SharpLink & Lido: The Future of Ethereum Has Never Been Brighter (Here’s Why)

Transcript

When Ethereum is finally on offense and winning 55% of stable coins, over 50% of RWA, it dominates DeFi, why would you want to rug pull the monetary policy that is the future of growth of the ecosystem? So again, >> I think everyone knows that you're effectively like you're shooting yourself in the foot. Again, as Joseph mentioned, you're just making it an incredibly easy for institutions to move to Solana. >> Just like the streets of Manhattan, I'm going to keep this quick. Over 70% of our viewers are not subscribers. Yes, you. Every week we interview some of the best entrepreneurs and investors [music] in the financial industry. The easiest way to support our channel is to hit the

like and smash the subscribe button. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy [music] today's show. >> Uh Keen, uh and and Joseph, good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you again. >> I think the last time you skipped us for your sister's wedding, so this is going to be a banger episode. [laughter] >> She is happily married. Yes, I was missing you guys, but I was I was watching the stream as she was walking down the aisle, so I think I'm fully >> [laughter] >> we're up to speed. Um and and like Andy said in the intro, I mean there's plenty to chat about. Obviously, first and foremost is I believe it's $200 million of ETH that was staked through Lido via

Congratulations. Let's start there. Joseph, maybe you could tell us, you know, why this was timely, why did you choose right now to do this staking move, and and why choose Lido as a partner? >> First, Lido is the largest and most liquid staking protocol in the Ethereum ecosystem. I think over $16 billion. And from day one, we've been making at Sharp Link our Ethereum productive. We staked nearly 100% starting last June, and we're building a portfolio of ETH from simple staking to liquid restaking tokens into DeFi and the announcement with Lido is taking a pretty big sleeve of our treasury, 200 million out of of

about 1.7 billion so that we can use it to do things that are portable and composable. And for people in crypto, they completely understand what that means, but for traditional investors, um in crypto, you can take ETH, in this case wrapped ETH coming from Lido, and you can use it for other purposes in the ecosystem. In this case, we're going to use a bulk of that to put it into a new Galaxy Sharplin fund so we can stay liquid in Lido, directional in ETH, and then make it productive on chain. So, it's actually quite exciting. Um so, we're really happy to partner with Lido.

We do tons of diligence and um it it was an easy choice for us when you think about liquidity and composability. >> Yeah. Uh and Kean, from your side, I mean, please, uh you guys have been doing this a long time. Uh one of the leaders in ETH staking, uh tell us, you know, about Absolutely the leader in ETH staking, no doubt. So, tell us how this ultimately came together and uh what things have been like from your perspective. >> Sure. Well, firstly, like we are incredibly excited to be working with Joseph and the rest of the Sharplin team. I think we were speaking to the team late last year and having initial conversations, educating the guys in what we're doing. Um we're incredibly [clears throat] fortunate. One of the

gentlemen on Joseph's team, Kam, I think he's the head of DeFi for Sharplin, uh he was incredibly knowledgeable about what Lido was doing, the benefits of using stETH and wrapped stETH as collateral, liquidity. So, it's been absolutely fantastic to kind of build a deeper relationship with the Sharplin team. And I suppose to maybe answer your question or your original question more directly, I I think this is just an incredibly strong signal for institutions more broadly. Like the commitment that kind of Shapelink and Joseph has shown to kind of move and allocate 200 million, which is a significant amount of capital, like Joseph mentioned, um into a battle-tested protocol like Lido is just a tremendous endorsement

for what we're trying to do. And for me, like we're definitely seeing a common theme for these digital asset treasury companies and different asset managers that they don't want to sacrifice between earning yield and trying to maintain liquidity. We're seeing these institutions come to Lido because they want both. Um So again, I can't really emphasize enough how excited we are to work with Joseph and the rest of the team, and I'm incredibly proud of all the hard work both sides have put into this to get us to this point. >> Yeah. Yeah, I think I mean, Joe, from the perspective of really trying to maximize, you know, ETH per share from the Shapelink um perspective, when you think about allocating capital, whether it be

uh through this initiative or other similar previous ones, like through um Linea and through that kind of initiative that you did with Joe Lubin over there, and kind of just looking to maximize maximize ETH per share, while obviously, you know, kind of you know, navigating on-chain risks, smart contract risks, regulatory uh and compliance risks, uh how do you think about more broadly the strategy as it has changed throughout the last several months, uh and then looking forward about the strategy to maximize ETH per share? And then I think that'll take us into the whole issuance conversation as well.

>> So to us, it's very simple. Unlike Bitcoin, who I'm a huge fan of, ETH is a natively productive asset. So if you own it, and you own it on behalf of shareholders, you damn well make better make it fully productive. And for us, that doesn't mean just achieving the Ethereum staking rate. Uh we use Caesar as our benchmark. To me, that's the risk-free rate that you want to actually try to exceed. Um we call that alpha, and uh it's actually portable alpha in the sense that the sources of that excess return can come from lots of different places. It can actually come from optimizing uh the validators and the staking operations you use. It could come from allocations to DeFi, and earlier this year we

allocated 200 million uh through Ether fi. And then it can also come by putting it into fund structures like we're doing with Galaxy. And the reason why we purchased 200 million of Lido is you could have funded that type of investment with dollars or stablecoins, but you wouldn't be directional ETH. And if your conviction is that Ethereum is the future settlement layer, and you your whole purpose of your digital asset treasury is to give investors exposure to ETH, you can own Lido, you can pledge it, and you can be directional ETH. So, that that's very easy. And then the ETH we earn in staking rewards, you just put back into the treasury and it compounds

itself. When you talk about risk and compliance, we were the first to go out into DeFi, but we didn't do it by leaving our qualified custodian. And in the case of this sleeve, this 200 million allocation to Lido, we're taking that token and keeping it in Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered bank. So, you don't have to compromise on smart contract risk, security risk, go into a Web3 wallet, and leave your custodian. You could do it all as institutions do in trusted counterparties. So, um we're really excited. I think you're going to see a new wave of productivity coming from digital assets treasuries. Some are going to choose to build staking operations. Some people like us will

choose to be the most sophisticated deployers of our ETH because it's permanent capital. And maybe later we can talk about what it means to have permanent capital versus what you see in crypto, which is a lot of short-term mercenary capital. >> Yeah, we we've certainly seen uh you know, the merry-go-round of mercenary capital as it you know, goes through the L1s, it goes through DeFi. Uh the entrance of permanent capital is a is a welcome uh occurrence. Um I I think you know, 8363 this EIP that was proposed around the issuance schedule uh you know, caught a lot of people by surprise.

Um it felt like for once the Ethereum community actually came to consensus on a thing and it was against this thing. Um I I didn't see too many positive takes on it. Uh Joe on a post August 8th you said it would undermine DeFi and erase the native yield advantage driving billions in institutional adoption. Maybe you can just like it just from the institutional perspective, you know, you guys are pioneers in and showcasing [clears throat] what it means to have institutional Ethereum access and exposure.

Why is this so detrimental? At the face of it I guess if I were to strongman, you know, the proposal it would be bringing down issuance, less supply inflation would mean uh you know, overall uh a higher ETH price. Why is that the wrong thesis, the wrong perspective to have from someone who's on the ground working with Ethereum day in and day out? >> Yeah, I I wrote a piece and I wanted to be very thoughtful and I want to start by saying the folks who proposed that um are not bad people. They actually have ETH and Ethereum at their heart. I find them to be a more academic crew. Um but when I wrote the title of my piece, I tried to keep it as simple and

uh digestible as possible. The wrong proposal at exactly the wrong time. Why do I believe that? Ethereum has been um in a bit of a leadership crisis for the last 6 months to a year. It doesn't have this Alana treasury with built-in BD. It doesn't have, you know, vast swaths of token they can give out to win business. What it does have is 11 years of exactly what institutions are looking for, security, liquidity, uh and trust. And the reason why this is exactly the wrong time to mess with a monetary power uh policy of Ethereum is one, this uh Ethereum staking rate fall at

dynamically in the mid-2% range is essentially the risk-free benchmark for most of DeFi borrowing and lending. And DeFi was built on Ethereum. Ethereum has a massive moat around DeFi. Why would you want to undermine one of the most successful elements? And that DeFi, the swapping, lending, borrowing that's that Ethereum dominates with that risk-free Ethereum staking rate, then allows many more stable coins and tokenized assets to enter the ecosystem.

So, one is you'd undermine the core strength. Second is there's a view that the staking rate is just giving out rewards to validators and big institutions. But as you see about a third of all ETH being staked, that money is not leaving the ecosystem. It's going right back into it. What do I mean by that? Chainlink takes a significant portion of our ETH rewards, puts it back into DeFi, puts it back into blue-chip protocols, pledges and invests in projects like Lido. It's permanent capital. It's not being taken out in dividend to investors.

And then the final thing I'll say is it really is a differentiating factor from Bitcoin. If you're an institutional investor and you want exposure to the future of crypto, you can own Bitcoin, but you get no yield out of it. One of the reasons why institutions really like Ethereum is the fact that it has a native productivity. And if you want to get the upside of a network plus yield productivity, it is massively differentiating. And when Ethereum is finally on offense and winning, 55% of stable coins, over 50% of RWA, it dominates DeFi, why would you want to rug pull the monetary policy that is the future of growth of the ecosystem? So

again, we don't think these people are ill-intended. We do like the idea of scarcity and some limit on staking, but wrong proposal at exactly the wrong time. >> Absolutely. Um >> so we're >> Just kind of passing to your side from the Lido perspective, from what you've seen over the years of liquid staking, staking, you know, through through the merge, 2022, there's been a just a ton of monetary policy changes, economics, right? The the old the industry is kind of going through this coming of age of trying to look at these blockchains more like a a ledger and and and and a business with with a profit and loss, looking to kind of uh you know, turn these things into you know, very investable assets, perhaps missing the whole, you know,

store value and monetary, you know, premium thesis here that I think a lot of Ethereum uh folks have been you know, pioneering and pushing forward. From your from the Lido perspective, do you agree with Joe here? What is some other kind of nuances that you think are uh a bit a bit a bit important to to note? >> Yeah, like I would definitely echo and agree everything that's Joe said. I would say like I I think the approach is misguided. I think obviously from a Lido perspective, we're we're not in favor of this. Um I think the idea that cutting issuance and effectively cutting staking rewards to nothing doesn't necessarily mean it will solve the problem that it's trying to solve.

From an institutional perspective, we were conducting interviews over the past kind of 2 months. I think I spoke to maybe 10 or 15 different institutions. Tier one managing billions, if not trillions. Uh I haven't met anyone that is supportive of this idea. I think everyone knows that you're effectively like you're shooting yourself in the foot. Again, as Joseph mentioned, you're just making it an incredibly easy for institutions to move to Solana. >> [snorts] >> Yeah. >> Um the other big thing we've noticed, which is again critically important, is just to keep the network decentralized.

We've met a lot of people where if the staking rewards rate was to go down to 1, 1 and 1/2%, they don't see the point in running a community staking node helping to support decentralization because there's I suppose no meaningful upside to that. There's a lot of effort and no reward. And then the final thing I would say from again speaking to different asset managers and ETF issuers, they've spent millions launching these stake products, lobbying governments. There's been a huge amount of due diligence. There's been an ecosystem launched over staking. And the idea of cannibalizing it right now just doesn't make sense.

>> The beautiful thing about Ethereum is that anyone can make this proposal. That is actually the beauty of the governance process. But the flip side of that is if it's not some technical change where the technical researchers uh need consensus, this is a business model and monetary policy change. It requires consensus from the ecosystem, and it's just simply not there. And I think the voices have been voiced, and I think most of the voices have been moderate and reasonable and Ethereum-aligned, and not greedy and self-serving. So I I think this has almost no chance of passing, but decentralized governance allows anyone to make these type of proposals and then others to, you know, democratically

express their views. And that's the beauty of Ethereum. We're not dominated by one voice. >> Yeah. And I think Rob may have some more specific questions about the proposal and and the nuances there. Just one quick thing. Is there anything that you guys would like to see >> That was actually exactly my question. >> And is there you know, people came out in force against this, but we didn't really hear from people as far as, okay, is ETH issuance perfect right now? You would make no changes? Or if you were to have a perfect world and make changes and it were to go through, what would you do to ETH issuance to the monetary policy right now?

>> Yeah, Keen, you you want to start? >> Yeah, I think look, from my perspective, is Ethereum perfect? Absolutely not. Is issuance perfect? Again, not. But there's so many other things you could focus your attention on and make a more meaningful impact. Like, at the end of the day, everyone wants to grow Ethereum adoption at an institutional and also at a retail or personal level. So, for me, I just think more effort could be spent on making Ethereum more accessible, building applications on Ethereum that grows adoption. So, again, for me, I just think people are spending their time and effort on a topic that's not exactly the most high on the priority list. And there's time better spent elsewhere.

>> And Joseph, anything from your perspective as maybe a consumer of ETH yield rather than a supplier? What what else would you be looking for? >> To be honest with you, at this moment, when Ethereum feels like it's going on offense, look at the scoreboard and compare it across stablecoin adoption, tokenized real-world assets, and and [clears throat] DeFi, I would simply be spending my time and money, and I'm doing both to drive the institutional adoption. We're at a moment that matters. The world's largest institutions are going from tokenizing de novo or brand new products. When I was at BlackRock, we took a couple of years to plan and get our Biddle token to be the largest

tokenized fund in the world, but it took a couple of years. A year and a half after I left BlackRock, they're tokenizing existing funds, money market funds with 8 billion dollars of existing assets. That is like 30% of all tokenization happening in one shot. And so, I'd be very, very focused on supporting those use cases. And then, I'd also be very focused on building a differentiated offering in Ethereum for Argentic. I know it sounds like a cliche, but if you're dominating stablecoins, which is the money layer, you're dominating in tokenized real-world assets, which is the asset exposure layer. It's not a new asset class.

And DeFi and on-chain finance is where a lot of the execution is happening. The Argentic layer's just the automation layer. That's going to bring billions of new users to Ethereum. They may be agents, but they're users, and they're going to transact, and they want decentralized rails. So, I'd be focusing on that rather than messing with the protocol. I think that is the most important way to drive Ethereum adoption. And then, when you get that level of transactions, the burn will pick up, and you'll start seeing Ether be what it is, which is a really important trust commodity that you're going to new you're going to need to do on-chain finance. So, I'm I'm less focused on making technical changes to

the protocol. I'm actually hoping we can put it in the hands of every person in the world. Yep. >> Um Kean, something specifically with regards to Lido, you know, Joe mentioned uh the exposure with the 20 million dollars of ETH into the protocol, as well as um you know, there is Lido rewards that you know, that you earn through staking with Lido. There's different programs. Obviously, enterprise and commercial deals are now a part of kind of Lido's institutional offering here. Right, not not needing to get into the details here, but a kind of a separate uh tangent that I'm curious how you're thinking about is uh you know, we coined this term revenue meta. It's kind of a silly term, but it's what's happening where you've got these protocols that are earning a lot of actual revenue,

right? From some from some product market fit, whether it's perps, whether it's trading, whether it's yield, whether it's staking, whether it's stablecoins, and they're kind of restructuring their token models around essentially treating token holders as first-class citizens. And I want to say, Joe, that I think that's where this EIP is coming from is kind of from this kind of potentially short-lived pendulum swing in a bear market of hey, we want to you know, try to make these crypto assets more more attractive to investors by essentially evening out their emissions versus their uh kind of inflows, trying to kind of turn that into a positive. A lot of this, you know, stem from the administration uh that has previously been elected, the Trump administration. Hyperliquid kind of came out, did this, you know, huge

buyback program. And so, you've got protocols like Lido been [snorts] very, very profitable profitable for a while, but you have these emissions, you have expenses, you have all these things, Keen, that investors are now coming to you and basically saying, "Look, we don't even want to really get involved unless we're looking at something that we're investing into a business where the equity is the token and the token holders are being treated as first-class citizens, meaning buybacks, meaning transparency, meaning uh openness, profit sharing, etc." And so, I'm just curious, Keen, what your current viewpoint is from the Lido perspective, the Lido token perspective, and just this this kind of rhetoric and current era of the token market in digital assets uh outside of Bitcoin and

Ethereum. Maybe you put it something like a Zcash in there or some other other kind of like monetary assets. These on-chain businesses, the way that that the tokens are being um you know, thought of now, how do you think about this from a lot of perspective? What changes are you making? What changes are you not making? How are you guys, you know, kind of going about uh this era? >> Um Yeah, it's it's quite a broad and I suppose there's a lot of different nuances to this and I think like anything in life, there's levels. I definitely view Lido as tier one, battle-tested. One thing that Lido is tremendously good at is getting feedback and listening to feedback. So, by that I mean, the Lido research forum, anyone can go, post, give feedback and guidance. And I can say again with

absolute certainty, the contributors in Lido, they do look at that and they take it seriously. And I think that's been one point of criticism that's been raised a number of times against Lido where all the revenue is being generated from staking and in this ETH and it's not being passed over to LDO token holders. So, one of the big actions that's taken place over the past year and that's really kind of ramped up over the past couple of months is uh LDO buyback program. So, this is I suppose probably the first prong where we're trying to again increase the token price, give I suppose token holders skin in the game from the revenue that's being generated in Lido. But again, this is the first prong and there's definitely a huge amount of work taking place behind the scenes to okay, how can we do more for token holders? How can we

implement their feedback? Um so, what I would say is kind of watch this space. >> Yeah. But you generally kind of see this shift as one that is healthy and signs of a maturing space. Is it overextended? Just kind of more broadly speaking, I'm curious what you guys think about this kind of uh uh this you know, more revenue focused, product-market-fit focused that we're entering as a space. >> I personally I think it's fantastic. Like, it's a sign of maturity. Like, I've been in crypto for around 10 years and I would say there was never really talk of a P&L, how do you manage risk?

Now suddenly institutions are entering the room, people are looking at it from a different lens. Whereas I think before it was a little bit of throw it at the dartboard, see what sticks. Now people are asking real serious questions. And again, I think that's a sign of maturity for Ethereum. Like if you look at it even just from a business perspective, like um you have to work Joseph's work he's doing again. I always think Joseph is a de facto head of BD for Ethereum to a degree. All the work the docks are doing. You have Ethereum institutional, you have the enterprise Ethereum alliance. These are again bodies that are building serious institutional and just structure around Ethereum. So I think this is all positive developments and it's a really good sign to see.

>> Um in addition to sort of the expanding uh universe of Ethereum, I guess it's is one way to put it. We we saw Fidelity start to now offer staking on its Ethereum product and start to bring that to market. Joseph, maybe just a reaction to what you're seeing in the enterprise and institutional capital markets as it pertains to Ethereum. What is the demand been like and is there still money on the sidelines that is waiting to come in and what are they waiting for?

>> Let me give that answer in two ways. I think since um basically June when the Ethereum community got its act together, stopped flagellating itself and focusing on the negative, and actually started telling the real story of the of what's coming. Again, I keep on saying look at the scoreboard. Uh a group of ecosystem stewards, including Joe Lubin, Tom Lee, myself, and dozens and dozens of others, funded spin-offs from the EF. So more nodes in the ecosystem. You've seen for the first time in what I think are years, Ethereum start outperforming Bitcoin. I think if you look at the last 60 days, ETH has outperformed Bitcoin by 14 points. It's outperformed Solana.

It's outperformed Canton by almost 50% just in a 2-month period. And there's a reason for that is that the largest institutions in the world from Fidelity to Morgan Stanley to Franklin Templeton to JP Morgan to BlackRock, they're launching their new funds on Ethereum and the L2s. And um I think one of the reasons why you're seeing ETFs start seeing inflows again is most of Wall Street understands that if most transactions are going to end up being on chain, you're going to need ETH as the trust commodity, the security commodity, the store of value for these transactions.

We haven't seen enough value accrue from the L2s to ETH itself, but I want to see 10 Robinhood announcements where you're seeing, you know, an L2 partner with one of the largest fintech companies in the world. The transaction values you've seen in the first three and a half weeks have been off the charts, and that's really, really good for the long term uh of Ethereum. I do want to mention one other thing that's really important. We're in the business not only of helping fund the Ethereum ecosystem, but create new standards. And what do I mean by that? If you have permanent capital and you can deploy it into DeFi or if you can deploy it into Lido and make a commitment that's not 3-month, 6-month,

a year, but you can make a multi-year commitment because you have permanent capital, you can create not only incentives for your investors, and I'm not talking about the details of any deal, but you're now being able to push out the term structure of crypto. If you want to borrow against your ETH today, good luck getting a loan for more than a year. But when you start pushing the duration of your deployments, you can start putting a two-year mark, a a three-year mark on borrowing and lending against your ETH. And that's really, really important to help shape an ecosystem. It sounds very trad-fi, but that is how markets are made, not in 1 2 3 month mercenary capital in yield yield

harvesting. So, we're in the business of raising standards, setting new benchmarks, and we're going to do that, and we hope the ecosystem rinses and repeats. >> And um yeah, that is certainly something that I think we're looking forward to. Um you know, you mentioned it earlier and alluded to it again. Can you describe the permanent capital that you've got at Shapelink and why it's so important to building this base on Ethereum? >> Sure. Most capital in the crypto ecosystem is either short-term oriented, do quick diligence on a protocol, but you really don't care. You want to harvest incentives for a few months, and then you pull the you pull that deployment out, and you move to the next one, and you

harvest, and you farm over and over. Or you have venture capital, which has four to six-year equity-like returns. You want a convex outcome for your investors. There's very little in the middle who are people who own ETH like we do. You can buy or sell our stock and express your views on Shapelink, but we're not in the business of selling our ETH. And in the Bitcoin space, you're seeing the dads start to sell. And if you're an ETF, which has large amounts of capital at BlackRock, uh Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, you have to provide daily liquidity to your investors. So, if they want their money back, you have to sell that ETH that day. So, there's very little you can do

besides buy and stake ETH, because you need to have that daily liquidity to give money back to your investors. So, we fit in a really great space, and that's why it's a better exposure vehicle. If you believe in the long-term Ethereum opportunity and you want to make your ETH productive beyond the Ethereum staking rate, Permanent Capital is able to do that in a way that venture capital doesn't, mercenary capital doesn't, and the ETFs, which are really important exposure vehicles, just can't deploy their ETH on a long-term basis because of a daily liquidity to investors. That's the easiest way I can explain it. All great vehicles, but just different than Permanent Capital.

>> Very cool. Um and ultimately, our thesis that we've been talking about on this on this show, going on for the last couple of months here, has been this this accrual of Permanent Capital in the space, kind of shaking out the weak hands, if you will, and and building more of a stronger capital base, ultimately is a confluence with the tokenization supercycle of tokenizing all of these asset classes. These tokenized assets ultimately proliferate across the entirety of Ethereum, make their way into DeFi protocols such as Lido, such as the rest of the OG blue-chip DeFi protocols on Ethereum, and we re-rate not only the TVL, but the total addressable market

for DeFi and on-chain finance and digital finance as a whole. I mean, please keep like can you pick up kind of on this thesis? Does this align with you, you know, what you guys are seeing in the market? And once that happens, how long do you think it will take and where do we go from there? To both of you guys, feel free to jump in. >> You, why don't you go first and I'll give you my take after. >> Sure, yeah. Look, I think again, we're in a fantastic state where like adoption and the different use cases are picking up immensely. Like for us, one of the big things that we launched, I think in December of last year, was with WisdomTree. So, like WisdomTree launched the first liquid staked ETP in Europe.

It was the first 100% state ETP and they would never have been able to do that without liquid staking in a decentralized protocol like Lido. So, for us kind of going through this journey with them, I think the answer asked us something like 400, maybe 500 questions and getting them comfortable with the idea of working with a DAO, decentralized protocols, explaining that like Lido is actually a middleware. Nothing is actually staked with us. There's 800 different node operators in the background. So, for us to convince say heavily regulated public company like WisdomTree that look, if you have a problem and Joseph mentioned this already where you can only stake a certain proportion of your ETF or your ETP because you need a percentage for liquidity, we were able to come along and show them that liquid staking you

can actually have a 100% staked product, meet your redemption and liquidity requirements, and ultimately pass on those returns to investors. And then, of course, from a WisdomTree perspective, you're able to launch a better product. So, for me like I am incredibly bullish on all the things that are happening, all the huge logos that are coming into the space, and it's just fantastic to be a part of it right now. Like we're definitely at the forefront of change. >> And I I think we're at an Amazon, Uber, lithium, Nvidia moment. What do I mean by that? Every one of those assets went through a period. Amazon was viewed as an overpriced bookseller trying to sell more books online. Uber was being questioned for making their transactions

really inexpensive and subsidizing both the drivers and the users. Nvidia's TAM was graphic cards and chips inside laptops. Lithium was used for very few use cases. The market then caught up and for each one of them they understood that the TAM was a thousand X what the market was pricing at the time. Amazon was changing the market structure of finance. Uber doesn't want to be a cheap ride share, They want to be an everything app for your daily lives. Lithium became required for and rare earth for new technologies and new business models.

Nvidia, the moment they went from powering laptops and gaming to being essentially required for all inference in the world, you saw the price not only catch up to the narrative, people were betting on the future of demands and I think you're starting to see a real understanding of what Ethereum's going to be, which is the global settlement layer. And they're seeing ETH as something that the price is lagging, but the market share and demand is not. And then the final thing I'll say is one of the reasons you see divergence is crypto and on-chain finance pledge collateral in very different ways. In crypto, people would pledge their Bitcoin, which has no yield. They

would pledge their stable coin where they weren't earning yield. No one in finance would ever do that. They pledge treasuries, high quality liquid assets. Why? Because they get yield as they're putting out collateral. And that's what we need to bring more and more into the crypto space. So I think Ethereum, you're making a future bet on the future of on-chain finance and I think the price is under appreciated relative to the amount of transactions that'll be coming. So we're in the business of telling that story and giving people a little bit of a peek to what institutions are doing behind the scenes today. You're seeing a bit of the tip of the iceberg of what's coming. It happens slow and then it happens really, really

fast. >> Joe, Keen, I mean, impeccable answers. Thank you for your time. Very bullish Ethereum, very bullish on this collaboration. Keen, go enjoy that Euro summer, man. That's a Euro summer shirt. Joe, I think you're somewhere in New York or New Jersey somewhere at your uh at your place for the weekend. I'm going to go take a break here guys. Thanks for your time. Thanks for being part of the show and bullish ETH. >> Ethereum's in good hands with you guys. Um just uh yeah, thank you for uh stewarding the industry and uh sharing your time with us today. Appreciate it.

>> Uh really love seeing you guys um and I'll see you at the next one. >> Thanks guys. >> Sounds good. >> Thank you. >> Enjoy your summer Kean. I'm serious. Have a herbal formula. >> I'll go for a pint. Don't worry. >> There you go. [laughter] All righty. See you guys soon. >> Cheers guys.