Rollup TV: Inversion, GEODNET, Stabled Up EP 6, Galaxy Ventures

Transcript

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

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

Heat. [Music] Heat. Hey, [Applause] [Music] heat. Hey.

[Music] Yo yo,

I think we're live. We're live. We're here. All right, let's go. Uh, I'm pretty stoked. I think before our first guest comes on, uh, we're going to be talking about the A16Z 2025 state of crypto report that just came out. Uh, pretty pretty cool stuff. This report comes out every year and uh Chris Dixon's ghost writer did a hell of a job with this one. Uh so we're gonna go through it. Uh our team in the back uh let's get it up whenever we get a chance and we're going to kind of give you guys some first reactions, first impressions as we're as we're digging in.

Um we've also got a great show you guys have probably seen. We've got Santiago Santos, great guy uh and and great business guy as well. Uh the uh founder of Inversion Capital, the private equity firm focused on crypto. Uh every time he comes on, he's telling us about how he's going to acquire the second largest telecom company in in Latin America. Uh and I am excited to get his update on this. Uh he is also going to be joined by Mike Horton of GeoNet which uh has a token that's live. You guys stay tuned for that one because there is going to be some alpha that drops. Um and Santiago and Mike are both building in

the DPIN arena. Uh very very exciting conversation there. Later we're going to be joined by the Galaxy guys, Galaxy Ventures. We're going to get Mike and we're going to get um uh his co-orker from Galaxy on the show. Very excited to spend some time with the Galaxy guys uh as these guys are just continuing to push. I just got an email about uh Galaxy's quarter three earnings results. Uh and Mike Novagrats, the founder and CEO of Galaxy, said the third quarter was the best quarter in Galaxy's history.

Great, great opportunity to chat with the Galaxy guys. The Geonet team is in the chat. Can we get the A16Z state of crypto report up as we go live before we kick over to Santi and our uh our our first couple of guests? Let's see. Should have should have it up now. There we go. the state of crypto 2025. As you can see, this is uh a pretty exciting report. Um we're going to get some more brightness going. Point disclosures. A6Z, they want you to know that uh they are doing things the right way. Uh let's see.

We've got a ton of exciting things. So, crypto market is big and growing. I think we knew that. uh you see trillions as the footer of every tweet on the timeline and so yes it is big we are in the scale of billions we have not yet hit trillions but we're getting there stable coins have gone mainstream that is real it is a stable coin super cycle the world is coming on chain all of these this table of contents is just incredibly bullish one after another infrastructure is almost ready for prime time AI and crypto are converging I would also posit that Wall Street and crypto are converging.

I think that uh is not too controversial. Crypto industry in America is stronger than ever. I think we know why. Introducing the new state of crypto dashboard and what's next for crypto. Guys, there's 54 pages as a result of this. And so, we're just going to try to pick out some of the highlights. The crypto market develops in cycles. Is A16Z calling the four-year cycle? Let's see what we got here. uh a feedback loop between prices, developers, and users. We know this. We know this. So, we see some of the cycles here. The ICO boom in 2017, DeFi summer, and the NFD surge in 2021, Bitcoin ETF led to a spur of growth, and then memecoin mania regulatory shift.

Stable coins going forward could have an outsized impact on developers. We're also going to seeund 150 plus ETFs go live almost imminently as soon as the government opens after their shutdown. If you guys missed it, James Seafart came on from Bloomberg. He's the ETF guy along with Eric Balenunas. They each described how they're looking at the ETF landscape post government reopening. That's really the only catalyst that we're waiting on.

ETFs and memecoins had an outsized impact on users. We could also see these two particular categories have an outside impact on developers. Bitcoin still dominates. I saw a tweet from Ben Cohen today that said Bitcoin dominance is upwards of 60% and it's on the rise and we're going to continue to see it rise over the coming months. This is quite the take. Obviously was in a decline going from 2014 Ethereum launched. This led to the spur of new new coins. ERC20's Cambrian explosion of new tokens. This ultimately developed and we got more and more uh tokens as a and as a result of this Bitcoin

dominance fell and fell. Bitcoin still continues to represent more than half of crypto's total market cap. You guys wouldn't know that because CT doesn't own any Bitcoin. We're going to keep moving along here. uh US tech companies and global commodities, they like Bitcoin as an anchor to the modern economy. Gold obviously $30 trillion market cap on an absolute run. Bitcoin is up there uh about uh let's see right between Amazon and Meta. And so I think this uh gives us you know the the the sentiment around Bitcoin. It can do both. Get you an asset that can do both. It can be a dollar uh a safe haven asset an

inflation hedge just like gold you know we're seeing uncertainty in the market gold is running uh we can have bitcoin act as a similar commodity at the same time bitcoin actually it can also act as a tech stock an explosive growth tech stock at that and you can see it valued as such obviously we liken this to gold digital gold uh as a store of value bitcoin has monetary properties and that's why you can see Bitcoin is an 11x away from gold. That is the target that we're continuing to stretch. I do believe Bitcoin will flip gold in the near future. Stable coins will continue to proliferate. Eventually, we'll see Bitcoin eat the entire market cap of stable coins as well. Quadrillions.

Let's keep moving. Macro forces matter. Sometimes Bitcoin acts like a safe haven asset. Sometimes like a risk asset. Boy, you ever you ever watch a sports game and you just say exactly what the announcer is going to say? That's exactly how I feel right now. Exactly. Sometimes Bitcoin acts like a safe haven asset. Sometimes it acts like a risk risk asset. Right now, it's valued like a growth asset, like a technology company. It's sandwiched right between Meta and Amazon. It could also act as a safe haven. That's why we're valuing it comparable to gold. And so like we can see here the Pearson correlation uh is really low when it comes to gold but really high when it comes to NASDAQ. And so you know we we

can see the correlation here. Uh at the moment Bitcoin, gold and the NASDAQ are all up and to the right. Uh even though the Fed funds target rate has grown, you can see that black line on the chart here. uh yields have gone up and we expect those yields to come down and we know what happens when risk assets react to yields coming down. Uh crypto is global but onchain activity is growing fastest in developing countries. This is pretty exciting. This gets us back to some of the core ideological benefits of crypto to begin with. The fact that underbanked and unbanked societies can now have access to finance at internet speed. This is particularly exciting because I think this opens up global

finance for all. No surprise here that crypto is growing fastest in developing countries. The other in this uh chart on the left is growing in particular. United States it's actually kind of flatlined between you know between 2018 2019 it's ebbed and flowed a little bit but it's actually uh decreased in market share as uh as a global crypto economy has taken hold. Uh we've seen countries like Nigeria grow significantly since 2020. Uh what's that green one? Argentina has grown significantly. Um and we're going to uh also see more and more growth spur as uh as these

countries grow. Uh let's see, let's see, let's see. We're going to keep moving along here. This is some great stuff in here. Crypto is multi-chain with Ethereum and its L2. Salana and Bitcoin attracting the most developers. I think we knew this. Um, top blockchains by builder interest, Ethereum based Salana. Top blockchains by monthly open source developers, Ethereum Salana Bitcoin. Pretty interesting to see Bitcoin up on the list on both builder interest and open source developers. Uh, any surprises here? Polygon up on this list as well. Cosmos, Polka Dot, open source developers up there. Um yeah, hyperlquid by builder interest. I

think that's pretty cool. And then obviously we can see here uh this orange view live button. Uh that is the uh state of crypto dashboard that we saw on the table of contents. I believe if you go to this PDF, you can click the view live. You can go to the dashboard and you can view some of these charts as they update in real time. Honestly, with these two charts, top five, no surprises. Bottom five, you see some sleepers, hyperlid there, top 10 in builder interest. What else we got? We estimate that the number of monthly active crypto users has grown from 40 to 70 million. 716 million global global crypto owners. Uh that represents people who own crypto but do not necessarily transact on

chain. We call these people crypto curious. They might own crypto on a centralized exchange. They operate it like a brokerage account. they don't really go and operate and use the chain or self-custody. That is really the differentiation when we see this when we see these kind of concentric circles. This is also really helpful for builders as they start to understand the demographic of users that they should be targeting and you can kind of niche down, niche down, niche down as we develop closer and closer. Uh before we bring in the guests, let's speedun a couple more things here. Uh 180 million monthly active users. uh monthly active addresses. Uh 40 to 70 estimated monthly active users. Uh the number of unique

people who transact onchain monthly 40 to 70 million uh 10 million users added in the last year. We're seeing this growth. I'd love to see what the percent over percent uh growth uh for uh monthly onchain active users is, but 10 10 million I think that's about 25% overall year of institutional adoption. Some of the largest financial institutions are embracing crypto. Wall Street and crypto are converging. Circle, Robin Hood, Black Rockck, shout out to Securitize. Black Rockck and Securitize launched Bidd. Uh this was a massive pop and now obviously we're seeing everyone come after Black Rockck and try to try to uh run on the coattails of all of this

bullishness entering the industry. JP Morgan just uh cut the ribbon on their Midtown Manhattan office. Them and Morgan Stanley Revolute Strike. Visa obviously making a huge fora into the crypto market. Institutional capitals flowing into Bitcoin. Bitcoin Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs hold over $175 billion on chain. Wow. I mean, this is just this is what we're looking at when it comes to uh this is what we're looking at when uh it comes to the the adoption. Um I it it's just super exciting. Um because ultimately we're going to have a

Cambrian explosion of ETFs that come in over the coming months. Uh, I I really think once the government is reopened, um, we're we're going to see a massive onslaught of ETFs. I'm really curious to see whether or not this is going to be a bullish or a bearish thing. Liquidity is obviously going to flood. We're going to get a surplus of these assets in public markets. Will there be demand for the longtail of assets when it comes to these ETFs? That's what we're that's what we're going to find out. uh Black Rockcks Eyesshares Bitcoin Trust IBIT was the world's fastest ETF to get to 10 billion 25 billion and 50 billion in AWM. These are some of the top performing ETFs ever that have ever launched on public markets. Bitcoin and

IBIT uh hold that title. We're going to see if the long tale of assets also hold that title. Uh maybe we'll come back to this chart because there's 54 slides here. We're only through 15. publicly traded treasury companies have burst onto the scene. Uh, Bitcoin holdings, we obviously see banker strategy there. ETH holdings, Soul Holdings, these are continuing to grow and grow and grow. Digital asset treasury companies are all the rise. Um, man, tons of alpha, really, really cool visuals packed into the state of crypto report. Uh, we're going to come back to the state of crypto report. Let's bring our guests into the show. We've got Santi, we've got Mike, we're going to be

having a conversation about DPIN. Okay. Uh, and we're gonna be uh we're going to be having a really fun conversation because some of these guys, both of them actually, Mike in particular, has built Geodet into a uh ARR machine. These guys have billions of dollars in ARR. And uh we're going to talk to Mike and Gio about how they've been able to develop this business. Uh we're also going to hear from S and inversion. We're going to hear from these guys about how they've been able to uh create the positioning in deepin as one of the premier industries and categories that

we believe is going to be sustainable and survive the test of time when it comes to all of the oncoming uh the all of the excitement that's happening around DeFi and crypto. Guys, welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on. Santi, it's good to see you again. And uh Mike, welcome to the show for the first time. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. I met a couple guys from the geo team. They mentioned that they were working with Santi. You guys were very just close collaborators in deepin uh as uh as two guys that are are taking the physical infrastructure building in the world of atoms and uh uh I think that's pretty cool. So uh Mike, it's first time on the show. maybe you could give people a little bit of an intro and then we'll

kick it over to Santi. Santi's always got a lot of fun things to talk about and I'm excited to get into it. >> Yeah, super. So, I'm Mike Horton, project creator of the Geonet network. Geonet is the decentralized location layer for robotics. We provide a signal which is about a hundred times more accurate than GPS and it is a kind of fundamental infrastructure layer for powering robots, drones, autonomous vehicles uh with the precise position, reliable position they need to to operate and navigate the world. >> Beautiful. Beautiful. We're going to get into it. Santi, welcome back, man. How's everything at inversion?

>> Thank you, Robbie. Great. You know, excited to be here. You know, obviously I've been investing deep for such a long time. Um, it was one of the reasons why I felt that inversion was needed. You know, you have deepen. Deepen is probably one of the most overlooked categories, if not the most overlooked, because, you know, when I first met Mike, he came to me and said, "Listen, I'm getting all this traction in industry conference. What do you mean?" I was like, "What do you mean? I've never seen you at a crypto conference." He's like, "No, I can't even get a speaking engagement. I'm going to ad confer and uh traditional like real world conferences and and and our booth is light you know lighting up because you know if you're a farmer you want to you know use their technology and it's it's just it was just for me an eye

openening moment where it was like okay like a lot of times in crypto we hear there's no real world application to this technology and it is far from the truth like when you think about you know we talked about you've heard me talk about helium uh and you know I've been talking about geonet as well it's obviously I'm an investor been an investor for a file and it really is Mike is one of those guys is super impressive. You know you have probably the highest caliber of founders in the space are in deepen because they have so much industry expertise and they came they didn't like wake up one day and say gosh I believe in decentralization it was like hey I have dedicated my life to this industry and I see the pain points I can utilize parts of crypto to fix those pain points that exist in industry

and Mike is just an embodiment of that. Yeah, thanks honey. That's exactly right. I mean, we came at it really first trying to figure out how to solve the problem in a web two-way. How to put up for this precise location signal, you need a lot of base stations. We call them satellite miners. They they pull down satellite signals, process the data in order to correct GPS from 10 ft to sub inch. And people have been trying to build that infrastructure for years. And we looked at things like public storage, cell towers, and we realized this is going to be a multi-billion dollar capital investment. Instead, we chose the deepen route. Seeing sort of what helium done and realizing it could be applied to our problem, we've been able to build the world's largest, best

coverage, best quality network ever produced on the planet and less than three years. and with very modest capital raises thanks to the community, thanks to people purchasing this hardware, setting it up, taking the care to do it right, and building such a quality product for for the world through decentralization. >> Yeah, very very cool. Um, we had a a project just yesterday on uh they're called Daylight and they're also building in the deep category. These guys are putting batteries and solar panels on houses uh as a way of decentralizing the grid. Mike, I think what you guys are doing is is particularly cool because you you're taking a lot of the same principles and then you're you're getting hyper localized and hyper specific on a

particular area. For anyone who's unfamiliar, geode uh has these signals, these pieces of hardware. You put them you can put them anywhere uh put them on tractors so that uh farmers know exactly where the crops that need to be harvested, need to be plowed, these sorts of things. Um and this is the power of uh building this sort of network. But I I'd love maybe just generally but but Mike you can speak to geo node. I think when you guys use decentralization I'm curious why did you choose to incorporate crypto as part of the way of building this network and and not just you know manufacture the hardware stick it in you know a lot of places and build the network. Why was decentralization and in in particular uh crypto such an important piece of

building this network? >> Yeah a couple things. I mean essentially you need a rooftop space um at more than 20,000 locations around the world uh to build you know a backbone network for the service and trying to find and source those locations and pay for them in a web 2-way is just enormously expensive. People have been trying for 20 years and it hasn't happened and we've done it in just a couple years through the power of decentralization. So allowing people to permissionlessly uh participate in the network, set up stations on their own um in exchange for token incentives is just a very powerful economic unlock that can move really fast without central coordination. So I think that's at that's at its core. Um

and then I think there the rails are also very good. So simply trying to pay 20,000 people all over the world um in a web two-way, it's inc it's basically kind of impossible. Um and and to do that on a daily basis, right? Our our u mining rewards are distributed on a daily basis in proportion to the quality of the signal that's provided um and the uniqueness of the location for the signal. And to do that efficiently, it's just not really tractable um with with web two rails. >> Yeah. Yeah. Mike to add a little bit of more context there. I mean it it takes uh historically infrastructure uh is challenging. It requires so much capital uh and it's this issue because you don't

have the coordination that you have in crypto right and so you need to have centralized companies spend billions and billions of dollars. There's Mike the the the competitor so to speak of Geonet is a company like Trimble which Mike you know the stats really well. I mean they've raised gosh how much? >> Well they've been at it for 20 plus years. They're uh you know $18 billion publicly traded company. They've spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars over the years building infrastructure and they have a fraction of the coverage we do. So it's not only the capital cost, it's also the speed and with the robots coming, you know, be it the drones, be it humanoids, be it uh autonomous cars, this all stuff is converging very quickly. The need for the infrastructure is now and you know the web 2-way just isn't hasn't gotten

it done and we have. >> Yeah, exactly. That's like a common theme that we see at inversion huge opportunity which is leveraging these decentralized infrastructure networks uh because the world requires them right you you talk about daylight another portfolio company of mine through my family office Jason and the team just realized you know the grid is incredibly fragile and you need coordination to finance and deploy uh alternative battery you know energy sources into the grid and crypto just sits at that intersection because people forget at a very basic level we're deploying infrastructure faster and it's crowdsourced and it's reliable, right? Historically that that's been the piece, right? You talk to Helium, you talk to Telco experts, they're like, gosh, this is not nothing new. Like a lot of people have tried to do it

pre-crypto. Crypto is just that incentive layer that allows people to continuously maintain these infrastructure networks. Um, right? If you're a Geonet, you have an antenna, like you have certainty that you're going to get these rewards. And then that allows the network to be actually credibly redundant, resilient, and reliable, not just for consumer applications, but like businesses starting to use that that infrastructure and and it's it's like honestly going to transform many many industries. I don't think people are really appreciating the opportunity here.

>> Indeed. And I think the reliability I want to hit that point. I think that is people have tried crowdsourced approaches in the past and I push back whenever anyone tries to relate geoet to crowd sourcing because it's a protocol that incentivizes quality. We recently published a paper at the institute of navigation showing that the median reliability of a geoet node is 99.9%. And that is actually relative to the the field that we're in. That's an incredibly great metric. And so delivering these solutions at scale reliably with a fundamental cost and economic advantage is just very very powerful. I don't think people understand it at all. It's completely unappreciated in the web 3 uh sphere today.

>> Yeah, it it's a category that takes a long-term mindset, a long-term uh event horizon when you're thinking about building in the world of hardware. And I think we've got a lot of bull market warriors, a lot of financial engineering at play. and and this is what is capturing the attention especially in a bull market. Um but it's impressive to see the fortitude as you continue to build despite the market conditions broadly. Um and and you're at very different stages, right, Mike? You you have a product in production. You know, you've rolled it out. You you've got nodes that are out there. Um Santi Santi, you're you're a little bit earlier in the process, but obviously seen a lot of companies go through the development stages. You know, what what

could you say about maybe the difference between where inversion is and where Mike and Geod Node are or excuse me, Geonet? You know, inversion will get there. Geonet will continue to grow. Maybe you could just talk about how the adoption curve, you know, operates more broadly. >> I'll tell you why I started in version because I go and talk to a lot of these deep end teams and I say, why don't you have more scale? Like, why don't you have more usage? If the network is reliable and at scale and and the coverage is there, why don't you have way more customers? And they're like, well, you know, people, as much as the tech is there and ready, you still have the go to market challenge. Mike still needs to go to conferences and convince large companies to use this technology.

And it's a conversation that I think you can lead with business logic and you would you would think that businesses would be smart to adopt a network like Geonet because it lowers their cost and it improves their operations. But we know the story. This saga of companies being slow to adopt technology is is is is real and it's not going to change. You know, boards are slow to adopt this technology. Crypto still has stigma. The minute Mike walks into that room and he talks about decentralization, game over, right? The minute they maybe look at the docks, it's like, oh, it's crypto. No, no, you know that's not viable. Even though you have a 180 on the regulatory environment, >> and Virgin quite literally exists to be a deployer for this technology cuz I don't want to wait another 10 years. The technology that Mike has built and Jason

has built and air and helium team has built is ready to be deployed at massive scale. >> It's battle tested. And so we come in and we'll work hand inand with a network like Geonet and Helium and Daylight and accelerate that deployment because we don't want to ask for permission and sell in a businesses. I want to buy the entire business and then call Mike and say hey come in here do that. Why? Because I win. I mean quite literally you be you lower cost you dramatically improve the operations of that business. And so no one in the industry has woken up to that. uh no one in private equity is really understanding how this technology is going to massively transform these businesses. Everyone's focused on AI. Look, AI is great, but

you know, inversion takes a very because I've invested in this technology for so long. No one needs to come and convince me that the I mean, I'm quite literally an investor in most of the best projects in crypto. >> I just want to deploy them at scale because I want to see them win. It's such a shame that the best goddamn thing that this industry is selling is a 50 times perpetual long product. Amen. >> Like enough's enough, man. You know, like let's cut the crap. >> Yeah, we've seen it firsthand on this show. Uh we we try to we try to filter that signal through the noise and we really appreciate you guys who are really building uh for the long haul coming on. Um Mike, you you mentioned something that really piqued my interest because, you know, I've seen kind of these guys sort of orbit around it, but

I think we're still just not hitting it on the nose and I think you we're getting to it, which is the difference between decentralization and crowdsourcing. what why why is crowdsourcing so ineffective to build a network but decentralization can really scale >> yeah I think the the challenge with crowdsourcing is that you get kind of spikes of activity people get excited about something um you know open street maps is a good example people get excited about it there's a lot of contributions there's been a lot of contributions of unique data products like hiking trails there but the sustainability to build reliable infrastructure isn't there and when you deploy infrastructure for real applications. You have safety considerations. You have um just a need for very very high uptime resiliency. We

all learned that again with the AWS uh outage just yesterday. You need to build reliable infrastructure to do deliver things like robotics, transportation, uh products that you know, drone delivery, these things can't be, you know, working one day and not the next. And that's been the classic problem with crowd sourcing. It's been kind of sporadic. when you put a protocol around it, you're creating a long-term mathematical structure that people can understand, model, and plan on um in order to deploy infrastructure. And the infrastructure actually becomes more reliable than the centralized uh variation of it. There is actually a ton of internet infrastructure issues in general that people don't see. It's not that reliable. Decentralization at its core

really addresses these problems and the you need a token to do that. There's no way to uh I testified to this to and to the to the House ad committee working on the the Clarity Act. You need a token in order to make these networks work. It is a utility token that connects the supply and demand together and that is the magic. The infrastructure that's been built by Salana and L1's is all there for you to use. Um and it and it binds all this together and makes it work. Yeah, I I'm glad you brought up the Clarity Act because there's crypto law make uh founders and there's lawmakers that are in DC today that are discussing this. David Sax is supposed to have a conversation with some of the the senators that are holding this up. Um what would the Clarity Act do for your

business in particular to help push things along? >> Well, in the deepen case, the SEC has already kind of come out with pretty clear guidance that these things don't violate the Howie test. So, that's a huge step forward. we're not, you know, deep in founders are not waking up in the middle of the night worried about the the how we test anymore. So that's a huge step forward. I think the clarity um act will just help really the United States lead in financial innovation and I think that's foundational to bring uh infrastructure, jobs, um productivity, you know, reshoring a lot of core tech that's been offshored. I think the clarity act is a huge accelerant to that. So I think it'll help the economy tremendously.

>> Yeah. Solante, any any additional thoughts there on the clarity? >> No, I think it's instrumental. I mean, the US really sets the tone for the rest of the world and um we've been waiting for this for many many years and and it's it's a detonator. I could tell you in in from our standpoint when we go talk to businesses like there's no hiding of our value creation story. We say, "Hey, we're going to plug in this technology called blockchain, crypto, whatever you want to call it." And and I can tell you long gone are the days where management teams be like, "No, no, can't touch that." even uh investment banks that have historically been so against this space uh not only are okay with it but they welcome it. It's like you know what our clients actually do want to hear about it. Um and so I've obviously been

intentionally building in the open. Uh you can't tell how many businesses business owners reach out directly and say hey herd inversion is looking to you know buy businesses or work with management teams to integrate this technology. We'd love to learn more. I mean we we don't have enough capacity to take in all the inbound that we have. We are very focused on uh on a couple acquisitions but that that's what a regulatory 180 will do to you. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think uh there's also some stats uh out of the A16Z state of crypto report that just came out a few hours ago uh estimates that the number of monthly active crypto users has grown uh 40 to 70 million and now we've got over 700 million global crypto

owners, not necessarily onchain, but holding crypto and 181 million monthly active addresses. uh 40 to 70 of those uh 40 to 70 million of those are people active onchain transacting, bridging, doing all of these things. I think this is this is helping to spur the uh Overton window that is available to us as we continue to talk about crypto and blockchain and incorporate it into businesses. A lot of this is a community-led effort that is bottom up and it ends up uh at the tops of these companies and the decision makers in industry. Um I yeah I any any any comments there on on the growth of the industry and how this is changing the perception of our

industry and how it's making uh it making it easier to build and scale businesses. >> I will say I I read that report last year I think they put it out and and it's that the number of active users hasn't changed much and I want to draw attention to that because that is the issue that we have. Look, as much as we have built really great technology, crypto is not still not a relatable piece of technology for many people. And 48 million active users for a trillion dollar industry is actually very little and that's that's a problem that we have to address. You know, we are still mostly a casino and it's a disservice because we're selling ourselves short as an industry. you know, we it's frustrating for folks like Mike, you

know, that that it's still an issue, right? And so that's why I created inversion. That that's the challenge that we have. When you go talk to a regulator, they still say, "Look, I hear you. Really interesting tech. Seems like hobbyist technology. Uh most of those 40 million users are going 50x or levered on hyperlquid and got all wiped last, you know, two Fridays ago." And that's really the challenge that we have, right? We need to go to a state where we have a billion plus users interacting with this technology. And I tell you, it's not going to be through the casino.

It can't. It just fundamentally won't. And so, we got to take quite literally invert the go to market. Like, we are not going to onboard a billion users to an exchange, Robbie. That's it's just unrealistic. >> I I think there's pure math that we can point to as to why that's not going to happen. And it's because in the world of 50x perpetuals, every long has to have a short and vice versa. And if you have a billion people, 50% of them are going to get wiped out every other Friday. And you can't build a sustainable user. >> Totally not. Look, I'll tell you one thing. We are, this is how early we are as an industry. We are debating whether this technology is useful based on the price of a crypto asset. The tech world, okay? If you're there, a company, you're making a decision of which server to

use, AWS or Asia or Nvidia or some other company. You don't make that decision because the price of Nvidia has gone up or down or the price of Amazon has gone up or down or the price of Microsoft is up or down. You use Microsoft suite and you use Asia or AWS because it works. And that's that's just like how it's a problem that we need to fix as an industry. It's nonsensical to be debating the merits of this technology based on the price of the crypto asset. >> That's an amazing analogy. That is right. Spot on.

>> Yeah. I I think that I think it absolutely is. We have difficulty separating the financial elements of this from the hard tech technology elements of this and I think this is why these market cycles come and go. We get this fervor in the industry when everyone starts to uh focus on prices and then it ends up shifting back. Uh and I think this this category in deepen is particularly positioned to succeed no matter market conditions, no matter market cycles. Mike, um, one of the conversations I had when I met uh, uh, uh, one of the founders of your team was that you guys have had real revenue.

Like you you've got a live product. You guys have uh, I think it was three or four million in ARR. >> Six million. >> Six million. Hey, I think I met these guys two months ago. Now you guys are at six million. So there's tremendous growth that's happening here. maybe you could just talk about, you know, what this is like when you're looking at real businesses outside of crypto because in crypto we have this thing called the revenue meta. There's this thing that's like this unicorn status if you're generating any kind of money at all, but it's it's actually really really common and uh and quite useful when it comes to uh real business. So maybe you could just talk about your journey as you guys have grown now. What are some of the things and the and the strategies that you've used that have proven successful?

>> Yeah, I mean we let the product speak for itself. Um we give customers free trials all the time and those convert at a very very high rate to subscriptions and to enterprise customers. Um we do have the best coverage, the best quality and the best price by uh by kind of an order of magnitude in our product category. So it has been easy to attract users um to use our and build on our platform. And we're addressing markets that while they're big incumbents like Trimble, there's also a lot of whites space market like robotics that just, you know, is brand new and is wide open to the competition and wide open to new solutions. So, it's been actually, you know, we're growing at 200 plus percent year-over-year. Um, and that's going to sustain. So, I think it it's it's just

early. Web two, one year in web 3 is about 100 years in web two. So, people do need to take this a little bit longer view. And that's been been hard for hard for the market. I am still you'd have to argue really hard with me that crypto cares anything about fundamentals right now because I don't see much of any evidence of that on a day-to-day basis as in deepend a lot of these projects that um are the high quality projects have proven great deal of traction um yet valuations are are down from a year ago. So I don't know I we're in it for the long game. I don't think about that stuff that much. We have so much going on on the web too. We're doing all kind of stuff in drones. We're working on new silicon architectures to make these robots much cheaper, bringing a lot of

capability of manufacturing um this technology which is today almost exclusively in China, which is fine, but the US should be competitive and we're working really hard on that. That keeps my my mind busy and occupied, but I just kind of am bedazzled at times by the web 3 market because it's it's it's very confusing to me honestly. I I think there is a reshuffleling that will take place and it's difficult to say exactly when this will take place but again over the long haul if you take a longer time horizon the this you know the the state of um just bloat and and overhyped memeco it's just unsustainable at a certain point and people can they can come into crypto for gambling and for the casino u but ultimately you know we know how that's going to play out. You

guys have a token that's live. You guys have real revenue. Like there are things that people can buy if they don't want to just go 50x long on on some purpose memecoin. Like there are things that they can hold for the long haul. Um >> indeed. >> Beautiful. Santi, I want to switch gears a little bit um and get your reaction to a couple things just more more recent timely things. Um Arthur Hayes recently put together this crypto PE. He wants to do some private equity acquisitions. um Inversion Capital uh is in a similar playing field. There's there's some important nuances here, but I'm curious just to get your reaction to Arthur's latest venture and and how you think inversion and malstrom could complement one

another or or kind of figure out what the landscape is going to look like in crypto PE. Yeah, look, we're very focused on buying traditional deeply unse um web two businesses and integrate this technology and make them more efficient. That's unique to our strategy pioneers in that field. It comes from having invested for so many years in the space and uh in companies like Geonet and Daylight and Helium. uh Malstrom the their private equity fund is focused on acquiring crypto companies you know maybe companies that you know could so so it's private equity both um both strategies are they're just within crypto we are not as interested or interested in that um look the

reality is private equity is a very proven asset class it's been around since the 80s I used to work for one of the guys that kind of really invented it uh and was doing some of the larger buyouts uh when I was with JP Morgan, you know, I was saw some larger buyouts like when Dell got taken private, when 3G and Warren Buffett bought um bought Hines. So, it's it's a strategy that exists. There's h there's tens of thousands of private equity funds. Most of them use financial engineering. This idea of putting so much leverage and debt on a business and then kind of the same way that you would like buy houses and the reality is that that strategy doesn't work, right? Especially not in a world where high rates. Um and so look it's it's validation. Uh the asset class

is maturing. Um there's only a few private equity funds that have created meaningful value. Most of those have adopted technology to drive value in the companies that they acquire. So there's definitely parallels. I think what what Arthur and their team probably sees is is that opportunity, but just applying it within crypto. Right. I've ran into them with a couple of companies that I've looked at that I found interesting um in the crypto space and just saying you know you probably do something pretty transformational here. Um so look um there there's KKR, there's Blackstone and then there's uh you know 10,000 other private equity funds. Um and so there's you know I think it's it's uh it's a reflection of the maturation of this asset class. Um I think uh there

will be uh you know our position is that every business is going to adopt this technology to remain competitive and so we take a multi-deade view uh to that and the opportunity is vast you know it doesn't apply to one single industry it doesn't apply just to robotics it doesn't just apply to agriculture it quite literally applies to every industry and so that's really the opportunity set is massive >> yeah the parallel drives You know, in the early 2000s, no one really understood what the internet was going to be useful for. And then you had private equity funds like Vista, Silver Lake that were smart in understanding that software is going to transform how you how you do business. And they've been very successful in doing that. And then there's other private equity funds

that kind of didn't really understand new technology and fell behind. >> Yeah. And and with private equity, we can kind of kill multiple birds with one stone and and really insert this technology into several companies. Uh and and I think it's important to build kind of, you know, someone that you're looking at and you're you're you're stewarding forward in this space, which is which is Avalanche. They're they've recently done some financial engineering themselves with this AVAC DAT uh that's going to go forward. Curious to get your reaction to this and and how you think it could help push forward some of these other things that you're mentioning, whether it's private equity, this is the technology you're going to insert when it comes to inversion. How do you think Avalanche fits into this broader picture?

We see a opportunity to work with Avalanche because it affords out of the box experience to launch our own layer 1 to support all the acquisitions and companies that we acquire. The comment around DATs is it it increases the opportunity the availability of investors to have exposure to crypto assets. it does nothing to prove this technology is anything more than a speculative asset class. So you're you're just expanding the availability in a different financial market. Um which look has its own merits but it doesn't again solve the problem

the biggest problem that we have as an industry which is it's not relatable. you want to think about utility tokens. The thing that like utility drives the the the value of an underlying asset. The reality is that most of the fees of these networks is tied to speculative activity. And so putting it on a wrapper as a DAT does incremental um value and giving people the ability to buy. you know, in the absence of having an ETF, it's a vehicle to express a view, but it doesn't make crypto relatable. It doesn't prove how avalanche or this technology can serve business needs. And if we don't do that

as an industry in the next three years, I think we're going to have a hard trouble justifying valuations across the board. And the tech is real though, like it works. Uh you can get scale. The question is, you know, again, it doesn't it doesn't do anything for that. And so a DAT, you're going to find DATs be super reflexive and they're going to go down like your typical altcoin goes down. And you're starting to see that with most DATs across the board, right? >> Yeah. But just to follow up on the on on Avalanche, you guys, you know, you're real pioneers and stewards of this technology. And I think that's something that you're particularly focused on is separating the financial elements of this from the technology of this. And we

can focus on, you know, this is kind of where where the separation between blockchain and crypto comes in because crypto gets tied up in all this financial engineering. Whereas blockchain is the underlying technology that can power fundamental changes in a landscape like physical infrastructure, like networks. Um, and and so this is this is where it's it's important to separate these things. >> Totally. Yeah. I mean, I I'll say it again, right? I mean we we're going to reach uh if we do this right at inversion we're we're leading with business logic. We know that this technology can cut cost can transform unit economics can really meaningfully improve business operations.

Price eventually catches up to that. The market is a is a is a voting machine uh in the near term is a weighing machine in the long term. If we do this well, the inversion chain and our utility token and uh networks that you utilize in our ecosystem, maybe Geonet, maybe Helium, maybe Daylight, uh maybe you know, Hivemapper and other uh projects will benefit because we're very motivated to onboard a user that has never existed in crypto before. It's a user that doesn't understand how this technology works, but is very motivated to use it because they feel the impact.

And so, you know, I I think going back to the A16 report, we we have very little active users today. We have less active users than Chat GBT. Okay. And so, how we cannot justify the existence of this industry if it's just going to be a casino. And if it is going to be a casino, then it's contained of a small small sphere. Um, so I want to onboard a billion users on chain without them realizing that they're interacting with this technology. Like infrastructure is going to be invisible. It always has been. That's the end state of the technology. >> Yeah, indeed. >> And and and so obviously if we on board a billion users, maybe you can start justifying the valuation of some of these networks. But is Ethereum worth 500 billion? Gosh, I think you got to sit there and really

have a a pretty cooked up version and assumptions on terminal value to derive that sort of valuation. Is Salana worth 100 billion? Gosh, well, we got to think that maybe the fee stream maybe diversifies away from uh pure memecoin activity. And and so I think like you know you know speculation the casino is is is financial markets financialization is a massive massive industry. I'm not like trying to just take a ding on that. You know I uh but I think we all know how reflexive that is. >> Yeah certainly. >> Um and this is where things tend to average out in the long run and you guys with the long time horizon and the sustainability uh uh we'll we'll see you know who survives and what survives. Um, as we as we close out here just in in in the last couple minutes that we have,

uh, curious to just find out what's next, um, you know, Mike, like you mentioned, six million in ARR, you guys are doing incredibly well. Um, what what comes next? How do we how do we push six to 60 ultimately and, uh, then to six billion? Uh, Santi raises raises his hand, so maybe Santi can can pick up on that as well. I'm just curious on both ends, inversion and geoet, what comes next? Well, well, from our side, we're, you know, big believers in consumer autonomy, for lack of a better word. That is these drones, robots, um, consumer services like self-driving cars that really bring physical AI to the consumer. We think that these unlock the largest markets ever and that we, you

know, deepen provides foundational infrastructure for that. some of the data protocol data collection protocols like a project we have with Rover that's collecting data for HD maps and for um world model training really foundational ways to use web 3 very efficiently to to build out physical AI and I don't I don't think some of these visions of physical AI really happen without web 3 so I think that's another unique thing um about that market being whitespace and also having these geos geoysical problems that are hard to solve decentralization is just a really great way to orchestrate that and I think it's already proving to be quite successful.

Um and in time as you know the weighing machine will eventually weigh weigh these things out and I think they're going to be very valuable. >> Love it. And uh Santi uh any insights can you can you give us any alpha as to what's coming next for inversion? >> Yeah well look we have a we're actively hunting. We have identified a couple of really good businesses and we're actively you know the reception to for management teams is really strong. The pipeline is strong. You know I think we're you'll see us acquire company and it's going to be a case study for crypto of how it could be you know meaningfully impactful to business operations and I think it will help Mike when he goes to conferences when he goes to pitch hisology and you know that's why I started inversion because I I I love

this industry. I think if I do this well, it will facilitate the go to market and the selling for many of these protocols that, you know, may or may not require us to acquire business and integrate them. But, you know, I think it's it's it's an incredible time in the industry. It's it's four years ago the technology wasn't ready. >> Now, we have high throughput blockchains. have battle even an event like two Fridays ago you see a path where look there's a a lot of wreckage but the infrastructure on chain works flawlessly and and and so we got to just you know bring a different type of user and different type of use case the logic works the ma the the smart contracting works the infrastructure works the

coordination works like and so I think um there's really no we don't have the last we We will not have anyone to blame in three years if we can't increase the active user base of crypto 10x. No one. Not the regulator, not the infrastructure, >> anything but ourselves. And so we got to get our together. And so at Inversion, we're just going to be we're very very motivated to fix that, not just for ourselves, for the sake of this industry because the time is now, not in 10 years. >> Super well said.

>> Love it. Awesome, guys. Thanks so much. Um, Santi, I think I said it last time, too. If I was the second largest telecom company in Latin America, I'd be shaking in my boots right now. Inversions coming for you. >> We're not barbarians. Uh, I think, but who knows? >> I love it, guys. Thank you so much for joining. Uh, it was a great matchup episode, Santi. Pleasure as always. Mike, great meeting you and and great having you on. Um, yeah, we'll we'll love to pick this up sometime when uh we we scale deep in another 10x from here, you know, next next week, couple weeks from now.

>> Let's do that. >> Awesome. Cheers, guys. >> Good to see you, Mike. >> See you next time. Cheers. >> Bye. >> Love it. >> Beautiful, guys. Deepen, I mean, if you're looking for something that is just is gonna survive, then deepen is your answer. Um, I it it's really really cool to see because if you're, you know, if you're like me and you're kind of looking at this industry and maybe you got in a while ago, but you're just a little bit disillusioned by the things that are getting a lot of attention and getting a enormously high market caps these days. Looking there's gems out there. There's teams that are building in robotics. They're building deep.

They're building these networks. They're building in the world of hardware. and and ultimately um they're building four, five, 10, 50 years from now and and these are some of the networks that uh survive the test of time. So very very exciting. Great conversation with Santi and Mike. Uh we've got Kosh coming up next. I think we're gonna hit a little bit of a uh of a standby before we bring the COO Kosh up. Uh uh and then we're going to get into our um our next conversation with Kosh around uh around Jupiter and stable coins uh which is going to be particularly exciting. So let's um let's

go to standby real quick and we'll be right back with our sixth episode of Stabled Up. [Music]

All right, we're live. Cash, welcome to the show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. Uh really really cool um to have you on. We've been keeping track of the Salana ecosystem for a long time. Um I mean just generally we're technology maxis like we're we're not e Salana maxis. We we like to take a broadstroke view of the ecosystem and at Jupiter you guys have done incredible things and grown incredibly quickly. Um it's your first time on the show. So before we jump into everything that's happening recently and the and the new uh stablecoin launch partnership with Athena, could you just kind of just give us an intro first to you? You know, how did you end up building in this in this wild industry that we uh

uh it was a long and uh securitous route. Uh so I first got into well I first got Bitcoin back in the free faucet days. I don't know if you remember that back in whatever that would have been like 2009 or something like that. you could just go to websites and click and get like full Bitcoin for free. Uh, obviously I lost all of that Bitcoin very quickly, but was intrigued and it wasn't really until 2016 that I got like nerd sniped by the space. I uh my background is in postmodern political philosophies like what I studied in college and I read the Ethereum white paper and in the first paragraph it talks about Dows and this idea of these autonomous organizations that you know can reshape the fabric of society uh perhaps and I was immediately taken. got some ETH got into the uh the Dow like

the very first one and as your viewers know exactly uh although so it got hacked I was like I don't know what the hell this is but then I got Ethereum Classic uh because there was the the fork right and I was like this is the greatest industry ever to exist I just get free money out of uh thin air uh anyway to make a long story short over the next whatever five years I was like following the space pretty closely but not didn't really get all the way in until 2021 uh when a good buddy of mine Aku PD who people might know as the CMO over at the Salana Foundation. Uh he was a poker buddy of mine. I was going to get a job at a bank. He kind of grabbed me by the shoulders and said, "Uh, what the hell are you doing? Let's go do

something crypto." And that's when Super Team got going. So ran Super Team or worked on Super Team, part of the founding team, uh, for four or five years. I was the Sherpa over there. Uh, basically helping onboard entrepreneurs and builders to Salana. And so I just did that as a nonprofit exercise for many years until the beginning of this year when I joined Jupiter full-time as the cat herder. That's my official title, I should say. COO is only what I use because it fits on a little banner, you know. Uh but Cat Herder is my uh more precise uh title. >> Wow. Okay. We we might have to update I think we just updated that uh in our banner. Cat Herder at Jupiter.

>> Okay. Nice. >> It's official. Another promotion. We're two promotions in. >> That's pretty good. >> I should come on more often. This is good. I like this. Yeah. You know, actually the funny thing is I was only the cat herder because we don't really do titles at Jupiter, >> but then we did uh we sent anou uh with the Kazakhstan Central Stock Exchange and to like tokenize equities in Kazakhstan and they were translating my little quote into Russian and they were like I we we what do we do with this? What is a cat herder? That's not a concept in the Russian language. So like just call me COO and that's fine. So I've been running with that for for press ever since >> and it stuck. There you go.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Um, man, you guys have been doing great things. Uh, a couple announcements just just uh went live. You guys are doing prediction markets with KHI. You've got a stable coin uh partnership with Athena. Um, so all all kinds of cool stuff. Can you can you just kind of give us a speedrun of, you know, when you joined Jupiter and catch us up to, you know, where you guys are at today? So, Lana had a very nent ecosystem um, you know, just a few years ago and now it's exploded. um just give us give us like the highlights, you know, where where have you seen the most adoption and the most activity over the last 12 to 18 months?

>> Yeah, in the last I mean the last 18 months in particular have been crazy. So to the degree that like the broad world knows about Jupiter, oftentimes they used to know us as just a DEX aggregator, the top DEX aggregator on Salana and the best place we would route across all liquidity pools that existed on chain and give users the best execution price every single time. That was kind of the motto and we became very dominant in that vertical and then it became clear that hey we have a bunch of user trust. We have a absolutely cracked uh technical team. Uh we should start to expand and create more value per user. Uh and that's really when we embarked on this DeFi super app journey that we've been doing over the last 18 months. So we went from one product 18 months ago now we have a dozen revenue generating

products which is pretty crazy. Uh a few kind of like small highlights. First would be our per stacks. Launched that I think just about 18 months ago actually maybe a little bit less. Um, and it's been since basically since it was launched, it's been number one by volume, certainly number one by fee paying volume. Uh, and that kind of continues to today on Salana. A lot of people use it. We only have three assets on there. Salana, Bitcoin, and ETH, but it's guaranteed liquidity at basically up to, I think, 20 million max size per trade. So, people really dig that. Uh, and I should say that JLP, which is the uh, liquidity provider token for per is like $2.1 billion asset. Uh, and that's been really great to see people, it's the best token on Salana in many ways.

That's one highlight. Uh, more recently we launched Jupiter Mobile, which is our mobile wallet and our desktop extension. Passed a million downloads on that. People absolutely love it. The only app that shows you your trades with P&L, with your watch list, with your portfolio across all of DeFi in one consolidated view. And then if I had to pick one last one, I would say Jupyter Lend, which we just launched in Q3. Ran that up to a billion dollars in supply in eight days. Uh, fastest growing salon protocol in history. And uh, we did that in conjunction with the fluid guys who are awesome as well. And that kind of set the tone for like how we wanted to continue to grow. We realized that we have a lot of distribution. We have a lot of like user trust and we have, you know, many 8.4 million wallets connected

to Jupiter just in Q3 alone, right? And so we have a lot of users and that is really attractive to other partners that want to enter Salana uh like Fluid or like Athena who was the the more recent partnership that we announced and we think that's going to continue on. Same thing with Koshi with the prediction marks that we just launched two days ago. They want to work with, you know, the people that have the user trust and that have that distribution and that's Jupiter. >> Yeah. I I want to dig particularly into the Athena partnership and what you guys are doing with Jupusd. But you you mentioned the user number. Did you say 8.3 million? Is that Did I get that right?

>> You did not. 8.4 million. 8.4 million. >> Let's not be bearish now. You know, >> that's 8.3 is FUD. 8.4. That's right. Um because we we were just talking about the state of crypto uh report that came out of A16Z. They estimate that there's 40 to 70 million monthly active users on chain. Uh this is kind of like the most active subset of users. They're bridging. They're using the apps. They're they're actively self-custodying and they're using these things actively.

Um monthly active users. And then you know we've got 181 million monthly active addresses. Uh these are number of distinct active uh addresses across blockchains. Um and then we've got 716 million global crypto owners. These guys might be on centralized exchange, might own crypto uh in in a centralized account, not self- custody, not bridging but 8.4 4 million out of the 40 to 70 million that are on chain is I mean it's incredible market share that to have you know upwards of >> just you know whether it's 15 20% or so 10 15% of the global population that is using these things onchain um and so I

think that speaks to Solana's distribution it speaks to Jupiter's distribution and it and it means that now like you're doing you guys have the opportunity to launch these verticalized products these adjacent product offerings that are all complimentary and we see a lot of teams go after this super app concept. Few of them are going to survive. Few of them are going to capitalize on the opportunity. They need the distribution that you guys have. So I think I think this speaks to uh the opportunity here and also uh what what you guys have at your fingertips. >> Was there an inflection point before we get into the stable coin conversation that you guys saw, hey, we've reached an inflection point? we reached the critical mass of users that are familiar with Jupiter. They're on Jupiter. Now is when we can embark on this broader user

journey. Did that happen or was it just kind of more gradual an evolution, one product launch after the other? >> Yeah, you know, it really was, uh, a slow and hard grind, right? Especially in the wake of FTX, uh, which, you know, everyone remembers is quite a painful experience for anyone who was on Salana. That was that was pretty brutal, right? So, it goes down to eight dollars, proclaimed dead by basically every project that's out there. And at the time a lot of projects ended up leaving right they're like well there's no future on Salana uh and so we'll go somewhere else but Jupiter never did stayed on uh and then from there just like as things steadily steadily got better you know Jupiter kind of grew along with it there was no in particular point where things went up but just to put some numbers to it like we're seeing

ridiculous growth every quarter so like versus last quarter our volumes are up 70% it's like somewhere in the neighborhood of $240 billion in volume just in Q3 alone right u you know our uh our TVL grew by 42 2% in Q3 relative to Q2. So I guess it feels kind of gradual because it's just like this constant growth curve that's just up and to the right. Uh and yeah, we're we're lucky to have it. I think that PERPS was the first big bet. Seeing that PERPS could work, that we can kind of expand the product offering and retain those users and kind of convert them and upsell them, cross-ell them, etc. Uh that was the first indication that hey, this can really work and that's when I think we went all in and started doing all the different products that exist.

>> Yeah. Incredible. Um, okay. Let's dig into uh into one of these products, which is the uh JUP USD stable coin in partnership with Athena Labs. Uh, I'm going to read off just a couple things here that stick out. This new token will serve as the core liquidity and collateral asset across the entire Jupiter ecosystem, including perpet uh perpetual futures, lending, and spot trading platforms. Maybe you can just speak to, you know, the scale, but also the effect of unifying liquidity in your own stable coin. Maybe just can you describe what it means to unify liquidity in in a stable coin and what that means for the platform overall and then for it to be a stable coin of your

own choosing, right? It's not it's not a stable coin you guys are importing from somewhere else or or no, you're the the issuers in in collaboration with Athena. What does it mean to to do this in general for the platform and then what does this mean for for it to be your stable coin? >> I think it means uh a whole hell of a lot at a few different levels, right? So I'm fond of saying that crypto has product market fit across three categories and that's payments, profits, and ponzies. And obviously Jupiter does not really get involved in the Ponzi side of things and we're pretty well established in the profit side, right?

Around trading, yield generation, etc. It was really payments that was the big missing piece for us. And so for us it kind of fills in this this kind of critical hole that we had in this DeFi super app vision. The goal of Jupiter right now is anything that you want to do on chain you should be able to say just use Jupiter you know to a friend I want to send money around the world just use Jupiter. That's the kind of goal that uh we're going after. And payments are obviously a giant business right $300 billion plus of stable coins globally. I think pretty much everyone knows that number is going to at least a trillion including the Treasury Department uh put out a report in that same direction. Uh, and so I think we're really still in the early stages of stable coin adoption. And for Jupiter to

have its own branded stable coin is a great way for us to, you know, build up even more trust to capitalize on the existing trust that we have and build up more trust here. And then also kind of control and internalize some of the the revenue and the growth within the products. Just like for a little bit of context inside of JLP, uh, well, to zoom for a second, our PEPS product is not an orderbook based perspect if your audience is more familiar with like the EVM landscape. Uh, and the JLP token, like I said, is $2.1 billion or so in AUM and something like $750 million of that is in stable coins.

That's all in USDC right now. Uh, and you know, no shade to USDC, obviously a great company, have done incredible things, doing a lot of great stuff on the regulatory side. So, nothing against them, but if we can internalize that ourselves and then potentially figure out ways to kind of distribute that yield to JLP holders, to dupsters, to other users of the products, I think that's a really powerful value prop for us. uh and it allows us to kind of have full control end to end of the spectrum, right? Apple famously was really big on this and uh you know we don't want anyone to open up the computers to touch the motherboard. Obviously in DeFi it doesn't work that same way, right?

You're open and composable by default. Uh but that doesn't mean that there aren't opportunities to kind of control the brand experience and the product experience at every level of the stack. Uh so we're very optimistic about how fast we'll be able to grow. Again, we have a very high a very large number of stable coins directly in our protocols already that we can start to convert out uh into our own stable coin and I think that gives us a real leg up uh in addition to the distribution that we have and the trust that we have and so on. >> Very cool. Th this is an approach that um it's not just you guys, right? Right. This is an approach that perpetual exchanges are taking overall uh where they're seeing that they have uh the majority of their collateral in one particular stable asset be it USDC uh

and then they're innovating on that and they're going and they're launching their own stable coins. Um >> you know at at on one hand we're internalizing this into into our own engine but on the other hand we're we're deploying more and more stable coins left and right. There's a new stable coin launching every day, >> right? What do you what do you think it's is going to be the result of this this Cambrian explosion of stable coins? You know, are is it an opportunity for middleware and infrastructure to come in and kind of unify this once again? you know, we we don't want to reach kind of the same fragmentation that we have in in in Ethereum world uh you know, across all the L2s and you know, wrapped staked ETH this version that version like h how can we bring this all together so that

um you know we have one uniform uh liquidity layer uh we have uniformity across our industry and we're not confusing newcomers into the space. Yeah, I mean I think it's a great point and I think this uh bulcanization of liquidity as uh my buddy Ramsay at the Salon Foundation would say uh can be a real problem, right? And I think uh the real short-term effect I said most of these stable coins are not going to last very long, right? In the same way that everyone's launching a memecoin launchpad, you know, three to six months ago and basically, you know, a handful of them still kind of remain standing, I think stable coins will have the same opportunity where many people see the attractiveness of the business model and the power uh the power of the narrative and they want to get on top of that,

right? But the truth is when you have a lot of divergence, you inevitably have to have some convergence back afterwards. And I do think that that's going to happen on the stable coin side. from u kind of an industry level. The two things that are really incumbent upon us are one more experiments in terms of unifying that liquidity. There's stuff like this on Salana right now and other places where you're kind of uh collecting a bunch of different stable coins under the hood and then kind of treating them as equal. >> I am not as bullish on that approach honestly because I think different stable coins have different risk assumptions and it's not always fair to say that they should be onetoone. So, I think the more likely path is that there's pressure put on the industry to build really high quality stable swaps that have exceptionally low slippage,

right? The problem is not too many stable coins. It's too much slippage as you're trying to move between them because then if I'm going from $1,000 of, you know, let's say uh GPSD to $1,000 of USDC, I want $1,000 of USDC back, right? I don't want to get $996 back. And that can really break the experience. And I think there's great uh, you know, demonstrations in this direction already. A major credit to our friends over at Fluid who like I said are helping build Jupiter lend on Fluid right now on on Ethereum. There are times where it's less than one BIP oftentimes 10 pips uh is the only uh kind of fee or slippage that you pay between uh major stable coins. That requires deep liquidity across the different stable coins. And what Jupusd is going to have is you know at least $750 million of liquidity just from the

JLP pool alone. Right? So we feel very confident that we'll have deep enough liquidity to have exceptionally low slippage uh between stable coin transfers and that's going to allow us to kind of uh persevere uh over the long run. >> It feels like we're reaching a tipping point where DeFi is becoming more capital efficient than Wall Street. And and once we reach that point, that's when I think it becomes more of a risk to Wall Street institutions to not be on chain, >> right? like I I if if they're if they can get a fraction of a bip like you're saying if they can get you know pips on chain by going back and forth in between assets whether that's you know it could

be tokenized stocks at a certain point right and and ultimately this could be what they're trading and they're going back and forth between you know whether it be stable coins tokenized stocks all these different asset classes that ultimately will be onchain and available >> it becomes greater uh it becomes better price discovery better liquidity better prices and and more cost effective for them to execute their their trading experience on chain rather than continue to do so offchain even though where they're they're they're being forced to innovate. H have you had any conversations with Wall Street institutions or any any of these asset managers and trading firms that are kind of are they seeing it this way or generally what what is the what's the vibe and sentiment that you're these

guys? Uh so yes across all three I mean uh again because of Jupiter's kind of position in the ecosystem we're oftentimes the first port of call for those kind of partners and you know what I've noticed over the last two years or so is that crypto as a technology cannot really be sold right it really has to be bought like for me to go to you and try to explain and kind of force it down your throat is is very hard and you know god bless the people that are doing that work in Washington DC and elsewhere uh but I do think that like where you're going to actually see a lot of adoption is going to be when people see the users they see the product benefits and they see the volumes really starting to happen there. I do think that FX uh in

general has long been the kind of you know white whale of the industry and again there's like really cool things happening there. Shout out to Altitude and the Squads family who've got a really great business offering u for Euros USDC and stuff. Uh, and I think you're just going to see more and more of that where they do have to kind of cannibalize their own revenues when they come on chain, right? So that you're asking them to give up something and the thing they have to get in return has to be big enough to justify that trade-off. At least on the Wall Street side, certainly on the capital allocator side, there's no doubt uh that, you know, they're all coming on chain. Many of them are talking to us and other major protocols. I don't think that they're quite that far on the risk curve just

yet. And here I'm talking about the multi-billion dollar funds, right? not the, you know, $10 to $100 million liquid funds in crypto. Uh, I think we still have a little bit of a while to go, but for the first time, they're the ones knocking on the door. They're the ones asking for questions. I mean, one of the biggest banks in the world showed up in my email like a week ago, be like, "Hey, we'd love to urgently talk about some new product ideas." >> Just cold outreach. >> Uh, they they got a little intro from somebody else, but yeah, I didn't know that it was coming. It just like showed up in my inbox like, "Hey, connected you to, you know, I won't say who it was, but every one of your viewers has heard of this uh this entity, right?" Uh, and so we're starting to see a lot more of

that appetite come in. Uh, but it is incumbent on the technology continuing to get better, right? It's, uh, I think everyone in the Trafire world knows that crypto is still not ready for prime time literally right now. But now everyone can see the path to get there in the next 12, 24, 36 kind of months. >> Yeah. Beautiful. Um, man, it's exciting. I'm just I'm dying to know what this page is. Uh, best of luck in that BD journey. >> Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. No paperwork signed or anything. So, please don't to, you know, buy Jup on the back of that just yet. But >> that's how it starts, man. That's how it starts. Very, very cool. Um, okay. I'd love to dig into a little bit more of the nuance in Jupusd. Um, >> you you got uh Athena uh as sort of this

collaboration partner and and we've seen this we we've seen them do this with some of their other uh their other partners, but could you just walk through what the journey is to ultimately spin up your own stable coin? What is the role that that Athena plays? What is the role that Jupiter plays? And how do you collectively bring Jupusd to life? >> Yeah, you know, I'll tell you it's a it's a bit of a funny story because we were at least a month and a half, maybe two months into building it out ourselves, fully by oursel, right? In order to do so, you need different entities that have these open-ended fund licenses. You have to get these regulatory approvals. Like, it's a pretty complicated legal and regulatory matter, even outside of the tech side of things, right? And that just takes a lot of time to get the necessary licenses.

and so on. And uh we had been working with a number of great partners including Securitize and Black Rockck who are the ones who make the Viddle uh token which also backs USDB from Athena. Uh and you know it wasn't until we saw the hyperlquid USDH proposal process that it really occurred to us of like hey maybe we should partner with the best. We just did this with Fluid the best guys in lending worked out very well. Uh maybe we can try it uh doing it again. So I reached out to guy and you know we had a few calls and honestly within less than two weeks we met up in Korea and some other places and within two weeks the the deal was signed and we were ready to go. In terms of the actual kind of roll out it is a little bit

different for us than it is for some of them some of their other partners. Athena's contracts are not natively on Salana today which means you cannot mint and uh redeem and that you know can create risk or make uh certain people uncomfortable and kind of reduces the way that you think about a particular stable coin. So on Salana, Jupiter is going to be building the contracts in collaboration with Athena, of course, but we know Salana, so we're going to be building the contracts. Uh Athena is going to be managing all the operations around it. They're also going to be great design partners to let us know what works, what doesn't. They're working helping us work with Anchorage and many other great partners to ensure integration across major custodians so people have access to it. Uh and they'll be, you know, also great u kind of

partners on the collateral side. To start, Jupusd will be fully backed by USDB, which is basically a tokenized uh treasury product. Uh and then over time we're going to increase the balance to also have USDE which is their delta neutral uh stable coin that most people know. It's the third biggest stable coin in crypto. Uh and the reason we want to be able to play with those numbers is to kind of generate more outsiz yield especially if we can find creative ways uh to kind of distribute that yield to partners, stakeholders and uh anyone else that needs it. So our job is building the contracts, figuring out the distribution and the product integrations. Their jobs are bringing best-in-class expertise around stable coin and managing the day-to-day operations. Uh, and by the way, the operations is no small feat. I should point out as well. You have to do

constant, you have to defend pegs, you have to ensure that the mint and redeem and the secondary windows are working at all times and uh, you know, there's there's quite a bit of stuff under the hood. >> Got it. >> Got it. And and I think I saw in the announcement this is going to roll out sometime in Q4 and that's because you guys are going to build these uh preliminary contracts on Solana that uh uh be you know make make this stable coin available. Um so all the minting and redeeming is still going to take place on Athena's side but you guys are going to build the contracts to make sure that uh we can mint and redeem on Salana. Is that is that the right setup?

>> Yeah so the mint and redeem will be for Jupusd on Salana itself. uh they'll be based on Athena's contracts of course because we're using Athena Athena collateral as the underlying uh but they'll be you know our contracts for GPSD so GPSD will be natively mintable and redeemable right there on Salana. >> Got it. Okay. Um and when it comes to yield I think this is what a lot of the a lot of the users are looking for. Um you know we we've got this this pool of treasury collateral that that's sitting there. Uh these treasuries are obviously earning yield. what's the process to ultimately pass that over to users? Is it regulatory available now? Uh, you know, is there intermediaries that are kind of taking a cut of this yield? Can

can you just describe the process as we ultimately, you know, we we get the money printer printing money on these yield on these treasuries, but then how does that end up flowing into uh users? >> Yeah, you know, there's a there are a few different people that along the way will take very small chunks of the yield. Uh, I would say and here I'm talking like single bips uh typically, right? So uh typically whoever is managing that primary mint redeem window or your primary custodian might take a little bit uh you know bidd and securitize and those guys who actually create the tokenized treasury product that underlies it all they might take a very small piece uh but the vast majority will flow to us and Athena and we have our own kind of private commercial arrangement on that side. In terms of kind of how it goes out to

others the genius regulation that passed in America recently said you cannot be a genius compliant stable coin if you are distributing yield directly to users. Uh, and so I think on our end, it'll probably look a little bit different. In the JLP pool, for example, it uh, makes sense for us to just like add in more money to that pool's rewards and to boost the native APY. I mean, right now, I think it's like 45% or something like that. At other times, it's down to 15%. It kind of varies, but it'll be kind of a consistent boost on that yield. Uh, and then there's other ways, right? We can take that revenue and perhaps do giveaway programs, trading competitions, uh, rewards for stakers. All these kinds of things are on the table. We haven't finalized any of them just yet. Uh but yeah, there's a bunch of different ways

in which you can make sure that everyone is able to kind of uh enjoy the upside of that yield. >> Beautiful. Um yeah, I think uh this is an incredible innovation because you're also going to be bringing a lot of the products uh the structured products like the Bidd uh from Black Rockck Secure Ties that are currently underpinning Athena's stable coin and help helping to collateralize this this industry. We're going to be bringing that over to Salana. Is there network effects that are going to kind of proliferate outwards from here? Obviously, there's minting redeeming that's going to be taking place if he is helping with that.

It's going to be taking place on Jupiter, but you know, the stable coins could ultimately make their way out of Jupiter and into the the rest of the Solana world, right? >> Like what what would that look like and how can you continue to bring value acrruel back to Jupiter even as this Jupusd token ends up becoming composable with the rest of the Salana DeFi ecosystem? Yeah, you know, as uh as my friend Lily uh who's president of the Slana Foundation likes to say, a good asset should be everywhere, right? That is what makes it a good asset. It has to be available and used by as broad a base of people as possible. And certainly what we hope for GUSD. So, we'd love to collaborate with all other Salana projects on making sure that GUSD is available uh within within them, whether

it's as a collateral asset, a borrowable asset, as a trading pair, or whatever else it might be. Uh from a yield perspective, it doesn't actually change. So much in the same way that Circle collects that yield on USDC no matter where it lives, Juv USD will do the same. So that yield will still ultimately be coming to our entities and we'll have different ways to distribute it. Uh you know there's a bunch of interesting ideas and we've seen other like fun experiments for teams who might share yield with companies who hold that particular stable coin on their balance sheet as an incentivization to like you know hold their particular stable and increase TVL. Uh it might be that we can use some of that deal to produce more um kind of win-win situations with other partners again maybe crossplatform trading things or with memecoin communities or whoever else it might be.

Uh but the goal is certainly to have it be diffuse in everywhere. I would say we mostly think about this in terms of stages though right so the first stage is hey let's just get it to really work in our product suite. Let's make sure it's the stable coin of choice in our lending product in our uh perpetuals product in our wallet products while all other stable coins are still available. ultimately going back to that idea of you know DeFi is not like Apple you don't want to constrict user choice right so USDC everything else is still going to be there uh for sure but what are the ways that we can nudge people to like starting to use it and then I think once we kind of figure out that first stage once we have a little bit of lindiness built into the stable coin

then I think we'll start to think about more aggressive growth and other broader plans so our plan is not to try to you know dethrone USDC on day one by any means >> okay that makes sense uh but it is it is gradual Uh and and like you said, we've, you know, now seen a couple of these Athena powered stable coin launches. Uh we've seen how they can grow and how they can develop. And so we've got a little bit more of an understanding about how we can how we can scale these stable coins. Uh overall, um I just want to quickly recap some of the things that you've mentioned. in terms of the integrations of the stable coin across Jupiter's products, collateral on purp and mobile, uh, and integration into new

products that you guys are building. There's a little piece here, and I'm just reading off of Jupiter's announcement. Um, it says a stable coin for everything Jupiter, including JUP holders. This feels like maybe you're pointing or alluding to something. What could Jupusd do for Jup holders? You know, I think it could do a few different things. Um, at the risk of uh kind of front running our own announcement, I won't be super specific here, but I will say like in the at the broadest level, Jupiter has a 50% JUP accumulation plan where 50% of our revenues from Jupiter go to programmatic open market purchases of Jup via this thing called the Litterbox Trust. So, more revenues is good for Jupyter holders.

>> Every every cat herder needs a litter box. >> That's right. It's I swear to God, the we made the decision on what to call it. uh or not us but like with our partners what to to like name it a few minutes before we actually announced today it like where does a cat keep his it's in the litterbot address right so that's actually how that uh and now it has like 125 million Jup tokens or something in it uh it's like little jokes that kind of get us through the day anyway so you know it's great from dup holders in that perspective it's great from an increasing the brand trust uh especially when you talk to stratfi and traditional capital allocators you know stable coins is a narrative they understand it's a narrative that helps build trust and if you have a large stable coin that is

great and especially if we can get it up over a billion dollars, right? Because Jupiter has three tokens over a billion right now. This would be our fourth. Uh and so that's really, you know, an exciting kind of way to ensure that awareness continues to grow and adoption grows of the rest of the product suite. And then finally, you can imagine that there are certain perks that we might be able to offer uh dup holders and dupe stakers uh somewhat uniquely that other stable coins cannot, right? Because we have this kind of vibrant ecosystem of stakeholders that we might want to reward in different ways. >> Very cool. Could you just zooming out a little bit from the stable coin in particular, you know, for for people that are just learning about Jupiter's ecosystem and and kind of understanding the nuances, you know, these three three

tokens, four tokens, uh, soon, you know, over a billion dollar market cap, could you just describe how these tokens interact, how they work together to ultimately form this this Jupiter universe? >> Absolutely. Yeah. So, I I call it the holy trinity right now. I'll have to come up with whatever a foursided >> foursided trinity. >> Yeah. the holy square maybe is where we go afterwards but like um we have uh not three stable coins but three tokens right so we have Jup which is the the kind of primary token that's the the kind of governance and ownership token of the Jupyter protocol that receives 50% of the revenues that I mentioned earlier uh that market cap I don't know today but it's you know something in the 1.4 $4 billion range. Uh we have a second token which is JLP which is our per uh liquidity provider token. That

one is at about 2.1 billion. And then we have Jup Soul which is the highest yielding Salana LST and that's at about 1.1 billion or so. They all interact uh kind of in productive ways I would say. So Jup Soul not only does it give great yield to the users because we don't make any money on it but uh it actually the soul goes to our validator. We have the second biggest validator on Salana is run by Jupiter. And that's really important because on Salana there's something called stake weighted QoS which basically means the more stake you have on your validator the more efficiently and effectively you can land transactions.

>> And on Salana that really matters because it's very fast and there's a lot of demand for block space and so on and so forth. And so Juke Soul being so large actually makes the rest of the products better because we have a better we have a competitive advantage in landing transactions that other people cannot match. JLP feeds in because it's uh you know it by having such deep liquidity on JLP the purpose platform can offer massive size uh with guaranteed liquidity right every trade that you open on Jupiter you will be able to close and that's not true for other purpose platforms right especially if they're orderbook based especially if you're doing it size and especially if you're doing it during volatile times so that draw draws more people in as well uh and then of course Jup itself is the thing that kind of cruise value uh

across the ecosystem and the better Juke does the more people know about Jup Soul the more people that know about JL LP and vice versa. So in that way they all kind of support each other across the product stack. >> Nice. Just looking at JLP now. This thing basically looks like the S&P. It's up and to the right. Not financial advice. >> I I mean listen I don't give financial advice. I'm not trying to do that. But I will say that like JLP is the most beloved token on Salana. If people are watching this have not seen it yet. Um I you know the alpha is the number one most popular trade from liquid funds this past uh over the past year on Salana has been buying JLP and then hedging the underlying. So you have a delta neutral position and JLP I don't know what the number is you can tell me.

I think it's like 40 or 50% APY right now. It's been as low as like 14 15% but you get 15% risk-free uh if you run that trade. So people really love it at size I will say. Uh if you go and multiply JP right now right now right now right now right now right now right now right now right now right now in Jupyter lend you get like 220% APY I think right now something like that. uh which is pretty incredible. So it is a uh it is a real powerhouse of a token. It's in my mind almost like the platonic ideal of what a token should be. Really yield inherent yield. It gives you diversified exposure. You know it's very liquid so you can get in and out of it. I don't I don't mean to be too much of a sales guy. I just genuinely love jail.

>> No, it's it's the philosophy background that's coming out. This plonic idea of a token. >> There you go. Yeah. I I came to at least a few classes in college, I guess. Um, yeah, I I it makes a ton of sense. Is there a benefit that by running stable the the Jupusd stable coin and deploying this and getting this to scale, will it help this trade this this looping strategy that you're describing on JLP? >> Absolutely. Yeah. So, it'll help because it'll add in additional yield native. So, most of the yield in JLP comes from Per trading fees. 75% of all per trading fees, and again, we're the largest uh per product on Salana, they go to JLP holders. 25% comes back to to the

Jupiter protocol. But in addition, we actually have a JLP loans product. So if you have JLP, you can borrow USDC against it at really competitive rates with like a 95% uh liquidation threshold or something like that. And uh we actually native stake a bunch of the soul that's in the JLP pool that's unutilized by traders to our validator that again generates extra yield. If we replace USDC with JUPUSD inside of JLP, it'll only further increase the yield. Now, the exact percentages and how that breakdown is going to happen, we haven't figured out yet with the JLP community. So, there's still conversations to be had there. Uh, but that would be one additional way to ensure that, hey, even if trading volume goes down, you still have loans uh providing lending um yield to it. You have native stake providing yield to it, and now you have a stable

coin yield uh coming in as well from treasuries. So, that's the way that we kind of ensure that JLP remains robust. And again, the more robust it is, the more perpetrating happens because it's deeper guaranteed liquidity. >> Very cool. Very cool. Um, Cash Man, it's been it's been so much fun. We've got there's a couple more things I think our team's got teed up uh in the back and it has to do with this announcement video where you made an an impressive debut as an actor. Um, >> let's see. >> See if the JBSD announcement video.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Can we play this? I think I think our has it ready. Uh, gosh, I'm sure you've seen this. If you look if you click on the output in the bottom left, you should be able to I think we're we're playing here in just a moment. >> Uh >> like it's it's actually crazy, you know? It's like biggest Salana DeFi protocol, fastest growing stable coin, best of both worlds coming together. Like I swear to God, dude, DeFi up only from here. >> I swear to God, DeFi up only. >> I'm ready to go. [Music] >> Yeah, I will. >> I'm Guy found Athena. At the moment, sort of Athena's balance within the market is roughly, >> you know, me and Guy got together at 8 a.m. during token 249 because we both had like very busy days afterwards. The

video was unscripted. We just kind of like rocked up uh had some coffee and then just so we can keep this. So, I'm talking to guy off camera here basically and then I just kind of freestyled on the other end of it are a critical component of that. We couldn't ask for a better partner than Athena in this, right? They've been blame. Hollywood's looking at this right now for your next role. >> This is too top tier. >> Can I tell you actually it's a real problem. I'm flying to Bombay on Friday night which will be my first like on stage shoot with like you know a full cast. If you like the cash on acting career stay tuned to Twitter you'll see you'll see more of that soon.

>> There you go. Let's go cash. I think around 20 to 25 trillion a lot of fun to make. Shout out to the boys at Goatfish who put this together for us as well in the world. baller name right there. >> Exciting to us. >> Yeah. And what's it like been working with Guy? I mean, obviously just a savage killer. I mean, when it comes to stable coins, built the third, third largest stable coin working together now. What What's that experience like? >> It's also about making I think that, you know, before I I only have known guy since we started working together. So, I've known for whatever a month or so.

>> Before that, I you know, admired him. I think like anybody in crypto admires Athena is like one of the best executing products in the space and one of the best executing teams in the space and I found him like as we work together to be an exceptionally clear thinker a great partner you know there there during the negotiation phases there were you know a number of sticking points like you know we both have different kind of objectives that we wanted to try to meet in the middle and I found him to be like very understanding and uh kind of open about what his aims were and kind of what was needed on our end and just like the way that uh he and the rest of the team does business you know Nick and Jane and everybody else there too. Yeah, absolutely. Um, very very cool, man. I

>> I will say I don't like standing next to him though because he's like a very, you know, beefy jacked guy. I I I assume he's like one of those like 5 a.m. ice bath kind of guys and like, you know, I'm I'm not. Uh, so like when we were next to each other like for the recording, I was like, I just keep him in a different frame than me. I don't want to, you know, my vanity cannot take it, >> man. Oh, it's so funny. I I I love it. Cash, it's been an absolute pleasure, man. I I you know, feel free to wrap us up. Uh we do have if you got another minute, we got a question from the audience here. >> Uh let's see how much alpha we can share. Could Okay, this guy new type uh hit us up in the chat. He said, "Could

Jupiter take a page from Binance Alpha?" Uh example here, I stake Jup and can get airdrop some of the most successful meme coins that get launched on Salana. >> Uh I will say that a we already have some of that. So Jup Stakers got access to the Huma pre-sale which by the time it opened up was something like a 5X because they got in at a $75 million valuation FDV. So that worked out great for them. Wrecked uh which is a brand coin people might know people got a airdrop if you were a Jeep staker. And then most importantly the Meteora TG is happening tomorrow. Meteora being the top AMM on Salana. Uh 3% of the total supply of MET is going to dupsters. So if you're a Jeep staker you will be

rewarded. But I'll give this little bit of alpha. >> ICOs are very hot right now. We've been working for months on an ICO platform that's going to launch in November. Uh and the first launch is going to be coming up I think in mid November roughly. Uh and I think Jube Stakers will be very excited about it. Uh and so as we have more ICOs, I think Jupakers will continue to be uh excited about uh what we're trying to do. >> Wow, guys. Jube stakers are winning. If you're not if you're not staking your right now, I don't know what you're doing. You should probably hop on that. Uh uh it might might already be too late, but maybe cash can squeeze you in.

Yeah, I think you have some time before the November one. I think we'll we'll take a snapshot a little bit closer to the actual date. >> Okay, there you go, guys. If you're not already staking Jup. Uh we know how much the last ICO platform got acquired for. Uh this this one coming up is going to be just as exciting. And so yeah, there's new type in the chat. Dang, I need to stake Jup. Come on, man. Let's go. Stake your Jeep. Shout out new type. There you go. Draw the alpha out of cash. Wow. Cash, you're our you're the chat of the day. Drop an alpha. Everyone comes on and they're like, "Oh, I don't want to run the announcement. I you know, I don't want to drop too much. I don't want to say too much." Cash comes on, drops bombs. There you tube. No

doubt. >> My pleasure, man. It's the benefit of being up for 14 straight hours working, I guess, is maybe my PR filter is not what it would have been in the morning, but uh >> absolutely. This is this is the the the result of shipping and uh and testing in prod as we do in this industry. Cash man, thank you so much. Absolute pleasure. Uh best of luck. Meteora uh TGE tomorrow uh new ICO platform in November and uh Jupusd launching Q4 in collaboration with Athena. >> Keep up the great work, man. It's absolutely cool to see the progress.

>> Thanks, buddy. Likewise. It's been great to see the rollup uh continue to grow. >> We'll have you on on again soon. See you next time. >> Please. Anytime. >> Love it. See you. >> Bye, man. >> Allighty. Wow, banger. I think uh I think we're gonna keep things moving. Um yeah, that was great. I think we're gonna hit standby for just a moment uh so that we can get things reset here. Uh always love these stable coin conversations. you know, just even though we've got so many different stable coin options here, we've got, you know, all all of uh all of these different architectures, uh these different structures, the different ways in which these stable coins are composable with one another, how they fit into the broader DeFi

landscape. Very, very cool and exciting to see uh the stable coin landscape evolve. Let's keep it moving. Uh Leo, let's hit standby uh for just a moment. We'll get things reset and uh we'll we'll keep moving with our next guest, Mike and Will from Galaxy. Don't miss it right here on the rollup TV coming right Heat.

Heat. Heat.

Heat. Hey hey hey.

Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, hey hey.

Heat. Heat. Hey hey hey.

Hey, hey hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

Hey, hey hey. I don't know. Heat.

Hey, heat. Hey, heat. We're back. We are going to get Will and

Mike, the GPS over at Galaxy Ventures, up in just a moment. Pretty exciting times. Uh we're going to hear from them about market commentary. Obviously, uh quite the uh turbulent market conditions over the last couple weeks. Uh we are going to hear about uh how they're looking at uh stable coins. Uh this is you know absolutely timely. Uh and their fund strategy. Which portfolio companies are they most excited about and why? They just closed $175 million venture fund. We want to know about the possibility of how liquid market fluctuations are going to affect the venture portfolio. these guys have been bearing with us in the back and uh we

really appreciate their patience. So I think without further ado, we're going to bring them up. Uh I spoke about earlier in the show Galaxy uh released their quarter three earnings. Uh here they are, guys. Thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks so much. It's really nice to be here. Um super super big fan of your podcast and what you guys have done. So thanks for having us. Yeah, excited to hear. >> Absolutely. Thank you guys so much. I know it was a it was a bit of a a whirlwind trying to get you guys set up.

The the IT department over at Galaxy does not mess around. >> Nothing Nothing like crypto uh it you know it to protect against the crypto podcast right? >> Exactly. That's what we need our crypto protections for. Um yeah, the Lazarus group got nothing on us over here. So where >> roll up the rollup's gonna be fine. All right, guys. Well, it is a pleasure to meet you. Uh you guys are GPS over at the uh the Galaxy Venture Firm. Recently announced $175 million venture fund. Uh really really exciting stuff. Maybe you guys could just talk about what the the process like raising this fund was like.

Um you guys are huge, you know, in the space. Uh, so I imagine that when you're going out and you're talking to capital allocators, um, and you guys have a little bit of an easier time than the rest, but all of this is somewhat dependent on market conditions and the market cycles, and we're we're certainly at an interesting time in the market these days with Bitcoin, with the rest of crypto. Can you just walk us through what the process of raising this $175 million venture fund kind of what what were some of the trials and tribulations? Any any stories that you can share generally? How did how was the experience about of of uh raising this fund?

>> Yeah, I I'll I'll I'll start and then Mike can finish what I leave off. I think um you know, we're we're really fortunate in a lot of ways to have the backing of Galaxy. Um you know, I've been with Galaxy personally for the past six years. We were investing, you know, by by way of history, investing off the balance sheet of Galaxy for uh you know, for six years from 2018 to 2023. And so we had developed a track record. I think we had developed an ability to sort of compete in deals and identify uh and get access to interesting opportunities over the years. I think there's always a trick which is being part of a larger organization. Um you know does the market understand you as a venture fund?

Does it understand you as uh you know a a strategic as a as a trading firm? I think we benefit from um you know being strategic for portfolio companies literally for portfolio companies every business in the space you know the different business lines of Galaxy they're one hop away you know it's a it's it's a ping and it's an integration with the rest of the firm and so there's a lot we get out of that there's also kind of the the broader you know capabilities and relationships and connections in the space that you know make the sales and kind of uh you know fundraising process a little bit easier but the same, you know, on the same token, Mike and I are both firsttime, you know, GP with external, you know, managing an external fund. Um, you know,

which requires a little bit of additional underwriting and diligence for uh for for LPS in that context. I also think the market from a fundraising perspective was a little slower um for, you know, for GPS over the past year as a as a result of kind of maybe LPs feeling burnt after 2021 2022 kind of kind of era. So, you know, there's a good bit of push and pull. I think the thing we've done well is identify that our thesis is sort of uniquely focused on the intersection of financial services and crypto. Um, which has really clarified one, our ability to win deals and two, you know, the kind of exposure that we're going to bring to an allocator's portfolio. Um, they know what types of companies and

opportunities that, you know, they're getting exposure to. So I think that all kind of came together the the push and the pull of that to uh you know to to lead to you know in our view what was a successful outcome for us. So I don't know Mike what would you add to that? Yeah, the the the experience was interesting because we started in the beginning of 20 2024. So, the fundraising process takes a long time and given how fast crypto moves, um, a lot has changed, right? And so when we started having our first conversations with with folks, we were talking about stable coins and tokenization and and how financial services is going to be replatformed on onto blockchains and people, you know, a lot of allocators

kind of stared at us like, I hear what you're saying, sounds really interesting, don't really don't really buy it. Um, and you know, one of one of the one of the the fortunate positions that that that we were in was we were able to leverage um leverage Galaxy and and and our ability to um deploy into uh you know, a handful of deals and show our work, right? Show people how this is playing out. And now you know those conversations when when we you know when we were going back in 2025 at the beginning of this year um and saying look like you know here we we were talking about how these trends were

going to impact the world then it's actually happening it's happening faster in a in in a more pronounced way than we even talked about you know 12 months ago. And so I think that that built up a lot of confidence and and we're super thankful to to our our partners in in this fund and um we're excited to build a a you know a top tier venture platform uh here at Galaxy. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um given that you guys were uh raising this and started raising this in 2024 and and you know like like you said you know this space moves so fast was there sectors or categories of companies that you were bullish on and you were speaking to investors and LPs

about back in 2024 and then fast forward to 25 and those those are no longer relevant or you guys have sort of shifted the thesis a little bit. What maybe you can describe the evolution. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting um realization that we came to which was like I'd say the the number one thing we we had identified even going back to sort of middle of 2023 was that stable coins were going to totally eat crossber payments. Stable coins are extremely good for moving money across borders. They're actually very they're not that much of an improvement for moving money domestically because domestic payment systems tend to be settled with the central banks. uh and so those those tend to be fast and then crossber systems are essentially interbank which require a ton of

reconciliation and settlement between you know banks globally and and so swift payments and stuff like that move quite slowly it's expensive etc. So I think we had a view that stable coins were going to disrupt crossber payments and that was going to be like a big theme of the fund and I think that we were right in a lot of ways. We made a we led an investment in a business called layer 2 at the time uh uh which became rail and then they recently got bought by Ripple um you know over the summer you know which was which which was a good investment. I think the thing that surprised us was uh the degree to which actually crypto settled cards may have been the bigger category in this kind of payments space. Um this concept that like a user who wants access to dollars

over the internet i.e via stable coins could then convert those you know dollars into a you know an actual spend with a local merchant via the visa network was maybe the much bigger opportunity. So as the space became very competitive in crossborder uh we've saw we saw the the emergence of a big new opportunity in these kind of crypto settled cards I think over the last year uh we made investments in uh Rain and a business called Red Pay based out of Hong Kong both of which have you know been been really interesting uh in a lot of ways and so I think from the time you sort of state what your thesis is to actually deploying it like some of the trends are changing. I think if you're

consistent with like financial services, disrupting financial services is a two two decade opportunity and you're confident in that like you're going to find new pockets of opportunity that pop up over time. And so I think you know that's that's certainly true. I personally focus on some maybe some of the more cryptonative uh adjacencies to traditional finance. So kind of on the DeFi side and the protocols and and uh and whatnot. And so there's interesting ways that those will eventually converge with kind of neo banking and and and and stuff that really is starting to pop up now but but uh is not sort of wholly explored. So I'd say I'd say that yeah there's transition there's there's kind of es and flows of your of your thesis but as long as you maintain like a strong consistent secular thesis you're

you're going to be well positioned I think. >> Yeah. just just from first principles like what if you if you just take a step back for a second what we're looking for are very large profit pools right uh and within financial services there there are many we're looking for complicated financial transactions where there's a lot of intermediaries and uh there's a lot of inefficiency both from a capital perspective but also from a a processing perspective and and you know the the more jurisdictions the uh uh intermediaries inside a financial transaction, the more complicated the most the the more kind of um inefficient and and uh and costly that process is. And so when

you think about like you walk into, you know, uh a store and you swipe a Visa card, the the you know, we take for granted all the things that happen behind the scenes. But what blockchains are uniquely good at is is cutting out those intermediaries, allowing >> the parties to start to interact on, you know, a more a more direct basis. And so and that cuts out a lot of the costs, improves the capital efficiency and you can apply that to not just cards but you know crossber we we'll we'll mention crossber payments uh there's a lot of other financial products that have the same principles and so our approach has been just be thesis first you know try to do um try to find the um the the

transactions and the the use cases that uh that are that are most problematic and then you know try find great entrepreneurs to go work with to to solve some of those problems. >> And is this the thesis broadly? Essentially, you you try to pinpoint where the most complicated financial transactions are. We we detect the intermediaries and then we understand where crypto and blockchain can fit in to remove those intermediaries and make these systems more efficient. Is is that generally the thesis of the fund? And you're targeting crossborder, you're targeting remittances and payments. When it comes to stable coins, you can be more selective. Is this broadly the thesis for the fund or are you guys is that maybe one sector and then you guys are there's also there's there's some complimentary pieces to it.

>> Yeah, that's that's a little a little too narrow. I think the the the broad uh focus is how are financial services being disrupted, right? And so um we're talking about payments as as kind of one one use case. Um, we think the asset management industry is is coming on chain and and we're moving from stable coins, which is essentially tokenized fiat currencies to yield bearing assets and a bunch of other assets. And maybe we can talk about that. Banking is is, you know, is I want to say being disrupted, but is is being augmented in a in a in a very serious way, right? And maybe we can we can double double click into into banking, but at the end of the day,

we're looking for technology and kind of regulatory wedges um in in financial services, right? That can be leveraged and used by by startups to to attack profit pools, right? That's at the end of the day, that's that's what we're we're focused on. Um, and all of these industries are are are grappling with how to adopt crypto assets, how to adopt crypto rails to make their businesses um, more more efficient. And so, uh, you know, we're we're not only investing in companies who are trying to disrupt the incumbents, but also companies who are selling services to the incumbents, right, as a way to help them innovate.

And so we just feel like being positioned at the center of really the the cryptonative um products and services that are happening to the traditional financial folks and kind of sitting in the middle. Uh a lot of a lot of good things will will happen there with with that positioning. >> Mike Mike spent eight years in fintech before uh essentially fintech venture before coming into crypto and he jokes like this is actual fintech, right? this is actual technology uh behind finance not not just the sort of the re reskinning of sort of experiences on top of banks right so I think there's real you know fundamental uh phase shifts happening with blockchains because you've got this shared and ubiquitous

ledger in a way that like banks and and dealing with the sort of traditional banking system it's it's a totally uh each bank has their own ledger and then the goal is to reconcile with each other that's a those are fundamentally different sort of substrates and models and and just a lot of change is going to come out of that. So we have to be aware of all of the protocol innovations that are happening at the underlying layer uh so that we can have a informed view of what financial products and and financial use cases are you know are are are viable as well. So we're not wholly focused on just the financial applications. want to invest in the entire supporting stack with a with an eye to how it's all going to play out from a you know a product market

perspective in the financial services industry. >> Yeah, abs. Absolutely. Um switching gears a little bit here. I'm curious because I actually yesterday got a got an email about Galaxy's third quarter earnings results. Had a quote from uh the founder CEO you guys of uh of Mike Novagrats. Uh, third quarter was the best quarter in Galaxy's history. For eight years, we've been building a brand rooted in confidence and trust and Q3 it all finally came together. I I'm just going to shout out a couple stats and I know you guys are on the venture side. This is on a little bit more of the operations side, but you know, quarter 3 marked the strongest quarter in Galaxy's history. Generated over $500 million in net income. Um, assets on the platform reached a record 17 billion dollars. Um,

you guys had had an execution of an 80,000 Bitcoin trade. You guys helped facilitate that. There were there were several other other landmark achievements that you guys had on the operational side. How does Galaxy's day-to-day operations liquid side and facilities help to augment and and facilitate and support what you guys are doing on the venture side? Did it help you raise are companies leading into and and and essentially looking for capital from you guys as a means of getting in involved with the rest of Galaxy's business? H how how did these things complement one another?

>> I think it's like I mean I've been around six years, right? So I have a lot of um sort of historical context to speak from here. Um we're as a firm we're executing very well, right? like uh and I've you know I've seen the last two two to three years and like I've seen just the the trends and and things change and everybody's sort of really hitting their stride in their individual business line. Like what I say when we talk to founders sometimes is look we're not a 20 person VC firm that's managing 250 million in AUM right fundamentally it's a different model. It's uh you know the the VC you know side of things is is 10 people but the entire operating business is 700 people and everybody at in the other business lines is at the

frontier of their particular business line whether it's staking we're you know one of the largest validators on validators on Salana we're very active on Ethereum uh you know we've got real expertise there especially with respect to kind of the financial products you can build around staking how to use it as form of collateral you know when you talk to even our finance team, right? Who was actually just doing the books and records? Like, how do you account for, you know, DeFi activity on chain? How do you account for token movements? How do you discount the value, the marktomarket value of a token based on the liquidity schedule? So like everybody across the firm is sort of operating at their own little frontier and they're forced to because um you know because uh there's so much new

stuff happening in the space and we just kind of have to learn by experience and trial by fire and you kind of grow and get stronger over time as you as you do that and so I think our portfolio companies historically and today have benefited from the expertise you know at the firm I mean a famous story is Fireblocks right which we were a series A investor And uh they were coming in their, you know, their CTO was coming into our office to work with our head of operations to, you know, get product feedback because they're the ones actually moving the coins around and doing end of day settlements for our trading desk. And that's like a really rich source of information and product feedback for for companies. And you know, every company's different. Not every company's going to be well integrated with our operations team, but

you know, they might be well integrated with our lending team or get benefit from our, you know, advisory, you know, advisory and sort of banking capabilities. And so there's a broad world. I I I I think, you know, it's a hypothesis I have. I think if you reran venture like and you it was only focused on one industry like it if it was only ever focused on chips it wouldn't be surprising to me that some of the most competitive like venture firms actually would have totally vertically integrated like operate chips operating businesses it's just that venture generalist venture focuses on a broad swath of industry so you can't be so targeted I think crypto is a big you know big opportunity in itself and so I do think this kind of vertically integrated venture model where you have an operating business plus like really good

you know capital allocators uh to make investments is like a potentially great model in a specialist industry and I I think you know we want to continue to you know um build momentum and benefit from you know bear the fruits of that thesis but um you know that's what we're excited about I think and and and what we like about about Galaxy. I don't know Mike what what would you add to that? It's it's the best part of the job. Just I I just just say that, right? Like the best part of the job is helping our founders um do things, especially things that other firms don't have the capability to to deliver on. Um and you know, we we're we're working hard to productize that as much as possible for for our founders. And so many of our portfolio companies are are uh working

with Galaxy well beyond just equity capital investments from from the ventures team. And >> uh you know it's it's I've worked at other venture funds where and and every firm has their own kind of you know way way to differentiate. Um I I I see every day how um our team um our our company is working with our portfolio companies to to help move the needle for them and and and vice versa, right? So there's a real symbiotic relationship between our portfolio companies and the various business lines that we have across the firm. And I'd say it's the coolest thing I've seen in my three years at at Galaxy is just the, you know, traditional financial services

firms coming to Galaxy and and also looking for help and and guidance and to help them navigate this, you know, the the trends that we talked about, right, at at at at the beginning of of of this conversation, right? when you have a State Street or a Bank of New York or you know um you you name your big bank financial institution um there is a real connectivity that Galaxy is providing not just to our business units but also to our extended venture portfolio. So that's that's uh when when it when it works out uh you know ma magic can happen. So we're we're excited about that.

>> Yeah. Um, you also highlighted some of the categorical advantages that you have as a firm that take you beyond a a capital allocator. This is your operating experience, expertise, connections that you have in the industry and and and you mentioned that you're working to productize these. Can you just say more about this? What what is what what is that going to look like in practice when it comes to the value that you're providing to the portfolio companies or the market in general as you productize some of these more qualitative characteristics of Galaxy? Can you just make that a little bit more tangible?

>> Yeah, it's look, it's it's it's it's hard to uh plug our portfolio companies to every opportunity across the firm when when the firm is expanding so so rapidly. I think we're we're we're trying new ways of of um you know understanding what our business units are are working on and looking for. And we're also spending a lot of time with our portfolio companies figuring out, you know, what what they're looking for. um whether that could be, you know, Galaxy becoming a customer or, you know, they need a credit facility to help them scale or, you know, or some some something something of of that nature.

So, it's really just a kind of a a a matchmaking role that we're trying to play here a little bit. um where you know we have uh uh we have kind of problems on both sides that if you put put them together they they they help they help solve each other. So um we're just in in an interesting position you know aggregating a bunch of the things that our our colleagues are facing um and coming to them with with solutions and and um you that that our portfolio companies are offering. So it just streamlining that right uh as much as as much as possible to the advantage of Galaxy and and to our portfolio.

>> Yeah. Uh I' I'd love to double click on one of the the sectors that you mentioned that is um taking hold and and and a real focus of the firm and and you know the venture portfolio which is which is is banking and you guys have experience in this you know broadly financial services but in particular banking as you guys are looking at the current DeFi landscape and and you see you know Wall Street just just coming in you know with respect to RWAS stable coins um how do you think DeFi is going to evolve. Are are are you anticipating that we're going to see incumbent Wall Street institutions build out some of their own solutions? Are are you thinking that, you know, they're going to they're going to deploy on some of

the existing DeFi solutions that have product market fit? We've seen Maple and A get get a ton of traction. You know, the old adage is is, you know, which can happen first, the the newcomers, you know, can can they get distribution before the incumbents can improve their technology? um where where do you see this balance right now and how do you see things shaking out? >> Yeah, I mean look, I think it's a it's a great question. There's a lot there to answer. Um uh I think we think if you could replicate like take the consumer banking experience, right? Like which is like let's open your Wells Fargo uh mobile app for like the average consumer like what do you get? You get like

theoretically interest on deposits albeit like you actually don't get interest on deposits. You get, you know, the you get offered cards and right you get the ability to spend cards out of your electronic deposits, right? Um e both debit and credit cards. You get, you know, the ability to theoretically like take a mortgage, right? Uh and and like have have an offering, you know, uh for a mortgage and borrow from from the bank or borrow from a partner of the bank. And then you've got sort of connection to the payments. So some via wires and a and stuff like that. Like there's not that much more that the consumer gets uh from their from their sort of consumer banking experience. I think one of our hypotheses is like over

a multi-year time frame um the DeFi and sort of a modularized version of DeFi can actually compete with that stack. Um, I think other people, there's other companies in the market that have said something like this, but um, you know, Plasma came out obviously within within NeoA, but I don't think Plasma is the only one thinking about this. I think all the exchange wallets are thinking about how to look more like fintech apps. Meanwhile, you've got Revolute and others and new bank looking how do we get more into stable coins and crypto. So I think everybody's sort of on a three-way convergence in a lot of ways between the exchange, you know, the wallets, the the exchange wallets and the major wallets, the tra traditional and existing fintexs uh with a lot of distribution and then

like the kind of emergent like crypto startups. Uh you can think of these as like the card startups like Red Pay. uh they're all kind of I think headed on a on a trajectory towards each other and I think net net once they have sort of product um you know feature completeness they look a lot like you know uh like your Wells Fargo digital digital bank I think emerging markets will take to this faster because there is that stablecoin distribution and adoption I don't think you know I think I think that actual being able to hold a US dollar and then in an electronic kind of deposit format via stablecoin is like a really good value proposition for for a consumer in emerging markets more so than a consumer in the US markets. I think interest on deposits will eventually it's been a big

form you know type of debate um or you know debate um you know between the regulators and the legislators and the industry um whether we can really get yield on stable coins and what types of yield are allowed and and and whatnot and so that'll all be sort of adjudicated over time and then I think with respect to your question of like the incumbents versus defi DeFi is really prone to network effects uh once you get instantiated as the DeFi protocol and you get integrations uh and you have capital in your pools that you know brings and is is able to sort of deal in size like if you look at a like I think they're they've crossed 50 billion in deposits that's that's

real scale I think it's going to be really hard to compete with something like a because the the cold start and the the the network effects that you have to build to compete are are really material. I I think you look at Pendle like with a really interesting product there like the the degree to which they've probably got network effects around some of the yield you know the yield splitting uh products Athena certainly with all the integrations that they've gotten in between Pendle a morpho etc. So I think it's a network effectrone business. Uh certainly people with distribution can can make attempts but I I I I I think most of the trady you know space is looking in at like what's happening in DeFi and they're identifying some of these key players

and like they're more likely to partner uh than to like build build directly and compete in a lot of cases. And I think that only starts to strengthen the network effect over time. So I think if you can get that level of uh you know stability and um robustness in DeFi where you're kind of now compounding I think these these some of these winners will compound for like a real real pretty long period of time here. Um so Mike anything else? >> Yeah there's as as we'll mention there's there's a lot there's a lot here to to dig through. A few a few things I would mention is one like if you think about just the the fintech neoanking market, right? There's been a few hundred

billion dollars of enterprise value that that has been created. If you just take New Bank and Revolute, there's probably 150 billion of of of enterprise value just between those two companies. And if you think about what they've done, it's like, okay, we can now there's a there's a mobile application, right? There's a mobile experience. I no longer need to walk into walk inside of a of a of a branch, right? There's digital account opening. Um uh and there's not that much and and and they kind of decided we're not going to nickel and dime our our users on fees like like the the the Trady banks are doing, right? So, um so much value has been created and financial access to to these products um has improved

tremendously. uh but not that much innovation. It's never been easier today uh to to layer in financial products, right? It's never been easier. Um the the embeddible nature, the composability, um the crossborder by default, right, nature of crypto and wallet based products is transformational. Um and ultimately what that's going to do is going to create a lot more competition. uh and that's going to create better outcomes for for users and and businesses, right? So like all of that is the backdrop which is which is really exciting. The one other point I'd make on banking um in uh sort of in a in a in a in a positive direction for for the

incumbents is um they have tremendous distribution as as you called out and um stable coins also create opportunity for them too, right? So they uh and and banks love FX, right? they they they love being able to take one currency and convert into another currency. When you think about the where we're going in the not too distant future is stable coins are going to be ubiquitous. Um you know it's one and a half% of of of money supply in the US today which is small but but meaningful. Um, and if there's a number I could bet, you know, uh, bet on, it would be that that number is going to go up uh, significantly over time, right? And so as that happens,

there's a huge opportunity for banks who already have a lot of these relationships to effectively catch stable coins and convert it into fiat, right? And so, um, this is sort of similar to travelers checks and some of the other, um, modalities of of financial products and and how how they've evolved over time. But the same thing is going to happen here with stable coins. And so, there's going to be tens of billions of dollars of of revenue opportunity uh, that is up for grabs, you know, for for for the incumbents. And so, it'll be really interesting to see who's on the front foot and and where where they're going to place bets. um what what new businesses they're going to open up to try to remain, you know, not not only

relevant, but but uh hopefully to to be a growth driver for for for those businesses as well. >> Yeah, I I'm glad I I think that's a perfect segue into uh this next thing that I want to talk to you guys about, which was this Fed uh payments innovation conference that happened just a couple days ago. Um and I I think you know this kind of caught a lot of people by surprise the conference itself but also the the level and the extent to which uh Fed Governor Waller had had experience and expertise that he was talking on some of these issues. He he also announced what I think is a pretty substantial announcement in terms of starting to explore and if it ultimately does come to fruition these skinny Fed accounts or these skinny master accounts

so that stable coin issuers could go directly to the Fed. they could hold cash there and then they could, you know, my understanding is that they could buy treasuries directly in Fed auctions. Could you just help clarify what exactly happened at that conference if you guys are aware and generally what the significance of the industry and and specifically the significance that it has for stable coins is? >> I I I did not I was not in attendance so I I I can't speak to the to the the specifics. I I obviously saw a lot of the the commentary uh coming out of it and it was just interesting as as you said like you know 90% of the conference it felt like was talking about stable

coins and um and innovative things right whereas uh as you said you'd be kind of hardressed to find too many other feddriven conferences uh talking about innovation uh in the past but I think it it fits into this administration and fits into the regulatory posture, you know, um, uh, since since January, right, and and the impact that it could have on on our industry. I would say that there's a number of, you know, gen Genius is is passed. Um there are still a lot of questions around how um how genius is going to be interpreted and galaxies is involved right now to you

know help with uh with help helping helping craft the the guidance. There's there's there's an open comment period right now that that we're engaging in. Um, so there's a lot of things whether it's whether it's uh with Congress, whether it's with regulators, whether it's directly with with the White House. Um, there's a lot that's happening uh that we need to have kind of our our fingerprints on and and working on behalf of our portfolio companies to help them uh be be involved in and and shape, right? So, um the the uh the comments at at the uh by by Governor Waller um uh the other day uh is just one one, you know, one one specific

example of that. >> Yeah. Will, any anything there? Did you have a chance to catch it? >> Yeah, I the last couple days have been crazy for me a little bit, so I I I haven't I don't have any deep thoughts on it. I think um it's not that surprising that the Fed would want stable coin issuers to have direct access to the Fed. I mean there's it's just like for them not to have direct access to the Fed at least in a sort of skinny capacity as they say is like could be a financial stability risk in some respects, right? Like it's being essentially intermediated by other banks. Um and those other banks have their own profit motives and and whatnot. Like if stable coins are systemically important, it it makes a lot of sense for and the US legisl

legislators are supportive of allowing stable coins to exist inside of the US, i.e. the Genius Act, then it makes sense for the Fed to have a direct line, you know, direct relationship with them, especially at the scale that these, you know, issuers are buying US treasuries, you know, uh, and so, yeah, I just think more cooperation with the issuers of, you know, you know, and and and the and the government, both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve is is sort of necessary and smart as opposed to the opposite approach which was historically taken, which is like, no, these things don't exist, they shouldn't exist, and we're going to sort of, you you know, try to fight them at every, you know, at every at at every angle. So, >> ignorance. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Like I I I just think it's I think it's especially when these are these issuers are sort of evangelizing like the US national interest, >> right, in the form of dollar adoption and, you know, purchasing of US Treasury bills and and whatnot. So, I I think it's I think it's smart to allow them to come into the fold a little bit more. I I'm not surprised the degree to which the Fed governors and other folks uh around the Fed are are are super educated about these, you know, these topics. Like these are fundamental financial financial innovations. Uh and I I think they're they're worth taking seriously from a from a plumbing perspective. And I I believe that the the smart people at the Fed and in the sort of academia surrounding the Fed are

are are definitely taking them seriously. It's a fundamental phase shift as I said in in how markets and settlement works between financial institutions right you have uh you have shared ledgers rather than discrete and individual ledgers that you have to reconcile with like that that seems really important and and so I think people are trying to work through the consequences of of of that. So >> I I would just I just add one one more point is like as as we've invested in dozens of companies now that are operating at this intersection, you know, they're they're using stable coins to do some something interesting with they're always bottlenecked by banking uh always. And uh it's going to be

really exciting when uh that no longer that bottleneck no longer exists. And I think it's a natural place for um regulators to to not just allow innovation but but encourage innovation because you know as as a narrow as a narrow bank you're um the the risk profile is is a lot lower and so I think if if founders are on the the side of taking lowrisk uh making lowrisk moves to improve uh you it make improvements for for for users, i.e. and like being able to share more more yield uh with with users on

deposits and being more of a transactional bank rather than one focused on um on on credit and lending. That is a a a very good sandbox for for entrepreneurs to uh to be experimenting with. >> Yep. Yeah. Guys, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure and I appreciate you taking the time spending time with us. Um just some closing thoughts just you know as we wrap up. Uh feel free to take us home here Will and Mike uh you know GPS Galaxy Ventures um you know any any through lines or trends that you think are important calling out here. I would just say um there's a few trillion dollars of of market cap that's

that's uh focused on financial services around the world. Um these are some of the biggest profit pools. uh you know makes up huge portions of of the global GDP and it's never been a better time to be founding a business to be layering in these financial products and you know across it's not just fintech but fintech's going to be embedded everywhere and um as Will said I've I've been I've been following you know the these trends for a long time and I feel like now the floodgates are open um and I'm very interested to see I know there's a lot of different analogies that people use, but it it feels like, you know, um dialup internet, dialup AOL

where, um, you know, in the early 2000s and and broadband is here and and, uh, the the kind of the o open financial system is is really poised to take off now that we have uh, you know, the the right the right regulations and and support uh, in DC. So, couldn't be more excited for for uh, what lies ahead. Yeah, >> I'll let Mike uh I'll let Mike kill it there. Uh that he he he put a good cap on it. >> I love it. Yeah, it really does. It feels like we're at an inflection point where it's a greater risk to these uh incumbents to not come over, experiment, put at least some portion of their balance sheets on chain and start to dabble in this industry. And that that's how it starts. And ultimately that's uh

that's where we're headed. Uh is that is that trend accelerating? Yeah, I I guess I I guess I do have a final point which is like the way you think it happens is never the way it actually happens and it always it always surprises you like uh so I think we're like expecting this all to play out but like the ways and the specifics of how everything is going to happen will inevitably surprise us at the same time too. So I'm looking forward to the ways in which we'll be surprised over the next couple years. >> Same here. I think expecting a surprise is the way to be and then remain adaptable and and uh you know survive through it. So guys, thanks so much for joining. Really appreciate you uh you know, get getting set up behind the scenes and also spending the time with

us today. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. This was really fun. >> Yeah, we'll we'll see you next time. Next time uh there's a 100x in the Galaxy port, we'll we'll get you guys on with the uh to talk about it. >> Okay, >> it see you next time. Cheers. >> Banger. All right, man. quite quite the stream. I think we're gonna I think we're going to close it right there. I mean, there's not much not much else to say. Will and Mike on the Galaxy thesis. These guys uh these guys just sprinted all the way through.

Um talked about the Fed skinny accounts. We had a great deep pin conversation with Santi and Mike. Um man, there was just there was a ton of alpha. If you caught the Jupiter uh COO cash talking about stake Jup, you want to stake your Jup. They have a launch coming up in November. Make sure uh you can still qualify for that one. Uh and then obviously Meteora launch tomorrow. Jup stakers are going to be rewarded as well for that. Galaxy is continuing to do very well in the public markets and there's tons of alpha to dissect from Will and Mike. Just before guys, thank you so much. banger stream. We've got a ton of action. I think we're gonna get

Hib on tomorrow. That one is going to be a guaranteed banger. Uh that's it. We're cooked. I'm done. I'm cooked. I'm going to see you guys next time. Shout out everyone behind the scenes. We'll see you tomorrow. Same time, same place. Rollup TV. Don't miss it. Peace. [Music]