The Rollup TV: Plasma, Veda, Sei, XION

Transcript

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

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

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

[Music] heat. Hey. [Music] Happy Thursday, Rav. You know this song, the days. This is your song, bro. I showed you this song and you were you were just running it on replay.

There was uh New York City shenanigans to be had to this song. I remember. >> Yeah, man. I woke up today and the markets were red. >> How you doing, Rob? >> You can't be mentally red when you got that song jamming. You got a You got a Hawaii penty to yourself. There's really There's no need to be upset. Shout out the OG I am nomad. >> Here we go. All righty, guys. Let's cover this base rollup map that we did yesterday. It was a banger stream yesterday. Um yeah, >> we did the base rollup map. It was really fun. Had a lot of uh a lot of good teams. I think I think it's almost hitting 100K now, which is sick.

>> Um had a fun stream as well. So, we'll we'll just pull that up on the screen then and uh and we'll go over some of the teams on it. We didn't really get a chance to go over it. Um so, maybe if we can just click on the actual picture here. So, we hit 93K views, which is sick. Not exactly our prime level from the OG days, but you know, we do what what we can. >> Ethereum's making a comeback. >> Yeah, >> you can see that here. >> Rob, you're like a cyborg. You're like half on the screen here.

>> Scoot to the right of it. There you go. >> Here. We haven't done a screen share in a while. The most innovative media company in crypto. >> I am quite zoomed in as well. We're going to get that figured out. All righty. So, so I mean look, we had Ris Zero on. We had Succinct on uh that was fun. We had L2B throw a quote suite. I think the sleepers here were base line scroll. Some of these teams Aztec that aren't really confirmed that they are actually going to be based, but they are. Uh that was cool. We we had Rya on.

Um yeah. Yeah. Shout out to some of the guys who boosted uh OGs at the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> Uh Consensus obviously Joe Luben, Sharpling Gaming, very ETH aligned. Shout out to those guys doing great work. Um we also had a pretty good conversation about Ethereum uh treasury companies amidst the technicalbased rollup talk. Yes, >> had that with Mara from Aluvial and Shere Rom which I think paired up very nicely because Mara is helping to onboard a lot of these institutions and then once they're onboarded it's like what's next? Well, staking restaking engaging with the DeFi ecosystem from

there and Siri is one of the OGs can obviously talk quite a bit about that. Justin Drake re retweeted uh I think the Ethereum Foundation retweeted. Um, so several very ETH aligned uh accounts. We appreciate your support. >> Yeah, it was awesome to see. I totally agree with that. Um, we had good turnout. I think it's going to hit 100K. Honestly, I'm just stoked that Ethereum is having its narrative time in the sun again. I don't know where this thing goes. I don't know how much juice Tomley's got left. I don't know where these DATs are going to take this thing. I still think it's gonna struggle in some capacity.

I don't know if we get to ETH Bitcoin ratio highs of 21. Be hard to see. But I think uh you know I think that I think this cycle is very much firmly Bitcoin cycle and I think that Ethereum is going to have its way in the in towards like the latter half towards where we're heading and I know people are saying that this is never going to end. But I think whatever comes next will be an Ethereumled kind of cycle I think. And and so I I I think that's I think Ethereum is basically a couple years off of having its Bitcoin moment is what I'm trying to say here. But I think that this technology is great. I'm stoked on this map. Um, and I'm glad that we could get it out.

>> Yeah, the 2021 ETH Bitcoin highs are about a 50% move on ETH Bitcoin away. >> It's 0.05 uh E to Bitcoin ratio right now. If we get to about 0075, then we're kind of around that range high. Obviously, back in 2017, you know, we went all the way 0.1 all the way to 0.25.15. So, it really peaked out there, but it did not stay very long at all at that price point. >> Yeah. >> Um, for that to take place, you would need about 6 and a half to 7K ETH with not much change in Bitcoin, maybe between 110 and 120. If we get a pop, I mean, Ethereum DATs, you know, what

would be the catalyst that would spur them higher without spurring Bitcoin higher? Um, I think it would really be uh uh these DATs crossing the critical threshold of about a billion dollars and then starting to issue more shares. We had Michael from Framework. We're going to have Vance from Framework tomorrow to talk a little bit more about this. And it really did seem like there was this inflection point once the DATs reached this scale. then they would start to they would uh open up some more uh conversations with more traditional banks that were able to operate at such scale. That seems like it would be the catalyst to drive ETH Bitcoin higher. Um but then again, I mean, Micro Strategy could enter the

S&P 500 and Bitcoin could absolutely blow the the top off that thing and and Bitcoin dominance could surge. >> Dude, we are less than two weeks away from rate cuts. No, we're not. We're very close to two weeks being away from rate cuts. I mean, come on. Today's the fourth. >> Today's the fourth. >> Yeah. And I think we're looking at the Wednesday. >> Hey, pal's coming, brother. >> From now. >> J Pal is coming. He wants your coins. The institutions want your coins. >> Come on, Rob. Get fired up. They want your coins, my boy.

>> Are you gonna sell it to him? >> I don't know. >> A little bit of them. >> This is what we always said was gonna happen. >> Who we got on the show today? >> Oh, it's going to be a banger. Shout out to all the guys behind the scenes. >> Yep. >> We got the guest booking. >> We got Jacob from Plasma, their their general counsel. He put out a tweet earlier. He was saying like uh he was saying Plasma started the uh stable coin chain category. Looking forward to coming to talk to the boys about it.

Looking forward to that. >> Yeah. Who else we got on? son from Veta, the co-founder CEO who contributed to the massive plasma predeposit campaign of billions. They've contributed billions of dollars. I get DMs right now. Launch this on Pump and Dual Stream from people that just want to ape our coin. >> Yeah, let's talk about that. >> Let's talk about >> Dude, pump creator markets are going crazy right now. >> What What's your bull bear case on pump creator tokens? I don't know, but I heard Rasmmer said he made like 12K already from it. And this guy Mitch made like 70k.

Talked to Chain Yoda, he said he made 10K, but it's hard to keep his his token sustained. Um, bare cases creators get labeled as scammers. Bull cases, your token runs the 10, 20, 50 mil. You make a ton of creator fees and you do really well. I think the most the most interesting thing here is what is going to sustain trading volume. >> I I think what you're talking about is like if uh an audience is bullish on a creator, there's going to be a bunch of buying volume. Maybe it drives up the market price and then realistically they may just forget about it if there's not a whole lot of motion with the show and it just sits at that high market cap. to me. How can streamers get creative and generate

unique interactions with their audience such that the token is crucial to that interaction and it becomes this portal or this gateway into that interaction that I think is going to sustain trading volume. It's going to continuously push people to buy the token, sell the token if they're not happy with whatever product it is that the channel or the stream is providing. It it to me I made this analogy earlier like to me it reminds me of chain link because they charge for their services they they charge in their token and so as you want oracle services you have to buy the the link token and I think they even you know they'll let you pay in USDC if you want uh price feeds but then they're going to take the USD they're going to

convert it into link and it's the same kind of buying pressure and trading volume and I ultimately think that is going to be what makes or breaks these creator tokens. We'll see. We'll see. I haven't seen a very compelling model as of yet. One of the ones that I have seen is uh is I think it was the chopping block. Shout out to our guys Hibb uh Lesnner uh Tarun. These guys said that they're going to be donating uh their creator fees to charity. I think they're going to go to Coin Center, uh, which I believe is kind of like this, uh, Washington DC, uh, US regulatory lobby service. And so they're obviously, you

know, shephering the the industry and they're pushing forward, uh, friendly regulatory uh landscape. Um, I mean, that's one way to do it, right? But then as you know, you can you can imagine as the bare market comes, people are going to be less excited to donate to this charity. And so why are they, you know, going to continue to support the token if that's where the proceeds go? I think the more compelling path is to take the creator fees and reinvest them into the show. How you reinvest them, what you do with that, what other features you build out, that's where it pays to get creative.

>> Look, man, I agree. I think uh it'll be an interesting it's a very interesting experiment. I'm very intrigued by this uh both Pump Fund, Zora base, all of it. So, >> what's what's interesting about Zora is that each piece of content is its own token as well. >> I know. I don't love that. Honestly, I'm not sure. It's like >> why not? >> I like the whole like you just have one place to pump your token. Like you have one uh one show, one place, one stream, etc. So, look, let's get Jacob up here.

He's coming up. Jacob Whitman, general counsel at Plasma. Um, and yeah, I'm looking forward to um hearing what he has to say about stable chains. Uh, this should be a good good spicy stream. We got Jacob in the back. >> Hey, what's up, guys? >> Hello, Jacob. >> Yeah, Rob, Andy, what's up, guys? How you doing, >> dude? How do I get a jacket like that? That sweater is sick. Yeah. Yeah. Um, give me your address.

I'll ship one your way. >> Those are for the Plasma Elites only, Rob. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll get one for you guys. Um, >> yeah, they're they're really comfortable. I actually picked them out, so yeah. >> Very cool. Well, Jacob, man, welcome to the show. First time meeting you as well as Rob. Um, at least that's what I think. Um, would love to just get a background on on yourself, man. Like, who's Jacob? What are your hobbies? What what do you like to do with your free time? How did you get into crypto? How'd you find Plasma? Kind of get us up to speed so we can have a little foundation.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to. So, uh I've been a lawyer uh in the space for about eight years. Um I started uh dabbling in Bitcoin in about 2012 2013 uh with a buddy of mine in undergrad. Really believed in the the separation of of money from state. Um and and still do in many ways. Um and that that really, you know, influences, you know, kind of how I operate as a human. Um uh went off to law school in 2014 and totally abandoned uh any focus on crypto. Was just totally focused on school at the time. Graduated 2017, started doing capital markets work. Uh mostly underwriter side IPOs and the firm I was at at the time uh actually represented Blockstack with their reggae offering. Um so this was the first uh token registered with the

SEC and I kind of realized hey there's a niche here for for for crypto lawyers. So ended up becoming my entire practice. Um had somewhere between 100 and 150 clients. Um moved in house uh a few years ago. Uh I was at a another L2 a layer 2 network. Um and then about four months ago joined Plasma. Um one of the one of the co-founders is a friend of mine and it just made sense for me to join at the time. Um as for hobbies, uh I don't have any right now. You know, mainet launch is coming up. Uh but uh I have a ninemonth old son, so spend a lot of time with him.

>> Congrats. >> Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks, man. I try to run and work out when I can, but yeah, you know how it is. >> What's it like being being a dad in crypto? >> Oh, it's great, man. It's beautiful. Um you know, I think you just find like a new purpose for for what we do. Um and uh you know, actually, one of the reasons I I wanted to join Plasma um is because I think someday my my son's going to ask me like, "Dad, what did you do? What did you build?" and I'll be really proud to tell him, you know, I built Plasma, man. Like, >> I built it with this epic team that we have. Um, so yeah, that's uh it's it's it's pretty fun.

>> Well, things are getting hot out there, Jacob. I'll tell you that. This the stable chain wars when you joined Plasma may or may not have really existed, but they firmly exist today. I saw your tweet talking about Plasma really setting the stage for what a stable chain really is, if we're calling them that. I suppose that's the terminology nowadays. >> Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't mind that. >> Yeah. Okay. Cool. Um maybe maybe we can just understand from your perspective here, you know, how did Plasma come about to lead this category, right? Like I think it's very clear plasma is the leading stable chain today. None of them are live. So it's even hard to have a category. But when you're looking at this map here, you're you're understanding like okay, there's a core

uh core use case for uh payments for blockchains to you know verifiably uh you know conduct payments across global settlement etc. How do you think about this stable chain race today with regards to plasma leading the way? Um you know what is your broad holistic view and then we can dive in. >> I mean the the easy answer is it's it's not a distraction for us at all. We we try not to think about it too much. we're, you know, we're we're we're heads down focused on what we're building. But taking a step back, when we first pitched Blasma, uh, you know, and and and this idea of a stable chain, it didn't exist at the time, right? People were like, "Ah, stable coins don't need their own chains." And and now we've seen some of the largest companies in

the world sort of validate what we're not not even sort of, they are validating what we're building. Um, you know, even down to some of the same copy that we've we've we've discussed. And um it just shows that you know we have the brightest team in the world thinking about some of the best issues and we're going to continue doing that to the best of our abilities uh even with some of these competitors popping up. >> Got it. Uh Jacob, another thing that I wanted to ask you about um is a tweet that you had. It was also uh it was a quote tweet on top of Vance from Framework who I think we're gonna have on the show tomorrow. Um >> awesome. But I I I'm curious if we can if we can kind of get your take on this.

Maybe we'll we'll cut the clip and we'll quote tweet your tweet. And you said uh the original was that plasma is the most important thing to happen to Bitcoin in a very long time. And this just kind of this just kind of you know strikes me odd, right? Why is a stable chain so important for Bitcoin? >> It's a great question, Rob. Um so, you know, we are going to be building a a bridge uh to Bitcoin from Plasma. Um, yeah, kind of back to my early days in in in crypto. I tried to play with some early Bitcoin DeFi tools and they they just weren't very good. Uh, I think Plasma will be the first to really bring a strong distribution mechanic to to uh DeFi on Bitcoin. Um, again, I'm a big

Bitcoin believer. I think it's it's the the the best asset in the world that's really going to separate uh money from government and allow people to truly transact the way they want to transact and and save money as well, right? Um, so I I think it starts with building a really strong uh base um which which which we're doing at Plasma and then you'll see as that Bitcoin bridge is introduced um we're we're really going to bring people over. Um really to hone in on your question though, Rob, I I think uh you know in a few years we're going to see people hold two assets, stable coins and Bitcoin. And I think they're going to hold stable coins that they can transact in and they're going to hold Bitcoin that they can save money in and use as an asset that's going to appreciate over time.

>> Got it. There's strong inter interplay between those two. >> Yes. >> The the the separation between money and state I think is something that we we've hear a lot about. We talk a lot about it's still very theoretical. In your words like what does that look like in practice, right? Like we have a lot of combination. You know, there's a lot of factors that go into it. Um maybe people don't really understand like the the ins and outs of it. What what does if we were to separate the two? What's the the point A where we are now to the point B end state that we're trying to achieve? Yeah, great question. I think it starts with separating money from politics and money from from policies. So, we're even sort of seeing it now with with the Trump administration and and and and

their approach to really forcing the Federal Reserve or trying to force the Federal Reserve to its lower interest rates. And, you know, it might be good in the short term, might be bad in the long term. I, you know, I'll let everyone have their own opinion on that. But the fact that a single president on a four-year term can kind of dictate money the way they want just just speaks to the core of the issue. Um so I think you know if we can start separating Bitcoin uh you know it's the it's the truest form of money because it's separate from these policies in itself. There's no one that governs it. There's no one that gets to control distribution rate of Bitcoin. There's no one that gets to control the underlying policies of it. Right? It's it's it's a true autonomous currency. Um, so it it takes

away those policies and it takes away, you know, the sec cyclical four-year term you're seeing with presidents or eight-year terms sometimes um that that really dictate people's lives. >> Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty crazy that that we just have Trump strongmanning J Pal right now, just publicly berating him. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not even JPAL. If you look down the the entire federal, you know, governor's board, we've we've seen him remove somebody and now there's a lawsuits going on there and and um it's quite interesting and quite fascinating. Um my my general take on it, not to get into the politics of it, is um whether you support it or not, we we you know, this level of power is is really as to support. Um because, you know, you may be pro Trump, but in four

years of you know, if the Democrats elected, you've just given them a pathway to sort of do the same thing to enact their own policies. >> Yeah. Yeah. Totally agreed. kind of uh zooming in on some of the more current events here. Uh recently there there was a pretty pretty insane uh liquidation spike on XPL, the plasma pre-market on Hyperlid. Uh Justin Sun, who I would consider somewhat of a competitor to plasma at the largest scale. Like if I'm thinking about the bullcase for plasma here, I'm thinking that we that XPL and the chain overtakes Tron at some point, right? Like I'm thinking like the amount of Tether transactions happening right on plasma should overtake Ethereum and overtake Tron like that's like where

where we're trying to go. Justin Sun probably feels >> go Andy not where we're trying to go. >> I'm going to ask you about your bull and bear case here shortly as well. But uh thinking about what Justin Sun is running in his mind seeing this happen from the council perspective, right? Like from the legal perspective. Now, I don't know what you can and can't talk about, but like when it comes to these type of types of situations, when you're managing uh community sentiment, when you're managing the legalities of pre-markets, of postmarkets, of mainet launches, like you have a different perspective than a lot of other people, you know, when it comes to this this liquidation event or these kind of like >> weird gray area situations in in crypto markets from the legal perspective, how

how do you view these now? And perhaps has your view on these types of situations changed due to the regulatory changes of the US? Maybe just walk us through how you think about these types of like crazy situations that happen in in crypto that seemingly don't happen elsewhere. >> Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I I can't speak too much on the specifics of XPL for for obvious reasons, but uh you know, I can tell you we we we at Plasma do a really good job of of not letting these things, you know, be a distraction to the work we we we want to do, which is, you know, overtake Ethereum, overtake Tron, and and build the world's best payments network. Um, you know, but they're hard to ignore. They happen. Um, and and uh, you know, rumor says it was Justin Sun. I I've seen, you know, notes

to the contrary of that. Um, the thing about these pre-markets, right, is they're highly manipulable. Um, and and and I think it speaks to some of, you know, maybe, you know, the the the underlying tech, um, and less about the token itself. Um, we saw whomever it was rotate from XPL to, uh, World Liberty Fi, right? And then sort of running the same playbook there. So, um, yeah, we we generally try to ignore it. It's it is hard to ignore. Um, you know, Justin, if you're out there trading XPL, uh, you know, it is what it is. Um, let's just let's just keep an eye on how, you know, number of transactions on the network over the next year.

>> Well, well, dude, that brings up a really good point, though, because today, and this is another good like legal type question that is not related to Plasma, but I think you you you'll have an opinion on. Uh today, World Liberty Fi decided to blacklist Justin Sun's address, locking $540 million or$540 million in unlocked tokens. So, they locked his unlocked tokens and 2.4 billion in lock tokens and say they believe an exchange has been using user tokens to sell and push down the price. Uh there's some comments saying from Olympia Crypto, you do not dump on the president. The president dumps on you.

Unstoppable crime meets immovable scammer. Kobe says question mark. Uh Mert put a a a picture of Trump and says I was a businessman doing business. Um what's your take from the legal perspective on this? Like is world liberty fight are they right to be locking tokens? Like you know in what in what permissionless in environment should we be able to allow locking of tokens in this open market? you know, we all know Justin Sun, but what's your take from the legal perspective on this? >> Yeah, I mean, I think this is the consequence of not thinking through um unlocking the tokens in the first place and sort of just just making a shotgun decision on that because I know, you know, they they decided to unlock their

tokens um recently. Um but no, I I don't think it's good. Uh I think it speaks to centralization, which you know, if you if you look at the ethos of crypto, we are moving away from that. Um, and it becomes a lot more complicated when it's the president of the United States. And uh, I look forward to the Justin Sun verse POTUS lawsuit that'll be filed in the federal courts next week. >> Oh my goodness, man. >> Insane. Insane. >> Uh, yeah, Justin's son. >> It just sets a weird precedent, you know? It's just like, oh, we're going to lock Justin Sun's tokens like just because >> it does. I mean this this this has happened in in the past with with with coins but again I think I think it becomes a lot more complicated when it's when it's you know a project that's

closely held to the highest elected official in office and you know probably the highest elected official in the world. So I I'm not sure how uh how this is going to play out but it'll be a fun one to watch. >> Yeah. Cool. All right let's let's revert back to plasma. You know, I I I did mention that I'm curious what your bull and bear case is. And I, you know, I genuinely think that we can get to a point where transaction volume and notional volume is going to be higher than Ethereum and Tron. Uh, you know, I think that's probably part of the endgame goal here. When you decided to join Plasma, what was your mental kind of thought process on like, okay, what is the bullcase here? What is the upside in terms of uh market dominance? And

then you know maybe you thought through okay what if this doesn't work what is the bare case from your perspective what is the current plasma bull case and plasma bare case >> yeah I think in our in our bubble we we we look at number of transactions but that's that's just the start for us I I want to um and the rest of the team wants to uh really be a a payment tool in everyone's pocket globally and uh you know through that we will surpass Ethereum human uh just by the the pure distribution. Um so I mean my my bull case is that you're using plasma um and don't even know it. Um I mean how many how many times a day are you using checkout tools or or payments tools or

underlying payments rails and and you're not even aware that you're using those? Um Andy, how many how many coffees have you had today? You know, you mentioned ice coffee, bro. Me too. I've had like four. Um but you know that that's all happening on the same payments network and we don't even really know it as as a consumer. Um, so we we want plasma and and plasma will be the the rails of that happening. >> Okay. And then what is your bare case that >> there's no Yeah, there there is no bare case. Uh, for me um I'm super bullish on stable coins um from both, you know, a consumer and and and policy perspective.

Um, I mean the kind of actually, you know, kind of to tie back to the earlier conversation, the the bare case is is a general crypto bear case and and and and my concern is that a lot of the stuff that's happening in the current market, >> um, you know, when we have a new, you know, electorate in 2028, uh, kind of gets flipped over with a little bit more too much regulation, you know. Um, so I wouldn't say it's plasma specific bear case, but I think it's more of a general crypto bare case. Mhm. And and this administration had the Genius Act. Obviously, that kind of opened the floodgates for stable coins. Secretary of the Treasury Besson has said publicly that he wants three trillion in stable coins circulating.

>> He he he's even saying trillions, >> three trillion by 2028. and how he wants to basically he wants to issue the government debt in stable coins or at least have stable coin uh issuers purchase this debt, hold it on their balance sheet uh to to then deploy these stable coins. How much does the uh strategy coming from the treasury impact the strategy at Plasma and and is there a working relationship? What kind of interplay do you have there? >> Yeah, I mean we're talking to regulators around the world, uh policy makers around the world. Um, for us, I I I think that, you know, the Treasury is is a really strong signal. I think Genius is obviously amazing for the the space, and I'm really excited about the market

structure bill that'll be coming out, uh, you know, and and playing through the House. Um, I would caution that this is just the foundation there. There's still a lot of work to do. There are active lobbying groups out there that are lobbying, you know, congressmen, congress women very hard right now. Um, you know, American Banking Association being one of them. They're filing letters to to applicable senators weekly. Basically, uh this this week it's about uh oh the yield loophole that some exchanges are, you know, and are um introducing, but you know, they were also the ones who fought against allowing yields through the stable bills, right? So, it's just going to be a constant battle. Um I also think Besset and Treasury, they're a strong

signal for the rest of the world is going. Uh we're not necessarily focused on on the western market as much, right? We really care about emerging markets. So, some of the conversations that I've had that are really interesting lately are with policy makers in Turkey, policy makers in the UAE. One really interesting Syria, um, you know, places Egypt, places that, you know, people aren't really thinking about, but these jurisdictions take a strong signal from, you know, what the US is going to be doing. >> Yeah. And they they receive a lot of the benefit of stable coins, just access to dollars, access to dollar denominated yields, these types of things. And and so I've noticed that you guys have started to promote some of the plasma ecosystem a bit. There's been some some Twitter accounts created for lending markets, for yield products, for uh

payment products, consumer apps. Um and I imagine these will be tightly integrated with the network such that right there's a there's an ideal world here where uh we have the plasma chain users globally have a plasma wallet account. they can spend their money directly at, you know, at uh point of sale systems uh around the world without having to have that money go in their bank account, some sort of uh integration from, you know, the plasma chain like like that last mile thing has is always the conversation about uh you know kind of stable chains. Is there is there a development within the plasma ecosystem around yield products around uh POSOS products around um you know

vaults these types of things like what has been the development such that it's not just a chain for payments but it's like a I can like live my entire financial uh you know kind of setup on chain there. >> Yeah. Andy I don't know if you've bugged our offices but this is this is a great question and something we're we're often thinking about. Um okay I you know we we view stable coin usage in in four right save spend send and earn >> so it's it's not just spending right like a lot of people around the world hold stable coins so they can they can save money because they may be living in an area with a deflationary asset a lot of people send money back home uh and then the one you just hit on which I'm very excited about is is Earn um so I

actually saw you have son on the show next uh and I was really excited to see his name pop up and and really shout out to Veta they've been an amazing partner to work with for us. Uh they just also hired a rockstar GC. Um and you know, I'm excited to continue that relationship with them and and there'll definitely be some stuff coming out. Um I can't share too much obviously, but uh those are the four categories that we're thinking about and the products being built on top of the chain reflect those four categories. Um also, you touched on ecosystem. Uh really want to give a shout out to the plasma ecosystem team. Uh I've worked across a lot of a lot of teams and and they're just they're working their butts off 247 to get the best blue chip partners launching on plasma which is going to be great for

distribution on our on our network. >> Yeah. I saw a curve and then uh others as well as native uh platforms as well. >> Yeah. It's going to be a really really fun network to play on. Yeah. >> Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Um Yeah. Rob. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, I I'm just trying to think through like what what this endgame looks like once we have all these stable coins come on chain. Uh the Treasury is literally printing T bills and they're going almost directly to these stable coin issuers. The banking lobby is going to have to bend the knee at a certain point, right? Like they're they're continuing they're fighting this tooth and nail, but what happens once those banks sort of accept the eventual reality? It's not like they're going to just lose deposits, right? Those

deposits end up on chain. So yeah, could you walk us through like how you see that progression happening? >> Yeah, I think it's going to happen very quick. Um, we've already seen JP Morgan, City Bank introduce, you know, internal programs. I'm having conversations with with some of those people in those programs. Um, and I think, you know, we're we're going to look six months down the road and the landscape is going to look totally different from today. Um, the the the positive point is really interesting. So as as we know and you know unlike many other banking systems around the world the the deposit system actually is very important in America.

Um and that is you know something the American banking association has lobbyed for but where they get wrong is that those deposits don't need to live in bank accounts. They can live on chain. >> Yeah. >> Um and like you and I aren't going to know that as consumers but like we're going to have access to really cool yield programs possibly by VA. Um we're gonna you know through our bank accounts someday and it's it's going to be very cool. Um, but I agree with you, Robbie. They're gonna have to bend the knee. >> Yeah. >> And And so they eventually bring their assets onchain. Um, you you've said you've worked with some of these guys and and kind of seen their internal programs that they have running. Are are they running back this 2018 2019 permissioned blockchain uh sort of like

a walled garden setup where they're going to have their own L1 call it? they're going to have their own yield products or is there now with the the growth of Ethereum and and Plasma these other chains is there going to be a push to make these more of a public chain and become composable with the rest of the ecosystem? >> Yeah, I think that's going to be largely driven by by regulation uh to be honest. So I had a conversation with a colleague today. Um a lot of these systems will probably be closed at first and that's just a nature of the KYC AML rules that a lot of these banks are subject to. So I think as an industry we could you know and and a lot of us are doing it. Um but we we we could go to the regulators and and discuss you know why the public

blockchains are better than these permission networks in many ways. Um uh but I think we'll see them as closed networks to to begin with which is you know sort of unfortunate. Um we just need to do better as as an ecosystem. >> Just just a matter of time before they bend the knee again. The the last one the last kind of followup that I have for you on this is that it you know there's a lot that we have done genius act there's clarity act there's all these things that have been been passed through but there's still a lot of work to go if you were council for the SEC or you know the US government like what would be some of the regulations that you would try to push through or you would recommend to lawmakers?

>> Yeah actually that's a great question and a big one that we just dealt with. Um, so as you guys know, we just raised $50 million through our public ICO. We have $373 million. Yeah, thank you. We had $373 million of committed funds. Um, all of those purchasers were fully KY3, KYC through Sonar, uh, which is Echko's new new product. Um, and, uh, but one one of the things about that sale, right, is is we still had to comply with rigs and rig D. Um, so I I think there's a lot of US purchasers that are sort of shut out from the investment uh ecosystem because of of regggd. Um, now now the SEC just put out a list today of thing rules they're going to be looking at. I haven't had a chance to dive into

that. I quickly looked at it and didn't see regggd on there. Um, but I that's probably one of the first rules I would look at is, you know, access to to more investments for for all consumers. >> So regggd is just the accredited investor rule. >> It's the accredited investor rule. Yeah. have to have a certain net worth or you know particular license um or you know make a certain amount of money per year to participate um and that's just a bad test right it just it just it just blocks people out from participating in in in cool ecosystems >> so Jacob when you're looking at uh dealing with other other um you know let's say non-crypto banks and uh you know shops in Turkey and consumers in

Buenosarades and all over, right? They're not really operating in the same lens as you know we are in let's just call it like the western world like what matters to them from a a regulatory or legal perspective and like what legal hurdles are you having to go through to get things done in like you know in the global setting uh you know is it is it new challenges for you stuff that you have experience in like just curious like what kind of like hurdles you're having to go through to get things done globally. Great question. Um, I'm spending a lot of my time these days focused on payments laws. Uh, not just in the US, but but globally. Um, you know, Mika, you know, the CASP rules in the EU, um, a lot a lot in South

America. So, I'm I'm learning to navigate that, which has been a really fun and new challenge as general counsel to to plasma. Um, and I think in in these jurisdictions, um, they they don't a lot of these just don't have regulations, right? I mean like some of the they have really early and the young banking systems they have they don't have an SEC uh per se. Um so so for us it's it's really about educating a lot of the the vendors and people we want to work across from about you know why crypto can be a good solution for what they need for their own consumers in their regions.

>> So so is it is it easier then to get stuff done? >> Uh it is but it's it's it's different right? It's it's just a different sort of education. You know what I mean? some of these conversations is like what is a stable coin? Um right of course you know and and Y plasma um which has been a lot of fun. I think oftentimes we we get in the weeds of what we do and it's sometimes it's good to take a step back and and realize there's >> honestly probably seven billion people who who don't know that you know who don't know about crypto. Um and so a lot of this is just you know education on why plasma will be the payments network over the next five years. It's going to be the fastest growing.

>> Yeah. and and >> bullish, >> you know, a big part of this uh I I wanted to ask and and we may be running running short on time here, but uh you guys have a relationship with Tether. Um this is a big part of your strategy. Um you know, maybe there are things you can share, maybe there's things that you can't, but I'm just curious like how that relationship has evolved and generally why it's an important piece to Plasma's strategy, why you guys chose to go with Tether versus another stable coin. H how do you see uh Plasma and Tether working together forward going forward to really champion stable coins across emerging markets?

>> I mean Tether has the best distribution of any asset in the world. Uh 400 million people hold Tether. Uh they use Tether daily. They hold Tether to save money. Um the relationship with them is is very strong. Um they've been a great resource for us both on the business and and policy and legal side. Um, so we'll continue to to, you know, to to work with them and, uh, we have some stuff in the hopper that, you know, obviously I I can't discuss. >> And in the hopper, when mainet, boys and girls, we've got XPL pre-market, Justin Sun or somebody's over here manipulating it. We got crazy crazy hype on this one.

>> Um, Jacob, what is the next what's the next six weeks look like for you guys? I I know you guys are slammed in London in the office just absolutely dialed. Um what's what's the next six weeks look like? >> Yeah. Uh mainet is what we're focused on. We're heads down. Um I think for a lot of companies uh mainet is the crescendo of what they build. It's their product for us. It's the platform for what we're going to build next. Um so we got to get that out which uh you know I'm actually my laptop is sitting on a pack of Celsius right now. Uh which I'll be drinking one of these after this. Um we'll get that out and that's go time, right? That's that's the time we, you know, we we we've got the platform we can build on and you'll start to see

some of the really cool stuff that that, you know, I've been alluding to. >> Four coffees, a pack of Celsius, and a fresh crew neck. >> Yes, sir. I need one. >> That's what you get when you go to the plasma office. >> That's right. Yes, sir. >> Jacob, man, I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining. It's a pleasure to meet you. Look forward to hanging out one day in London or somewhere around in a in a conference learning some more about the legal side of the world. Don't spend much time there, but uh definitely definitely some fun insights and and yeah, just appreciate you bearing with our curiosities. They are constantly evolving.

>> Fun. Yeah, this has been awesome. Uh really great to meet you guys. Uh happy to hop on anytime and and in chat legal. Um but I got to go launch mainet now. >> Good luck, sir. >> Good luck, sir. >> All righty, Jacob. >> Man, trillions on chain, Rob. Trillions are coming on chain. >> Nice money printer. go burr >> trillions on chain. I think this this is just it's an interesting confluence because on one side you have denominator going to zero which obviously means that it's going like denominator's you know they're just money printer go burr.

There's so much more liquidity that's coming into the system. At the same time we're bringing more of that liquidity onchain. So this is just a rapid confluence that could compound somewhat out of control. >> Somewhat out of control. We we got Sun, the co-founder of VETA, who basically made the plasma predeposit campaign happen. So, we're going to get a story time from him on how that went down. We're going to understand what VETA is, what their what their mission is, how they're working with some of the institutional folk. Um, yeah, Rob, another day, another stream.

Let's get some tunes rolling, huh? >> Yeah, I think the team is getting uh Sun ready behind the scenes. Um, you guys heard Jacob talk about Sun who was instrumental in the setup process for Plasma. Uh, they're launching products on top of Plasma. And remember that even though a lot of these L1's and these chains are somewhat theoretical in nature, they will have apps on top of these chains. And what was the strategy that seemed to work in 2021? It was like, well, you go over to the new chain, new chain, good chain, and then you go to the apps on that chain.

>> So, there's a lot of opposition. Well, I mean, Plasma's got a curve, all the good ones coming. >> Yeah, >> there's a lot of red on this ticker bar today, Rob. What's going on? >> I love this ticker bar because this has been my home for prices. >> What's What's going on out there today, Rob? Little little skittish out here. I will say if you're want if you're looking for just a little bit of market commentary I did see that our good friend Niels who has a sneaky token on on live which is live they have TGE but it's not on any centralized exchanges and Yuki the robotics protocol nil has been on and he's been on with Arthur Hayes >> and uh he he's always a great >> dude you know who launched mainet today

one of our port codes >> Union shout out Union >> let's check out what they're at I think they I think They launched around 100 mil. That's kind of let down honestly, but it's kind of a tough day to launch, but it's probably better for the community. This thing could easily run. >> Yeah, it's at 100 120 mil. Launched at 240 down a bit, but steading out. Looks like Looks like it's about 20% float. So, shout out to Union. They had an incredible campaign leading up to mainet. Um, yeah, I mean that that was a successful launch.

>> Another one that launched recently from the port code that we didn't really cover much was camp. >> Check how that thing's doing. >> Quick question on Union. >> It's down a bit today. >> How do we feel about oneletter tickers? >> Is that seven 700 mil? >> Dude, it's pretty bullish. No. Or what do you think? >> I don't know. It's something. I think um you >> obviously it's pretty good for the ticker SEO, right? You just type in one. Yeah, it's just you. you. Who >> just one letter ticker? Well, U is like the like the Uranian. >> Okay, >> you sun up here, guys. Let's get start.

>> Yeah, we're gonna get sun up. I think that Hawaii Wi-Fi might be uh might be getting some waves going. Or maybe it's the music. >> I got the Ethernet plugged in. >> Yeah. Okay. A little choppy there, guys. behind the scenes. Oh, now I I can hear the bass kicking now. Son has got some walk up music. >> Yes, sir. >> Yes, sir, son. >> The base is coming. >> Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, the new token stuff is just it's just not the same anymore. I mean, Plasma is going to come out the gates swinging, though. I think it's trading at like seven bill pre-market right now.

XPL 71 cents, 72 cents. I mean, this is going to be one of the biggest launches that we've seen in a long time. >> That would put it top 100, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, that would put it in the top top like 30. >> It's tough, man. I mean, >> it's real interesting times >> just just to get a sense of where these things go post launch, where the cycle goes from here. Obviously, I mean, I think at the same time, we have, you know, all of the stable coin liquidity entering the system. We have so much of that coming on chain. We have a macroeconomic environment that seems to be shaping up. But at the same time,

there's so many top like you would think the president launching a memecoin would be a top signal more than that was like seven months ago. Isn't that crazy? >> Yeah, that's insane. And now you have influencers launching tokens. These are top signals more than the top last cycle. Katy Perry painted her fingernails with XRP and that ended our entire entire industry. >> All right, we got Sun in the back. Let's get Sun up. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Vaults Talking Veta talking more. We're going to close your walk-off song. It was a banger EDM song. Good to have you on, son. Welcome to the show.

>> Good to be here. Thanks, brother. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, man. So, first time meeting for Rob I believe as well. For me, too. Would love to just get an intro about yourself, how you got started in DeFi, where you spend your time, where you are in the world, what's what's going on over there in Suns. >> Yeah, sure thing. Um, I've been building D5 for four years. I was actually um enrolled for a PhD in machine learning in uh 2021. And I spent all my life doing like academic stuff. And I thought uh before I commit myself to five years of of just kind of the same old publishing papers, why don't I try startups in like a fun industry? Friend of mine was in crypto, so I joined. Uh this was, you know, literally the peak

of like top 2021 top. Um I'm sure you guys remember how crazy stuff was. My like second week on the job, I was actually sent to Lisbon to host a boat party. And you know going from that back to a PhD is basically impossible. >> Um so I stuck around. It was a project called Small A Finance uh Cosmos Project. Not sure if you guys uh >> Zaki >> the uh Zaki is the guy who basically convinced me not to go do my PhD. >> Brought you to the dark side. >> 2021 ETH Lisbon was quite uh quite a whirl.

>> Yeah. Never been the same honestly. Well, uh, our our previous g guest that came on before you was, uh, Jacob, the general counsel at Plasma, and he spoke very highly of you. Uh, we were talking about Plasma the L1 and and the stable coin chains and now VETA, you know, will will be, uh, participating in the ecosystem. So maybe you could just, you know, you gave us an introduction to uh, to Sun yourself. Maybe you could give us an introduction to VETA and uh, the latest happenings. >> Sure. So VETA is the leading vault platform in DeFi. uh our basic mission is to bring DeFi yield to the world.

There's like a couple of core use cases that have emerged in DeFi. Payments is obviously one of them. There's financing. My view is yield is one of those like you know very very core use cases. Yield is a human right is something I say a lot. Uh we're working really closely with uh with plasma on a lot of stuff. I cannot speak uh highly enough of that team. I think a lot of what they've been doing has been validated with literally every single week we see a new, you know, multi-billion dollar company announcing their own kind of payments chain. So, yeah, really excited. They're an example of one of our great partners. But our view is that, you know, if you think about who's going to actually bring millions of users into DeFi, is it going to be DeFi native apps or is it going to

be the places that already have massive distribution and offer financial products and maybe crypto products? Think Fintex, like Robin Hood, Revolute. um stride right and our view is that vault and yield will be a core part of any financial application experience not just crypto apps not just crypto exchanges but any financial application will offer starting with stable coin yields but you know maybe things like Bitcoin yields in the future our goal is to build a platform to support that for everyone >> um so yeah pl plasma is great we're all kind of hunkered down for for the launch that's coming up but uh it's it's honestly really exciting times in the space >> yeah I I think it would be helpful for just understand a bit more practically how how their their pre-eposit campaign

was facilitated through VA. So I understand that they rose they raised like 500 million I think and then a billion and then a billion total and then you guys were able to like seamlessly bring that into a earn yield on those stable coins uh through VA's like trusted security council of moving assets around earning yield through the vaults basically you guys were managing everything for plasma's pre-eposit campaign on the stable coin side maybe you could just tell us that story how how does that happen and loop in some of the technical side like how exactly does VETA operate such that you're able to securely, you know, facilitate these types of of campaigns and and bolts.

>> Yeah. The first thing I'll say is that plasma pre-eposit campaign is the craziest launch I've ever not only been a part of but seen in like my my four years in DeFi. Uh the first cap raise or the first like cap opening was 500 million and it was literally filled within 30 seconds. It was the craziest right? in 30 seconds you see $500 million pour into this smart contract. Um I think there's this is just validation for like the cryp crypto and blockchains as a technology. That ability to form capital that quickly is is almost unheard of and unprecedented.

Uh day two there was another unannounced cap raise and this time it took like 20 minutes for something to raise the next 500 million. So just a massive massive launch. What that means is there's a billion dollars sitting there today from plasma depositors innovative vault that is currently earning yield on a um this is one of the many use cases for vaults right like what plasma wanted was a way to give their community upside in the launch right give them ownership but also like you know we know that airdrops are kind of a dying meta right like if you just throw tokens at someone and hope that they'll stick around what what do people do they obviously sell right there's they have a life to um they're getting free money. It made sense to kind of um you know go take

some of that out. With Plasma, what they've done is there's a cost basis, right? These users and these community members are actually buying in. But not only are they buying in, their capital is actually going to be productive on Plasma mainet on day one, right? So once the chain goes live, the capital gets withdrawn from a on mainet. It gets bridged over to Plasma and deployed into DeFi on Plasma. Um, so not only will Plasma have a billion dollars from us, they have a number of other programs going on. Plasma is going to launch day one with multi-billion dollar stable coin TVL, which is just crazy and it shows you the power of of vaults if you have the right story and the right distribution.

>> So So wait real quick, Rob. So your TVL your four billion in TVL, I think, is what you have in the Twitter bio for Veta. It it's just like plasma basically. >> I mean, >> well, one one out of the four bill is plasma. >> Okay. One out of the four. Okay. Okay. But but there's other multi-billions coming from other parts of the campaign that weren't facilitated by VETA. >> Understood. >> Exactly. >> I I just think it's important to mention like obviously this is this is great for Plasma U because it'll have all this TVL on launch. This is also uh taking one of the metas that was really not a positive one uh where it was uh stakers that were getting paid while they had locked tokens and then they were dumping those

rewards and it was just deflationary pressures on the token. You're actually you're flipping that. You're going to deposit into the chain. These these investors that have locked tokens are going to be getting yield, but it's not going to be in the native token and they're not going to dump it. They're just going to be earning this yield. I think this is a much more positive and sustainable way to perform on a similar meta. >> Absolutely. There's a lot that I think is being done correctly in this setup. One of those things is exactly what you said that capital is not extractive on the chain, right? It is being deployed like everyone wants to borrow stable coins. It's the most useful asset in the world. More people, you know, it's arguably the only asset that there's universal demand for. So, when there's a

billion dollars sitting in lending protocols and it's cheap to borrow, someone will come and borrow, right? It might be other vaults that Veta runs. It might be different liquid funds, um, but someone will be there. And so, this is kind of a win-win for everyone, right? The the depositors now that they're plasma holders and community members and owners, they are incentivized to um, you know, stick around and and watch the train go, and they're earning real yield from their capital being utilized. So I think it's a really clever and um you know a mechanism that has not been tried before at scale but it's one that makes total sense and I think this is going to be a meta moving. So, son, you guys have a ton of TVL, something that a lot of teams want, you know, and um I'm curious, you've got of the of this 4

billion in TVL, um how much of it are you guys able to capitalize on as revenue for yourselves and like how does that work for Veta? Because I I if I'm not mistaken, VETA is pre-token. Whether there will be a token or not is up to you and the team. But but the the it's very clear right now if you look at the best performing uh tokens for the last several uh months. Number one is obviously Hyperlquid in in terms of actual utility. You know, I think pump.fund is actually going to start to go on a run now because it's just there's only two tokens in the whole space that are actually generating millions of dollars of revenue buying back their token and saying we're going to do this consistently. VA is in a is at a is in a perspective or in a position where uh this is you have the

liquidity and you there's got to be some way for you guys to generate revenue take a small percentage off this and turn this into a sustainable flywheel. How does that work right now a and you know what is the plans to create that flywheel? >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think there's, you know, uh, it is, we are in the revenue meta of of DeFi. It's funny that it's even a meta. It's like it this kind of should have been the case forever. But, um, what I'll say is we generate revenue today on the order of millions of dollars. Um, now, if and when there will be a token, I do think there's kind of an art to this. There I don't think there's really a scientific way of deciding how much you buy back,

right? Hyperlquid everyone can look at hyperlquid as an example but that's like you know a very unique case right I don't think anyone can do what hyperlquid has done um but that being said we are definitely still growth focused if you actually look on the ground at what's happening in DeFi today it is absolutely a land grab as we see large enterprises moving on chain right Robin Hood is launching a chain today it's very timely Stripe has announced a chain uh there's only going to be a few protocols that actually have a value prop that is powerful enough to not just get totally vertically integrated and swallowed, right? I mean, an example of this with Tempo's announcement today, they have a a built-in AMM, right? What

infrastructure are they using? Don't ask me, but I think this is bad news for, you know, the dozens of kind of tier 2 AMMs that exist, right? It's like when you own the distribution and you can just copy the open source software that exists and plug it into your chain and retain those margins. It's bad news for everyone, right? So, what we want to do is we are very very focused on making our platform as uh featurerich as possible. We want it to be a no-brainer, right? That if you are offering yield products in through whatever it is you are, you're an exchange, a wallet, a DeFi protocol, a bank, you should build an onvea. And you know, in a world where there's trillions on chain, uh I think revenue comes with that, right? So, we're kind of taking a middle road.

We're still growth focused, but we do actually generate significant revenue already. >> Yeah. Interesting. I mean, man, Rob, we we talked about this, right? Where like it it's kind of it's it'd be a pretty messed up world if we spent all these VC dollars the last 10 years building uh all of this open source technology, all this all everything. We've built the groundwork for everybody and then Stripe, Google, Facebook, and whomever else comes in and like, "Yep, all right. Thanks, guys. We'll just plug this in. all your little tokens that that you guys are playing with right now or Yeah, we'll just Yeah, those are just a little child's play. We're going to come in and and Good Alexander put a tweet about this today is like uh here, let me read it to you guys. I think it's super super

uh pre uh prevalent and you guys should both comment on it. uh which I think um is super super relevant is basically like um um I I I can't find it but he's saying like look you know um certainly every L1 having their own chain for their own stable coins is good for existing coins sarcastically right and so it's just kind of it raises a a question of like what what do we do with the current DeFi environment today knowing that that these players are coming in looking to capitalize with their distribution networks tomorrow.

>> Yeah, Robbie, I'm curious to to hear what you think. >> I mean, I just think that this is like the alt L1 thesis all over again. And like we saw play out in 2017, 2018, and several of those chains are no longer no longer relevant. Stellar Lumens and EOS, like those were going to be the next Ethereum killers. Now it's Tempo and it's it's these other it's ARC. It's these other L1s that are coming in and going to take Ethereum's lunch. I think Ethereum is at at a point now where if you look at the stable coins that are on ETH it I mean maybe Stripe may or tempo maybe ARC from from Circle right are going to rival those numbers especially as trillions come on chain if they don't interact with ETH first but I think ETH

is at the size where we're going to have to have some deeper form of interoperability whether these L1's become L2s or there's a more composable layer in between there's going to be middle middle layers between these L1s that are going to profit immensely. Um these existing infrastructure projects I think whether it's through the token or it's through the business they're going to monetize pretty nicely. And so I actually think that that that tweet um in the short term I think is sarcastic but in the long run yeah I I do think that these L1s are going to have to leverage the existing infrastructure.

I'll just I'll take maybe a philosophical view on this, which is I think DeFi is guaranteed to produce massive amounts of value, right? It's DeFi is creating a ton of value. Um, giving billions of dollars back to users that have been disintermediated from the financial system. Now, how much value can be captured is an open question, right? Like all of the software that we've all built, yes, we should be happy to some extent, right? It's it's going into the hands of millions of users. Now, do we get paid for it? That's kind of the opening question, right? Um, it's it's bittersweet in some sense.

>> Yeah. So, when you look at this enshrined AMM and and I'm looking at Matt Hang's uh uh post here about uh Tempo, when you look at at this enshrined AMM, you know, payments and stable coins, payments first UX, opt-in, privacy, scale, etc. Like do you feel that do you feel that we're that you know VETA would be properly suited to like be a part of that ecosystem like how would you how is like VETA's institutional appeal currently and and perhaps this applies to other DeFi uh you know automated products or AMMs or lending markets like how does what is VA's appeal to tempo and like how would

you guys interact there? Yeah, I'll maybe answer this more generally for like, you know, you're an institutional or enterprise uh customer who has millions of users, tens to hundreds of billions of assets on your platform. Maybe you're building your chain and you're thinking, what sorts of use cases do I want on my chain, right? We're clearly seeing payments as one of the core use cases. I mean, you you got to give Plasma a credit. They were the first payments chain, right? And this is uh yeah, there's a lot to be said about leading versus following, but I think it's it's amazingly validating that we're seeing all of this interest in this category. So, payments is clearly one use case that everyone wants on their chain. Um it's this is also justified by fees, right? If you look at

the um percentage breakdown on where blockchain fees are coming from, a massive amount is coming from like USDT payments. Um now what I think is another core use case that every single chain and every single application will have is yield and onchain yield right so whether that's from lending from staking liquidity provisioning there's new sorts of yield sources take pendall right where you're effectively turning points into real cash and creating a marketplace for people to speculate on growth of new projects. I think this is like a universal need that every single chain will have. Then you do the calculus of okay, I want to offer yield to my users. How do I build this product? Right? To some extent, you have to be able to abstract over all of the

complexity of DeFi, right? You want battle tested infrastructure because the downside of doing something stupid here is not it's a bad product. It's that people lose their money, right? These are the stakes that are at play in DeFi. So Veta is the largest vault provider. We've been doing this for a long time. We've never had a security incident in our vaults. This is the argument for why it makes sense instead of to build it yourself and take massive amounts of execution risk, use the best in the business, right? Use something that's at billion dollar scale. That's basically our sales pitch.

>> Yeah. And are you guys seeing this institutional interest? Like, you know, are are it looks like you might be in New York or San Francisco? >> One of the two. New York. So, I you know, I assume you're in the mix shaking hands having espresso martinis. um you know what does this look like for you guys? Sorry, that's a that's an inside joke. >> It's an inside joke here. It's just if you're in New York, you're in the mix. You're shaking hands. You're you're in the arena sipping espresso martins. You're the best in the business. >> That's right. Uh it's crazy, man. Like if you asked me a year ago, I would never have imagined we're having some of the conversations that we're having today.

>> So good. cal the caliber of institutions and enterprise and companies that are interested in DeFi and moving on chain is truly unbelievable. It's it's immensely motivating. Um so the answer is yes, right? I I really think this is the best time ever to be building in DeFi and over the next year even it's it's coming like imminently. Uh we are going to see millions of users get exposure to DeFi. Hugely validated. >> Yeah, it definitely is. Are you guys going to raise again or are you guys all good there a after the coin fund round? >> Uh we're we're always thinking about it.

We're we're pretty much good but uh you never know, right? We like what we're doing is the ambition for this if you really like look ahead over the next couple years. >> Yeah. >> Uh we want to build VAT like a SAS platform, >> right? It sounds boring. It's not very sexy for a D5 protocol to think like this, but the reality is there were there is going to be demand from tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of applications and customers for vaults. Every single protocol in DeFi wants a vault today. My view is every financial application in the world will want vaults. So that's a big undertaking right to build a platform that can operate at that scale and that level of security. Uh I am imagining it will require more capital than we have today.

like you said, yield is a basic human right and uh it reminds me a lot of that saying I think it was Einstein that was like compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world like walk us through like that the philosophy that you like how did you arrive at that conclusion obviously you've you've taken it as truth you've gone and built the yield protocol like how how did you arrive at the philosophy that that yield is something so fundamental to you know our our being >> yeah I mean you think so there's a product experience that's possible in DeFi today that all of us here totally take for granted which is you have a liquid savings account that pays something like 5% and you keep the keys it's your custody you see where your

money is at all times and it's fully liquid you can withdraw whenever you want weekends after hours it doesn't matter um that experience which again like a lot of people in DeFi take for granted is completely magical to people outside of this sphere Especially when you look in things like developing countries where step one is saving and preserving wealth, right? Which this is arguably like a huge part of the plasma mission and what Tether is doing, right? Allowing people to hold dollars to preserve their wealth. But going beyond that, it's like growing your wealth, right? Actually being able to um acrew value and uh make money in with your savings. I think that is the clear next

logical step. Um, so that's kind of the philosophical point here. It's that the financial systems that exist in the world today have effectively sidelined a ton of people and people don't have access to wealth preservation. They don't have access to uh growing their wealth and so we're focused we're very very focused on the ladder. That's I think that's what gets us up in the morning. >> Talk to us about some some of the uh uh where some of the TVL is right now. Who who's utilizing VETA, which products, which protocols? Um, how and then maybe you can give us some hints as to how you how you take this from 4 billion to 40 billion. Like I'm just curious from your mental perspective. All right, we've got, you know, we're working with X, Y,

and Z. We're doing great. Here's how I think we 10x this thing uh in terms of TVL. >> Yeah, sure thing. Our first partner that we launched with was Etheri. And Ether is another team that can't say enough positively about them. Uh Mike and Ether have been early on a ton of stuff right they they started you guys remember how crazy the restaking wars were and I en layer and they are the only ones in my opinion who've successfully transitioned from like a reststaking project to now they are you know effectively financial services right they have spending saving staking and you know top five D5 protocol so we have over a billion dollars in TVL with etherfi they are were our first partner and I think have

done a lot for the category but you know we At this point we have I think over $1000 million plus um customers. So Lombard is a is a great customer of ours. Mantle Plasma of course yesterday we launched Lido earn. So uh I don't know if you guys saw this they called it the golden boost vault but you go to you know stake. And there's an earn tab and there's a veta sitting there. This is something that I think has been I've I've been hoping for this kind of product for years for especially for someone like Laido who you know they're bit one and two against a for the largest DeFi protocol massive distribution right massive credibility so this isn't the strategy for how we scale this is also

the answer to the question of how we keep growing you find people who have distribution who have users who want to activate that capital who need yield you put these products there and they truly grow like wildfire Okay, I'll tell you a story for, you know, when we learned that this was the right strategy. >> Uh, building Somalia, we grinded for like two and a half years to grow TVL from zero to 100 million. It was like truly, you know, handtoand combat. Every single depositor was a win, right? We had like a Telegram chat. We'd be like, "Oh yes, we got like 100K in deposits. It's huge." Right? Two and a half years.

We launched with Ether Vi with the launch of Veta. They were our first partner. In three weeks, we grew from zero to 400 million in TVL. And it was at that moment that it's clear like we clearly understood that for vaults as the category the B2B approach is the right approach. >> Wow. >> So do you think if you had gone if you had started with a B2B strategy at Somalia you could have you could have grew as fast as you've grown beta? >> This is a great question. I actually think the answer is no. >> Uh I think Somalia it was too early for this strategy. So back then you talk to Lido, you talk to any other protocol, you say put a vault, put a yield product in your front end, they would say absolutely not. It's way too risky,

right? We don't want to take that risk. It's crazy. This is what I think was genius about EtherFi. They were one of the first people >> to put that yield product directly in their front end. So yeah, it wasn't even just a strategic thing. I think the market was very very immature. DeFi was riskier back then, right? We didn't know. I mean there were way more hacks, way less security practices. Um so while I think that strategy is the right one, it's also a question of timing, right? >> Yeah. I mean Somalia was just grinding through the bare market, man. >> Grinding. Just absolutely grinding. >> It was like one of the bare market runners. Like it like the token was actually good. Like people were actually hype on it. It is just so hard to get. I mean yields were so compressed and the

demand for DeFi was so low. Yeah, it's brutal and honestly, you know, super valuable experience. I learned so much at Somoleier. Uh, one thing is Cosmos, right? I think I know you guys are, you know, uh, dabbled in the Cosmos ecosystem now and then. Cosmos is right on so much stuff, right? We're even the stuff we're talking about today, the app chain thesis. Tempo is an app chain, right? Like we're seeing we're seeing these special purpose chains come out. Um, so there's a lot of like intellectual value that that I gained from the Cosmos ecosystem. The challenge is that you know the user base there is really tough right it's very niche it's it's uh very specific a specific culture so I think it's so hard to to navigate on like Kepler and Leap wallet just the transactions the

bridging the IBC is so difficult man >> yeah it's uh you know it's tough >> yeah are you guys expanding do you guys do Salana stuff as well >> we uh we have not formally launched on Salana but we recently finished audits for our Salana extension for our vault architecture. >> Alpha here. >> I'll give you guys a little alpha. I'll tell you a product that you can build on VA that you cannot build anywhere else. >> You can have a stable coin vault that users you deposit on Ethereum and you earn Salana yields and you can deposit on Salana and earn Ethereum yields. So, this is truly just like merging, you know, unifying chains. It's it's chain agnostic. Uh I think and I what I can tell you is there's a lot of

institutions that want both, right? They want both Ethereum and Salana. Yes. And if you're going to win them, you have to be able to support all of the major chains. >> They want this, too. >> Yeah. Seriously. >> Yeah. >> Son, give us a uh give us a quick spiel. Where can we find you guys? How can our community get involved? Where's where's the best vaults? Where's the best yields? Um how can we get involved on chain with VETA and support your guys TVL? >> Yeah, check us out on Twitter at veta_labs. Um our website is veta.te. on that website you can see a list of most of our vaults but uh we're working on it.

We don't have access to all of them through our site. Uh but yeah, just just follow us on Twitter and keep an eye out because we have some pretty big stuff coming in the next uh couple months. >> Beautiful son. Appreciate your time, man. And uh it's been a fun it's it's been a fun chat. We'll have to get you on stream when you guys hit 10 bill. >> Let's do it. Appreciate you guys. >> All right, brother. Be easy, man. >> See you. >> Keep drinking those espresso martinis out there. >> Shaking hands. in the mix. >> In the arena. >> All righty, Rob. >> Best in the biz. >> We going back on some music vibes.

>> Let's do it. Between guests, we're going to integrate that with the stream. I hope our technical production listening behind the scenes. We're on boarding trillions. >> Trillions, my boy. >> I sent some Pump Funcoin. >> He's up. He's up 5%. >> Really? >> He's up. Boys are vibing. >> Yeah, Pump Fun is a good one. I don't think we spent enough time talking about Union. Shout out to those guys. Those guys have been building for a long time and they launched today. They launched Manet. They launched the token. I do think this ties in nicely with one of the trends that we had talked about earlier with these alt L1s. You have stable coin chains launching left and right. I do think interop protocols are poised to do very very well, very very

well because they're essentially going to be in charge of connecting these chains. And like we said, uh like it's a little a little distracting. It is a banger though. >> Um like like we said, in the short term, I do think uh that these L1s are going to be somewhat um they're going to consolidate a lot of capital into these chains and it's going to take away from ETH. It's going to take away from some of the existing L2s. But I think interop protocols are the ones that are going to have to solve this. Eventually, we're going to have to unite these chains, make them composable, and that is a problem that interop protocols are bound

to solve. >> I mean, I just I just see that those interop protocols are so cutthroat. Like, you already see the layer zero wormhole chain link. Like, that is a that is a cutthroat industry. I I find it hard to to to think that there's going to be like a ton of value acrewing. I still think like the app layer lower lower layer stack is the right way to think about it. The middle is just it is just so hard to differentiate and create an edge. Don't shoot me boss. Just saying what I think.

>> I'm trying to I'm trying to rationalize it. >> All right. We got Justin in the background, executive director at Say Foundation. We have not had anybody on from SE in a while. We're gonna we're gonna tune down his intro song. Get him up here. Talk what's going on at Say Institutional New York City. Baby, welcome to the show. Justin Barlo. What's going on, man? >> Hey, how's it going, guys? Hear me right? >> I think we can. Yes, sir. How are you? >> Awesome. Uh, yeah. Thanks for having me.

I'm uh sitting here in uh our New York office um watching some folks go by, so let me know if uh background noise gets too loud, but excited to chat. >> Awesome. Well, welcome to the show. I think it's your first time on. We've had uh a couple guys from today on before, so our audience is familiar, but uh they're not as familiar with you, so maybe you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about uh why you got into crypto, what you like about the space, all that good stuff. >> Yeah. Uh I've had a pretty interesting journey uh in the space. Um so uh I grew up the son of an entrepreneur and founder um in the internet space. Um so always was very interested in internet

companies and software. Started building companies when I was like 12 or 13. Um you know lots of things that I tried out um and really got into crypto um really near the end of of my high school experience. um had realized that as much as I loved tech, I was never going to be a developer. It just wasn't something that that was interesting to me. Uh which of course my dad loved. Uh but uh he uh you know uh had really instilled this this really keen interest in business and and finance into me. Um and you know, as soon as I really stumbled upon crypto, um it just instantly clicked for me, right? I was like, "Hey, I've seen um you know, all of the stuff that, you know, my family and friends

and people around me have been doing in the internet space. Um I'm really interested in the finance and economic space and this is like marrying those two worlds, right? Um and so I've gotten into crypto and and very quickly kind of went down the rabbit hole um was increasingly spending more and more time in the space. Got into crypto Twitter um relatively early and got to see, you know, a number of cycles play out. Um, so joined really the space in 2016 or so, which I guess is at this point uh the better part of a decade, which is crazy to say. Um, was spending more and more time in the space. Um, and eventually got the opportunity to interview at a big bank in Wall Street. Uh, went into the bank thinking that my crypto experience would

just be interesting background for me to go get a trading job. Uh, and what was supposed to be an interview very quickly became them just peppering me with questions about anything and everything you can think about um, in crypto, right? They were like, "How do blockchains work? What happens if this? What happens if that?" Um, and by the end of that uh, day, what was supposed to be like a 30-minute interview ended up being like eight hours of me sitting on the trading desk with a bunch of really senior traders. and they were like, "Hey, it would be great if you know you could come on and maybe do some internship or something like that, but what would be even cooler is if uh we give you some money and you actually go launch a fund um to, you know, trade crypto. Like we all are really

interested in this. We don't even know how to connect a ledger or a treasure at that time was was really the the device of choice for me um to our computers like can you go out and actually start a fund with some of our own personal capital?" Um wasn't sure how serious they were. I was about 18 at the time, but lo and behold, had gone back to my family's place and they had somehow figured out a way to get in touch with my parents and say, "Hey, he should uh take some time off of school and and launch a fund." So, >> no way. >> That was kind of my my my formal entry into uh the space and what went from, you know, a hobby really became a full-time role >> uh pretty quickly. Um, >> dude, so spent a few years doing that.

>> So, what what were some of the biggest wins that you had on the fun side? Yeah, I mean honestly um at that time there was Bitcoin, there was Ethereum and then there was like a whole host of other things that have since largely died. >> What era is this like the 2016 17 18? >> This is now 2017. >> So you were buying Bitcoin in like the thousands and ETH around like under 100 and stuff. >> I wish I wish. Uh, no, I mean it was a small fund, right? I mean, keep in mind was was still 18 at the time, but was able to get it um at one point to, you know, a multi multi-million dollar AUM.

Um, and a lot of it was relatively straightforward, right? It was just like momentum trading things like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It was at the time the equivalent of of what kind of cryptovc has become today, which is like picking early altcoins and and riding the waves there. Um, and a lot of it was just all kind of centered around this sort of information asymmetry that you got from being early to crypto Twitter, right? Like at that time it was it was a super small community. >> Um, and so, you know, ran that for a few years. Then came kind of crypto winter. I was still at that time, you know, whatever, 18, 19. I was like, hey, you know, I'm at home. There's not much going on in the space. I think I can go back to school, complete the degree in case crypto just falls apart entirely,

and in the meantime, keep running this fund. um on the side, right? Uh so that's what I did. I went back to school at uh USC and in LA, had a great experience, met some great people, did some awesome networking and studied economics there and and finance um and and sort of law as well. Um and uh you know did some internships at places in the Trady world and was always just kind of ended up becoming the the crypto guy, right? So worked at uh Millennium Management here in New York, one of the big uh quant hedge funds and the endowment over at USC, my alma mater. And uh no matter what, you know, kind of conversation came up, it was always like, hey, this is cool, but it'd be way cooler if they tokenized this or

if they brought on to blockchain rails or if they used, you know, uh 247 settlement or whatever it may be, right? And so realized that I really needed to to uh dive back, you know, full-time and and really just take that swing and and if the market didn't materialize, um you know, it didn't materialize. And thankfully it did. Um and so joined uh the Thai, which is uh sort of a one of the early crypto research companies um building effectively like a Bloomberg terminal but for crypto. um was one of the sort of early employees over there um and just wrote long form research.

Think like 20, 30, 40page research papers on things like the polygon ecosystem and axi infinity and tokconomics and you name it. Um and uh was was in my time there when I first encountered uh Salana. Um and so got in touch with uh the team over there was originally going to put together a piece on Salana. um ended up being right around the time uh when uh they were uh looking to bring on some more folks and uh ended up making the move over to uh Salana um back in I think it was 2021.

Um did some other stuff in between um you know joining the Thai and and Salana. But I would say that was probably the the biggest move that I had personally made in my career, right? jumping from more of the research trading side over to the operator side um you know through Salana as one of the the earlier folks on that side. Spent about two and a half years over there uh eventually helping to um join and build out ventures which was our investment arm investing in things like Phantom and Magic Eden and Tensor and Stein and and you name it. Um and so you know really had a lot of uh great times over there and learned a ton about building high

throughput ecosystems. Um got the opportunity uh just over a year and a half ago now to jump over to say um at a similar stage candidly to to when I joined the Salana ecosystem and saw a great opportunity to you know kind of run it back build another ecosystem from the early stages uh but this time be able to do it um on the EVM side. M so Salana you guys obviously made a ton of investments you did quite well the ecosystem is thriving do you see similarities between say and salana if so like what are those similarities and like maybe you could compare contrast how is this ecosystem development different or similar from that of Salana?

Yeah, I mean there's a ton of similarities. Um, if you really take a step back and think about the core sort of pitch for say, it really is kind of kind of uh combining the best of Salana and Ethereum. So the performance, right? So the speed, the low fees of Salana um with the tooling and infra and mind share and security of of the EVM. Um and so what that means today is that say is extremely high throughput. It is fully uh EVM compatible um and has you know fees just about as low if not lower than any other chain um on the market. Um and so a lot of similarities and overlap in terms of the types of applications that work well on say uh in terms of the

investors in the ecosystem right um and in terms of the vision for um you know where blockchain tech can go. >> Got it. And I'm curious as far as like the uh what what would you say is like kind of the unique differentiator? Obviously speed, cost um and security are going to be like the blockchain trillemma here. But then you you go and you see okay like you know once you've sort of picked your spot on that trillemma you start to innovate across a few different dimensions. Maybe it's creative financial engineering. You got the ETF now say has the ETF. you got um you know these diff different treasury companies that are now going these DATs and and you know you're getting more and

more creative on the product side the blockchain as well as kind of the more traditional offerings is say playing more in one of these sandboxes than others and generally like what is the direction here and the competitive advantage that say has versus some of the other L1s that are out there. Yeah, I mean look, I think if you think about blockchain products today, um you know, with the exception of a select few, the vast majority are worse um by a fair amount or at least worse by a little bit than their centralized counterpart, right? Um and I don't think that's necessarily a hot take, right? If you go to, you know, uh the average trading firm and you ask them like, hey,

you know, where do you trade mostly? Is it unis swap or is it um dydx or is it something like binance right most of them are going to say binance and a lot of that comes down to things like latency comes down to cost reliability etc. Um what I think say really stands out is that we you know in the ecosystem have truly prioritized end-user experience and have a very sort of pragmatic approach to how um people in the ecosystem build products, right? Um and and the core idea here is like look, if this is um remarkably worse than the competing product in web 2, getting this to be something with actual traction outside of crypto

is going to be really difficult, if not impossible, right? Um and so, you know, a great example that that I, you know, like to call up is like, um a product like uh overheard on say um a lot of people have heard me talk about this product a lot. It's a team that I'm really excited about. Um they are building a anonymous uh social network that's location-based um and it is very similar to um a product that many of us you know grow up grew up using which was Yikyak right is a you know anonymous social app right um got super viral got to I think 200 million downloads raised like 70 million bucks from Sequoia um and had a lot of success but ultimately um really had struggling uh struggles later on around

things retention and moderation, right? Could never figure out how do you kind of keep people engaged past like the initial dopamine rush and how do you uh moderate an app that has tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users um when people are posting all kinds of things, right? And I think that's why you guys laughed there, right? Because I think we all remember what some of those posts look like if you were a user of the app. Um yeah >> and so what's amazing about um say is uh the you know the team behind Overheard has been able to build a product that is very similar to something like Yik in terms of the good parts of the app right the things that people loved about it um but yet have really solved for the issues that plagued um Yitkak um they

found that they can incentivize users have more retention if they have things like microtransactions enabled where people can actually be paid for their engagement on the app right so Hey, I post some awesome piece of content. It's not just people upvoting it and me being excited because I got an upvote, but I can actually get paid for that because people are spending time on it, right? They're looking at the app um and looking at my posts. And what that means is that there's ad revenue to be generated, right? Um similarly for moderation, um there's going to be a point where they're able to have moderation be something that's incentivized through microtransactions as well, right? And all of this is happening on say in USDC. there's no like ponzomics going on. It really is pretty simple. It's hey, you have

something you post, there's ad revenue associated with that post and now you're getting paid out. >> Um, and uh when I was speaking to that founder in in the early days, he said, look, there is really no way we could have built this on any other chain uh because I would either have to pay ton of money, right, for each post, which mean I couldn't actually subsidize the transactions on behalf of the people posting. Um, and thus you need to like deposit Ethereum into the app and it creates all this clunkiness where like the average high schooler is just never going to pick it up, right? Um, or uh I was going to post and it's going to take too long to actually post which means that there's no way to have this be >> on chain, right? And if it was on chain, it would take like five seconds for it

to post. And that doesn't feel like an experience we're all used to in 2025 where you click go and all of a sudden everything's instant, right? Like you post a Tik Tok, you post an Instagram, it goes up in a second, right? it's not taking 10 seconds, 20 seconds, you know, multiple minutes. Um, and so they came over and and built this app, um, you know, on say that's live today on the app store. And the vast majority of the users have no idea it's a crypto app. >> Beautiful. >> They don't even know what crypto is. Um, and that's where I think we get to get to this really exciting spot where crypto can actually reach the billion, you know, billion uh, user number that we've all been talking about for for years in the space, right?

>> Yeah. So, last time we had uh spoke with Jay on the rollup was in January of 2024. So, it had been it's been a while. Um, and you guys were in the middle of transitioning to the EVM compatibility. I think you you guys got a lot of push back for that. Seems like it was the right move. I think you guys have had a lot more TVL come in as a result of that. Tons of new wallets. Um, 60 million plus. I think people get a lot of people put a lot of flack around the active addresses in crypto, but it it it clearly worked. Um and and now you're describing this overheard app. Is that where a lot of these users are coming from? Like apps like this maybe like walk us through where where some of these apps like where these users are

coming from if it's overheard or others. Um you know and how you see the development of say kind of going into being a you know a a top chain based on uh users because I think a lot of people push back on say as just being another L1 that's unnecessary. People are always like, "Oh, why do we need another L1? Just another general purpose chain." Maybe you could answer answer that as to where some of these user coming from, what's unique about it? Um, yeah. >> Yeah. What's amazing is again most of the users today on the chain, um, and I think last time I checked, we had something like 16 million monthly activives, which makes us the most used EVM chain, at least I think it was according to to DAP radar. Uh, most of

these users have no idea they're even using crypto. Um, what that means is you sign up for an app. Um, a lot of them right now are games. So, we've like become a massive gaming chain. Um, at this point like dwarfing all the other sort of established names in the space. Um, you download an app, you sign up for that app with your username and password or your Google account or your Facebook, right? You get aird dropped enough tokens where you can make basically unlimited transactions given how cheap say is to use. um and you can play this game or use this social network like an overheard without really understanding or knowing crypto is part of it at all.

Um, and I think that is really the the powerful thing and the interesting interesting thing about say is like you know crypto Twitter is is very much in echo chamber right like we all know that there's like a very small relative number of folks that are that are really doing kind of all the talking on on crypto Twitter um but the world is so much bigger than that uh and so you know we're seeing a ton of activity in um you know places like Southeast Asia games that had 5 10 million downloads on the Google Play Store on the iOS store integr ated say in the back end and now are giving users rewards in USDC with their native token right um and this has been like a massive shift from what I think you know games and social media

networks and other consumer apps have looked like in the past uh where you needed to understand crypto you needed to have your own crypto to start you needed to have a wallet right all of these things that have been like kind of these friction points um are now like basically erased right and and it's really only possible if the chain is fast enough that the user experience ience isn't degraded by integrating blockchain and the chain is cheap enough that the average user doesn't have to come with their own tokens to pay for gas. Um and so uh yeah I mean seeing massive growth in in these consumer areas um and then you hinted on it before but but DeFi as well right so the next step of that is okay now you have all these users on chain now they might have some money sitting in their wallet

right some say or some USDC or some ETH whatever it may be and eventually they're going to get curious and and want to do other things with it right some of them may just go and bridge offchain but an increasing number of them are going to want to go and lend those tokens maybe they want to borrow against them to take out you to to get USDC in return. Um, you know, maybe they want to trade them or or hedge their position or whatever it may be, right? And so all of that is really flowing into a really strong uh organically growing DeFi ecosystem where we've seen something like a 100x in TVL over the last I think 12 or 13 months. Um, and a lot of that being driven by all these new users coming to the chain and interacting with crypto for the very

first time. I think it's always great when um you can really grow the pie for everyone. It's one thing to just be like, "Hey, we're the hot chain today and now the users from X and Y chain are just rotating over and they'll be gone tomorrow, but really trying to like bring net new users into the space that maybe have never touched crypto before, I think is something that is um really powerful and ultimately is is how we all win." >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean that combined with some of the institutional work that I think the entire space is getting getting its grip of uh say seems to be positioned for that as well. I see that one of the securitized co-founders Jamie Finn joined the SE development foundation as an adviser. Um, and you know, obviously you guys like many

others have had some ETF filings. You know, I'm curious on the ETF side like is the SE ETF going to pass? Like is the Pangu ETF going to pass? Will we see a Dogecoin ETF? Will we see Injective get an ETF? There's a lot of these Canary and 21 Shares ETFs out there. We actually have Eric Chen and uh Canary CEO on tomorrow coming on. Um I'm I'm just curious what is your what's your take on these on these kind of crypto token ETFs? Uh you know, will we see these past? What's been the latest? >> Yeah, I mean look, I don't have any sort of advanced insight there. I think the Canary guys are probably going to have uh much more insight than I do. But I mean, if you just take a look back at at the precedent here, right, there was a

long time where, you know, if I think back to, you know, maybe 2018, 2019 when this really started being something people talk about, um, if you thought of a Bitcoin ETF seemed impossible, right? It was just like, hey, like Bitcoin ETF, like the promised land, right? Um, and then lo and behold, now we're a few years later and, you know, Bitcoin ETFs are a massive piece of the market. you have the biggest players in in traditional finance launching these things, getting involved, recommending it to clients, etc. Um, now you saw a similar effect uh with Ethereum, right?

And now you're seeing all these things around the the DATs as well. Um, so I think, you know, there's really only one direction which this goes. How long it takes to get, you know, some of these old point ETFs over the finish line is is anyone's guess. Um, but I think inevitably if you think in sort of like, you know, longer terms, uh, we're going to see, you know, all of these relevant products, um, you know, find, uh, some way to get approved, whether it's in the US or or as well.

>> Yeah. Well, Justin, man, I appreciate your time and coming on and sharing some of the uh, latest with say. I know you guys have a sick podcast studio out there. Might have to jump in there sometime soon. and uh run it up. Otherwise, we're we we'll be hosting some events in New York City around SmartCon uh in November and would love to see you out there, man. >> Appreciate it. And yeah, would always love to uh to have you guys out here. Thanks for having >> Yeah, man. Cheers and uh keep up the good work, brother. >> All righty, boss. Guys, that is say that is Justin. That is the state of some of the ETFs, the say EVM, um, and some of the work that they're doing over there. Rob, welcome back.

>> I remember when >> What do you remember? >> Our next guest came to a podcast in a cloak. >> He did. It was in New York City. >> It was in New York City. He showed up like a cult leader. This is better to be really funny and silly. >> This is going to be if you're >> I'm gonna ask him what's going on. Like why are why is our investment not pumping? >> Okay. >> You guys are partnering with Uber. What happened to that? >> We're going to grill them. >> If you're a seuite executive at a financial institution, don't watch this next segment.

>> No, I think they're actually pretty well positioned somehow. I'm super bullish on their uh integrations with some of like these big companies. I remember >> we got Burnt Banksy. >> Burnt. >> Burnt on NASDAQ. >> I would love to see Burnt on NASDAQ in a club. >> He's there. I believe >> he was there. He was there. Let's get him up. >> I was I was dumbfounded. And now he's on the rollup TV. Wow. What What a change up. Here we go. Burnt, welcome to the show. You got the new setup. Everything's ready for you. You're here. Welcome. >> We did it. We did it, boys.

>> Burnt, what's happening to my bags? Why are my bags not pumping? I mean, you just got to believe in yourself and really at the end of the day, you know, all dreams are going to come true. >> Okay. All right. That that's all I need to know. >> What do you believe, B? What do you believe in? >> What are your some of your most strongly held beliefs? >> Strongly held beliefs. Oh, geez. Um, I really hate people who are slow walkers. I just think that you got to get out of the way. >> Like a true New Yorker, >> honestly. Yeah. >> On the spot. >> It's good to have you, man. For those who are new to Zion, what you guys are building? Um would love to get a progress update, man. What's the what is the the state of affairs over there?

What are you guys architecting? And uh yeah, man, let's have some fun. >> Things are honestly things are going great. Um I think that we've gone past this chain abraction concept. We've abstracted crypto, come to a conclusion of what is it good for and are in the process of trying to answer that right now. Um keep it short and sweet. Um the 100,000 daily activives contracts with Uber working with Nike and about 130 other brands uh can go into that but probably will at some point. >> Yes.

>> Make crypto usable >> and who thing. >> So tell us what what do you have cooking with some of these larger brands? You're working with Uber, you're working with Nike. Is the nature of the partnership the same throughout all of these brands? And and if so, what is? Otherwise, what are some of the nuances? >> Um I mean some of them are just like technical. I think I can go into Uber, which we've kind of talked about before, but that expands a lot once you had initial success, but Uber very easy. Um, you know, proving everything on the internet. We can get into ZKTLS and how this works, but who cares? Um, proving that top lift riders are top lift riders. And if you are a top lift rider, Uber will pay you to swap over to Uber.

The only way you can do this is with crypto. similar with Nike and Straa targeting uh Strava users in local areas. So, who runs is pretty big information for Nike. >> So, it's about vampire attacking these things. >> Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, we're vampire attacking web 2. Uh, you know, I'm told not to say that because we don't want to be combative, but yeah, that doesn't work too well with me. And what's the value acrruel mechanism like after you help Uber >> call it what whatever you want you know acquire some of Lyft's top rated customers h how does that value acrew back to Zion? Yeah, it really depends. I mean, there's like the pretty basic method which is transactions and every time one of these things are proven or

transaction is sent like Uber sending money on chain uh to any of the the people who are actually doing this stuff um you know that's kind of one of the main ones and then all of that goes back to buying and burning the Zion token. >> Buying and burning the Zion token. Do you have any insight or data as to like how much buy buy and burns you guys have done up? >> That's a great question. I don't know. Uh, and I apologize. I can get that information though. >> No, no, all good. Um, so you guys, uh, put something out that you guys are saying that you're thinking about this project in terms of ages.

>> Yeah. >> Like ages. Uh, like almost like chapters of a book or you know, scenes in a movie. And um, you know, you kind of put as like the age of proofs, then you're going into the age of unicorns. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> you know, what is this about? I think that we've been I mean dude we've been building for four years now and like the way we describe it at Zion right it's like you had the age of burning which was the gorilla marketing tactic of effectively buying a banky burning it um and breaking pretty much all the NFT records then trying to recreate that uh on Salana actually um realizing that the needed to be solved

on a protocol level so needed to abstract all of the crypto away And I think this is probably the last time that we spoke was like that age of abstraction which is like dude we actually can't build products in this industry until all crypto is completely disappeared. Uh and I think now that you're there you then had this like interesting conundrum of if you remove the crypto from everything most of the projects that you look around the value purely exists in the fact that they are a crypto company. Pretty similar with like what you're kind of starting to see with AI where you're just riding off of a tech narrative. So where is that inherent value? And the answer to that is proofs. And so you have this kind of this concept of the age of proofs which is let's prove everything on the

internet. Whether you're a lift rider, whether you have tickets to a concert, money in your bank account, real estate, etc. It doesn't really matter. The real concept of crypto without all the ruined jargon and buzzwords is just proving everything. Um and then we have this kind of concept of the unicorn of unicorns where now we're facilitating projects to build with this and become unicorns themselves which is really exciting. >> Okay. So crypto is in its proving era. I think you know that is something that our audience would generally agree with. What is your proving? We we've also had conversations with provers the different ZKVMs. We've had conversations with uh some of the ZK TLS projects building on IGEN layer. So all across the docket pretty familiar with ZK. What is your

proving stack over at Zion? >> It really really depends. Like um you talk about everything that you're proving like we're not trying to focus on one thing. We're trying to focus on everything. So like reclaim we work with really really closely. Uh you know we're also very close with the opacity team and we do a lot of work in ZKTLS and you know a lot of that really just depends on the exact proofs that you need. Um, and I think that like where we stand is we're pretty agnostic as it relates to the tech stack. But like if you want to prove like proving financial data on chain is a different kind of proof than like proving that you own art and then that's different than proving that you know nonchain data such as u you know Uber status and things like that. So I

think kind of looking at this from like an agnostic point of view, but of course working with Reclaim, working with a bunch of these guys um to just try to bring all this under the umbrella of like we're not really selling the technical complexities. You tell us what we need and um you know that's kind of it. One of the projects we're working on is uh status matching for airlines. So, I'm not going to, you know, we've been kind of talking to a few airlines, but they don't really care how it's actually done. But you want to prove to Delta that you're a JetBlue member with status on JetBlue. That's valuable to them. It doesn't really matter how you do that.

>> Okay. So, a lot of your work is actually going out and not really applicable to like crypto Twitter or crypto users. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, Yeah. But there's like 12 of them. >> Yeah, there are. There literally are. Yeah. And so it it almost Yeah, just kind of piggybacking on that. It sounds like this is like an interop protocol for web two companies that are siloed. Like obviously Uber and Lyft do not currently interact. Their databases, their membership identities are not uh they're not composable with one another.

Same thing with Delta, JetBlue, Door Dash and Uber Eats. All all of these things, right? And so you're choosing to connect these databases. And by bringing both of those those worlds together, you kind of effectively create this this Zion where it's kind of like this uh the shelling point of of all of them. And you're doing that just with the best technology that you have available to you, which is ZK. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you nailed it, Bobby. >> All right. Well, great talk. Fun to have you on.

>> We'll see you next time. Yeah. Great. Great job, guys. That was a lot of fun. Thank you. I'm like 6 minutes in. I'm like, "Wow, we haven't gone completely off the rails." Like what's going on? >> So, what's coming up? So, what's coming up next? You got Delta, JetBlue, like what other what other industry without, you know, you don't want to disclose partnerships before they're live, but what other industries are you are you targeting? >> Um, geez. Uh, I mean, you've you did you guys have NOS on here? I feel like we've definitely talked about NOS. >> Okay. >> They're one of our flagships. Uh, and they are doing marketing which then pretty much allows for, you know, their tentacles to be in everything. There's a lot of really cool ones. A lot of like I'm I'm I'm a big fan of uh I'm a big

fan of having fun and like doing really dumb things as you guys probably know. Um, you know, so I think that there's a lot of fun to be had with dating apps. Um, being able to prove how much money you make is always so much fun. Um, being able to prove really really dumb things is a lot of fun for me. Um but then you know working with like things that you can do with passports in different countries is especially like corrupt countries where you know you want to prove that you're an actual citizen of that country but you don't want to expose who you are. You know there's a lot of aspects like this and that's you know unfortunately or fortunately I guess you kind of nailed it earlier which is like the users of what we build are not really crypto users. It's just kind of like these

really hyper localized markets where if you end up using those applications, you can kind of do that. But for us, it's like we're not building, you know, hyperlquid, but for, you know, JetBlue. >> Yeah. Okay. So, Burn, what's the latest in the community, man? How is the Warriors tribe of Zion guys? They used to absolutely rip me a new one on Twitter, but they haven't been doing that much recently. >> We can we can get back to that, Andy, if you'd want. I I uh >> No, I think you lost your power. I think you lost your community. Yeah. Okay.

>> I think I don't think they respect you anymore man. >> I would like I would like a tweet after this because I had to calm so many people down because especially after the last time and I remember the la I think the last time we had an interview I think you literally stormed off because that's how much I pissed you off which is awesome. Like I'm so happy we're here and we're back. >> Wait, I don't remember this. Could you could you could you >> Yeah, this guy left the group chat. This guy left the group >> Well, I left the group chat totally. I was like >> I'm in the group chat. I saw I saw Bird's evacuation. >> I go I was just like I was just like let me know when you like I because I wanted to come on for so long and you guys are

taking your sweet time and I was like you know what just let me know when you when you when you'll have me on. And then we finally scheduled it and I'm like good to see that you guys came to your senses. >> You stormed you stormed off because Andy stormed off. >> No, no, no. I'm talking Andy. So, I showed up to the interview with like a freaking cape on and I was answering absolute nonsense and Andy was just this is the first time that I met Andy in person and he was so sick of me and I like for fully understand why. >> I was a nightmare. >> It was funny. >> It was funny. >> But I just think that like you're deflecting now like I'm saying that you have lost the cult leadership of your community and you need to bring it back.

>> I I Okay, I will take that. I will. Uh, >> how do you how will you bring it back? I mean, where are the burnt Where are the burnt maxis running around? I'm looking for them, sir. >> I mean, we're doing pretty solid on KO. I mean, I I honestly like I don't know, we've been posting a lot of KO stats. Like, we're pretty solid on the mind share, higher than we've actually ever been. I think like we're consistently two to three times higher in mind share than we were on the day of TGE, which is pretty exciting. I think unfortunately they're not as aggressive, which we could change. I think you know what it is. I also like I think I was in a point last year where I was like screaming to crypto people why crypto sucked and like getting really

aggressive about chain of traction needing to do that. And then I think that like we ended up getting a lot of projects that we didn't really not not I don't want to say we didn't really care about but it's like I don't want to build another DEX. I don't want to build another NFT marketplace. I want to build pilots for hotels and casinos to use and like that's really exciting for me. And so like having an army to just scream at other interop protocols as fun as it actually is really wasn't that beneficial. It was fun though. I had a great time doing it.

>> Yeah. I mean >> that whole like infra narrative cycle has really died down. >> Yeah. >> You know >> it really it really has. But I think I think that comes with like solution too, right? Like the issue with that chain abraction was that the scope of it was really really small but also vague at the same time. Like >> a lot of it was what bridging was plus you also we're in like a weird we're in a weird kind of bare market like an altcoin bare market where you know you you of course have like your top dogs that are getting the attention which will then cycle into altcoins but >> you know it was a real bare market back then where people were actually solving real problems. I think part of that silence comes with them actually being solved. Some of it comes with the money

not flowing to interop and flowing like these big L1s. And then I think um you know I think a lot of that was just scope being >> tacked on to each other. >> So B putting altcoin bare market aside, token price aside, is the business growing? Is revenue up? What's the like higher customers? Is it like would you say the token price is somewhat detached from the business operations? >> Yeah, totally. Um, and I think that's like I mean I I can't, you know, I can't really talk too much about like token price. It's like one of these things like Andy did to answer your question like I have no I've realized I have no effect on token price. Um I can just build the best goddamn company in the world and like actually build a really really solid crypto company.

>> Well, can I push back on that a little bit because we we do have projects out there that are buying back their tokens and maybe they're burning it, maybe they're just doing buyback. So like though I would you know that is real buying pressure. There is a real effect that you know those those revenues or those business operations have on tokens. >> And so when you say you don't have an effect on token price like maybe just maybe the talk doesn't but >> the talk does and that but that's exactly what I mean right the best thing that I could do is build the best company with like incredible revenues. And the thing about like Uber and Nike is they're slow revenue conversions, right? Like we launched in December and you know these things do take a while to kind of convert. Um I agree with you

completely and I think that there's like you know the scope of like what I can do of just like community being at the leading of that. But yeah, no I I agree with you and then I think that we're we're kind of aligned on that of like yeah the only thing that I could do is just build a really great company. >> Yep. too. >> Has the team changed? Has the has the operation changed? I know you guys are in New York. What's the latest on the team side of things? >> Uh, we grew a lot. I mean, we just had bought a bit of the team. We took we had this old CMO of Cardano join us, which has been really exciting. Um, and he's brought in a couple people who used to be Cardano uh guys. I would say that actually hilariously most of our

engineering hires have been ZK integration engineers, Devril, and then a couple a couple of protocol engineers. Um, but that's those are pretty much I mean I think last time it wasn't too different. You guys still talk to Jean on a daily basis and he's an absolute machine. >> Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Um, yeah. Yeah. No, just curious. I mean, it it it just feels like the space is moving so fast. I I I don't know how like I don't know h how you feel about Zion's relevance or Zion's uh state of affairs token product etc. But it it feels like there's so much happening right now. It's I don't know I I can imagine that uh being a founder in this current era is like easily the most difficult time just

because of of of the lack of attention on different uh ideas as well as just all the happenings happening at once. But then also it's it's it's a very good time to be building in the space and being a founder. Um yeah I mean I mean I don't I don't know how your journey has been evolving but I imagine you've been going through kind of es and flows of of different feelings with how the project is evolving but it seems like the steady steady kind of linear growth happening you know is is is at least providing this kind of float for revenues for morale for efforts. And so I, you know, I imagine that if the token price starts to go up then, you know, things feel better. But I'm not sure.

>> I don't know about that. Like maybe, but I think that, you know, I've been doing this for a very very long time. This is not my first rodeo. I've been I've been a DGEN. I've been I guess >> like I have a collar on my shirt now. That's disgusting. >> Um, you know, and I think when you treat it like an actual like adult startup, um, you have different metrics. we start our all hands like imagine if you started your all hands and you're like all right what's the token price at like yeah you would be pretty depressed and then you know I've seen a lot of companies fail because they equate success to token price and then the engineering team is just extremely like demotivated because you could be doing absolutely nothing from an engineering team having that token rip and be like

what am I good for right and so I think being able to have these KPIs which for us is like top tier ecosystem projects and we start every all hands with you what does that onboarding process look like? How many projects we getting into the funnel? You know, and it's not it's we have a grading system which is just, you know, if there's 30 dexes, we're like, please get the hell out of my face. I don't care. >> What are what are some of the top ecosystem projects now? Maybe give them a shout out. Tell tell us what they're all about. >> Uh yeah, I mean is probably I would got to say our flagship. Um we I mean I love these guys and I will always give a chance to talk about it. Um we got God's Legacy which is a really cool game. Uh,

I think that's coming out actually pretty soon. CA, uh, that'll actually be a lot of fun and we're actually going to be doing some community stuff around that. Um, so definitely stay tuned on that. Um, you got cash, which is really interesting. I'm I'm I'm not not going to say that I'm bearish on prediction markets, but I think that they I don't like how they exist in their current setting, which is just like pure like like a horse bet in a way. And so these guys are like socially embedded. It's really exciting kind of to watch. And then we're going to be getting credit card and debit card throughout the chain very very soon. Uh and then the ability to kind of spin off into a debit card.

So being able to socially embed um and then you know being able to socially embed and then pay out on debit card or pay in with credit card and that's my dream and I think that's kind of like I know we talked about the ages thing which I don't know if anyone actually really cares about but I think once we get that in that's like the mo the last thing that we need to do because now there's absolutely no mention of crypto and like to the point earlier of keeping like people motivated like we had a sprint this last weekend because we were building uh we I don't know if I can really talk about this too much, but we were building a um you know a demo for an airline for the for them that reached out effectively. Um and like that keeps people motivated. It's like these are

real names and like real projects that we can work on >> and really really exciting stuff. So it's like >> trying a lot of things probably hope to I hope to fail like I hope we're doing so much that not all of it works and we get a lot more. What what's your BD strategy like in the pipeline that you've put together? Because I think a lot of crypto companies are oftentimes looking to break out of the echo chamber, break out of the bubble. You guys have done that. And sometimes just getting in front of a non-crypto company, be it a big web two, a big airline, big casino, just being the company that is face to face with those guys building those demos. That's a win in and of itself. Obviously, you want to capitalize on that, but what is the BD

strategy that gets you there in the first place? It's going to sound really lame, but it's have something to sell. And like I I I mean that not jokingly where I like we came for a while and once we made crypto disappear, we genuinely had a really hard time defining the value of crypto, especially to web two, which is oh, it's decentralized. You don't have to store your data. It's like none of these things are actual benefits to to web two companies. That's not and then even bringing on the CMO of Cardano, you know, it was like not to say that some of these were a joke, but it's just like put this on chain because marketing like that or like we pay you a lot of money and you pay that's how you end up paying Starbucks $40 million.

>> Or you could go to Starbucks and be like, hey, you know, blank street coffees stealing all your customers. Why don't we just get a way for you to figure out who their top spenders are and then bring them over to Starbucks? It's like great, that's a value. >> If I'm like a web two corporation that is looking to get access to my competitor's sales and data, like how much do I have to pay for that? >> Uh, I mean, it's it's opt in, right? Like it's not we don't just give you a list of saying, you know, here are all of your top top competitors, right? It's, you know, Uber is going like I I give the example of Uber and Lift because that's probably like the most easy direct example, but you need to like want to be paid by Uber

to sign into Lyft to prove them that you're switching over to Uber. And there's other uh you know, I don't want to get too specific on some of the other contracts, but like there's exchanges where this is going to happen. There's a lot of places where this is going to happen. And that's like one angle to it. Um, similar with, let's say, like some of the status airline stuff, which is like if I'm flying Air China pretty regularly, but then I'm moving to London, like I kind of want like British Air status because I'm not flying Air China as much. And, you know, British Airs is going to want that. I'm going to want that. And it ends up being this concept of like proving it so that you can get something, which has flipped a lot of dynamics on its face. And so that

that user flow is that like you guys would have a relationship with British Airways and then how would they know to reach out to this new customer? >> We got I mean you're saying British Airways would reach out >> like how how do you make the connection between this this company that uh like they don't know that the customer exists right? >> Yeah. And so they there needs to be a connection established between that customer and the new company so that they can they can migrate but the company doesn't know they exist. Is it the customer that's reaching out to the company?

>> In a way it's the customer that's reaching out to and so it's like this was actually it's funny like this was an idea before it was effectively reached out to us. This was an idea for an internal team hackathon because our CTO flies a lot and ran into the same situation. And the way that it's actually proven status matching is you need to screenshot. And so he's like, "Yeah, I've, you know, for a friend screenshotted and altered like a bunch of these because that's how it's done." So it's in the like best of a lot of people most, you know, to be able to do this and actually prove it. Plus, you have like GDPR regulations which says you can't store it. But if you want to have all these things now, we can like talk about like this layer above where we can get all of these data points and

have this like verifiable information graph which is very very cool. >> Yeah, I can imagine like Spotify, Apple Music, you know. >> Yeah, we we were we were trying to build except the Spotify API kind of sucks. Um but uh sorry, Spotify for this kind of sucks, but um we wanted to build because we thought this would be brilliant. We thought we wanted to build like who's the number one Taylor Swift fan in the world and you know how many people would like you laugh but like you know how many people would gladly give that information >> they would fight tooth to be at the top of that leaderboard >> and think of how much like pe like Taylor Swift would pay for that or think of like you look at and now bring that concept to freaking anything in the world and that's going to be you know

the next time Andy we're on this we're going to >> is when you're you're going to bring Taylor on. >> I'm going to be like, "Yeah, maybe I'll come on." And Andy, I go, "Maybe." >> Oh boy. >> Someone Someone's going to leave the group chat again. >> It won't It won't Yeah, it'll be me. Just kidding. >> Burn, what is the Where is Zion in six months? >> Uh, dude, Zion in six months is in more web two companies than you've seen in this entire industry. Um, and I think that, you know, we've always had the ethos of being behind the scenes and powering a lot of these things, but you're going to see it's going to be absolutely insane. Um, and I don't want to say Zion's going to be a household

name, but I think you're going to recognize the logo. >> Yeah. Well, Bernett, that's that's the main question that that I wanted to kind of uh close off on. Rob, did you have anything else to just kind of wrap us up here on the on the main points of what's coming up? Maybe just the last question like you know this this feels very different certainly from chain abstraction and maybe very different from the original thesis that you guys pitched to VCs when you were raising capital like is is this what was the thesis when you guys were pitching? Was it this? >> It was you know what it was I will say it really genuinely has been the same. I will say even from the burning of the banky it has been the same which was crypto like I want people to use crypto and so you talk about you know that age

of abstraction things you know etc but it's like we tried building this we thought the issue was on the application level because I wanted people to make NFTs and be able to find an NFT artist anywhere in the world but it was absolutely impossible um and so we built on the protocol level and effectively we're like we want to make this usable And I would say like where we are now, it's not necessarily different. It's just kind of an evolution, which is we want to make crypto usable, but we don't want to just like jam crypto in people's faces. We want to give them benefits, not rely on the technology that underlies it because that's just not sustainable, right? Like, and you see this through every tech rise and fall.

You're going to get more money coming into crypto because it's crypto. Same thing happened with AI. then you're going to realize very very quickly that that narrative dries up and the benefits are kind of wiped away. But I've always believed in crypto ever since I started and I truly believe in what I'm building and I think the burnt community who will be harassing Andy after this I must say genuinely believe in what we're building. Um and I think that it's just a continuation and an extension of that original vision but haven't really diverged at any point.

It's an evolution pure infrastructure guy. Burnt Banksy >> nailed it. >> And he's on mute. He's already being harassed by the burnt. >> I look forward to being harassed. Get me get me harassed. >> All right. >> I'm ready. >> You hear that everywhere? I'm already It's funny like I'm already I'm have my my Telegram open for the inner syndicate and I have like five people who are like, "The rollup has blocked you." I'm like, "Maybe that's why it's quiet, Andy." >> Wow, that's tough. Ouch. No, you know, yeah, listen, I know we I know we joke, but I really appreciate you guys. Like, I really love what you guys are doing. I've seen you guys coming from like not that much to where you are today. You guys got one of the best shows in the game. You guys are

absolutely crushing it. And like, I appreciate you for having me on. I know I can be a nightmare a lot of the times, but really happy to see what you guys have done. It really makes me so freaking happy. >> Hey, man. Thanks, bro. >> Hell yeah. >> You keep it up. Next time I see you, you'll be in a cape. All right. >> Absolutely. I'll do it just for you. >> All righty, boss. See you soon. >> Bye, guys. >> All righty. >> Vibes. Interesting segment for sure. That's burnt. >> That's burnt for you. >> Get some tunes back rolling. Let's wrap us up.

>> Oh yeah. What was your take today? Any unique insights? [Music] >> H. I mean, >> that was a chill one. >> Just this tempo stuff is crazy. The L1's, the stable chains. People on Twitter are going back and forth right now about Ethereum. They don't want to use uh these companies don't want to use Ethereum and people are pissed about it. >> Jacob didn't talk a whole lot about Tempo. Jacob from Plasma, you know, it was like, >> well, because they're just building a competitor, >> of course, but it'd be I'm just, you know, it's always interesting to hear competitors talk about one another.

Competition's fierce. I mean, look, I think the Ethereum people are really upset about these L1s. >> I mean, that's how you know that there's the competition's real >> cuz like if they if they weren't worried about these L1 siphoning off TVL and transaction activity, like they wouldn't really care. >> I mean, look, I think a lot of the I think Tempo kind of copied Plasma's docks or something as well. >> That's what Jacob was saying. Yeah, >> I think somebody tweeted it as today. I was like, hm, that looks really familiar.

>> What's your take on Paradigm, >> dude? There's some sharks, aren't they? >> I uh I was staying at a hotel in California for SBC and they had their team dinner downstairs. I was thinking about thinking about just popping by. >> Yeah, there's some sharks, man. I mean, they're This is basically their chain. I mean, Stripe is in on it, but it's it's their chain. >> They've got quite the partner list. >> Anthropic >> Open AAI, man. I'm so I'm bullish. Plasma. I think that they're going to do well. That's going to be a huge launch. It's going to be the biggest launch of the year.

>> I think so, too. I think it's just gonna be like, you know, I think Plasma is going to be even more stable coin focused than the Stripe chain. I think Stripe is going to end up like like we heard they had uh an entr enshrined decks. There's going to be like more uh more just apps, a more general purpose approach as far as I see it on Tempo. >> Yeah, we'll see, man. We'll see you tomorrow. Another banger stream, guys. Thanks for coming out. See you tomorrow, Friday. Last one of the week. And uh >> finish strong. Don't be sidelined for September.

>> Andy >> soon. >> Cheers, guys.