put that in context, Ethereum gas per second is under 5 million, right? And so, >> you said 500 million on Monad.

>> Yeah. Correct. Correct. So, you know, the idea here is basically it's twofold. One, you know, you do have new apps that are unlocked when you enter into these bounds of, you know, high performance, very fast transaction times, and very low fees. That's where you start getting into kind of like order books. You know, you you have things like Kuru, which is a spa order book. you know, Crystal, you have uh things like Purple Drake Exchange, which are per order books. Um but then also, you know, if you're building a consumer app, right? Um not to, you know, try to turn this into a, you know, criticize Ethereum thing,

right? But, um you basically need your the chain you um the chain you're building on to be able to scale well. And so what this means is that one, it needs to be able to handle a lot of throughput, a lot of transactions per second. But then two also is that once you start experiencing that load, you need the transaction fees to say to stay low. And so you could look at the stress test that happened, you know, as you were saying like a week ago or where there's a flash crash. Um things starting crazy like fees on ETH are spiking to crazy levels. Um gas at 250 plus, >> right? Right. And so if you look at the median gas fee during that window of Salana, it was significantly lower than you know L2s like um base or arbitrum or

whatever where the L2s spiked um and Salana didn't so much. And so the point I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of apps that basically have a ceiling towards how many users they can really handle. Because if you if if you have an app where suddenly it goes viral, you have 10 million users, well then all those users are almost going to start pricing each other out because transaction fees are going to start spiking because the chain isn't designed to handle that load and maintain those good user conditions. And so basically any app that is built on the EVM today, you know, we feel confident that, you know, you can give as a builder, you can give your users the best possible experience at scale by building on monad. And so there's lots of awesome

consumer apps being built on Monad. You know, I can give some shout outs to Kizy, for example, which is kind of prediction markets for social media. Uh rare bet sports, which is, you know, kind of prediction markets for sports. Uh Lever, which is leverage sports betting. Um Loot Go, which is kind of like, you know, Pokemon Go meets Stein. Um yeah, I mean Omnia, which is, you know, Savvy Seals kind of, you know, their game. Um there's there's lots of really interesting things happening. Uh and just as a last component is, um again, it's like this dynamic of building an ecosystem pre-launch. I think there's

also a lot of builders who generally are not super interested in what they consider is wasting time by like launching an app on a test net. And so I just wouldn't be surprised if whatever my or anyone's expectations as to what Monad's ecosystem will look like 3 months after launch. I think it's going to be really really hard to predict because there's probably a lot of talented builders who are just waiting for it to actually launch. See if it lives up to the promises. See if people are actually doing stuff on chain and then you know hopefully you know they'll they'll dip their toes and you know we can really start having some fun.

>> Makes a ton of sense. there's network effects as a result. Once you see the liquidity and you see the users, you want to start building on top of that and tapping into that. And that's the network effects of Monab going live with some day one launch partners and a ravenous community that you've built yourselves and then the users and the builders or excuse me the the application builders on the outside kind of seeing that and wanting a piece of it and then coming in to compete for their share as part of the community. And that's ultimately where you get this healthy nature of competition uh between applications and and that is what makes these apps the best because then they can they they are pushed to be better and to innovate. Tounes absolute

pleasure man. Um congrats on all the great work. You guys have inspired a whole subset of the crypto industry around Monad. Uh people are really really excited. Uh and I think it's for good reason. So, I appreciate you coming on. I'm sure you're busy. We're gonna get you out of here so that you can uh continue trolling all of the Monad uh the Monad uh community members. Uh G Monad to you, sir. And I look forward to the the launch. >> Yeah, Robbie, thanks so much. Um it's really fun to see Monet take over the timeline and, you know, keep your eye out for the preveal because might just happen again.

>> Wow. Will do. Awesome. We'll keep our eyes out and uh and yeah, keep up the great work, man. We'll talk to you soon. >> All right, take care. Thanks, Robbie. >> Cheers. Banger. Wow. Tunes. I think he might have dropped the alpha. I think he might have just like he didn't say November 3rd, but he kind of said November 3rd without saying a November 3rd, right? There's nothing explicitly says that says once the claim ends, that's when it goes live. But I mean guys they're not going to they're not going to make everyone just wait. They've made us wait for two years, right? They're not going to let make us keep waiting.

Wow, what a show. Um, all right. I'm I think people are going to clip this show to an oblivion. I mean, just check out the rollup. the breadth of going from a stablecoin OG with Sam from Fracks to another Gigabrain legendary Sam Trabar at Bit Digital, one of the leading Ethereum digital asset treasury companies. Think about the the pure DeFi to the to the legendary Trady DeFi crossing the chasm on both sides of the of the aisle. And then we bring it back and we go with um we go with Alex G, the super technical just wizard when it

comes to ZK. And we wrap it all up with good vibes from Tunes. I mean, you couldn't ask for a better show. Uh we're going to be clipping this one. I hope you guys are going to be clipping this one. I hope you enjoyed this show. I certainly did. There's tons to unpack on all across all across the board. So, we're gonna let you guys dig back through. If you enjoyed it live, you'll enjoy it even more a second time. Don't be asleep at the wheel. Don't be a ghost watcher. Go give us a follow. Give us a subscribe. Give us a comment. Give us a like, a retweet. It all helps. We want to keep coalesing and acrewing all of these guys on one channel to make sure that you guys don't miss a beat.

If you guys have been watching our content, you probably got the Monad Airrop. So, keep watching, keep staying involved. We're going to keep bringing you the realest, biggest, best creators, founders builders projects yields and assets in DeFi. Thank you guys so much. We're going to see you next time. Peace. [Music]