Takeaways from the SEC Roundtable and Privy Acquisition | Weekly Roundup
13 Jun 2025 · 1:03:24
Empire hosts Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Roel Santos cover Stripe's acquisition of wallet infrastructure startup Privy and takeaways from the SEC's Crypto Task Force Roundtable. They also discuss Bill Gurley's comments on tokenization, the outlook for a Solana ETF, and Singapore's regulatory crackdown on crypto firms, along with what the moves signal for the broader digital asset market.
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I feel like people think that tokenizing assets is like you're forcing a public asset onto a company that doesn't want it, but it's more like like I don't think all startups should have a publicly traded equity. Um because there's actually real value in like not having a publicly traded token too early on in my opinion. But if someone wants it, you should just be able to IPO onchain. And I think that's where this is headed. Super low barriers to entry, lower cost of capital. You just want more value flowing to those who deserve it. And that is not in the long run Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. I can promise you that. This episode is brought to you by Geodet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network delivering real time centimeter accurate positioning around the globe. You'll
hear more about them later in the episode. Hey guys, Jason here. Just to let you know, we have Permissionless 4 coming up in June from the 24th to the 26th at Industry City in Brooklyn. This is a conference for the developers and builders where we'll be focusing on the DeFi Renaissance, applications, token design, and much more. Click the link in the show notes to grab your ticket today and use code Empire 10 for 10% off. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the
Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies funds or projects discussed. Dude, you see this jacket? Uh, well, first time for everything. I never wear a jacket like three times a year. Wait, you got married and you didn't wear a jacket? I'm concerned. Three times a year. Yeah. Wedding. Yeah. You honestly can't think of the other times I'd ever wear it. Yeah. I was I was at Coinbase Coinbase uh state of crypto summit earlier today. Really good. Um I was actually uh talking to someone that was there and took a call from there. Yeah, it's great. I tried finding an area to take a call, but uh you know, I wanted to look professional for the podcast, give the people a good mic, keep the
audio quality high, you know, so I ran back to the office. Nice. Well, we appreciate that. I was late, so my bad. I actually have also started to wear jackets. I was on Proof of Talk the conference in Paris. Yeah. How was it? I wore a jacket. It was very, very good. It was uh very curated. Uh very good speaker lineup. I'd never been to this conference. Three years in the making, but it was fun. I was there for a day and like was talking about deep end panel. Um it was very good. I liked it. Nice. Nice. Um dude, listen to this lineup for the Coinbase event. So, it kicks off with Jeremy Lair and Brian Armstrong. Amazing. First line of the event, the moderator, this woman, uh, Lulu Chang Mezer Mezerve, she runs Roster I, this woman, Lulu, uh, goes,
"Brian, Jeremy, great to have you here. I can see that you both attend the same barber shop. Savage, savage, savage." So, that was great. Um, they had their head of M&A talking to Phipe, the founder of CO2. Um then David Pluff uh you know who big political uh adviser campaign ran ran big campaigns. I think he ran Obama's campaign. Uh he joined as their adviser. Um and then there's I'm you know we're recording this at noon. Apparently they have some big announcements in the afternoon. So they've got Toby from Shopify coming. I heard that. Yeah. The CEO of Darabit. Um Shane from Poly Market. And then they have Saquon Barkley. Do you know who that is?
Basketball player. Tough. Nope. NFL. Oh, okay. Anyways, I knew I knew I knew people who live in your in don't live in the US have a subpar knowledge of uh Wait a minute. What are you talking about? I I had eight interviews with like investment associate roles and yes, this is a plug for inversion. Um, and one of them was like, "Yeah, I went to University of Kansas." I'm like, "Is that a you mean a Jay-Hawk?" So, wow, nice. I I know. And then I was like hanging out with like people from Louisiana. I'm like, "Tigers, dude, I know my game. College football is when you test true knowledge, you know, because for me it's like, yeah, everyone knows NFL, but like college football on the other hand is another level. Mind you, Beu never had a college football
team, which is Who is All right. Who is the LSU quarterback who got drafted and was a bust? He could throw the ball like 80 yards. Was he also not uh Heisman Trophy, which is a Heisman curse? I actually don't know. I don't think he I don't know. No, he's stalling while he Googles. Garrett, was it Garrett Newsmire? No, no, no. Jammarcus Russell. All right, let's talk Let's talk crypto. Let's talk. By the way, by the way, on on this point Oh my god. You were googling it.
Yeah, I I did Google it. I I I I'm guilty of charge. How do you interview people now? Like I'm trying to send people like a test, like a modeling an LBO model test. I'm like, do I How do I make them like where it's like you just fake it, right? It has to be in person or you record it. Do we have this with our engineering interviews? Yeah, like you gota I think our CTO on a final round. I actually don't know at this point, but I think our CTO joins the interviews with people and has them share their screen and just sits with them for like an hour and watches them do the engineering test. I don't know that for a fact, but uh I'm I'm pretty sure that's what we're doing right now.
Well, there's we're here to talk about crypto, right, at some point. Yeah. Let's talk about um let's talk about the SEC, but in a fun way. So, there was the uh crypto task force. So, Okay. So these are the things on my mind for this week. So Stripe acquired Privy. Um Bill Gurley had some pretty interesting talks on just the IPO markets and actually there were some interesting talks about um like moving public markets on chain and I thought that was pretty interesting. Um something happened in Singapore that I see nobody talking about but it actually has a big impact on the uh exchanges out there. Um ETF updates um corporate treasury updates. You mean Salana ETF updates? Salana ETF? No, no, Salana ETF. Um I think I think we'll see a Ripple ETF before people know it and
you know don't shoot the messenger here but yeah I think anyways let's talk about the SEC. So actually on um on Monday the SEC hosted the crypto task force roundt um and there were some amazing takeaways from Paul Atkins. Uh Paul Atkins is the chairman of the SEC. He gave a great great great talk and I want to share some quotes and some thoughts on it. Um but actually pretty interestingly so the the group that went was the um was Richard Gabbard. Uh Richard's the chief of staff for the crypto task force. Uh obviously chairman Atkins and then we also had uh three commissioners, Pierce, uh Oueda, and Crenshaw. Um but actually I I I don't know if a lot of people saw this, but there were some industry representatives there. So you had Jill Jill Gunter from Espresso, Michael Jordan from DBA,
um Rebecca Reig from Jetto, uh Gabriel Shapiro, the lawyer, uh Peter from Coin Center, Eric Vorhees was there, few other people. So did you see the um did you see the Paul Atkins remarks? Nope. Oh, these are great. Okay, let me read these. So um maybe I'll just read some highlights because it is pretty long. So there were three there were three quotes that stood out. First quote um Atkin said, "I'm in favor of affording greater flexibility to market participants to self-custody crypto assets, especially where intermediation imposes unnecessary transaction costs or restricts the ability to engage in staking or other onchain activities." So that's like
that's amazing like just like really really really talking about self-custody which is crazy. Um sec second was um said I'm also excited about the use of onchain software systems by issuers uh by issuers to eliminate economic frictions increase capital efficiency enable new types of financial products and enhance liquidity and then the third said another core feature of blockchain blockchain technology is the ability for individuals to have self-custody again self- custody coming up again to have self-custody of crypto assets in a more personal digital wallet the right to have a self to the right to self-custodies one's private property is a foundational American value that should not disappear when someone logs onto the internet. I'm in favor and then
this is actually the thing I said before. I'm in favor of affording greater flexibility etc etc to self-custody uh crypto assets. This is this is massive. Um we have uh we have Caitlyn Long said it best. She said the SEC has officially begun reversing decades of attempts to eradicate bare assets from the US financial system. This started in 1994 uh and then reached its peak under Biden and Warren with their war on cash said self- custody of private property is foundational. I've long referred to UCCC article 8 uh as probably the this was the 1994 uh kind of when this started said as probably the biggest theft of property rights in human history because it turns stocks
into IUS i.e. credit instruments instead of directly held investments, right? Property, not an IOU. Moving back towards direct uh direct ownership of securities reduces systematic risk and it allows the financial system to enter the internet age finally by allowing securities to become natively digital. So, I know there's a long like reading some quotes and takeaway from great takeaway from Caitlyn Long there, but this is just a I don't think in anyone's dream we could have dreamed up someone like Chairman Atkins running the SEC. a total 180. I mean like you have a uh an incredible 180. And so the question is like there was some rallying of of of DeFi tokens. I think based on DeFi tokens went up 14% on the speech.
DeFi tokens went up 14% rel everything went up a little bit but L2s memes gaming L1's AI everything went up between like two to 6% and DeFi ripped higher to for went up 14%. DeFi's absent like hyperlquid has been kind of like in a tough spot after DeFi summer there's been some until recently until recently until recent I agree with you until I think it's been uh catching a bid on the buy and burn narrative and fundamentals like maker and a I think with onchain credit too like but like pull up a pull up a chart of like a for instance or maker and and overlay that not on the dollar pair but on the ETH pair M and and I think I
think I just want to make a point of like how again you you could you could say oh it's been a a relief rally but I'm just trying to say like there's a these tokens have been kind of left for dead and like might this be um DeFi summer 2.0 know um but it sets a stage I mean it's a very big 180 change in policy and I think um of course we need we I wouldn't say policy just stance I think we need to see policym come into effect but uh yeah I mean look at that it has come down it has come up quite a bit right I mean it's almost like tripled uh since the bottom like July right like FTX is probably where all this stuff like really went down um but yeah It's still certainly not at
like, you know, peak DeFi mania levels. No. No. But I mean, it's interesting. I feel like DeFi tokens, um, maybe not DeFi tokens, the the credit tokens have actually entered the, uh, kind of consensus trade here. So, if you talk about someone's consensus bets in their portfolio today, what do you have? You probably have Salana, Hyperliquid, um, I would say one or two meme coins like a fartcoin or something like that. RWA, like anoish, I don't think so. I don't think that's a consensus trade. No, I think RWAs have entered uh would would probably be in the credit trade like something. So, okay, you've got Salana, Hyperlquid, uh Sooie is in the consensus trade right now, too. Um Salana, Hyperliquid, Sooie, uh something
like Fartcoin and the and then the uh I think AI something in AI someone would have like whether it's Worldcoin or something else like more degenerate AI tokens. And then the the last bucket I think is these credit tokens like Maple, Ailer, Morpho. Yeah, it's very interesting to see after they've been kind of beaten to death for a couple years. So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Um it's it's a classic Howard Marks line which is like the market swims swing the market pendulum swim swings to extremes from euphoria to despair and where the real kind of business fundamentals don't really go to those extremes and so you got to catch it wherein it's at said you either sell when it's at one extreme or buy when
it's in the other. That's when you make the most amount of money. Yeah, totally. Um let's see. They uh I would just say like I mean the the Paul Atkins talk people should go read it. Um it's up it's you know you can read it for free on online. You can just Google like what crypto task force roundt June 9th SEC or something and it'll come up. Um I would broadly say it can be summarized as a massive massive massive victory for DeFi and a massive victory for crypto in the US. Um and I think it'll actually have a profound impact on I think Caitlin Long nailed it. Like this is the start of the pendulum swinging back to self-custody being a normalized thing. Um, and if you rewind the clock, like, you know, bit of
a history nerd, like, you know, you rewind the clock 200 years, like the US was founded on the right to have, you know, own your own property, right? And the right to sovereignty. And I think like if you look at what Atkins is talking about, these are like foundational principles to Yeah. really America. So, I think I think US DeFi is coming back in a big way. It's very cool to see. Um, did you listen to ah he also talked about disclosures and I will say more on this this upcoming week. Blockworks has a very cool launch related to this. Do not miss do not miss an upcoming block.
Wait a minute. Did you just take your jacket off? Like how did I miss this? All of a sudden I don't I took the jacket off. I just jackets. I hate the jackets. Jesus. Did you say I only say that because what you're announcing to me feels like very I have some insight into what you're doing. So uh I got to put the jacket back on. If you're going to announce serious stuff, man, I think you got to put the jacket on, but fine if you're not if you're not looking at There you go. Hold on. So So you're going to announce on Monday. Should I flip the collar up? This is how you do it. Yeah. That's like a That's like a neo neo uh kind of matrix. Yeah, exactly. The launch is coming.
Yeah. Anyways, yeah, pumps. It shouldn't It shouldn't catch people for surprise. I mean, we've been talking about this particular thing that you're trying to solve forward, which honestly I feel incredibly excited about. I think it might be one of those things that um not to tease too much but is very very much needed like I would rank top three things that are needed in the space to be to continue on legitimization of the industry and is probably as you overlay this and fits so nicely in what are the key issues as regulators think about this industry and I think this is like at the heart of it at the absolute heart of it and so I'm excited to see it I've been put you know we've been having a lot of conversations around this thing and you guys just ship fast Then you ship good. So yeah, you mentioned to me,
I mean, this was what, a couple months ago. You're like, I think someone needs to go do this. And so we were at a Blockworks poker. I was just in New York because I was doing the inversion kind of round and stuff and I was going around and stuff and we talked about it and here we are. Here we are. Six months later. Very cool. I'm I'm not going but and we're recording this on Thursday afternoon. Obviously, you'll be listening on Friday or Saturday, but we are going into the SEC um on Friday to talk to them about this. So we're very very excited about it. We think it can yeah become the standard for the industry. We want to share more. You'll see it next week. Give us some love when you see it. How quickly did they give you a meeting by the way out of
curiosity? Um very quickly because we're working with some of uh you know our mutual friend who's you know arguably the best lawyer in the industry I'd say. And so that uh she she's helping us out. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Geonet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real time centimeter accurate positioning around the globe. Powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics, Geodet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By delivering real-time centimeter level accuracy, Geodet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision,
and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy nononsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's chief investment officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one.
The Bitwise weekly CIO memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitweisinvestments.com/ciio memo/mpire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Uh, okay. Bill Gurley phenomenal podcast episode on the state of venture on invest like the best. Um so what bit what Bill Gurley lays out is this idea that the public markets are broken basically and venture and because of that venture markets are broken. Um and
there's this very interesting idea that he lays out which is companies are everyone knows this the number of IPOs are year after year after year are decreasing and companies are staying private later and later and later. So you know it's not out of the picture that we'll see a privately held trillion dollar company right is closing in on that. SpaceX is closing in on that. I I don't know their mark their market caps today, but probably like 5 to 10x off from that. So, not that far off from a privately held trillion dollar company, which then begs the question um uh oh, oh, sorry. And the other the other element of this is uh when you get to be the the private market liquidity for secondaries is actually starting to become pretty robust and companies like Stripe and SpaceX like I'm sure you get
these deals all the time. People sending you like SpaceX deals uh and like you know I feel like every other day there's like and secondary in my email um SpaceX Stripe things like that. So and the companies are actually getting really comfortable with the secondary trading. So now if you've got these hundred billion dollar companies where the secondary is becoming pretty liquid market it's like and it's not a pro it's not a public market but it's kind of it's kind of like the pink sheets right it's kind of like it's kind of like a market where I don't it's a it's a slightly less efficient market than the public market. So, what what Bill Gurley says is um he says the only uh uh there he says there's a really
interesting post by SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce that argues that blockchain is actually the path to fix this broken IPO market, right? And he said if you tokenize the security, it's going to get interesting. I'm going to start watching this. So this is Bill Gurley historically not a huge crypto bull and I think kind of like you know actively doesn't really like crypto that much and he's saying look you've got this massive problem this might be the solution and this is the big it feels obvious that like you've got stable coins right now and then the two big trends that are coming it's like the resurgence of DeFi and tokenization you know again again I think a lot of a lot of what happens in crypto is people treat this as a science experiment and you attract a lot of brilliant uh
product or developers and they have this like itch to build something transformational and I get it. A lot of it is just reminding ourselves of like very core ideas of what you joined the space that are true. And it's like we don't have to like build and reinvent stuff, but things that have already been built in crypto can apply to so much in the real world that look of course if you want to build the next zero to one thing, go at it, right? Uh prediction markets for instance, but like just just take for an example like an AMM. What is crypto like really really good at? Price discovery. AMMs are really good a new type of mechanism to like crypto's good at liquidity for a tail end of assets and price discovery of of
of those assets. more liquidity, more price discovery. And so markets eventually like surface that. And so to me that feels like that's a core property here that as you think about like the these growing secondary markets or like private markets in the traditional world, moving over to crypto, you might be able to get achieve better price discovery and liquidity on these things. And so it's it's a thing, right? And the second one is and and I felt this a lot when I was at Parfy, like when we go talk to people, they're like, "What are you guys? Are you like a hedge fund or you're a venture fund?" And we're like, uh, we're kind of lit both because like the path to liquidity is shorter, but it has venture type of returns and we're investing in early stage, but the tokens are liquid.
And look, that has both pros and cons, right? Because if you're a startup and you have a token, it could be distracting. Um, price discovery also to contradict what I just said. Price discovery of these things can also be incredibly inefficient. Like how do you value a startup? Like there's there's there's benefits of not having a real time price on a startup. Well, not only that, the valuations are marked. You've got 10 different firms marking the valuations. You might have a venture firm that marks it at a billion. Another venture firm marks it at 500. Another venture firm marks it at two billion. If you're an LP, you're like, "What's the mark? What's my mark?" And I've got all these company I've got all the venture funds marking the exact same company at
three different numbers. So, yeah. Look, um, it means like where Go, go, go, go. No, no, go for it. I was just gonna say where this obviously feels like it's headed is all assets get tokenized. You let one market trade the assets. Um, you don't tokenize. I feel like people think that tokenizing assets is like you're forcing a public asset onto a company that doesn't want it, but it's more like like I don't think all startups should have a publicly traded equity. um because there's actually real value in like not having a publicly traded token too early on in my opinion. But if someone wants it, you should just be able to IPO onchain and I think that's where this is headed. Super low barriers to entry,
lower cost of capital. Uh I mean we saw how much the bankers kind of flubbed some of the circle IPO. There's obviously benefits to it, right? Went up 4x and that's great, but um you just want more value flowing to those who deserve it and that is not in the long run Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. I can promise you that. Yeah. So, we'll see. I mean, I've been I've been I've even heard radical ideas of like, could you create uh tokens on specific departments within big organizations like Google, for example. Hey, could you take um could you create a token on like employees within like the Google brain division? I don't like that. I don't like that because uh it's like people do that in crypto today. You launch a second token. People have sec people launch second tokens and I don't think
that's healthy. Um it's like imagine Amazon. Do you think Amazon should have launched a second stock? Like I don't look for companies do this all the time. They spin out certain divisions and and unlock value. Like yeah, you should let them you should let them figure out how to do I like that's what I'm saying. Like I'm I'm not saying they should have spun out like the AWS like the cloud division, but if they had they probably would have gone a better multiple. Now what does that do to the and then so if you can create a economic relationship between like like if you airdrop if you airdrop part of the supply to the Amazon shareholders and that's typically what happens in a car in like a spin out.
Yeah. And that's it's funny we we uh there's an episode we already recorded with uh Felipe from Thea who did this great thing about tokens are broken. you you weren't on it, but it was L uh Louis from L1 Digital, Dan Smith, and Felipe from from uh from Thea and talking about why tokens are broken. And he talks about what what exactly what you're saying, Santi, which is you kind of carve it out. You give some of the supply like a you give some of the Amazon stock supply to AWS, and they're actually legal rights that say that you legally have to do that to protect the shareholders. In tokens, there are no legal rights to do that. So, if I'm That's true, you know. Well, well, you can embed it if if you're a lead investor. Like, you can very much dictate those terms. You could, but most
people don't do it right now. So, there's actually no legal rights. And so, that's there's all these uh barriers to entry. Anyways, yeah, listen, a lot of this can be solved by standardizing c this is a classic example of like things in crypto that we're trying to reinvent. We just need to borrow certain core primitives from finance that governance rights and token rights and whatever. Uh I think that's like a going to be very essential. So anyways, um um where are we going with this? I think Bill Gurley's point is a really good one though. Like um I I've seen it like most people don't want to invest in the next private equity fund or the next venture fund because it's taking longer, right?
companies are staying private longer and if you're an LP like you or a pension fund you clearly have like obligations to your own constituent base and that duration is like 10 years and if if after 10 years you haven't gotten your money back and DPI is not there then the asset class is in a pretty tough spot. I think I've seen most most new funds are trying to like address this point because this is the biggest push back from LPs. And so um of course like you can't be a crypto fund going around saying like oh invest in crypto because faster path to liquidity. It's still important to like justify like what you're actually investing in like quality assets. I think that's still going to be the far most important thing. But um but yeah, again like um the counter to Bill's point is like
these secondary markets are kind of very liquid, right? Or if you want to get liquidity for employees or investors, like you can do a tender like companies do this all the time. Like it's um totally. So like this this idea of like not getting liquidity because of you know you're not a publicly traded company, that's kind of not true entirely. companies find ways to like raise money quickly in the private markets. Um, and also like clean up the cop table if you need to. Like there's these like there's massive secondaries that are happening. Like I think that's kind of actually what Bill is saying is like he he shares this one story of a of a founder who was talking to a bank. The bank priced the um priced the IPO and the founder said, "Why would I ever do
that? I could go in one day tomorrow go raise a billion dollars at a 20% premium than what you just quoted my IPO." So, I think Bill's just saying, "Look, we need we should try to put transparent markets and more more efficient markets around these things because the way that these things do sell is like look, like you get an email in your inbox, like I've got, you know, a million bucks of SpaceX that I'm willing to offload, uh, taking a broker fee of 6%, it's like it's it's it's definitely a a less efficient market." Um, yeah. So, uh, the last thing on this note is it reminds me of this thing that Vance from Framework, it was a tweet from Vance like a very long time ago about how crypto is like becoming the only investable category, which is obviously a uh hyperbolic thing
to say, but if you lay it out, I'm going to botch what Vance said, but like it was something along the lines of look, fintech is largely consolidating right now. Consumer has no organic VC scale hits with sustainable growth in the last like decade. uh enterprise SAS has like revenue multiples that are compressing somewhere around like six 7x right now revenue multiples not like that you know not good for the for the massive VCs that you know invested at 20 30 40 50 times revenue ton of competition obviously AI AI is going to completely upend the the SAS model uh defense is like really hot right now obviously led by and who just raised at a $30 billion
valuation but very unclear what the outcomes and the multiples are there. And then AI has kind of become the the last refuge of the the large gigafunds. It's very tough to say that like anything is more interesting than than investing in crypto right now. Um unless you are a massive massive massive gigafund who needs to deploy like a billion dollars. Yeah, go throw it into, you know, Perplexity or Anthropic or something like that or Anderole. But yeah, for I especially when you see these crypto acquisitions, uh, which let's talk about the privy one right now, but yeah, all these acquisitions, it's it's, uh, I think the venture market for crypto is about to come ripping back. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Um yeah, I I don't have necessarily any
other insights on this other than um I I well I guess the other the thing I will comment on which is what I want to say is there is you take the long view that there's going to be this whole vintage of companies that private particularly large private equity funds have bought or even venture investors have bought in a different state of the world where rates were super low particularly in a private equity context. If you were like a large private equity fund and bought a business for like I don't know 10 billion or more, you were most of your underwriting was like in a low or record low interest rate environment and you didn't kind of factor in higher rates and staying longer and so like financial engineering is kind of gone right in a higher interest rate environment. the
amount of operational efficiencies that you can squeeze out of a business of that size are, you know, you could argue some funds like Vista are better than others, but most of them kind of didn't really underwrite that in their plan. To Vance's point, like AI might be the saving grace of all these businesses, but um you know what we're doing at Inversion, but like I think that's my view, which is I get excited because the amount of companies that are going to be up for sale over the next 5 10 years of people that have said, "Hey, listen, I got to return investor. I got to return money back to investors. I'm willing to let go of this asset for 60 70 80 cents on the dollar.
Like that to me and I was just talking to a guy who left Soft Bank to do this which is capture that value too. And I I think that's going to be that to me feels like a strategy that I get excited about because I think there's going to be force sellers and you always want to buy when there's a force seller. This episode is brought to you by Geonet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real time centimeter accurate positioning around the globe. Powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics, Geodet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By delivering real-time centimeter level accuracy, Geodet enhances emergency
response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. Hey everyone, Jason here. Earlier in today's episode, you heard me mention the weekly CIO memo from Bitwise. In an industry as hectic, fast, and complex as ours, it's incredibly hard to get an easy, nononsense stream of what's actually moving crypto. The memo comes from Matt Hogan, Bitwise's chief investment officer. He's been on the show before, and he has this amazing ability to take the most complex topics and break them down with clarity. Trust me on this one.
The Bitwise weekly CIO memo is really worth the 5 minutes of your time. Check it out at bitweisinvestments.com/ciio memo/mpire or just hit the link in the description of today's episode to get started. Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about the Privy acquisition. Yeah, that's good. So, um, Priv, uh, Stripe acquired Privy. Big congratulations to the Privy team. Privy is a um a provider of wallets. Um so they basically abs if somebody wants to
launch actually let's go to the website of Privy and see what it see what it looks like. Wallet infrastructure for every user. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails securely spin up wallets sign transactions and integrate onchain infrastructure all through one simple API. So their two their two main competitors are probably dynamic.xyz and turnkey. Uh so if somebody wants to go launch wallets for users, uh you know, Privy has become one of the easiest ways to do it. Um so I mean the big news is that Stripe acquired them. Um I'm going to read a couple of highlights from the from the blog post. It says, "Privy will continue to operate as an independent product, but you can expect us to serve you better, faster, move, you know, etc., etc. Uh we built Privy to abstract way complexity." Um there's a user
number in here somewhere I'm trying to find. Um, uh, today Privy powers over 75 million accounts across 1,000 different teams. So, so that it's pretty impressive. They have a thousand different teams using Privy, 75 million accounts, billions in transactions. Um, and it's very interesting. So, uh, obviously this comes on the heels of Stripe acquiring, um, uh, Bridge for, you know, that obviously massive acquisition that you could say kicked off crypto M&A season. Um, this is I thought our friend Rob who was on the show the other day said, you know, said it best. He said, I'll say it once, I'll say it again. Um, it's clear that Stripe and all stable coin
companies are trying to become networks and that the whole payment model is collapsing onto itself. Uh, he said uh there was a Patrick Collison quote that he pointed to. who says, "Money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable programmable vaults. Alongside our other stable coin work, we're looking to we're looking forward to enabling a new generation of global internet native financial services." And then actually John Collison had a great tweet too. He said, "Crypto wallets are going to play an increasingly important role in the growth of the internet economy."
So yeah, amazing to see just I mean Stripe is just moving crazy fast to they clearly have a deep conviction on stable coins and they are just ripping forward to integrate and try to own the entire stable coin stack. Yeah, I mean the the it's it's I mean we said I mean I think the bridge acquisition was just opening the floodgates and it was the Instagram moment. What Instagram did for Facebook, Bridge did it for Stripe and then the rest of Trafi. It's like now you're wondering if you're a Stripe. You did have a nice call on that. remember everyone was saying this is too much money go too much money too much money too much cheapest acquisition to reinvent the business of Stripe I mean it's uh and defend their valuation right I think now the question is what else
gets acquired BBNK I mean Visa obviously invested there like there's going to be a scramble of companies that uh you know Tradfi is going to want to buy right um and so again not every the the the I'll give credit to Stripe it's a founder organization and the speed by which they can move the agility and the aggressive ess is bar none. And so I think um they've really they've really moved at an incredible pace. Um Robin Hood I would characterize too, right? Um I think um I've seen some like um interesting commentary on this acquisition. I mean I think most people in crypto are like really excited.
There's this guy that continues to be like really skeptical and uh about crypto. I don't know if you've seen him or not. Like Jack uh Zang um he's the founder of Airwallix. Oh, what? He's scrub. Scrub. I give him more time. Yeah, you give him no time. Okay, we should not give him more time. But he was like very salty on this acquisition and I was like, okay. I always like make a note of like whenever Hey, let's read it. All right, Jack. I will give this man time. All right, you two minutes, but like I fell into my thing. Jack Zang, he said, "People think Stripe bought bought Privy because of the technology, but they are wrong." Uh, what no one knows is Stripe, I'll pull this up. What no one knows is Stripe bought it because of risk management. At Stripe's current scale, it's so hard to
build a crypto product by going through their internal regulatory compliance corporate structure. That's why they failed to build anything meaningful in their own crypto team the last four years. It's a lot easier to buy startup and run the crypto product as a separate legal structure to ring fence the regulatory risk. I actually don't completely disagree with that. Actually, what I do disagree with is uh his he had his thing the other day which is was this which was the horrible take. He said, "Inves investors keep asking me about stablecoin and how that can reduce FX fees. If you send money from USD to euros and the receiving end still requires to receive euros in their bank, I can't see any way stable coin can reduce fees. Um off-ramping from stable coin to recipient currency are far more expensive than the FX interbank
market. This misses the forest for the trees, my friend. Yep. Yeah, I I do think like um calling out uh Yeah. Okay, that that was really good. I actually have been speaking with Simon a lot. Um I I think that particular um blog post is something that everyone that is excited about stable should just read because Simon actually is one of the probably top five people that understand fintech. And and his point there is like again as the title suggests stable coins aren't cheap, they're better. And and I think that's a point that you should look at which is um where a lot of people are not correct is by saying look stable are going to totally reim everything like okay yeah they're room temperature semiconductors but for what? And and I think it's sort of like uh it's a great
blog post. I'm not going to like rehash everything he has to say. People we'll link it in the show notes for real this time. Um and and I think like a lot of where people miss it. I'll just kind of allude to is like um you don't have a full appreciation of the stack. You're still going to have to interact at some point and pay a fee, right? If you're working with stable coins on and off ramp are where most of the friction is. So like Jack's not entirely wrong. The question is are people offramping? Because in my conversations with bridge for instance, a lot of what they're highlighting is consumer behavior is changing. Exactly. People don't offramp. You don't want to we're not ramping anymore. Like if you're like a Western Union, you still have to go and like deposit the cash or whatever or send it through
a bank to onrem to a stable coin. But once the money is there for the first time, like people if you sent money through Western Union, you have to offramp there wasn't an option to keep it in a digital wallet as far as I understand. And now that is changing. And I think that's kind of the point that a lot of people just miss, which is yes, if you went through the entire flow, you would still pay fees. It's not to say that you know fees goes to zero. It's like the changing consumer behavior or business behavior around stable coins is powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Um totally I agree with that. I had a few other takeaways. One is that and I shared them here. I said one is that um for anyone who has met uh Henry and their team uh
they are relentless with product. I think uh Omar um Omar from Chaos had a good good tweet about this. Uh, Omar tweeted, "I had long heard that Privy was one of the best in the space. Months ago, Chaos needed a wallet solution. Do yogo intros at Saturday at 2:30 a.m. Henry responds 1 minute later, 2:30 or uh, Dio intros at 2:33 a.m. Henry responds 1 minute later, 2:34 a.m. It's the small things that make the difference. Congrats." And this is what I have heard from everybody who's ever worked with Privy or with Henry or anyone on their team is that they are just relentless with go to market and product and the uh we you know we have this now which is it's a new motion for us which is like you've got people on
the front line salespeople like customer support and account management all that kind of stuff. You're talking to customers then product and engineers and it's actually got to kind of close that gap between the customer feedback and engineering. And it sounds for anyone who hasn't built before, it's like, oh yeah, duh. Uh, you know, just get the engineers talking to the sales people or something like that. It's actually a pretty tough thing to do. And I think Henry's an amazing CEO because he's been able to do that so relentlessly. Yeah. I mean, most companies, it's shocking simple things like that that make common sense, like be close to your customers and iterate fast. And I was just having this discussion with this great great guy that actually lees product, one of the larger banks that that is focused like has a crypto arm.
And um I think the the point there was like people in crypto again like are very ideological lead from ideology and treated as a science experiment. It's like a academic project which is let's build something and they will come and let's build let's build like a perfect solution which is you know in a in a in a in a vacuum. Yeah. If you could design it great. And in doing so, they sort of lose track of the customer and what they're building for and and and ultimately like getting product market fit. Uh, and they're so like I like they're geniuses and they're so like adamant about building something that it never gets off the ground and they run out of money and they fail. And I think like there's other organizations that
are just like incrementally building faster faster faster and they're super in touch with their customers. And not just like I think Privy fits in that category nicely. Stripe fits in that category. Palanteer which has got a huge runup. They literally have engineers follow like you know boots on the ground like quite literally deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq to understand Yep. the end customer and go understand go spend time with them. Let me ask you a question. Out of 10 startups how many of them say pick any 10 startups in your portfolio. How many of them do they actually do this? Like surveys users like none. It's crazy. So the I think there's this common trope that founders are like should be the
product people or should be like the you know very the you know the gigabrain developer the gigabrain engineer and um they should be the product people but the problem that a lot of the founders I think that you and I have invested in is they get so focused on the product and actually the engineering that they actually never talk to the customers and uh it's yeah it's probably one of the biggest recommendations I make to people is like go buy your customers lunch, take them out, sit down with them for an hour, have them tell you everything that they use your product for and what they what they like and what they don't like.
Totally. Yeah. Uh on this point, can I make a comment? I I I don't know if you want to say more about Privy. I have I have two other thoughts on Privy. One is um uh for anyone building in crypto, Privy launched in mid 2021. Um, and actually I found Henry's original blog original LinkedIn post uh where he announced Privy. He said, "I'm so excited to share my ma my work with the amazing AAI. We're announcing our beta today. Privy builds API so developers can handle user data privately in web 3." So it actually so it launched at ECC. It was actually a um it was actually a privacy protocol um which I which I didn't originally realize and Privy didn't actually take
off if you remember this. So Privy was created in like mid to late 2021. They only had their big break uh with the friend integration which was in August of 2023. So if you think about that that's two years of just grinding and they launches a privacy solution. Nothing happened for two years. summer of 23, they get the break. Wallets, boom, pivot, uh, Privy becomes a wallet infrastructure company. And I think um, sometimes, you know, we saw this with Blockwork Works, like sometimes you just got to slog through the slow, low adoption until you hit it. And once you hit it, pivot every single ounce of energy you have into whatever just found
product market fit and go all in on that. And I think Privy did a great job of that. the way that's an excellent point which is so many companies most of the best companies their initial conception of an idea did not end up being what made them super successful and and I think like again it's like this constant iteration constant constant like you're you just got to like stay long enough in the game to be lucky but a lot of that in this case is just staying super close to the market to customers and and and luck here is like persistence of like staying close to where the action is and you could have pointed to certain discrete changes in the market whether it's regulatory in this case like uh it was probably account abstraction combination of things that led to the wallet propagation and like and like they were
just there faster moving faster than other teams and then you get your big customer like FTE and then you boom boom and then you win and and then and then you capture the market and and I think it just like there's a quote that I really like which is you're under no obligation to be the same person that you were 5 minutes ago and I think it applies to startups in general which is like at the end of the day you're here to be successful and capture a market. You don't have to stay like you know what your initial pitch was is likely not going to be what the end state looks like. Like you guys were an event company. You're not an event company.
Like you you are an event company, but that's that's almost like going to be secondary as I see it to what all the other stuff that you're building data and what you're announcing on Monday and like you're doubling down. But you had to start with a with a wedge which was events because that's what at that time in the industry people wanted to go and interact and it was like a meetups and they're still important but you can you can use that and you don't stop there right that's right 100%. So, congrats to the private team. Yeah, congrats. Really good stuff. We've been looking at them because they're just that it's a great they're great. Congrats to Sequoa for selling another one of your stripe.
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As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. There's a I so I was recording a podcast with Amir from one of the founders of Helium. Um we do this deep in roundup with Jason Bto from uh the founder of um Daylight uh Manesh uh from EV3 and Connor from Proof of Coverage I think. Um and and and Amamir came on and he said a great great line which really stuck with me and I'm going to read it. He says, "First time founders focus on the product. Second time founders focus on distribution."
Justin Justin K tweeted that. Uh that's a that's a Justin Con uh Twitch Twitch. Probably Justin barted from someone else, but anyways. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's it's a I I don't know what you would say to that. Spot on. 100%. 100 100 100%. and how you define distribution. I get for me it's like you know community ecosystem but just like again I I just came to that conclusion when I was like yeah distribution is all matters like getting your product in the hands of people and uh either you build it or you buy it or you latch on to it through a partnership but it's super important right because great products can be ruined by poor distribution.
Yes. If you have great distribution, you can if you know how to talk to the customers, you can find a great product to build. Yeah. Use your C. And this I think this is a core primitive web 3 that we haven't really latched on to as much, which is somehow like crypto is really good at getting attention from the community or I guess you could argue maybe just a bunch of people that want an airdrop. And is that the community? We can disagree on that. But people are screaming at you what they want. And I think that's like really good organizations I think capture that feedback and use it to inform product development. Um, and I just think crypto is has a lot of that first piece, but
not the second, which is the products haven't really translated into great products necessarily. Um, and I think a lot of that's broken in an era that is going to be long gone, which is like the users that are in crypto today are just expecting an airdrop. And, you know, it's not really the core user base. And I think some of the best companies that are like really hitting strides are just f companies that are actually go outside of the, you know, micro beta tester user base of crypto and really go to the real world and like start building solutions for that. Um, and so 100%. Yeah. Um, all right, two smaller things before we wrap. One is um nobody's talking about what's happening in Singapore. So Oh yeah. Um let me just Annabelle that had a great tweet about it.
Yes. Ann was Annabelle. So Annabelle I'll pull this up and un I did not do a ton of research. So we'll do this in real time. Um but Annabelle tweeted Annabelle from Altius Annabelle from Altius. Yeah. Tweeted noticed major panic in Singapore crypto group chats this week. Uh yet not many in New York seem to have heard about the new to digital token service providers regime in Singapore and its potential global impact. QuickTLDR. Uh one MAS had done a few rounds of consultation before the May 30th announcement, but most Singapore crypto natives were caught off guard. The rules seemed aimed at unregulated sexes, market makers, OTC desks incorporated in Singapore and their staff physically based in
Singapore, but the DA DTSP scope felt vague, especially for founders and developers. Two, MAS walked back a bit on June 6, clarifying utility governance tokens are out of scope, but it's still unclear how DEX's and DeFi fit in. And three, perception damage is done. Singapore's reputation as a crypto friendly hub has taken a hit. Might see talent shift to Dubai, the US, or maybe Hong Kong. So, I went and Googled just Singapore crypto, and let me read the headlines. Singapore's regulatory crackdown forces crypto exchange to plan an exit. Uh, Singapore tapped the brakes on crypto. Who could who could race ahead? Um, Singapore order leads unlicensed crypto exchanges to weigh exit. Top global crypto exchanges
rethink Singapore presence as MAS titans rules. Um, Singapore imposes June 30th deadline for crypto firms to halt overseas digital token services until licensed. So, yeah, this is a big this is a big shift. And um I mean Singapore was like if you think about when Gensler cracked down on crypto where did people go Singapore and Dubai mostly right you know token 2049 Singapore one of the biggest events the industry's probably ever seen last year we'll see I think this is I think this is going to change things and even for block works right we have digital asset summit in New York and London we've been thinking about what an international event could look like do we do it in somewhere like Hong
Kong or Abu Dhabi or Dubai or Singapore And yeah, Singapore is probably off the table now. So big impact on the global. What do you think like uh a lot of what we talking about is like the US is really kind of like sets the tone for the rest of the world. It's interesting because Singapore was was very like a a haven in a time where like you have a pretty like adversarial regulatory apparatus in the US and then now it's sort of flipped, right? you would have expected Singapore and other countries to like now like follow the lead of the US which is you have David Sachs, you have like the SEC, you have Atkins, like you have uh and it just feels like kind of out of nowhere. Uh and maybe this is
a long time coming, right? A lot of times like these things are years in the making, but I'm curious like if anyone in the community or you have any insight into like what what is the motivation behind it at a time where like most other countries like being pro crypto? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So, it's the monetary authority of Singapore. Um, right, which is like the central bank or it's I think it's both the central bank and financial regulatory authority of Singapore. I don't fully understand how it works, but I think it's both of those. Um, they oversee everything, right? Insurance, banking, securities, money. Um, so they came down and said this. I don't really know. Um, but something something to pay attention to that I didn't think people were paying attention to. Mind you, a lot of exchanges are based there now. So, we'll
see where they relocate. Yeah. Yeah, I talked to I talked to one of the biggest exchanges this two last week. He's the one who put this on my radar. I had I hadn't even heard of it and uh he's like, "Look, we're all we're all kind of panicking um because individual employees could get in trouble, too. So, like we might need to move employees." So, yeah, you got going to go to Dubai most likely and then Yeah. by the way, I'm not super in touch with this. So, I'm I'm sure I'm getting some things wrong. So, but people should just flag people should look into that. All right. La last news story of the week is um uh uh Blockworks had a big scoop this week which is that the uh the SEC is now asking Salana ETF issuers to submit amended S1 forms within the next week
which obviously sets the ETFs on a path to approval uh probably this summer um maybe by end of end of summer or something like that. So pretty big pretty big news um big scoop. Shout out to Jack and Katherine um at Block Works for this one. Uh I I had a tweet that got some people angry. I said I met um met with a top five bank the other day. So this was interesting. They refer I don't know if you've heard this before. The the the top four they refer to tokens as the top four and then everything else. B they say BTC, ETH, Soul, and XRP are the top four and then there's everything else. We don't really care about everything else. I said it looks like we'll get the Salana ETF in the next few months. My guess is the
next ETF after Soul will be XRP. And um yeah, I think uh someone commented a good comment. I forget where it is, but Oh, Litecoin. Oh, that's funny. Litecoin commented on it. Um yeah, it's either I think it'll e the next Oh, shoot. The next ETF after Salana will probably be I would guess 60 65% 70% chance it's XRP 30% chance Litecoin. No no wait no not Litecoin. Who's going to push it?
It's like weirdly a commodity so you can do it's uh it's identical to Bitcoin essentially. Are there any like going public public token what what do you call but they're corporate treasuries? No there probably will be though. Anyways, not not really Litecoin. It's going to be XRP. I I just like money's on XRP. XRP. Also, there are four markets that the C CME supports. XR. It's Bitcoin, ETH, Soul, and XR. Bitcoin, ETH, Soul, XRP. So, yeah. Yeah. I just got to show my Litecoin people some love. It's just farm engagement, ladies and gentlemen. No, no, I do. I Isn't there something with X with Litecoin where it's like it is a because it's just a fork of Bitcoin, it is a commodity, so it gets early approval on things. Am I an idiot? You actually might not be wrong. It's a good take.
It's like a very left curve take. But anyways, what else you got? Come to permissionless. Uh our data team uh just launched a hyperlquid dashboard, big uni chain dashboard. And actually our first um we're pushing beyond onchain data now. So we launched the fundraising dashboard about 3 weeks ago. We just launched a centralized exchange dashboard. So we've got all the big exchanges Kraken Coinbase Binance etc. Crypto.com. We also this week added BinanceUS Gate Bullish Bitstamp and Bitvo. We're working on HTX, which is formerly Hobi, LMAX, and Up Upbit data.
So, go check out the centralized exchange dashboard. Hyperl dashboard launched this week as well. So, and go buy your permissionless ticket. We are how many days out? Uh, 10 days. 10 days. 11. No, it's a 24th to 26. I know this because I'm I'm planning my trip. Let's go. Come on. I think I'll be there. I think it'll be It's going to come down to the wire, but I think it'll be a sellout. Let's see. Hold. Let me check the tickies today. Yeah, tickets are ripping. How could I end this podcast without not telling you how badly I'm going to beat you at this bet that we have? Suzanne Danheim has 1.689.
What is the bet? We didn't bet on this. I'm I'm pumping Suzanne, too. Lord God, I mean, don't let me hold you back. Please do. She's tweeting good alpha. Uh she's like, "At some point, I'm g have to stop tweeting like inversion alpha." You didn't grow that much this week. I know. I know. What's going on, S? You gota You got to pump up those numbers. Uh who Why is she out here retweeting some do more? What? He's good. He He's actually very good. He understands like um that's our intern right there. We have a bunch of interns. Matteo, you How many interns you got? I think we got uh eight interns now. Let's go. You did the intern strategy.
Graphic on his cover image. Uh yeah, I know. Uh why why would I how blurry this thing is? Oh, yeah. Matteo, come on, man. Uh, why would I hire BCG, McKenzie, or Bane to do desktop research and charge me a million dollars for like a company that I want to acquire where I can have an intern like survey a thousand people per week? Who's going to surface more time? That's true. True. Like I mean I'm like I tell my interns if you send me anything that's like chat GBT or Perplexity that I can find there, you've done something terribly wrong. and like no I want like go do what is something that in in a world of AI what is something that you can differentiate if it doesn't exist online there's stuff that you can still do to
differentiate you know what I mean I think so any content this week there's like the the ocean the blue the o ocean gate documentary came out I haven't seen it heard oh I didn't I haven't I don't know I actually don't know what that is yeah the bill gurly podcast on invest like the best is amazing I'd go listen to that I actually took your recommendation and I've been threequarters of the way on Steve Balmer acquired. So good, right? Yeah, it's so good. I love his energy. He's got like this big gregarious laugh. He's like, "Oh, he's great." You mean like sometimes, have you got to the part where he's talking about the the stadium? What's their stadium? The Staple Center. H I forget.
But have you got to that part? It's at the very end. No, you probably haven't got there yet. Oh my god. Like the level of like energy he put into the stadium is so cool to to hear. Developers, developers, developers. They talk about the story of developing that part. I I love that part. I mean, how many times have you seen that video? This is amazing. Honestly, sometimes it's so simple, but hiring high energy people is so so important. Yeah. And I've started to pay attention to that a lot. Like, if you don't have high energy, like you're Wait, you'll appreciate this. We just hired someone and we were between two candidates. One was like super great resume, um, older, more experienced, super like 10 out of 10 resume. The other one was like pretty crypto native and just like high agency energy real pretty young inexperienced but like and
so we we obviously went with the younger high high agency high energy because if you if you uh do are 1% better and I think that requires a lot of energy and agency at the end of the year the compounding of that is is like you almost think the better that that person maybe was like 10 20% like the gap but like over over a course of one or two years end of the job that guy's like like totally yeah that that's that's definitely one of the reasons I would point to this. So I was at the Coinbase alumni event last night um and it was all like Coinbase alumni there and you know kind of snuck snuck into that event and it was great and Brian Armstrong came and gave a talk to the old Coinbase alumni. It's like a bunch of people.
There's now a hundred over 100 funded crypto companies that have come out of Coinbase. Anyways, he said this thing. He said, "Look, when your company starts to get bigger, they have like four or five thousand employees now. You start to hire lower beta people. So if you're at the very beginning you're hiring these like high beta people the aka riskier people essentially bigger upside but bigger downside they could like totally flop when you get bigger as a company you just want to hire the Google product manager you want to hire the account you know the Yelp salesperson the the Facebook engineer it's the easier thing to do and he said make sure when you scale you hire the higher beta employee so anyways we hired the higher beta employee and he he said he said, "I now have three things. God, my family,
and block works. Let's go." He's got tattoo block works. God, I was like, "Let's go, dude." I mean, you're going to go to war with that guy. Yeah. Like, my guy, we made the right hire. All right. Yeah. Seriously, I was I was like interviewing this person today and I was like I was like, "God damn it, this guy's making me jump out of my seat." I was like, "How how is it that this guy's getting me more fired up about my company?" I was like, "Oh, damn." It was good. It's epic. So, hiring hiring great people is like one of the most rewarding things I I now It is by far the most rewarding thing of by far. Yeah. All right, folks. Thanks for listening. Um, we have a really good episode on Monday dropping with um, uh, Chalang who was
CIO of Ledger Prime, sold it to FTX, went through that chaos, and then co-founded a company called Arbalos with Josh Lim who ran I think it was derivatives at Genesis, was at Galaxy, um, and he co they co-founded Arbalos. Arbalos just sold to Falcon X. They're like the two smartest people in the world to talk crypto options and crypto derivatives. So, we talk about everything from like the state of the Derbit acquisition to just state of options um uh derivatives, what what they're buying in their personal personal portfolios, thoughts on Hyperlid. It's really good episode. So, that that drops Monday. Are they buying Litecoin or what what's the Alpha League? No Litecoin. No Litecoin mentioned.
All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great weekend. Uh we'll be here next week and um yeah, excited to be in New York in a few weeks. Permission ticket. Empire 10, baby. [Music]