The Rollup TV: Thursday, May 29th 🦣

Transcript

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Welcome back to the rollup TV. What's up, Rob? It's good to see you, man. This uh I'm excited for this one. I think we're gonna Let's have some fun here today. Yeah, I just got back from Stablecom this morning. I was in New York. Met like three private bank people. Um one in Texas, one from California, and another one. All three of them are launching stable coins. One has already launched stable coins on Ethereum. um they they haven't been able to get the proper regulation to actually start using in the wild yet. The other one said that they have a way to actually um go around the rule where you can't pass back uh stable coins or

stable coin yield to users. Um I bet a guy from American Express Ventures uh he is looking to invest in crossborder infrastructure. There's a ton of people from Latin America and Africa versus where the demand from stable for stable coins coming from. So anyway, that those are the key takeways from stable con. I was only there for like three hours. Saw a couple good talks. Uh Fireblocks had a big presence there. Mesh Connect had a big presence there. Um so yeah, that was that was my morning. I think I saw that.

Was it Mastercard or Discover was one of the major conference conference sponsors of stable? Yeah, Mastercard was this was their first first conference. Yeah. And that that is interesting because stable coins are eating directly into credit card processing fees. And so did you get the sense that these people at Mastercard and credit card companies are taking a back at the rise of stable coins? Well, the the the the thing is the banker told me that like like so he works for a private bank and he was like, "Well, uh I'm here because I need to figure out what's going on or else my business is going to be uh like, you know, it could get totally taken over.

They do a lot of crossber. They have a lot of foreign nationals as their uh clients." And he was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Well, or you could just, you know, get in front of it and uh your business could grow." And he was like, "Yeah, that's what do right." So, yeah. I mean that was or die that was stable con I am also excited about today's guests we have Tom from Bears Capital just recently joined exari analyst I have some good questions from from his experience in the Middle East we've got um David from Arya IP rwas see what's going on there in the RWA landscape with regards to IP we also have red guy from Megath we We have flood hyperlquid

gigabol hypees down like 33 now. See what he has to say about that. And we have Rip the Ethereum maxi. The Ethereum believer RIP from Rise Chain. So excited about that one as well. It's pretty broad swath of guests today. We have a Hyperlid Maxi, an ETH Maxi, an ETH L2 representative, and an IP Maxi. and we have uh people representing VCs. Yeah. So, I'm curious. Do you have any expectations for today?

Any through lines that you think we're gonna we're going to trace through or generally what's your anticipation going into today's guest? Um I'm more kind of thinking about our usual Bitcoin price bet. Um I see BTC at 106670. Um I I'm feeling again pretty bullish. Um, so I'm gonna say that we go higher by the end of the show. I I think we go higher as well, but I'm curious as to why we're not reacting more positively to the tariff pause.

Yeah, I think the judge actually just turned that around. The judge gave Trump a 14-day um uh time frame to appeal the the tariff ban, and it's more likely that tariffs will now go into effect. And so it's really business as usual when it comes to tariffs. Yeah. Yep. All right, let's jump into the first topic, then we'll get to the guests. We got a quite a few fun things to go over. Um, first one is classic Elon Musk and Telegram. Uh, will Elon pay 300 mil to Telegram for this Grock deal? Um Elon Musk created a overnight hit the mean denying the signing Durov claims in

principle. Not sure if this is bullish on distribution or desperate for users. Um so Telegram will allegedly receive if the sale goes through $300 million in cash and equity from XAI plus 50% of revenue from XAI subscriptions via sold via Telegram. Uh additionally, Telegram has made some other moves recently. They were set to raise $ 1.5 billion dollars in bond uh to issue as soon as Wednesday. That was yesterday. Wall Street uh journal reported that this was going to be uh included or Black Rockck was going to be included Mubadala in Sido. Um they're set to price these five-year bonds at 9% yield. Um and they want them to use this price to buy back

remaining debt from bonds issued in 2021 which are set to mature next March. They also previously bought back 400 million of those bonds with cash and they're looking at over $700 million in profit on a revenue of two billion for 2025. Um so Rob, what's your take? Is this bullish for distribution for XAI and GRO from Musk's perspective or is Musk desperate for users as OpenAI and his enemies Sam Alman and others um come to the forefront here? Look, Elon replied to the announcement of this partnership saying that no deal has been signed.

Yeah, that's the meme. No deal has been signed. I think I whether this deal goes through or not, I I think there's a couple versions of the tweet that Paval used to announce this partnership. First he said that there was a deal in place and Grock AI was coming to Telegram. Then he edited that and said this summer telegram will gain access to the best AI technology on the market, meaning Grock. And and then Elon still commented and said no deal has been signed. So I I think you know whether this deal goes through or not is is still a question mark but I do think that this is bullish for Telegram to have an integrated AI experience. I I think you know out of

all of the options that Telegram had to integrate they could have went and integrated Gemini or really any other model and they chose to use one of the more open-source models out there meaning you know in in Grock. And so I think, you know, there's a brand alignment here that is true to Telegram's nature. Um, is XAI and Grock the best model out there? I think still remains to be seen. But having an I think the most right-wing model, that's for sure. Yeah. And Gork is another is another character there. Dude, the trenches are so dead. Elon made Gork is it's or his profile picture and the thing only pumped to like 80 million or something or 60 million, I think. Yeah.

So Salana is gonna have to integrate Stablecon directly into its payment rails in order to get some more product market fit because you're right, trenches do seem to be dead. I think ultimately this is bullish for Telegram. I I'm Yeah, I just don't think that I want AI messaging. Like I don't I don't think that I want like Telegram's great not because you like you have this perceived privacy, but like you know that it's not like an Apple thing. It's not like a it's not like a Google thing. It's not right. So bringing in more like bringing in AI to like track your messages seems like it's kind of like the antithesis of Telegram. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that having AI in your messages is an invasion of privacy.

Like I don't think this would ever happen on Signal per se or at least not for a while. No man, even even Signal, you know, struggles to keep their their privacy enabled. Like there's Pegasus that, you know, theoretically is able to see and read all signal messages. So I think at this point it's it's essentially the case that we don't have a true private messaging service. Anything that's cloud-based and and says they're encrypted is only encrypted up to a certain extent. So ultimately, yeah, should we, you know, give gro or any other AI model permission to utilize all of our our messaging data to train its models? I think again we're going to have to have maybe this is where

verifiability comes into AI models and and having some sort of data providence but I do think for user experience this is bullish. This is the idea just like Grock is integrated into Twitter you know we can have a little button we have a little command and we can say hey gro this message and we can have a reply to it and I think that is bullish for user experience. I think the way that it's integrated is going to improve Telegram. But again, will this leak all of our data, you know, is Grot going to be leveraging our messaging to improve its own model? Yeah. I'm I'm reluctant to give up, you know, that that element of privacy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the cool thing about Gro is that it's trained so

well on Twitter. And I remember I remember Elon was trying to fight for some of the kind of to have a patent on the uh training data of Twitter like to have like this kind of exclusive exclusive uh ownership of that for the model. Um but we'll see how that plays out. Um switching topics, FTX is going to distribute $5 billion in stable coins or cash equivalents this this week. Um, basically the they're going to start to distribute this on May 30th tomorrow. Uh, people are saying it's very bullish.

Um, I don't know what your take is on this. How much of this liquidity goes back into the ecosystem and the psychology of trust like after you lose so much of your capital. Um, the a lot of these repayments will be made via Bitco and Kraken. Um and most creditors will be will receive a significant portion some up to 120% of their original claims based on the asset values. Now I do remember this being like at the bottom when it was like BTC was like 16k. Um but as of January 23 there's5 billion dollars of assets that had been recovered. They went through this bankruptcy court. um you know the the the chapter 11 and um still the

total assets missing was around 8 billion. Of course FTX had the lawsuit on November 15th, 2022 and it's forever shaped the word crypto and the perception unfortunately in a negative way. Um that being said though, what's your take on on on this? Is this money going to find its way back into the market? Um and if so, where's it going? This is extremely bullish. Like absolutely. I mean, take a look at the sheer volume here. Five billion was recovered. Maybe there was an $8 billion shortfall. Three billion of that could have been SPF's personal net worth or Alama's, you know, supposed holdings.

There's billions of dollars being distributed in cash. These are degenerates that had holdings on centralized exchanges and felt the FOMO of the latest rally. They didn't lose money. they're in most cases getting back more than what they had put in in cash. Yes, there was, you know, Bitcoin that they were holding. They feel like they missed out, but in in no short sight did they lose money. And so I think if we're looking at, you know, Sailor and some of these corporate treasury strategies, yeah, you know, Luben's going to go and they're going to buy $425 million of ETH. Well, that's like 20% of the distributions that are happening on FTX. I think even if you get 20% of reinvestment from the cash that is being distributed by the FTX

estate, it's still just as bullish as some of these corporate treasury strategies that are being deployed on Bitcoin and on ETH. And I think most likely these cash dispersements are going to be made in altcoins, Bitcoin, as well as some of these other coins down the list. Whether these go into other centralized exchanges or they get put into DeFi, I think still remains to be seen. Most of this is still going to be on centralized exchanges. Bitcoin, ETH, Ripple, Solana. These I think are the tokens that stand to benefit the most. And absolutely this is a bullish signal. And and you know one one more thing here. You just say Ripple. Well, I mean that's that's an example of the

corporate treasury strategy, but I think Bitcoin, Ethan, Solana are examples. Bullish on Ripple now. Look, you said didn't did you not send me $121 million corporate treasury strategy into Ripple? I think that is on the dollar compared to these dispersements. I honestly think less of this capital is going to go into the market than we think. Like I think people are are pretty are going to be pretty like turned off by crypto unfortunately but because they have their money locked up for a while. What's the rationale? Yeah. I mean, but I guess if they wrote it off then it's like you know it's like house money now.

But, you know, I just they look at where where they lost it when BTC was at 15K. They look at BTC at 106. It just I think it's going to feel hard to get in. Maybe they maybe they buy. That's why they go into altcoins. Yeah. I mean, that that kind of makes sense. So, I mean, look, I think either way, it's not going to be additional sell pressure. I mean, they're distributing cash. All the sell pressure already happened, right? when when FTX declared bankruptcy, they had to take the customer holdings and sell those off in order to get some net asset value of the estate. Now they're distributing cash.

This is but I just don't think it's not like we're going to get like a massive freaking green candle on the 30th just because FTX gave some un like you know gave people some cash. So but maybe over the next week we see some sort of positive price action from the movements of this. I think when you when you look at the the leverage treasury strategies, those take time to play out. You know, people are making the announcements now. They're going and raising money on the debt and then they're going to take that investment and they're going to, you know, put it into the market over time. Those take time to play out. Do we know how much of the 5 to 8 billion is being distributed on the 30th versus coming out over the next week? I'm sure it's out there. I

didn't have it in my notes. Um, but I would imagine it's not going to take very long. Like if they're announcing, I think it's starting on the 30th. So maybe different exchanges have some different unlock schedules, but I think for the most part, if you just look at the numbers here, 5 billion is more than any micro strategy investment into Bitcoin in one shot. Maybe their commulative is five billion or more at this point. It probably is way more. Yeah. If you look at just in one in one shot, this is is orders of magnitude greater than some of the OTC deals that we see taking place on most liquid coins.

Yeah. All right. Well, let's have a good day tomorrow. We'll see how how that pans out. By the way, little teaser. Next week, we're doing three rollup TVs, so get ready. We're going to scale this thing up. Rob's Rob's getting after it. Guys locked in. Um, you ready for three next week, Ro? I'm excited, man. I mean, shout out to our boys at TVPN. You know, I think they had a crypto day that, you know, was an absolute banger. Shout out to those guys. And and we're we're following suit in in capitalizing on just the absolute opportunity here. I think ultimately you will see a 247 cryptonative broadcast channel. That is the new CNBC cryptonative broadcast channel. Rollup TV will do it here

first. Our production manager shaking his head behind the scenes because he he knows what 247 means, but it'll take some time to get there. I I really do think that is the opportunity here. All right, let's talk Clark AI agent. Um, first agent to raise 60 million or first enterprise app agent. Um, CEO says, "Our customers will save $5 million on average. Book a demo. we'll save you $5 million too. We're so confident that if we can't, we'll donate 5K to a charity of your choice. Um question is like is this the future of work where AI agents are replacing entire entire internal teams? Um unlike consumer coding tools like lovable,

replet, bolt, Clark actually builds production ready internal enterprise apps which is crazy. Uh it's a multi- aent architecture emulating designer, IT admin engineer security operations. Wow. This is like this is this is this is crazy. Uh it's already used by Instacart, Carrier, Cvent. Um and yeah, it's uh it's here. I mean, this is the whole like there will be a single entrepreneur with a billion dollar company type of vibe, a solo company. Yeah. So Brett is coming on the show later today. He had a great diagram and tweet that talked about the

efficiency per employee in terms of how much in earnings per employee some of these companies are able to generate. And you see Hyperlquid is absolutely at the top of that list. And then you see other companies like Telegram that are, you know, right alongside of it. And I think, you know, you're seeing billions of dollars in revenue generated from teams that are less than 50 people, more like 30 people, but in reality, they have 10,000 AI employees, right? So, I think we're going to start to measure the effectiveness of AI like manpower, similar to when, you know, Henry Ford and and we started to see uh the automobile start to take place. You know that that's where they coined the term horsepower because they had to put it in

terms that people understood. You know, you have this horse and carriage, right? Maybe there's two horses, right? Pulling your carriage. They can go so far. You know, this is horse and carriage has maybe one or two horsepower. We're going to deliver you 40, 50, 100, 200 horsepower. Similarly, I think we're going to see a su a metric here start to emerge of manpower. And I think some of these AI uh services are at the point where they're 10,000 uh in in manpower. Ultimately, these are going to be uh sectorbased businesses solutions because you know last week we talked about CLA and Microsoft. Microsoft laid off about 3% of their employee base equated to about 6,000 employees. We saw CLA make a

similar move but CLA actually replaced all of their uh you know and they rehired them. They laid off, replaced them with AI, and then lost the human touch, and that was the basis for rehiring, you know, a lot of those employees. Microsoft hasn't rehired these people yet. I do think as AI develops, we're going to start to see layoffs. Maybe it's 10 to 20%, you know, unemployment, and that has significant impacts on the economy. Ultimately, this is the golden era of entrepreneurship because of the access to uh employees and technology and software at our finger fingertips. Yeah. Well, this is kind of like what what I thought we were we were promised with like agents,

right? Like currently the LLM are just kind of like these natural language models, but you know what when I thought about building this this company around uh using agents like it's now up to the people who can use these types of tools as they're getting better to, you know, put these things together. So um look, I'm excited to keep kind of like learning how to utilize these things. Um and I I mean maybe we ought to try this Clark uh AI tool and see what's up. Though on a different note, there has been a new trend on crypto twitter that has taken over which is the rise of loudio loud io. Um basically this has taken over. The question to ask here is uh you know is this the is attention all

that matters like like can attention seed an entire protocol? So, it's kind of like this three- three model here between yappers, people on Twitter talking and then also um you know people that are uh kind of actually going out and participating in the protocol. If we can just scroll down on on the screen a bit, you can kind of see some of the mechanics here about kind of how this works. Um, and you know, basically our our our understanding is that the initial attention offering was announced as of for I believe was for either tomorrow or Saturday. Um, where you can actually you basically need to be top a thousand to get some sort of like

special access to be able to contribute to a pre-sale. They're raising this pre-sale in two different categories based on your Kaido rank and based on your uh loud io leaderboard rank. Um it's like a $150,000 market cap when it starts. Um, and basically the the idea here is like we're testing this model where if you can get if you can pay creators every every week using this mechanism um then attention can can sustain an economic flywheel just based off attention and no other kind of core property. So of course this is powered by Kaido. Kaido's been crushing it. They actually just launched their NFT collection today as

well. Yappy baras that's gotten a lot of good recognition on Twitter. If you're on Twitter, I'm sure you've seen this. Um, we've been talking to we'll talk to Brad about this more in depth, but Rob, may maybe more broadly, what is your take on this kind of attention markets and mind share markets? Um, you know, you you have an absolutely diehard personal brand that I know you just love contributing to, right? Please tell us about your thesis here. My my first question when I saw this was where does the yield come from? Like, you know, it's one thing to launch a token, you have a bunch of emissions, and then you just distribute those emissions and you you farm the airdrop. You get the air

drop, you dump it, tooken goes to zero, it's not worth anything. Yeah. There's like fees there's fees in the in the mechanism. So now the idea is that you're not distributing emissions, right? You could even do this with a fixed supply because you're distributing soul Salana tokens as uh the mechanism for incentivizing attention and yapping. So that answers the question of where does the yield come from and I think they've consolidated the the user base to certain extent where you know failed airdrop campaigns in the past have been unsuccessful because they spread themselves too thin. There's, you know, there's something about getting a dollar that you just you you know, doesn't

really work. But if you have a chance to win $10,000 and maybe you have a 0.1% chance, your expected return is still just $1, but you have the chance to make it big. And I think that's what's happening here because they've consolidated the reward pool to 25 people and they make it so that you're getting something valuable. And so you have all of these people that are competing to yap for one of the top 25 spots. They're doing this by yapping about loud. I think you could apply this primitive to any token really. It doesn't have to be about loud, but in this case, you apply it to loud. You have all of these people yapping about loud. They're going to, you know, incentivize participation in the network, contribute trading fees, and then redistribute those trading fees to

the end user. This is essentially a value acrruel mechanism for the people that are participate participating in the community but it directly links the community to the product which is the token. If you compare this to you know other meme coins like take SPX 500 right which is you know doing really really well these days but there is sort of this ambiguous indirect value acrruel mechanism to hey you expand mine share for this thing and you expect people to buy the token in this case it is a direct onetoone correlation because people trade the token and you get the fees from people trading the token I think this is extremely interesting I think loud is going to do extremely

Well, because they're the first people to think about this and I think they're we're going to see multiple other projects apply the same mechanism to their token. Yep. I think that that's a really good comparison where it's like okay it's not in in normal communities it's just you know you're excited about it because you want to promote it etc. But in this is like the direct correlation between the level of promotion and the uh you know the feedback that you get from the mechanism which is just uh the fees or the rewards. And we'll we'll talk to Brett about this quite a bit more. Um you know and I'm curious to see how this kind of launch goes. Um but we had another interesting announcement today or this

past week. Uh I think it was either yeah I think it was yesterday we had um the return of ICOs on plasma or on echko. So echko launched a their project called sonar. Um and basically what what's going on on sonar is this is plasma's going to be the first ever public sale connected through sonar echko's new public sale infrastructure. Basically what what's what's happening here is um Echko is this platform where you can create groups and you can then invest in early stage uh projects still kind of gated still kind of like in the venture area. They've released this product called Sonar which has much more

flexibility and plasma is going to be the first company launching on it. Uh they're going to have 10% of their token supply sold at $500 million valuation which is their same valuation as the last equity round. Disclosure, Robbie and I invested through our fund um at an earlier round uh for Plasma. Um so as we talk about it, Kobe's ICO platform is kind of bullish, kind of bearish. I'm not sure. Rob, curious your take. Um basically anybody can can participate. US people get cucked again with a 12-month vest or 12-month cliff uh because of the rules and KYC. Um but yeah, that's that's the platform in a

nutshell. Um Sonar is basically bringing out this this way to uh facilitate better token sales. So I think this is in the right direction and I think it's something to be excited about. Um, I think people may think that that Plasma's valuation is a bit high on this round, but what they don't what they don't understand for this specifically is actually you're actually just depositing stable coins and then kind of like pre-farming it almost rather than like doing a venture bet. Um, so that's the plasma situation, but I think what's more pressing is the conversation around Ekko's new platform. be before I tell you my take on uh ICOs and and Echo and

Sonar, maybe you could tell people what Plasma is. Maybe they're interested in this round and participating in the in the ICO. Maybe tell people what plasma is uh and then we'll we'll get into the ICO business. Yeah, I mean FSMA is a purpose-built chain for Tether effectively uh for stable coins. So, uh I met with your team in New York studio the last couple days. They're working on a lot of crossber payment infrastructure for a lot of uh global companies where tether is very active already. Um so they do like uh a lot of kind of last mile work in terms of um settlement liquidity on and off ramp uh and getting US into people's hands globally. The

chain isn't launched yet. The token is not launched yet. It's going to all kind of come together on mainet. But effectively it's it's a payments focused chain that is meant for what I would say a lot of the world who doesn't have access to the US dollar today. And why do they need a chain? Tether is mostly on Ethereum and Tron right now. Um those chains are both not exactly purpose-built technically speaking for uh you know stable coins and payments. So that's kind of where Plasma is trying to fit in. Yeah. And one more note here technically is that plasma has USDT as the gas token. So you essentially have gas abstraction. It it's really a payment processing chain for tether and gas fees are taken right out of the

executing balance. So I I think you know this is something that is going to continue to be important for stable coin infrastructure. It's no surprise that Tether is building out their own chain. You also see RWA platforms building out their own chain like Converge from Athena and Securitize. Uh Fraal is building out their own chain and they're doing so to support some of the uh big bank infrastructure for uh deploying their own stable coins. You mentioned Stablecon was this morning. A lot of these banks and local issuers are looking at launching their own stable coins. They're going to be looking for infrastructure to process a lot of these stable coin transactions. And I think they're going to look at existing infrastructure and they're really not

going to build it out themselves. Even the big banks JP Morgan and City I think are looking at someone like a FRA to help with their infrastructure. So really no surprise that Tether is going into the chain world. I think ICOs are especially interesting because they're democratizing investing. I think, you know, for too long we've had accredited investor rules and the SEC has been out to try to protect us from our own investment principles and beliefs. And I think this has been a long-standing philosophy with in terms of my libertarianism is why is the government responsible for protecting us when, you know, a a simple internet search uh is reasonable for us to become

well apprised of the information here and make our own educated decisions. So, I I'm really excited about the continued financialization of things around us and the lower barrier of entry here to democratize uh investing. I think ultimately you can the old adage is right you can buy lottery tickets, you can go to casino and you can blow all the money in your pocket. Why isn't is is venture invest investing any more risky such that the SEC needs to protect us from it? I think it's just more about like accreditation as far as getting basically scammed by people that don't have good intentions is the reasoning. So I yeah I I mean maybe there is some sort of uh accreditation

that should take place on the projects side, right? But on the investment side, you know, as long as there's a project that passes some reputational test, then it shouldn't it be open to everyone? And maybe we need a regulatory body to to pass that, you know, from the business uh side of things. But I I just stand by the the, you know, idea that look, if if there's a house edge and I'm 48% likely, you know, to win versus 52% likely to lose all my money, you know, sports gambling at at least this is something where I can do my own research and it's more of a skill game. It's not pure gambling. I can control my destiny to a certain extent and I I have a better chance at capitalizing on some edge

where I find an opportunity more so than going to a casino or lottery tickets or sports gambling. Yeah. Yeah. No, I definitely hear you on that. Um all right, I think we have some some pretty good guests coming up. Um maybe I have time for one more topic on the macro side. Um take here is on Trump kind of rolling the tariffs um and trying to do a tariff ban uh or sorry the the Congress Congress trying to do a tariff ban and Trump being like no. So positive side we have the US consumer confidence rose to 98 exceeding expectations best number since February. Um US and Europe is trying to reach a deal. There's quite a lot of negatives though. Um the median

age of home buyers is way up 56 up from 31 in uh 1981. Um and overall there's just like a weak consumer perceptions. So yeah, Rob, I mean I would like to get your take on the tariff kind of cancelellization um and what your your thoughts there are. Kind of like this back and forth. Yeah, I think ultimately um this is going to come down to what happens in the midterms because for the tariff plan to work it it has to extend at least until the midterms it it for it to really take effect it it ought to

take place for multiple administrations. And I can sort of lay out my understanding of what the tariff plan is. And it's effectively to eliminate the income tax for people that are making less than $150,000 a year and instead to finance the government using tariffs rather than income taxes. I didn't know this, but I I heard about it on an all-in podcast uh with Howard Lutnik that this was originally the way the US government was financed from I believe it was like the 1880s to the 1930s. And then we started to implement an income tax once we needed to add some extra financing for the government to finance the world war the multiple world world wars. And so I think you know that is sort of the period in which we're

trying to like make America great again is by returning to that period. One of one way that we do that is by financing the government with tariffs. And and again, we have to have this playbook play out for multiple multiple administrations in order for it to work. And that's going to take, you know, some incremental progress that we can show the voting population like, look, this is working. Continue to vote for these people that are expanding these policies and and let us play this road map out. I think ultimately, you know, we're not seeing inflation rise. With the bond market the way it is, this is going to add some some shaky foundation uh to uh

the administrative policies that we're seeing. And so, I think the one criteria that we're going to have to really take into account is the bond market. and and it may even mean that Powell raises rates to try to stagnate inflation and and bring the bonds uh back under control. If we can do that, there might be some economic pressures at play. But I ultimately do think that if we can withstand this now and and push some economic progress going into the midterms and then going into the next election, this is what's going to be necessary to play out this tariff playbook. And look, this is our one shot to basically play out this experiment.

If it doesn't work now, I don't see the the US voting population voting for measures of austerity or tariffs anytime in the near future. Yeah. I I also think it's kind of funny that we had this entire Doge um push in the beginning of of this presidency. Yeah. And and look, now Elon's time is coming to an end. I I think, you know, we're we're seeing this austerity measure uh sort of fizzle out relatively quickly, which is unfortunate because we didn't see a significant impact in the national debt. We really didn't see a significant uh draw down in the amount of interest that we're paying on the national debt. These are really the

things that Doge were was meant to curb. you know, there was waste, fraud, and abuse that I think, you know, we we did take out of the system a little bit, but this was really just scratching the surface. In order for this to work in the long term, I think this needs to be pronounced measure of austerity, and there's ways in which I think we can do that without putting the pain on the broad uh US population. I think that there's no way we're going to have rates be raised and that um Trump is actually going to uh had a conversation today with um he he had a conversation today with

uh with Pal in the White House. Yeah. And in that conversation, I he definitely is pushing Pal to cut rates because the next Fed meeting is in June, I believe. Um and they have a chance to cut sometime in June or um July. But I think again, if it's a 25 bips cut, then like doesn't really really matter. So I think the the issue here is that, you know, they're going to try to get the bond market out, you know, back under control by doing some Treasury buybacks. And I think that is somewhat inflationary. And if we do see that level of quantitative easing, they call they sort sort of call it, you know, not quantitative easing easing, but like if

that does make its way into the markets, we're going to see inflation creep up and PAL is going to try to combat that. All righty. Up next, we've got Tom Dunlevy, head of venture at Varys Capital. We had some fun questions about uh actually watched one of his recent podcasts on Unchained talking about REV. It's pretty good pod. Um I kind of feel in the same way that he does about it. Um he has some interesting thoughts about the Middle East, his VC fund, stuff like that. So excited to chat to Tom. Let's get him up here when we're ready. Um and yeah, Rob, I mean we're gonna get a little bit of insight here from the from the VC landscape from Bears. Tom, what's up, man? How are you?

How's it going, guys? Thanks for having me. Congrats on the new show. Seems like it's going uh fantastic so far. Yeah, man. Where are you calling in from? I'm in uh the Boston area, so East Coast time, which makes dealing with all our friends in the Middle East and and uh Asia always very fun. But um yeah, come calling from the East Coast. I'm sorry about your loss, man. You know, I I'm a big fan of the Celtics, but you know, I'm sorry about your loss, dude. It's funny. I'm from New York, so I've lived down the block from like Fenway and now, you know, all the stadiums around here and it's like I'm I'm a New York fan, so I'm like kind of in hiding here, so I'm happy the Knicks are kind of doing well.

They're about to get bounced, but yeah. Yeah, they're definitely about to get bounced. Oh, good, man. Well, thanks for joining us, man. Um, we got a bunch of questions for you. Kind of a variety of topics. We'll just kick them off, kind of go rapid fire style. happy to kind of dive deep into any single one. Um, one of your recent tweets that I'm particularly interested in was around uh valuation frameworks for crypto. Um, and I think the tweet read kind of crazy that we're totally cool with creating a new asset class, but a new valuation framework for said asset class is too nuts for us. Um, I don't know if this ties into the REV conversation or kind of what what you were thinking there, but maybe you can

just uh give us your your mental model for valuing crypto assets, whether they're L1's, L2s or or you know, different types of crypto assets and and just kind of like what this new valuation framework is in your perspective. Yeah, so I think we have to think of these things in terms of crypto assets in different buckets. You have Bitcoin which very similar historic gold like flow type models not stock toflow specifically but flow type models kind of make sense in terms of supply and demand uh there because the use cases hold accumulate store more bitcoin store value like sort of separate then you have L1's which you know the token valuations are very much tied to the

underlying security that these assets hold and that is built on top of them. So to me that is immensely important. Then you have sort of application layer stuff which you know I think very much justifiably can be tied to revenue. These are like little businesses built on these broader L1s which are like you know nation states or countries or um you know real real base layers that facilitate the economic activity that these companies at the consumer layer are building on. So I think the pain point that most people have is taking what should be a business at the consumer layer and trying to value the L1 the same way they would value those businesses because L1's are fundamentally different. An L1 is trying

to foster network effects which means growing users, growing transactions and growing community. And just like we saw in 2021, what's the exact anti antithesis of what of growing those networks? it would be charging high fees, right? Because then that immediately destroys network effects and folks just go elsewhere. Blockspace, while it's um you know important that it's secure and uh you know takes a while to build those network effects is effectively free, right? We've seen how quickly you're able to spin up an L1. So um the the the rationale for not valuing an L1 on fees is because it's detrimental to those network effects and we've seen the history of this in crypto to date. everything the road maps of all

these major L1s are doing are to increase scale and lower fees and you've seen this across the board. So my uh extension of that is that fees on these L1s are effectively going to be going to zero. Salana has said this and it's always said this in a number of cases, right? We're going to go to a I think it's a hundredth of a penny or a thousandth of a penny, something like that. Like that's where we want to go. So if that's where we want to go and that is a big part of the thesis of a lot of people who try to value L1s on traditional models like DCFs and things like that, you know, how do we get to some valuation framework for these assets and does that mean they're not valuable at all? And I think that's that's not the case. I think they are

very valuable, but how do we think about new frameworks and how and why they are valuable? Yeah, absolutely. And and just to take that to you know the next step here a as you're thinking about why these things are valuable obviously they are because they house the the infrastructure for so much economic activity. What what do you think is a better barometer for the valuation there the economic activity that does take place on chain? So this is where the tweet comes in. I don't think there's any. So it folks try to take the easy way at now and say hey we could do this thing we could do it on DCF and it's like well okay fees are going to zero and these things aren't

really even if you try to do a DCF you have to do it in like the native currency which is sort of like weird recursive like language any sense then you have to start drawing analoges to corporations which like don't make sense because they're not the same thing um you know what what do you start valuing these things on and then this is where we have to come up with new frameworks and I don't have a perfect framework for it but the framework that in my mind makes a lot of sense is on some portion of the economic activity that is generated on the network because the network itself is an attack vector. If I could take onethird um of supply of Ethereum or Solana which would be very hard to do. I can disrupt finality. I can disrupt the underlying settlement of you know enormous amounts of transaction

volume for a number of businesses that are built on Ethereum and or Solana. If I took if I got 51% I could actually fork the chain and then really disrupt economic activity. So it has to be some portion of the underlying economic activity. Now I don't think tying it directly to TVL makes sense. Probably not directly to stable coins. Um probably not to total economic activity but some blend of those metrics is what we have to get to. Because if we just take that to the logical extreme, if there is a trillion dollars of assets say on Solana, Solana itself cannot be worth a billion dollars because then I would just find a way to purchase a billion dollars or $500 million of Salana and attack that $1 trillion. So what that ratio is, we're we're going to

sort of figure it out, right? And I don't think it's going to be perfect. It's might be Solana one, you know, other assets 100, whatever it is. Or maybe it's 1 to 10, maybe it's 1 to five, I don't know. But that's like the sort of mental thinking that I think we're going to have to grapple with as an industry. Because just unpacking why transaction fees are going to zero. If you were to take the entire world's volume of credit card transaction volume today, which is about 200 million transactions a day, charge a penny, that's 20 million a day. In terms of annual revenue, that only gets you 7 billion. Now Salana itself today is worth, you know, 90, 100 billion, whatever it is at the moment. So you're already at a crazy revenue multiple. So folks start throwing me and it's like okay well we can add an MEV to that

revenue calculation. If you look at MEV there was a study by Chicago Booth what ME in terms of high frequency trading which is MEV in traditional markets is valued at only $7 billion. So we add those two numbers together of all these volumes if we do every transaction volume for every credit card in the world if we add in all the MV that you know Trady is getting today we get to something like 14 15 billion for all L1 volumes. if we like hyper take over everything. So like if you look at that number and you say like how can we justify the 90 billion dollars that Salana is worth today or 700 billion the aggregate L1 complex it it just doesn't make any sense. So um and then you say okay are these things even valuable?

It's like well no of course they're valuable so how do we value them? And it's on the underlying assets that they're generating economic activity on. I think this is particularly um important for the the institutional landscape, right? Because obviously you your background you're looking at at things from the venture side looking for ways to value new types of essentially mechanisms on chain u different types of L1's chains apps etc. you know, and I I I was speaking to a uh a investor from Franklin Templeton at I think it was in Denver or at a conference here in the city and what what he told me was he doesn't necessarily like like the like the DCF or the revenue, you know,

there's always different things. What he's looking for is a way to actually measure some sort of adoption over time and then forecast that adoption through the core idea or primitive of that product and be able to then make some sort of like financial model based on the adoption of that technology, right? Like like he's not exactly thinking about like DCFs or like you know revenue multiples. It's just like at the very bare bones level, we need to be able to model a like at least certain aspects of these things um out in time. So um look, zooming out from from the from the valuation frameworks and kind of diving into some of the stuff that you're doing out in the Middle East, just curious like how you got yourself initially

established out in the Middle East. Uh what that looked like from a from a practical perspective. Obviously you're in the States now. um how did you get get involved out there? Yeah, so um our fund is based in Dubai. Our main backer is the royal family of Qar through their family office which is also based in Dubai. A lot of deep connections in the region. Uh our managing partner, our other team members are out there. I'm um sitting in the US as I noted earlier and the exciting part for um that base of capital is they're really trying to get their arms around crypto. They're excited about it. They have a lot of money and as you've seen from all these initiatives from Saudi, from Qatar, from Dubai, etc. They're looking for ways to

diversify from oil and a lot of the legacy businesses they're in. And the forefront of that diversification is crypto and AI. So, they're looking for really smart ways to get into it. And the cool part for for startups and folks listening is that all of the interesting startup or not all of them, a lot of the interesting startups are here in the US. So they want to get access to us. They want to find smart people and smart companies. Um so I was lucky enough that you know they were looking for someone in the US who uh who who kind of fit the bill um and is able to give them some access to that to those uh to those avenues. But you know folks in the Middle East have a have a lot of money.

They're very curious and it's on us to get like the education and get them like you know interesting interesting things as you talked about that um that are accelerating in the crypto space. So what is it like then working with the royal family like like outside of the time zones? Do do you ever bring them to Fenway and you know what do they think about an American hot dog at a baseball stadium? Yeah, it's funny. So I just joined various uh you know very short time ago. So I haven't had the privilege of of meeting any of those folks yet. Um but you know from what I understand and and our partners who are much more active uh directly working with them in the region it's you know they're a lot of those pe a lot of the folks in the region are all um you know western

educated a lot of them have studied over here in Boston or New York or wherever and and this really this this new generation of of royals throughout you know all the entire region is that very smart people who um you know were educated abroad are now bringing a lot of those you know sort of uh thoughts values and investment approach um home with them and they're investing across the board as as such. So I think it's a really exciting time. I mean we've seen the US government get involved in this stuff now and recognize that you know this is going to be and this is a different like Middle East than it was 50 years ago. Uh it's it's a new forward thinking Middle East and they have a lot of money, have a lot of capital um and and they want to progress the region

forward in different ways. So, I think it's really exciting that um that you know our industry is able to help facilitate a part of that. Tom, if you were to grade Trump's recent visit to the Middle East, you know, ABC and and maybe give him some, you know, great grading tips and and you know, terms on how it went, what what grade would you give him and and you know, any anything to improve or generally some things to call out? Man, I uh I'm I'm not going to put on my political science hat too much, but I would say it's the exciting the exciting thing is that we're opening up doors to the region when from what I understand the Biden administration effectively shut down everything in the region.

Wouldn't give access to chips, wouldn't give access to any investment vehicles, wouldn't allow, you know, companies um in terms of direct investment, you know, between the US and anyone in the region. So like just opening that door is immensely important because we need strong capital partners. We need forward thinking indiv you know folks in the region particularly those who are strategically oriented and have a lot of oil and other things that we're going to be needing. Um I think developing those relationships is smart. Um so in terms of that a I don't really know the nuances uh in terms of like the other things that are interplay though. Yeah.

So you mentioned a lot of the uh you know capital is going to be flowing outside of these um you know older more prominent kind of like physical industries like oil uh you know real estate etc into crypto and AI in particular and um with there being that that very large wealth fund from Qatar looking to invest 500 billion into the US what's your what's your kind of thoughts on how much of that is going to come into crypto? And in what forms, right? Are are they going to be doing some of these uh strategy vehicles? Is it mostly on the venture side, liquid side? Like what are you seeing as far as the demand for how they want to act like actually allocate that capital and kind

of how much of that into crypto? Yeah. So I think the scale of the capital would actually shock people if they looked into it. So that is just one individual entity. If you look at each individual royal in each one of these nations, um each individual city in each each one of these nations, they own they have their own um wealth funds. They have their own private assets and in aggregate it is a staggering amount of capital. So that is just a very very small sliver. That portion I think is directly related to AI chips and things like that. Um but more broadly the region is deeply uh integrated into looking at crypto and you can just look at these cities they're building. So I think it's Radia and Saudi Arabia. You

know, there's a vision 2020 2030 plan from a number of these nations and in the forefront of that is ways to get uh integrated into crypto through you know a lot of things like we like like deepen through smart cities and things like that. So um I would say they're just and looking through avenues like tokenization and I would say they're open to for all of these things. We just need smart people in the room to convince them why they make sense. But they're already saying, "Hey, we're excited about this." and what percentage they actually allocate to it. It's it's really up to us to convince them um of of what percentage. I would say very interested already and and uh you know we just got to make that that sale to them. I think we saw something Rob about uh XRP, right? There was like a a Saudi

prince or something that was trying to do a XRP strategy. A a corporate treasury strategy into XRP. Yeah, we have we have funny uh opinions about XRP over here. But yeah, I I think I I got a sorry to interrupt. I got a call. We were on an investor call today and um a bunch of investors in the the region more broadly were just trying to get up to speed on crypto and there was a question directly about hey what what do you guys think of XRP and would you invest in it? Always the question, man. It never it never stops, bro. I was like, is this guy tired like or or or is he just tired of of hearing about XRP as well? Yeah. Well, I just I I literally went like this for like 5 seconds and they were like, "Do you need me to

repeat the question?" And I was like, "No, no, I'm just trying to say this in like the most diplomatic way possible." I think I called it a banking memecoin. Um was was where I ended up. But yeah, nice. I like that framing of it. Yeah. I Tom, I'm I'm curious, you know, a as we're kind of rounding out, you know, these capital flows from the Middle East into the US and into these crypto and AI founders, you know, what what is the pipeline there for a crypto AI founder maybe in the West, you know, to to ultimately access capital and and what is the pipeline for their idea to ultimately land and resonate with these with these capital allocators? Is it reach out to you, a VC that you know has the connections? Do they go directly to the source? what what advice do you have

for founders that are looking for a more global reach? Yeah, it's one of the things that really attracted me about joining Barry is is that developing relationships in the region is uh it takes a very long time. So our team's been there for almost a decade now just working with individual governments individuals and in these corporations and and sovereign wealth funds and it's a very much relationship based business. So, you know, I would say whether it's us or others, find a good partner that can meet you or introduce you to the right people and kind of hold your hand along this process because it's a very different way of doing business than America. Um, it's not just, you know, directly jump in and let's figure out how much money we can both make together. It's, uh, you know, more of a family approach, right?

Like, I know you, I trust you, um, let's do business together. We're going to be doing business for a long time. So, um, that would be my recommendation is find some trusted partners in the region and and, uh, get access that way. Awesome. Or move out there, right? Or move out there and do it yourself, right? That's what a lot of people are doing. A lot of people moving to Dubai. It really seems like a long-term approach where, you know, we we sometimes see these staggering numbers and we think, "Oh, this is a cash grab to try to capitalize on some short-term opportunity, but really digging into it, these guys are are planting seeds for the long haul." Exactly. It's um it's a very long-term game and I think it's it's different than the crypto messaging because we're not used to long-term games and it's

very different than like the American western way of doing business which is quick instant gratification. Um these are these are big capital flows and very long-term games. Tom, last one for you before we let you go. Um there's seven trillion dollars of capital in money market funds as of yesterday. A lot of people are sidelined in the broader macro markets. Uh we've had quite the rebound in crypto and in the macro. Um put on put you on the spot a bit. Is the summer going to be a slow one? What's your expectations for kind of Q3 Q end of Q2 into Q3 for macro wise and crypto?

And uh you know why do you feel this way? Yeah, I mean my position when these tariffs were announced and when they uh had had we had the market downturn is they were going to be a lot of bluster fairly short-lived and we're going to settle at some higher level and the markets are mostly not going to care. Uh so far that's proven to be true. I think that will continue to be true as these deals sort of just you know kind of proliferate through um and the market cares a lot less about them. What I do think will be really interesting is a lot of the crypto legislation and executive orders that come in the summer. So, I was lucky enough to be in DC meeting with the Trump administration about a month ago. This was before the stable coin bill, but that seemed like

it was a done deal, which is almost almost all the way to the finish line. Uh the market structure bill seems like a huge priority after that, which hopefully should be done sometime in the summer. Um, which seems a little ambitious for me, but the folks in DC seem to think they can get it done. And then we have a lot of the um the findings from me remember the crypto council and David Sachs and all that. They had 180 days to give recommendations to the president which will then um you know be signed off by him and then uh given out to the each individual um administration, the SEC, CFTC, whatever all those others who actually do a lot of the work in terms of here's what I want in terms of my priorities based on the findings of our council. And I think that comes in July.

So, we're going to have a lot of um very positive regulatory news coming out um on the back of a lot of already positive momentum in the government. So, I think it could be a sleepy summer in terms of macro uh as these tariff like bluster kind of winds down. But in terms of crypto, I think the momentum is going to stay. All righty. Appreciate that explanation. I I I had a contrary take from Jordy Alexander of Seleni kind of talked about how uh the Fed's not going to be able to really you know give us the juice on the liquidity side until you know until we kind of get some some you know just a bit more pain perhaps. So um yeah I mean but we have as we noted you noted we have what is it 7 trillion in money

markets right now. Like any movement in rates down any sort of easing is those are massive capital flows that potentially could be coming in. Remember, it's not just a US story anymore. This is about China, and this is about the rest of the world, too, that drive a lot of those liquidity flows, and they are going to need to stimulate. Um, especially if the US keeps its foot on the pedal with these tariffs. All righty, Tom. Thank you for your time, man. Thanks. Pleasure. Thanks, guys. Catch you next time. Peace buddy. That guy is That guy's smart. Excuse my language. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, look, any any anyone who's been able to tap into the networks uh that exist in the east, I think are extremely extremely important. Um, what I'm what I'm curious

about is, you know, how crypto is going to break out of this echo chamber that's been caused by macro. We have we have, you know, these liquidity conditions that seem so overarching and and we look at, you know, things like the $500 billion sovereign sovereign wealth fund. Yeah. Tom's coming on saying that's just a sliver of the macro. No, I think he's totally right. I I think it is a tiny amount which is crazy. And so, you know, we already see, you know, you know, kind of this envelope around the crypto environment uh by the US macro conditions. And when you think about the scale here, there's two things that come to mind. One is that we're still early when it comes to the sheer size of cap the capital base that exists around the world. And and the second is that look,

these can have quite a weight on the the crypto market, right? as as the crypto market grows, it's still so small, right? And it becomes integrated into the, you know, the existing capital markets, I think this is going to become uh increasingly so that, you know, we're going to have to play nice, figure out what's going on in the macro environment in order to capitalize on that in the crypto environment. Man, I mean, what he said about the about the the capital wanting to specifically move into crypto and AI, I think is particularly pressing as well. Um, right? Because I mean these are like this this is kind of where the puck's going and so the Middle East kind of playing a game of catchup per se where they're trying to get ahead in

this space as they were kind of in the oil space and and others. Up next we've got David uh David C, chief IP officer at Arya. Again, I was at Stablecon uh this past morning. Tons of RWA activity there. Uh lots happening. excited to talk to David about what they're building at Arya, his take on IP and RWAS. We'll get him up here and uh let's go. Good to see you, David. David, good to see you, man. Hey, everyone. What's up? How are you, guys? How are you doing?

We'll get you unmuted here in Google Meet so we can hear you. Where you calling in from, David? Sorry about Sorry about that. Yeah, good to meet you guys. Calling from uh San Francisco. Okay, good morning. Good good late morning to you. Yep. All right. So, let's have you on world assets. Yeah, man. Um, let's talk IP RWAS. Um, I think that's a mouthful for a lot of people because I IP is an RWA, but you know, the term RWAS makes crypto feel like it's not a real world asset.

Right. Right. So, we're all you're trying to just make mirage. No, I it's it's it's an acronym. It's it's pretty much that IPR and WA the idea that we're tokenizing IP streams right intellectual property um which you you know you probably know and uh you know that that consists of you know largely income rights sometimes copyrights which are tied to income rights um we also have a program where derivative rights are able to be you know licensed and derivative works and tokens created and airdropped to parents. So the idea just in general is creating value out of IP that that not only pays yield but also provides rights um to anything created from the IP which we think is really the uh the

killer app especially in story and just with the incredible creativity and financialization of of you know web 3 and people in general. That really seems like the breakthrough here is putting traditional assets on chain and turning them into productive assets. Once you can turn something like IP programmable, you can unlock a lot of the latent capital that you know maybe by supplying it or borrowing against it and financializing it, you turn it into a productive asset. That and you you get to you know not only a productive asset, but you're able to create lots more productive assets from it. And that's I think where the blockchain's amazing where you know in the real world sure

you make remixes you can make derivative works you can make you know whatever a cover but most of the time I mean compulsory you know licenses aside you have to go directly to the rights holder you do a few of them you post it online you know it's it's a laborious process and then getting paid requires you know accounting lawyers accountants that kind of thing and what's great about the blockchain just in general is it there's automatic attribution. The the provenence as it were is directly uh auditable and trackable. And so you can make derivative works based on a tokenized work. And what we do is we drop 50% of the currency for the new derivative token to all of the holders of the parent token which gives the

holders of the parent token obviously a huge useful benefit like we're going to get more stuff and it and it compels them not to sell, right? because we want them to a enjoy the yield and the future um benefit of their token of the rights that they purchased, but we also want them to hold those rights because they're getting continued new rights or new airdrops of new tokens all the time, right? It could be years later, like, oh man, a new cover or a new uh remix or a new album design or t-shirt or whatever just came out and it's making a ton of money. I'm glad I kept this thing, you know? Yeah. And and that incentivizes people not to sell. Could you explain here the the flow, right? I I think it's intuitive. You tokenize this form of IP

uh some some you know property rights. Where does the yield come from? Right. Yeah. So so in general and and and Arya has a couple different products. One of them is is really more based on programmable rights. Um but one of them is is more of an institutional income uh uh fund sort of vehicle. Uh both of them though include income right and to your point they come from generally you know streaming you know of the DSPs synchronizations when you put a a music to movie or TV or whatever you you synchronize it in and that pays a fair amount of money um from what's called public performances which happen anytime a song is broadcast or streamed uh digitally or or uh through the airwaves

you know a public performance royalty is is paid um and so So that's on the publishing side and the master which is a similar copyright um that is also paid right in in slightly different ways. So anytime you hear music you know used in web two or web three or or anywhere basically there's some sort of royalty being paid and we're capturing that. Now the royalties some vary per asset and obviously that's disclosed per product but those are that's the universe of income that we're talking about. Yeah. So when so when people are looking at this landscape right because I think when people look at crypto they see you know blockchain they see speculation they see different types of of crypto assets yeah L1's L2s memecoins DeFi

tokens etc. What is it? How should people think about IP onchain as a different asset class compared to the traditional kind of crypto landscape? Like like I guess what do you what do people find most attractive compared to traditional crypto assets? Yeah. No, it's a great question and and I'm I'm actually not, you know, a a crypto native guy. I'm I'm a music guy, you know, and I came from the music world. I'm obviously familiar with crypto and and and financialization in general. Um, but what excites me about this was how it really applies to the real world.

It's not a crypto or a sole crypto ccentric play, you know, the spark program like we're talking about. I mean, that's an equity-like uh uh program where you're you're getting an income stream, but you're also getting drops of new works, and it really could go to the moon because you'd never know, you know, and we're working with iconic works to start with, and then we're uh commissioning third parties to come in and make, you know, like top top remixers to make remixes that everyone's get going to get drops of. So, the the the long and the short of it is income is actually a very very stable asset class. Music income, right? It's it's recessionp proof. In fact, people tend to listen to more income uh more music when they're sitting at home during the

pandemic. Streaming went up, that kind of thing. Um it's it's very predictable. You know, the decay most of the works that we're purchasing have years of of of history. So, we can see where that's going and we can model that out. And um you're not tariffed on on on uh on music income yet, but I don't think we will. And uh so, it's it's really uh it's a very very stable asset class. tends to pay like between five and 9%. Which, you know, it's not as stable as a government, but if you think about it, like what would have to happen for everyone to stop listening to Spotify and Apple Music and Syncing and the radio and like and we're talking about, you know, dozens of copyrights, sometimes hundreds when we're talking

about bigger funds that we monetize. So, it's a fairly stable asset class, especially from notable artists. And then you add the and so that's more like a bond, but it's a bond that that is is tokenized and is accessible for everyone. You don't need to be tied in with you know you don't need to be you know have five million under aum or anything to get in with a private equity company or something. Um and then separately there is that sort of scalable a little bit more cryptonative hey we don't know where this could go. There's only x number of tokens and this person's a star and you get income.

There's all sorts of derivative work. So there is sort of a a a gambling not gambling but but a shoot the moon kind of element to it. I will say that I'm attracted to stability. You know uh we don't you know the people in the real world re read crypto headlines and and get frightened and that's not going to help us grow and I don't think it helps web 3 grow. And I think the rwas really provide the chain to do to be highlighted for what it is. It's a really hyper efficient way of financializing, but also um sharing and attributing and and attributing, right?

And and uh uh and registering, right? That's not really how memecoins work or how NFTts work. They're just something. And to me, they're air. You know, we're not selling air. We're selling real stuff. And there's a real baseline value to it. it is the right way to think about Arya and this sector as stocks that pay a dividend, right? So for instance, you know, th this stock could could, you know, go up or down in value based on the performance of this this artist and their intellectual property and then they also pay a dividend in the licensing income that takes place. If so, maybe you could comment on that and then also tell us, you know, what are some of the IP that you have on the

platform now and what is the yield that that some of these artists are paying on their IP RWA? Right. So, you know, I'm I'm an intellectual property attorney. I'm but I'm not a securities attorney and uh you know the word stocks scares me but uh but yeah the the the the idea is you're you're participating generally as a as a copyright holder or incomeright holder in the outcome of the work in which you are participating. Right? And so if it does well and frankly we assume that or we we predict that the attention to these songs will make them create more money in web 2 that's going to flow back on chain but

also as we commission and the public makes remixes and derivative works and whatnot which derivative works may be released in the real world by the label who owns the parent asset, right? Because they will have rights and they will make money from this. that will dramatically increase the amount of money coming on chain to the parent work, but also to each of the derivative works. You know, we're going to have competitions, we're going to have releases, there's monetization online, you know, there's a lot of cool things that can happen that have never happened before, you know, and it is web 3 that allows this to happen. Uh, and it's fantastic and it doesn't corrupt web 2 in any way because that money is still happening and to your point, it still

comes online. So, it's it's a real you are you're definitely you're not just saying, "Hey, I've got a coin from so and so." You're like you're you're in the band, basically. It's just you you don't have to wake up as early, don't have to stay up as late, and um if you're the drummer, you're not going to explode. [Laughter] And and David, do you have some interesting iconic uh IP on Arya now or or or anything that you're cooking for us that that we get excited about? Yeah. No, we we actually just uh we're we're closing what we call this we did a stake vault where we included uh these are part partial copyrights and they're not programmable so it's just passive like a fund but music from Blackpink from BTS

from Miley Cyrus from Dual Lia from uh you know um the list goes on and on you know John Legend and so that pays a yield I believe and and we're not done we're actually adding more to it and and we delayed the launch the final launch of the token because we're adding some programmable works to it which are super exciting. They're not closed yet, but I think people will be really psyched like, "Oh, wow. I'm getting this." And then all these other things can drop. It's going to be cool. It's definitely names that you're like, "Oh, yeah. I know that. My kids know that. My parents know that. Whatever. Everybody knows this." You know, and um and so this just the beginning. I'm we're in talks with all the major labels, all the major publishers. Everybody's like, "Dude,

this is great." you know, and and the question is what what are you do doing differently than others haven't or than what others did in the past and we're we're really working it from I think from the rights holder perspective, but we're really working hard to be like, hey, what's going to make a an investor or a fan or whatever, not sell this token. You know, it's not a rugpull. It's not a pump and dump. It's like, hey, I want you to hold this in five, six years because you keep getting drops of new stuff, which obviously supports the price, you know, and everything else. And yeah, what what do you do do you have a a a gauge on how much income you you could be paying on some of these assets? Like h how much, you know, in in

drops do do you expect or yield do you expect like a Miley Cyrus or John Legend token to generate? Yeah. I mean, so those tokens are actually all wrapped up in one one sort of fund token we call APL, the the Arya Premier launch, right? But it will pay, you know, between 5 to 8% as a as a baseline, you know what I mean? And and then yeah, we don't know, right? Because we're going to include programmable assets there. Any each one of those can be then tokenized each one of those tokens and they will be separate tokens. They'll just be dropped to the APL token holders, right? as we discussed that that share and so those may have a life of their own that may dwarf the income stream of John Legend right because or or Miley Cyrus because

those are older songs they've already had to decay it's you know the nature of IP is again with predictability comes eventually decay with with bumps of activity and then actually it starts to go up because the music business has traditionally over the last hundred whatever years gone up right except for a little blip during the Napster eras you know so So, it's a it's it's a to the holders of the APL, my suggestion is don't sell, right? Because you're going to get that that the you know the the income stream, but you just don't know what's coming next. And obviously, yeah, you sell sometime, but like it's not meant to be like, okay, great. I'm out.

You know, it's meant to be like, okay, what's coming next? And you know, we also have plans to drop like for future drops to give everyone like everybody in our token ecosystem a small piece of every new token that comes out, you know, because you can do that on the blockchain. It's so amazing, you know, and and that's what's great. That's what you don't see with memecoins or NFTTS or or whatever. It's like, no, this is something that means something. There's real utility to it. So, don't just sell it, you know. David, I I appreciate you joining us. Just one last question. Uh, if you were to have a any IP on Arya uh, today this week, what would be your dream IP on Arya?

My dream IP on Arya, Warner Music, are you listening? No, I'm just kidding. Uh, yeah, you know, I mean, there's a lot of cool out there. Um, there really is like we we're we're flirting with a lot of I I can't I don't want to say it because I don't want to tweak anybody out and we're in negotiations, but but uh there's a lot of I'll tell you this, EDM tends to be more akin to or more applicable to to remixing, right? obviously, you know, um we're talking to Indian music creators, we're talking to Latin music creators, we're talking to hip-hop, you know, top hip-hop labels and indies and and um but you know, K-pop is really really big for us and we're working with some really really exciting K-pop producers and artists.

So, I think that EDM and K-pop are are lanes we're really going to lean into, and we're going to explore other I mean, it's based on our community. Like, what do people want? Let us know. We'll get it. You know, we're one call from anybody. It's all about demand. If we could show demand and interest, we can sign anything because this is a an ultimately a creative program to the rights holder and to the investor, you know. So, so yeah, I can't I can't really say I guess um because honestly the things that I dream of, we're going for, you know, and I don't want to I don't want to piss anybody off. I like this a lot. This starts to feel like fantasy football but for, you know, your favorite artists and and and musicians.

you actually get paid utility wise, but you know, you get paid something with fantasy football, maybe there's a pool or something, but this is like a direct line. And we're also we're also looking at sports. We're looking at name and likeness rights. We're looking at art. We're looking heavily at art. In fact, we have an art deal we're trying very hard to close. Um, name and likeness rights are a big deal. And and again, athletes, movie stars, film, TV, there's all sorts of great stuff. But, uh, music is is first. It's the most I think easily um monetizable and remixable. Uh and uh but it's just the tip of the iceberg. David, thank you for for joining us, man. It's been an absolute pleasure. Um have a good rest of your day in uh out west. And um yeah, man.

Hope you hope you guys close some of those big EDM deals. I'm a I like EDM on a casual Saturday. You know what I mean? I I do. And and think of all the cool remixing that can can happen to bring you to Sunday, you It's it's a it's a whole thing. All right. Well, thank you guys. I appreciate your time and for having us on. Speak to you soon, man. All right. Cheers. Cheers, man. There it is. IP RWA's remixing. Oh, yeah. When he says remixing, does that mean like actually remixing the song? I think so. I mean, look, when someone licenses the rights, you know, one thing that they can do with the rights is they just play it. But then I also believe they can you know go from uh an example would be you know like

featuring right in a song as well. I think they can they can literally remix it that way too. So yeah I I think there's uh there's lots IP is such a fundamental primitive that I think there's lots that you can you can do to extend that. We got our boy bread guy coming on next. Uh the biggest loud IO bull of the season so far with with the graphics. We got a lot to talk about. Got to plug my computer in. Oh, there we go. What's up, Brad? There we go. Hey, boys. Officially on the show. How's it going? What up, Brad? Welcome. It's good to see you here. Thanks for coming.

Yeah, this is slick. You guys got going on pro style here. You weren't joking around. You You calling in from a new location. I appreciate it though, Brad. You've moved newish. Yeah, like I uh I moved here at the beginning of the year, but like have been getting more and more set up over the last few months. So, yeah. West Coast now. How's the desk setup? Well, I saw you put a lot of effort into it, man. Clean. Clean. I feel like a new man. I got, you know, light over here, light over there. I got, you know, my stand up sit down. I got my little boogie board to to get loose every now and then. It's Yeah, man. I mean, we were talking about the the uh kind of nomad travel uh situation where you're just whipping the laptop up in any south eastern Asian country and

just going at it. Yeah, that's what it was for like uh three months for me. And I'm getting ready to do a little bit more of that. We're doing the the accelerator for Mega E. And that means I got to do basically that in Copenhagen for a little bit and then I got to go do it in Tokyo for a little bit. So that brings us to to our first question. Bread, what do you even do at Mega E? Red, what is your job? Do you see my you see my post the other day about that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the funny thing about that is like I'm actually literally the CMO. Like the I'm the one in charge of doing like the marketing.

Uh so I manage a lot of partnerships. I do like I run se several of the accounts, you know, talk about our messaging, you know, all that Uh, but the post itself was like chief morale officer because I'm also the guy on the timeline, right? So, I'm doing the yapping. I'm trying to like lift spirits, keep things light and fun. So, a little bit of both. But, but the official title is CMO. Great. Yeah, that's what I thought. You're like the brand face, right? Like the uh the chief ship poster. Yeah. Yeah. Like trying to do my best tooly impression. Got to balance ship posting with like technical arguments every now and then. Well, you do a pretty good job there. I uh I I do appreciate how you expand beyond the echo chamber sometimes, too.

One of my favorite ones was uh kind of the the earnings per employee and and how you were able to graph efficiency that way. And you put together this diagram, too, that showed how Hyperlid was towards the top. We're talking about Telegram earlier. Telegram is towards the top there. Generally, AI is powering like this next generation of companies. Do you employ similar strategies to try to maximize efficiency at Mega ETH or generally how how do you try to try to leverage some of these things that you see out there in the wild and put them into practice? Are you talking about like the AI as tools or are you talking about like just participating broadly in in like other conversations?

Participating broadly in other conversations and and generally squeezing the most that you can out of out of you know the teams that you manage and the people that you talk to. Yeah. So yeah. So, I I employ employ both of those things. One, like if you're not like actually getting comfortable with AI these days, you're just going to get left behind, right? Like there's a combination right now or uh some people are still hesitant to use AI because they feel like it cheapens their work, right? Like they're just offloading someone else. But like, you know, the best people are going to be 10xed, 100xed because of this stuff, right? Like you uh alluded to like the loud stuff right now, right? That guy's just a solo dev, but he's able to vibe code all this like make all these dashboards, do all this cool stuff,

experiment, throw stuff on chain. I'm not a dev. I was able to do like a deploy smart contract, have some fun, do do whatever. Like, if you can lean into this stuff um now in the early days, so that as these tools continue to iterate, like you you h if you're not doing it, you're going to get left behind, frankly. So, I always encourage it, especially even within our own team, like use it for idea generation. maybe like make sure not to just like throw it out into the world because I think everyone still has a pretty good sense of what is and is not AI and that does cheapen a little bit of the perception of stuff, but if you can use it to source your own thoughts or maybe even like assist your own thoughts and then put your your actual voice on top of it,

it goes very far. Um, so yeah, that's on the AI side. Then like the the broad conversation I just think that's important for um not turning into an ad, right? like you you have to talk about other people and what they care about in order to continuously build up your own momentum. Andy's great at that, right? Like Andy will talk about all kinds of different chains, all kinds of different projects. Whenever you do that, you get engagement from those people and that kind of plays into the algorithm a little bit because now this person that engaged with you because you talked about Nillian is going to get fed the content that you just generated about Celestia, right? So like now your content goes further in that sense and then you expose yourself to different uh pockets uh in the ecosystem because there's a lot of pockets in this

ecosystem and if you're not too careful you get insular. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Twitter is such a weird algorithm. X is such an interesting interesting like just you know I've I've kind of changed strategies over the last couple months. It's been a bit different but uh you know and I've just seen different results just just based on changing strategies. It is a game. Um, speaking of a game, Brett, I got a random question for you that I think that you'll enjoy. If you were in charge of the Ethereum Foundation tomorrow, what would you do immediately?

Um, I honestly think they're actually on a good good path, right? Like trying to be a little bit more relatable and kind of like isolate or distill what they actually want to do. Um, I like I've been pretty vocal on the timeline about what I think Ethereum as a blockchain needs to prioritize. I think, you know, it needs to to scale more. needs to like uh just defend itself frankly against like all of these things that like it's been giving away a value value like crazy and as this ecosystem evolves we're starting to see execution is kind of the thing that um people are driving value towards. So that's you know applications that's you know all the things that we interact with directly and Ethereum lost some of that at you know on its journey because it was planning for the seven-year horizon instead of the the three-year horizon

like you have to answer the middle ground. So they've reshuffled priorities and they're starting to to try to pull in that middle ground a little bit more. Um and honestly I think Tomas has been really good about that. He's vocal. He kind of gets in the timeline. He gets in the uh talking about his vision and what they need to prioritize. Uh I still think some of it's kind of cringe. So, like I would I would, you know, do my best to try to find like relatable people that resonate with the Ethereum vibe and like try to to pull them in closer and make sure that that is what's lifted up. But, um, honestly, not not a ton would change from what they've actually started doing um, since since Tomas came in.

All right, next next big uh, hypothetical for you, Brad. You're the GM of Mega ETH. So, as of it's it's a sports team. You have it's free agent season. If you could sign any five people onto the Mega ETH team, who would you sign and why? From the timeline? Yeah, from the timeline, uh, one would be my my boy ICO Beast. I think he's just really he's crazy with mind share and he's still a free agent. I don't know why no one has has actually gone after him, although he's alluded to that changing soon. Um, so I would do him. I would like uh, you know, I see like Jared Watts or like Saigar from Abstract. I think they're really good about uh throwing in technical stuff and like playful things,

right? Like um Jared just created the game for like people to hack around and do stuff and you just post it out on GitHub. People can around and again Saiger is really good at technical stuff so people have mind share there. Um I think uh here's a curveball. Nick Dodson from uh the CEO of Fuel. I think he is he's just a really smart genuine dude. I think his product is really underappreciated. And I think I don't know what he's been missing uh to actually get some attention on that, but I think like he is someone that I really um I like I would be proud to like build alongside him just based on what I've I've learned about him on the timeline.

What is that? That's I would say that's four. Yeah. One more. Yeah. I would do like another like just crazy social presence person. So, I would even do you Andy for like getting out there like a a big name like a like a Anom of the world just to like have someone like that in your back corner because like Anom and uh Flood from from Hyperlid just this person that has a big audience and just does not stop talking about Um and just winning with volume. Although I think ICO Beast kind of fits in in that category. Um so try to distribute it like that. Yeah, Flood is uh coming on the show right after you are. So we Oh, that's right. Yeah. may lift his spirits by by letting know you gave him the shout out. Um yeah, that's that's great.

And and Nick Dodson from Fuel is also a great guy. He's given us a ton of great advice along the way. So, it's been an absolute pleasure. Um he's really technical and just like he um he's technical, but he's relatable. Like he he conveys things really well. He's he kind of gets in the trenches with the the technical arguments and really understands this Um, and it's really hard to get people that are that technical, like to his level, that can also like talk like a human. Um, and I think he he balances that well. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I I think also loud uh is is something that's on a lot of people's minds, Loudio. And so, you know, you've been one of the more vocal people about this. Um, probably, you know, just uh just, you know, here looking at the opportunity that's

looming and all the attention that's garnering around it. How how are you positioning for Loudio? What what do you expect here? And and what advice do you give to people to to try to position for it? Yeah, that's it's been kind of a tough one for me because like I don't I'm not going to sell my soul and just like spam my timeline, right? Like our brands and the the presences the presence and our timelines that we've built up are probably our most valuable assets like one of them. So like I'm not I wasn't going to like cheapen my my timeline with just like slop. So, I've tried to be productive in how I've actually talked about it and yeah, more diagrams.

More diagrams. That's my thing, right? So, I was like, okay, it's like, you know what, people don't understand this thing. If they want to understand it, I'll just make some visuals. You know, it's fun. It's whatever. But the the project itself is just like, you know, we've we're entering the Kaido mind share era. Um, most of those things have a couple of relationships in them. It's like Kaido and the and a protocol and then the protocol and the people who can generate mind share on the timeline. uh and juggling that figuring out how these people can all you know uh convey value to each other whether it's token allocations or mind share or whatever um the the actual creator Ultra who's you know dashboard GCR is like a thousand dashboards out there um he created this project or this idea that like okay well

what if you just remove the product altogether and it's just a token that is associated to um this this project loud and um uh it is just tracking Okay, if the if this token were to or sorry sorry the the trading fees associated to this token uh it gets distributed to the top 25 mind share people that are can generate attraction to this this protocol and it's done in and just sold. So like as uh traders sit there and speculate on the token because they believe the token will have very good mind share right because people will talk about it um fees generated while these people sit there and speculate the token will just be converted to soul and then pay out to the the top 25 mind shares. So the thought is, you know, you

have people who are constantly talking about this thing to their audience and by talking about it a lot because they're incentivized to do so from all these trading fees. Uh eventually some of those people will be converted into traders and then those traders will go and trade on the token and then that will generate fees which will get more people to talk about it which will so like you try to create this little circular thing. Um, and it's just like a little bit of a art experiment to say, okay, like if it is a valueless token, but people will continue to talk about it because it gives them money. Like how much is that worth? Like are people like how much are you willing to to speculate on that? Um, and yeah, so like I'm trying to see if I can get into the mind

share thing because like if you run the numbers, the fees are actually pretty high, right? Like the the pool that these things it's like 4%. And if you were, if this token based on all the speculation, whether you're a trader or a yapper or whatever, u generates volume in the levels of the top 10 tokens on Salana, which are some are just like straight up I've never heard of in my life, then you're looking at payouts like for the top 25 people in like the mid five to sometimes six figures um for a week of of tweeting. So, like, you know, if I can get in that without being a a degenerate slop slot poster, then I figured I'd try throw my hat in the ring. Yeah. Yeah. I've kind of felt the same way. I've I've like I've thrown a little bit of tweets out

there, but I've just Yeah. It's It's hard to with all the Yapper mind share boards and rewards. It's just I don't know. You just you want to walk that line between being like this billboard, you know, for incentives versus just having that authentic brand. So, yeah. But sometimes the opportunities just are right there in in your face, right? And so you want to kind of tackle those. Yeah. Like and honestly, like until I put out the numbers and saw like what come out, I was like, man, like you could sit there and like uh complain about it and say like, "Oh, this is annoying." And then forget about it in a week or you can actually just like lean into it and maybe get again the top five people may like again if it does crazy numbers like who knows like there's a

there's a total potential that the traders don't want to speculate on this at all and it generates minimal fees. But imagine the week one runup given the mind share that it has like you could see, you know, upwards of like mid mid six figures uh for the top five people. Yeah, that would be insane. And Ultra's number one, of course. Yeah. No, he's not he's not ending number one. He's going to potentially get, you know, million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Um, couple of things about Mega E for you. I'm curious what what you think uh is brother Bing's unique advantage and how this gives Mega ETH an edge like what is what is her her special her special trait and you know how does this how has this contributed to Mega E's success?

Yeah. So for people who don't know Bing is like the business founder of we have three founders a CTO the CEO and then um Bing is the business side. Lei and Yilong are the other two. Uh, I would say her unique skill is that she's not like uh super trenchy like uh and what I mean by that is that she she looks at things with mostly fresh eyes and says like why shouldn't we aim for bigger web two like all this stuff like the stuff that like you think is often cliche or at least whenever I hear it I feel like it's cliche from most of these people where they want to target web two but she genuinely believes in that kind of stuff. So, whenever I sit there and I'm posed with a question, I usually box it into um like a blockchain versus

blockchain thing and like how is how is Mega E positioned to do better than whatever? How who is Megath targeting? I'm like, oh, they're targeting, you know, DeFi users who are like performing blockchain like the hyperlquids, the salons of the world. Like that's where my brain goes. And then she just defaults to like, you know, outside of that world, right? We're talking college kids. talking you know people who uh you know watch Tik Tok and like like that's their source of information. So like this web two brand stuff or web two brain stuff. So I would say her her superpower is being able to talk about um or view the chain in that light but then also being technical enough that she can actually convey like really complex lower level stuff about the chain. You know real time blockchain like that's us like why is that the

case? What like why is that important? What is that is what is that relative to the field? she can talk about that um while also having that web two brain just relatable a as you mentioned that's like you know being able to talk like a human and then also kind of speak the CT language um and as as as crypto expands into some of these more mainstream you know niches that that skill becomes increasingly more important. Yeah. Yeah. Just thinking outside the box as well right? Yeah. Yeah. And like you've you've seen that with a lot of our um go to market strategy to this point, right? Like most of the stuff that we've done is a little unorthodox relative to the field, right?

We did the fluff mint, we did the echo sale. Like a lot of that, you know, some teams have done it, but they haven't done it the same way. And most of that comes from this constant desire to like not not just like get comfy and do the same thing that everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it. It's like, okay, we did this. How do we do something bigger, better, different, right? How do we change the perception? How do we do the So, constantly being in that frame of uh mind has has materialized in like basically how how we've gotten to where we are. Brad, last thing for you. Um, what's the process for going into the forest and taking nude pictures with your girlfriend of of your tattoos? The community wants to know. I had to buy a tripod specifically

for it. You woke up that day. You said, "I'm going to I need to get a tripod so that I can go take this picture." No, we were do like you know we had just like started doing it just because right so like for the background for anyone who who doesn't know me like I'm working on a bodysuit so it was just like whenever I was getting it I I even told my artist when I was doing I was like I have this dream cuz I was living in Norway when I started it's like there's beautiful mountains there's all this beautiful like natural and like what's on me is not natural but it's still beautiful and like I always had this dream of like I want his beautiful art on me and has to be naked cuz it's a bodysuit with the back painting of like beautiful land I

like that just like always was like a goal of mine. So, it's taken a long time to get this tattoo. So, I've just like progressively as it's been done, I've just started doing it. First, it was like setting up this phone on a rock and then it was a, you know, doing all stuff and I was like, it's kind of annoying. So, then yeah, I was like, all right, we need to get a tripod. We need to like actually take this a little more seriously. So, it's it's evolved. So funny, man. Thanks for joining us, man. Uh hope you uh continue on the pursuit of the body suit. Looking forward to more updates from Mega E. Laudio is going to be wild to watch the next couple days. Um, yeah, man. Keep keep cooking, man.

You've been crushing. Thanks, dude. It's been a pleasure. Cheers, buddy. See you soon. Thanks, Brad. Here we go. Bread Guy's in the house. That's That's like imagine you're just like on shrooms or something or or just like walking through through the park and you just see bread guy with his bodysuit and it's just like, yo, so funny. What's going on, man? That'd be just hilarious. That is that's great. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about Mega Eth. I was gonna ask about the NFT stuff, see what's going on, but I didn't hadn't uh didn't get a chance. Yeah, I'm excited for our next conversation here with Flood, the uh the gig whale hyperbull from uh from the hype

ecosystem. And uh I think he's going to join us in a little bit. So, you know, we'll we'll we'll switch gears here. Uh and and yeah, hear from Flood in a little bit. I think he's coming up. Damn, man. Should be good. Hyperloop's been on a great run. Uh we've had we've got James Win, this trader who's just absolutely blowing his blowing his entire stack on 40x leverage long on Hyperlid. It's been insane marketing. Um obviously uh flood is quite quite bullish on hyperlquid itself. Um so excited we should we should make a disclosure here Andy that we are participating in hype on the liquid

market for sure. Um we are bagged up for better or for worse and I think uh we're going to hear from from flood here very soon about uh about what's going on what has happened recently. It's had, you know, quite a run and uh everything that's going to be coming up here soon. Here he is. Flood. Welcome to the show. We'll get you uh unmuted in Google Meet just so we can uh we can hear you. All right. And uh what's up? How's it going, guys? Hey, thanks for uh thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Um yeah, I want to make a similar disclosure. Obviously, I own Hype. Um very very bullish on Hype. we will be talking our book and obviously I um I

run in Silicone Terminal as well. So you know any any promotion of usage of that platform like uh you know I may be slightly biased I'll put it that way. Man I got to ask um Flood I you know Rob and I have been following accounts like yours and yours specifically since probably late 16 17 into the 18 cycle and uh you've had the singular PFP for so long man. What prompted the change man? Um, I think we're undergoing a fundamental shift in crypto. I think we're finally seeing the rise of long short actually mattering. And retail that's been able to stick around has grown up. I mean, we've all kind of

grown up together since 2017. And I think now we're no longer bamboozled by, you know, people writing venture checks or all of this vaporware or all of this, you know, sort of fluff around infrastructure and this dream that was promised back in, you know, 2017 18 either delta days of permissionless finance. I think we've seen that there has to be trade-offs and compromises, right, to make sure that user experience is comparable. And that's where we're getting to. I I don't want to go too deep into it. There's some some deeper lore as to why I changed the profile picture, but I think we're undergoing a regime change in crypto. People are tired of being fed That's the reality. Like people are tired of being

fed these overfunded, you know, loweconomic utility y low general utility tokens. And that's why you're seeing such a surge around hyperlquid and other um I think things that are capturing you know market share by doing things right on multiple levels both from a product perspective, token design perspective and fundraising perspective. Yeah. I mean we were just talking about um Ekko's sonar release for kind of bringing ICOs back in some capacity. Uh obviously we've gone through an entire like the infloat the FTV you know just like there's just there's been an entire transition. So um I you know I think we're getting closer back to the crypto

ideals that as you said that we were kind of promised. So don't need to harp on that. But what what I think a lot of people want to hear about is this James win and your take on this. So for someone to be up 80 million uh on Hyperlid the billion dollar uh position open obviously 40x long uh long short kind of been flip-flopping then now close to negative reloaded another $250 million last night in long. What is the psychology of a trader like James win? You know it took him 70 days to go from zero to 87 million and then five days nearly to to lose it all. If he was listening right now, what would be your message to him as well? on what do you think his his psychology is?

I think we're very fortunate to be able to view this stuff and this access th this data being accessible to anybody for completely free. Like before, only a select few of centralized exchange insiders and account managers were able to see and potentially leak info on large accounts um and their P&L and how well they've been doing, right? Because um that data was completely private and now we're able to, you know, watch people uh impale themselves on leverage if they choose to. But I think the perspective of someone like James W, I don't know that I have any advice for them. I think their path is pretty pre-ordained. I think they're going to

do what they want to do and they want to gamble and it's your right to gamble, right? And I don't think there's a greater casino in the entire world than hyperlquid because if you want to place a billion dollar bet and have it be verifiable provably and have everybody in the world be able to tag along in real time as to what your P&L is. There's no other venue that can facilitate that other than hyperlquid. Theoretically, you could, you know, buy a billion dollars of ETH and deposit into Maker Dow and leverage up, right?

You know, so there are other venues you could do this on, but those aren't as sexy and they don't offer the same amounts of leverage that Hyperlid does or that quick dopamine rush where he was getting in and out of billion-dollar positions. I I tell him I think, you know, if your goal is to get a lot of attention and you're just you truly have an infinite amount of wealth, he's probably doing things optimally. If he does want to make money, I think he should be a little more particular about how he's executing. Um because he is just losing a lot of expected value that way. But some people don't care. And I think we're lucky to tag along to this degenerate ride. you know, before it's really only CZ and his crew who'd be

able to uh view a position like this, you know, and I'm sure they have a dashboard with all this stuff at at Binance headquarters where they view all the large whales and their liquidations and their risk, but it's um no, we're we're really fortunate actually and that's kind of one of the coolest things about Hyperlid is, you know, um access to data. It's completely free. It's a level level playing field for anyone trying to use um positioning data leverage um trade data historical P&L as actionable alpha. Anybody can do it. Yeah. Back in the day it was just Arthur Hayes counter trading everyone on his insurance fund uh who had access to the data. You you recently went back and forth with Arthur a little bit uh you

know just kind of setting up. I think he's also uh on the hype train. H how how what is that like kind of back going back and forth with Arthur? Used to trade on BitMX now with Hyperlid. You guys are on the same team. How has that dynamic changed? I mean I've been lucky enough to um I I've been I've been fortunate enough to consider some of the BitMX founders I would say friends and work with them on some things. I respect them a ton professionally and I don't think they get enough credit for really pushing the perpetual swap as far as it could possibly go with um you know 100x leverage and and all of the early

infrastructure that they built it was pretty crude I think uh BitMX's infrastructure I think I remember it being 70 orders per second not trades but orders per second back in 2017 2018 so it's kind of a miracle that they were able to facilitate as much volume as they did. Um, but they also don't receive enough credit for never, knock on wood, having any security issues or any hacks for user funds. I think that in this day and age is almost the only thing that I really care about from an exchange side. And the fact that they haven't, I think they deserve a lot of credit for that. They did things correctly. They implemented best practices and they're extremely talented

and bright individuals. and you know um but yeah I mean Arthur's a Arthur is someone he's a hero of mine you know I mean he he's he's pulled out you know some of the largest capital in crypto in a fairly ethically way by building a product that everybody wanted. I don't think there's any better way to make money in crypto. Um, and you know, credit to the BitMX team and yeah, they've lost a considerable amount of market share, but you know, they they sort of live on to fight another day, but there's no one better to champion Hyperlid than someone like Arthur who recognizes how high stakes these exchange games are and how much money is on the line. I mean, I'll say this, and

you know, my figures could be slightly off because I don't have detailed data, but people fundamentally mispric Hyperlid, and Arthur is one of the people who actually has the best pricing and probably the most edge on it. And there's a reason why he's so bullish because people don't realize the global perpetual swap market is anywhere from 20 to$30 billion in revenue a year. I mean, Binance conservatively makes $10 billion a year in revenue. Revenue, right? Not net profit. They're not as lean as Hyperlquid is for many reasons, but Hyper Hyperliquid does about 16th 17th the volume that you know Binance does on per sometimes less sometimes more. Let's call it one/10enth

for easy math. Um, if Binance is making a bill or excuse me, if Hyperliquid is making a billion a year, you know, that puts Binance at which they have higher revenue per user at conservatively $10 billion a year in revenue and that's just from Per that's not including der that's not including spot that's not including their yield products, revenue from the launchpad, their marktomarket value from BNB. So like we're really seeing I think the unbundling of Binance in real time via Hyperlid and all of the things that Hyperlid will enable from builder codes to HIPP3 to self-custody to protocols built on top of it, frontends built on top of it. Binance is many businesses rolled up into one and

this is sort of the unbundling of that I think which is which is incredible to see in real time. So, so then if we were to ask then on a follow-up to that like what you think is not priced into hyperlquid would that be is it mostly around the way people are thinking about it or or is there is there like technical or roadmap or kind of other items of of of hype that people are not kind of thinking about and that aren't priced in or is just mostly the kind of thought process around how to value it? Yeah, it's anformational asymmetry right?

Um, when you're thinking about both the buyback machine, that's easy to quantify, but what's hard to quantify is the amount of growth that Hyperlid can experience because liquidity begets liquidity, right? Market makers and traders are pretty uh neutral when it comes to the venue they trade on. Like I trade on multiple different venues. I trade on Binance, I trade on BBIT, I trade on OKX and I trade on Hyperlid and I trade on chain, right? So, you know, um valuing Hyperlid comes from or or the reason why there's anformational asymmetry is people don't realize just how profitable these exchanges are. Coinbase has

obviously a different model where they're a much higher take rate um and they're charging, you know, 60 basis points out of the box for a spot, but they have 6.5 billion in revenue a year and a few billion of that comes from trading, right? So, you can Hyperlid is still in the very early innings of its potential growth and people are not valuing the token appropriately in my opinion. We're still buyers up here. We we've still been net buyers almost every day, right? And we have topside ball exposure. So, obviously I'm biased. Um but yeah, happy rumors that there's been there's been rumors that you've already dumped well over eight figures of hype.

I mean, people I mean, I can say that that's definitively not true. Um but there's a very there's a difference between being a net seller on one venue and using it to market make. We actually haven't been market making much of the hype spot. So, we haven't been net sellers generally. Have we sold some at times and bought it back? Yeah. I mean, I'm a trader, right? Um, and the purpose of investing and trading is to buy things low and sell them high, right? And your time duration for doing things uh may differ, right? I may buy something and and sell it a minute after. I may sell something and buy it back a month after, right? I mean, it's your right to buy and sell assets

whenever you want, but I will I'm not saying that it's a problem. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I don't know. People love to speculate on things. We have been and it's easily verifiable if if people have any amount of onchain diligence like much larger net buyers than net sellers of Hyperlid. Plus, we have millions of dollars worth of premium in in hyperlquid call spreads, right? In high call spreads. So, you know, that's uh that's as degenerate about that as well. That's as degenerate as it gets for offside exposure. So, I think there's a bit of a war going on right now. Um, Hyperlquid and Salana.

Basically, my perspective from the technical lens is Salana's gone out and be like, well, Ethereum's slow and expensive. We're just going to create a bit more of a centralized, faster, cheaper chain, less validator, scale it up. Hyperlid came in even even more on on the logical extreme was like well Salana is not going to do it for a you know highly performant uh purpose X onchain we're going to do it this way less validators way better uh execution and you put out a tweet saying that just like ETH Salana is fundamentally uninvestable I think this hyperlquid and Salana dynamic is getting a bit stronger over the last couple of weeks to months um you know people are talking about uh hype flipping soul

uh what's what's your take on this dynamic right now and and why is hyperl in your view much more investable than soul? I'm going to sound pretty controversial and inflammatory here, but I think a lot of my views are rooted in examples from traditional finance and they're not always directly correlary, but I think they do matter in this example. I think most L1s are commodity businesses and if you want to own commodity businesses that's fine.

They tend to do pretty well. Railroads are still businesses today but they are commodity to some extent right and the person that is shipping goods does not care which vehicle they ship on whether it's boat or train or truck or camel. They just care that it gets to the destination and that it is as efficient and cheap as possible and it fulfills all of the things that they are optimizing for. Users who will use blockchain technology knowingly or unknowingly to trade and transact values will not be deterministic for which chain they are using. In fact, they may not even know which chain they're using

because it will be wrapped in a wallet or wrapped in a front end or wrapped in some sort of very pretty UI that lets them do things more efficiently, right? So, what do I mean by this? You can imagine that trading for a business like Robin Hood, which is a front end, right? And frontends receive the majority of value in traditional finance. If you take the market caps of frontends, what do I mean by a front end? Robin Hood, Interactive Broker, right? Uh Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab. Schwab has 10 trillion of assets under management. These are frontends essentially that allow you to plug into all of the matching engines and trading venues all across the world, right? And well, specifically for the US, but theoretically all across the

world, the user doesn't care if they trade on NY or BATS or NASDAQ or CME or CBOE. They just care that their order gets filled, right? and they care that it's the cheapest and fastest to get filled with the best ideally user experience as possible. I look at blockchains very similarly and I think blockchains are a very dangerous bet because you're inherently betting on technology not progressing and you not getting leaprogged by advances in tech. That's what happened to Ethereum. Ethereum and again I'm not a blockchain researcher. I again I don't really care about layer ones. I think they are commodity businesses. I'm more interested in the frontends that will actually own the user. But you can imagine a user executing through Robin

Hood. They have no idea what chain their orders are being routed on. They have no idea what venues their order is even hitting. The or the order could be multipplexed to multiple different venues. It could hit Coinbase and Binance and Hyperlquid and a Salana AMM pool and they would have no idea because they are basically just trading and using and thinking about their order execution through Robin Hood. and Robin Hood will not care what blockchain in most purposes will not will power this type of trading. So these really are just commodity businesses. I don't understand why an AMM is a mo an AMM is a constant product, right? There is nothing revolutionary about putting two equal

amounts of an asset into a pool and having it rebalanced. There's no there is nothing inherently that is impressive about this or that is a moat. Um, and if you believe that, you know, uh, chains will get faster and cheaper and potentially more decentralized, then fees should also go down to zero. And people keep saying, well, network effects will make it so that, you know, this chain is valuable and there'll still be a layer 1 premium because, you know, people will want to use Salana or they've solved UX. No, they haven't. It's the frontends on Salana. It's Phantom Wallet that owns the user. Users don't even really understand if their Salana was wrapped in the back end, right, and then shifted over to another

faster, cheaper chain where they got better instantaneous settlement and then when they inevitably make a withdraw or a transfer, then it's unwrapped and transferred back to the chain of origin. There is no way that users will, I think, be voting with their wallet because of a certain type of chain in the back end that they don't even interact with themselves. That's why I think these are commodity businesses and I don't see how it's not a race to the bottom either, right? Like when you have custody over funds, it's a mo because you can enable different types of trading at low cost or no cost or microloans and other types of you know inter interclient payments and margin lending and capital efficiency usage like blockchains don't really do this right. So anyways, I'll let you

guys you know I have pretty strong views on this. This is fundamentally an argument for the the fat app thesis. Mhm. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And and you just have to look across the river at Tradfi and understand that the aggregate market caps of these frontends of Interactive Brokers, Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, Robin Hood, Weeble, etc. are larger than CME, Na, NASDAQ by a factor of 2.5x, 3x. So the value does go to these because they actually own the customer and you know that's why I think hyperlquid is actually very smart for saying no we don't want to go for the entire pie. We we are fine with someone building a front end users not even

knowing that hyperlquid is the base clob or liquidity layer and being essentially just the best matching engine and central base of liquidity. You can own the user. You can add additional features and fiat offramps and all this other stuff. We'll let you own those businesses and monetize them and differentiate how you want, but we will be a, you know, commodity business, but we're fine with being the best and most efficient one that lets you monetize, right? And Salana might win the Salana might win, you know, the L1 war. That's fine, but I don't think that that makes it worth a hundred billion dollars.

Yeah, that is uh I I appreciate the candid thoughts there because I think that uh you know, if you're going to put the elephant in in the room, you might as well say how you're feeling and and what's important is that you're you know, you you're backing this with with in silica with your personal brand with with your with your investments and so um I mean this war is going to rage on. the Salana people would say otherwise and they would clap back and just you know talk about centralization or talk about um you know lack of an ecosystem etc uh or different metrics like rev uh ways to value these things um but you know we can we can save that one for for a different day curious more again going

deeper into uh Hyperlid's evolution you spoke a little bit about builder codes but I think it's important to understand what builder codes really unlock for the Hyperlid ecosystem uh maybe you could just kind of give your thoughts and your take on what builder codes really unlock for hyperlquid. Yeah, I mean it's very simple, right? So if I had to build for those not familiar with what Encilico terminal is, we are an execution system where you know financial tooling for it's typically called an MS an order management system or an OEM order execution management system uh to facilitate better trading for free for retail users, right?

Basically I mean any user could use it but primarily our our users are retail. Um, we're essentially a reskinned UI for um, all of the top venues and we give you access to differentiated order types. So, what does that mean? That means TWAP, VWAP, limit chasing. You can fully customize your UI. So, you know, it looks exactly the same and it's uniform across different venues. You can trade on multiple venues at the same time from one consolidated UI. Um, and you can imagine most serious traders uh, see tremendous benefit from using this type of software. Um it's all completely free. We receive affiliate and broker commissions which is basically like revshare from the exchanges and we don't collect any user data, personal data,

PII stops, um P&L orders, anything. Uh because privacy is our our first and foremost focus. Um, I I think builder codes, what they enable at the core is a way for you to permissionlessly monetize. And that is important because this is what most blockchains enable and is the reason why um they have I think accumulated quite a bit of trading and speculation and incentivization to build things on top of them as opposed to building it on top of Coinbase or building it on top of Binance. If you were to build some sort of execution tooling, which is basically

one of the primary use use cases for builder codes, if you wanted to charge an extra basis point for your Binance customers, you either have to ask permission from Binance and they will tell you no, right? Or you have to find some sort of high friction way to charge the user themselves and settle up a bill. you basically have to invoice them, which is horrific because imagine you have a losing trading month and then I send you a bill for 30 grand for your execution for that month. You're going to you're you're not going to uh be very happy, right? So, that's why we've kept our business free despite being able to charge for it. Um I think it's important for this to be just a a net good like a a general net benefit for most crypto

users and we have other plans once we accumulate enough flow. Um, and we want to own all of the execution. But what builder codes enable me to do is if I wanted to, I can charge one basis point or 10 basis points if I thought I could get away with it. And Hyperlid can't stop me, right? And that's never been possible on any clo in history. Like if you were trading options on Darvet and you built a really cool options trading bot or something or you built really cool analytic software and you had execution bundled in that app, you have no way of charging other than through the gated broker and affiliate programs on centralized exchanges. Most people don't understand this, but you're basically at the mercy of CZ waking up

one day, which he has in the past, and saying, "Okay, 50% of your users, you actually can't monetize them anymore." He slashed monetization from V VIP4 to VIP2. So, Hyper uh Binance, excuse me, went from one of our most profitable venues to facilitate trading on to one of our least profitable venues to facilitate trading on, right? And they do this randomly because you're in their sandbox and it's their right to, right? I mean, it's just business at the end of the day. You don't take it personally. But Hyperliquid is allowing for the first time on derivative trading the ability for you to permissionlessly monetize yourself. And that is incredibly valuable. That's incredibly valuable. And most people don't

understand why because they haven't tried to build a product or thought about what monetization looks like. But this will enable and this will this will coordinate people to build exclusively on hyperlquid. Even if Drift adds broker codes, even if Dydx adds broker codes or or builder codes or some sort of revenue sharing program, they don't have the user attention and volume. Hyperlid is already too far ahead of them, right? So this will enable products that we haven't even thought of yet and will incentivize that sort of speculation and time exchange for time to build a product because you can actually have some sort of monetization on it in a way that has never been historically possible.

Flood, thank you so much for for joining and talking Hyperlid. Just one last thing for you. Um, do we do we think that there's a world where Hyperlid flips Binance in Purpose volume in 2025 or 26 or what's it going to take to get there? It's impossible for it to flip. Well, not impossible. Nothing's impossible, but it's very unlikely that it flips Hyperlid or excuse me, Binance volumes in 2025 just because Binance is such a commanding lead on the swap market. Yeah. Um, and spot and pers go hand in hand. Additionally, um there are some other uh capital efficiency uh things that Binance extends to you due to them being like fully custodial and stuff. Um

that enables better capital efficiency and higher rates of leverage for certain market makers. They also, and I don't have any proof of this, but I can imagine that if you're an extremely large trading firm, they'll issue you credit knowing that you have a balance sheet of a billion dollars or something and they've audited you or something that they can extend a credit of 50 or 100 million. Like Hyperlid will never do that. Like Hyperlid won't even pay 30 grand for their Trading View implementation, right? Like Hyperlid has a strict policy of not paying anybody for anything ever. So, the people that are talking about James Win being marketing, they're they're as far as I know, it's a lot. And I would bet a lot of money that it's a lot. Um, but in 2026, it's entirely possible because

Binance is in a really tough spot. They don't do regulated trading better than Schwab or Coinbase does because they're inherently not a US Nexus company. and they don't do you know permissionless trading or or push the boundaries of of finance and and maybe um open up discourse around you know KYC and permission like Binance is inherently a permission entity with a lot of baggage. So, I think 2026 actually looks looks pretty pretty rough for Binance where in crypto you you get killed when you're in the middle when like why did Ethereum lose to some extent, right? It's because they try to be both Bitcoin and Salana.

When you try to do two things mediocre, you typically end up uh atrophying substantially, right? You need to focus on doing one thing the best and then add other types of uh you know edges and and products and features. And that's just pretty standard like first principles thinking. And I think Binance is in a tough spot. So 2026 could look very different. 2025 uh Binance spot market is is the only spot market in the world other than Coinbases that matters right now. Floyd, thanks thanks for joining, man. And uh best of luck on your hype journey. We are riding with you and um we're glad to hear it. It's the only asset that matters in crypto other than Bitcoin.

Like it's very simple, you know. It it's very very simple. Nothing else makes money. Speak to you soon, man. Cheers. Thanks, Vlad. That is the hyperlquid mer right there. Up next, we got we got Rip. Um, the guy, the man, the the core community of Rise Chain and Ethereum, almost like to the extent that Flood is on Hyperlid. Looking forward to talking to RIP. That was a flood has some very strong opinions.

Absolutely he does. I mean it's great to hear it's really no different than what we see on Twitter, but uh yeah, I mean I I think he's got a very consistent thesis with centralized and decentralized exchanges overall. So it it's interesting to hear not just hype bull hype bull hype bull. There is a much more well-rounded thesis at play here. Just going to put on my uh my headphones here to make sure that we're good to go for this last segment. This has been a super fun show. I'm uh I'm really jazzed up about this. Yeah, man. We got Rip coming up. Last one. We're We're definitely getting into the marathon territory here. Um let's get Rip up and get Robbie tuned back in. Yeah, man. I mean, the Salana

Hyperlquid war is is is quickly turned away from the the Salana ETH war and is quickly turned to the uh Hype Soul War. Um, I mean, I think from price performance-wise, obviously, Hype has done better and probably continues to. Um, but those two communities, I also think that that when you're on the rise, you tend to get a bit cocky as a community, but then when you're on the fall, uh, other, you know, you know, teams can kind of like kick you while you're down. Uh but I I think this time around the hyperl community has done a much better job of actually you know being receptive to uh you know kind of winning and so I think that's been good to see on the timeline. Um well that's one through line between all three of

these communities that are sort of orbiting around. You've got you know Ethereum, Hyperlquid, Solana are sort of the communities that are capitalizing on most attention these days. These are the most organic grassroots communities that play here. Add Bitcoin into that as well. And I think it's no surprise that these are communities that stick around because there's longer term thesis. You know, you look at a project that, you know, isn't full of airdrop farmers and Kaido Yaps. These are guys that that kind of go by the wayside, but you know, there there are long-term projects out there that are building real tech. And sometimes it takes time to realize that.

And then we've got real communities that are grassroots organic and uh and weren't bought, right? These these are people that believe in the tech and believe in the community. So we're here with Rip the uh the Ethereum member and Ethereum champion. It's good to see you, Rick. Hey, Robbie. Excited to be here. Yeah, man. How are you? Nice mil. Hey, thanks. Yeah, I'm really great. How about you guys? Yeah, doing well. you're you're the uh last guest on the stream today. We've got learnings from 50KTPS scaling Ethereum. I think the thing that I want to start talking to you about is the diagram that you put out uh a couple days ago. It was of the Ethereum logo

and you had like the top triangle and the bottom triangle as different parts of like the services that Ethereum can offer. Um you know, and we're really pushing towards more of like this uh kind of full stack approach. So maybe you can just walk us through your your thinking there as as to like these core services and kind of how you're seeing that come together for Ethereum. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So um the current rollups today are using they're using settlement. Um so this is what makes an L2 and L2. So settlement on on Ethereum.

The other aspect is uh Ethereum DA which is great. And then the two other services that I added these are coming um some some exist for example B sequencing so B sequencing is using Ethereum sequencing so it's validators as your sequencer instead of a synchronized a centralized sequencer like most cells have today which means you can inherit Ethereum's properties like decentralization livess censorship resistance and it will enable synchronous composability with other L2s and DL1. I would say this is the one of the biggest

pros and we can maybe talk about that later. The other uh service that is is not ready yet uh but it it's coming it's been talked about from DF from Justin and so on. It's the native execution. So this is about using Ethereum's EVM directly instead of an emulation of an EVM. So you often see it's a chain which is EVM equivalent. Um but in that case with native rollup you're really literally using the EVM from uh Ethereum. So what that does is it reduces bugs u because you're getting it out of the box. It's pretty much like a oneliner

um to to get it working. and uh and so yeah, you get updates out of the box. You don't have to roll your own uh fraud proofs which is a really hard thing to do. It uh reduces trust or increases trust assumptions. So for interrupt uh you're basically becoming trustless which is uh which increase the the security of other chains you want to interup with. Uh so yeah basic basically these are the four uh pieces um which I think is uh the the endgame for rollups which will bring them closer to Ethereum uh which means yeah you're in you're

inheriting Ethereum's properties um and I think the value acrruel is going to be a bit better uh because you're using literally Ethereum services and with interrupt I think people are going to understand a bit more that it's a whole like there all L2s are part of uh the Ethereum network instead of competing in a sense against it. Yeah, that that certainly seems like the direction that we're headed. We we've gone back and forth on on the dynamic between Ethereum's L2s and its L1's.

Ultimately, bringing these L2s closer to the L1 does seem to increase the value of the whole pie. You know, I'm I'm curious what that does to L2 tokens, right, a as they become more integrated into the L1. But a lot of that still remains to be seen, you know, as as we develop more and more apps and utility on these L2s. I I'm curious what kind of new use cases you think are going to be unlocked as we scale in terms of TPS. We had Bred from Mega ETH on a little bit earlier. you know, you you're representing Rise Chain and I think you guys are are collectively two of the, you know, more prominent L2s that are really pushing the boundaries of throughput. H how do you think

throughput is going to manifest itself in some of these next generation applications? Yeah. Yeah. I think it will enable the next generation generation of DAPs um with the speed and experience of web two or like centralized exchanges and so if you have the low latency of rise for example I think it can unlock a lot of potential uh in like DeFi 3.0 I would say or gaming and so on. So you can think of like instant oracles or VRF. Um and so I think that um it's really something that the space should work towards too so that there is less of a

gap between web three and web two. I mean we want web three to be an improvement over uh web two. So the experience should be as good or better. And I think that speed is is one part of it. Riff, what's your hottest take on the current L2 landscape today? Uh, interesting. Uh, I think the one problem is the centralized sequencer which uh we we just talked about. So I think that base rollup is going to solve that. I think the other problem is fragmentation. Um I think that fragmentation is solvable and it's

being solved right now. It's like in the EF road map for the next 6 to 12 months. They have like the the open intense intense framework that most L2s are part of. And the end goal is that Ethereum should feel like one chain. When you go on an app, whichever L2 you use, it shouldn't you shouldn't have to bridge to it. it should uh be able to pull your assets from other L2s uh and the L1. Same for trades like you you should see an aggregated balance per assets in your wallet instead of being spread across a bunch of L2s and when you trade it should just work with assets on all

these L2s. Um and it could actually be more optimized that way. So it gets the most optimized route and I think like in intense is the first step base sequencing is the next step. So I think the biggest issues right now with L2s is fragmentation. I don't know if it's a hot take. Um but yeah this is it. The other is like speed which I think that rise um and mega 8 were were both I think nextg and not only L2s but chains um in terms of uh latency and speed.

Absolutely. I'm I'm curious from a broader Ethereum perspective, you know, we've we've seen uh the Ethereum community embrace this new renowned vision of the world computer. you know, that was sort of on the fence for a while. To you, what is the world computer and why is it important for Ethereum to achieve this vision? Yeah, I think there's been a lot of different narratives. Um, that's right. There definitely has during the time of Ethereum, I think, well, computer is one one that I like to uh talked about is the internet of value, which I think they're really similar. It's just an a different analogy. But I think the world computer works with my diagram that we

just talked about which you can use services from Ethereum and build apps both apps and L2s and smart contract and so on. I think I I like the internet of value analogy a bit better because um I think that Ethereum is uh like the L1 is the base layer or the protocol which I I like to compare to TCP IP from in the internet. Um and it's also it's credibly neutral. It's censorship resistant has 100% uptime. I think it's the best best uh ba base layer you could have. U and then anyone can build not only apps but

also chains on top of Ethereum. So it's horizontally scalable like the internet. Um this is like the fundamental difference with other L2s uh or other L1s. um DL2s will become again synchronistically composable and interable with each other which will become a network of a network of networks. So that's why I like to compare it to the Ethereum is the internet of value. That's what I like to say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the world computer was actually in one of the first Ethereum marketing videos ever released on on YouTube which which is

pretty funny. Um but yeah, it seems like we've kind of got gotten away from that. One thing that that we have in here as the as the headline, which is the um uh 50k TPS recently, I saw something uh um from from you guys at Rise about 50,000 transactions in a single block. Um yeah, what makes this possible from a tech perspective and and why is this important to everybody in the space? Yeah, I think the it's pretty it's pretty funny. The 50k transaction is a single block. We we don't know who did it. It wasn't us, but I think it proves that we do have 50k TPS on test right now. Our target is 100k. Um but yeah, there are multiple things things that

enable uh this. I think that uh the engineering team is amazing. We started with the OP stack and they optimize every corner of it. they spent like 18 months trying to remove the bottlenecks. Um, and it was originally built for 100 TPS and so 50 TPS is a a lot different. Um, the other aspect is the DA. So we know that Ethereum DA is limited right now. uh it's being uh improved on with the blobs upgrade and pure das and tank sharding coming but

right now we're using Celestia so I think this is uh giving us a big uh boost um and so yeah this is mostly it and in terms of like the other aspect is more latency uh but yeah we do have shreds which is a big uh reason why rise is faster in terms of uh latency Yeah. Yeah. I I've Could you explain shreds like Eli 5? Because I kind of understand it, but I I I'm I'm not really fully up to date on exactly because I I know Salana has shreds as as well, but I don't understand exactly what it does. Yeah, it's it's basically a preconfirmation, right? An

economically secure preconfirmation. So what how it works it's basically like a continuous block building pipeline where transaction are processed as soon as they land in the meool. It's really a new uh architecture for for like this for sequencing existing L2s they have discrete blocks rise is continuous blocks um so what it means it's just you have a faster experience for the user it's pretty much instant right we have five millisecond latency it's as a real time as it gets pretty much yep th this is obviously a a significant value you know proposition and use case for chains and applications that you

know are are running on these chains. just just before you rip on, you know, you came on the show, we had flood, you know, the hyperlquid bull, and he was kind of positioning this this argument for the fat app thesis, right? Where it's, you know, about owning the end user relationships. Wallets have this, applications have this, and it doesn't necessarily acrue value to the to the base protocol. Would you agree with that take or or you know, representing rise chain? H how do you you know sort of analyze this and reconcile this uh with value acrruel flowing to the base protocol?

Yeah, I think it's a bit similar to the L2s. I think that once I mean again I I've talked about this but once we have a really interpable network uh within Ethereum I think that anything that grows a network anything that makes it stronger will end up acrewing value to Ethereum. Um and I think that apps are are similar in a way. Um I think that with interrupt I think most app are going to be crosschains and I think that most assets are going to be tokenized on the L1 itself and then you can use them uh within L2s. So I think that it all

comes back to to ET and Ethereum in my opinion. I don't think that um I mean for sure I'm sure that apps are going to have tokens, L2s are going to have tokens. So these are more specific ways to invest in in those uh companies uh if you think that they'll grow. But ultimately if you want to invest in the whole ecosystem, I think eat is is a very good way. I I I like the mental model you you describe of most assets living on the L1 going and moving the assets to a particular L2 for some action and then moving them back to the L1. And I I think especially with the

snarkification and the ZK proofs and and acceleration that we're seeing, this is going to become increasingly possible. We've already reached some semblance of real-time proving, which is, you know, proving these things in one Ethereum block. I think if we can send them out, do some transaction with them on an L2 and send them back all within the same 12 second Ethereum block, then we really have the use case and scale that we're looking for with onchain applications. Yeah, I think real time proving is huge.

I mean, we thought that Ethereum couldn't scale without compromising on decentralization, but I think with the improvements of ZK, it's becoming possible. I think I mean Justin has talked about and other and tank and others I think that 10k TPS is possible on the L1 um and I think it's going to enable yes uh it's going to improve like the the settlement between uh L1 and L2 which is going to help synchronous composibility also I think it's going to bring it's going to help bringing postquantum security uh to the L1 And I think the the main goal of this of

scaling the L1 I mean some people think that it's in the road map right scale the L1 some people think that Ethereum should become uh should go to the path of other L1s like Solana right of just having one L1 but I don't I don't think that's the goal. I think that we we want a strong layer one which still has a lot of TVL is dominating uh stable coins dominating defy and so you want to keep uh those customers those users on there. I think there Ethereum DL1 is slow right now. there are ways to uh to make it scale and ultimately all of this is going to end

up improving rollups and synchronous composity which we want. So yeah, it's good all around. RIP, thank you so much for joining, man. I I appreciate your bullishness on Ethereum. I think uh uh it's tough to be bullish on Ethereum right now from a from a price perspective, but people are sticking to it and I think you'll be rewarded. Um, and I'm stoked that you joined Rise. We are really big fans, Sam, Sasha, and the team. Uh, also just been supporting for a long time. So, thank you for Thank you for coming out, man. And, uh, keep shipping, man. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, that's why I like to talk about the narrative and the vision of Ethereum, uh, to remind people why

we're here and why is still good. But, yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks, RIP. Boron. Thank you, RIP. See you soon, man. Yeah, man. That was the last one. Yeah, that was great, man. What an episode. What a stream is right. That was a marathon one. Yeah, it was. It was tons of really interesting commentary. Good guess. Fun time. Uh let's see what the Let's see what the BTC price did. Did I said I was bullish, right? I think you've been higher every time. Oh my god. We're definitely lower. We're at 1057. Boy, yikes. Yikes. Dun dun. I got that one on. It looks like you're two 20

two in the last two calls because of you know, you keep I'm just I'm the house. I I just play whatever whatever uh against the traders here. Apparently I think despite despite the price action here uh this stream has given a a reinvigorated sense of you know bullishness on the industry you know after hearing from RIP on ETH after hearing from flood on hype it it's incredible to see both of the ends of this industry pushing from the app perspective and the protocol perspective. Yeah, exactly. Just completely different lens and thoughts and focus points, but um you know, yeah, there's just a lot of people, a lot of people that are

committed and want to build and I mean, we're here to support. We're going to scale the TV. We're going to keep growing and uh the market's one thing, but you know, we're here to stay. I just saw a tweet that Pakistan is going to create a Bitcoin sovereign wealth fund reserve. And I mean, it's just it's all happening. So, thanks guys for for for watching. Rob, thanks for being on. And uh Polar Bear, we'll be here. We're not going anywhere. Catch you 247 next time. Cheers. Cheers, brother. Peace. Speak to you soon. See you guys next week. Uh got a couple coming up and permission list coming up later this month.